The ‘light’ side of life
We hardly have any indie groups or labels in Pakistan producing independent work. However, what we do have is Shahzad Nawaz who took the initiative to form one. Working under the label Coup d’etat, his first project, Daira, the adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s book Moth Smoke, although highly anticipated, didn’t exactly generate critical acclaim but it was a start. After the buzz surrounding Daira died down, he began working on his second project, Botal Gali, in collaboration with Humayun Saeed Productions. This time, Shahzad made sure that every little detail he could think of had been taken care of — from setting up a website acquainting interested individuals of the Botal Gali concept, to forming an Orkut community where it could be discussed, to handing out posters and a paparazzi-size booklet during the premiere of the movie to familiarise the attendees with the cast, crew, making and most importantly, the concept of Botal Gali several minutes before the movie itself was to hit the big screen for the first time. The concept behind the invitations was also well-thought and was hand-delivered in a symbolic message-in-a-bottle manner.

Over one year in the making and with a cast comprising of over 32 well-developed characters, the movie (which is rated PG) opens with a man depicting Zameer (conscience) giving the opening dialogue about Karachi as a city and its inhabitants. While talking, facts scroll on the screen displaying bits of information from the size of Karachi’s population, the date of when alcohol was banned, to the number of liquor (wine) sellers operating within the city to the demographics of their customers and so on. Zameer, clad in a simple white shalwar kameeze, speaks eloquently and mostly in metaphors. The story is set in a time where the bootleggers and the customs in Karachi are engaged in conflict and the city suddenly experiences a dearth in the quantity of alcohol available. When he is done, the camera moves to a location behind him where a man with long, filthy hair and persona is shown with his hands dipped inside an iron tub. He takes his hands out to reveal what he had been washing: an empty green liquor bottle.

Babu’s introduction into the play produces a chilling effect as he is obsessed, talking to his beloved bottles about how they, as the keeper of secrets, are used as scapegoats for everything gone bad. He speaks to them intimately and with emotion that seems to reach out beyond the screen and forces the viewer to pay attention to his dialogue with the bottles, to which he talks to with an odd mixture of bitterness and intense love. Babu, an ex-alcoholic, resides at the farthest end of Botal Gali, a place where all of the empty bottles of Karachi find a home only to be resold to interested individuals again. For eight years he has been collecting discarded, empty liquor bottles and bringing them home with him. We do not know his purpose for doing so, but while cleaning them he talks to them about the hypocrisy, confused identities, selfishness and self-indulgence of those who had emptied those bottles in the first place.

With Botal Gali, the film, depicting different stories of a variety of characters interconnected in one way or the other, we find Babu picking up discarded bottles, the morning after every drinking binge, from locations giving hints of who and where these bottles had been consumed previously.

Characters that play a dominant role in the movie are those of Shahid, a pan-spewing, surma-eyed bootlegger who suddenly finds that his brand of alcohol, ‘Dante’s Vodka’ (effectively pronounced ‘dants’ by him and his co-conspirators), is in high demand. Henceforth, he is shown making deals, having his product delivered via his so-called friend, Zahid, who’s girlfriend he happens to be seeing behind his back. Shahid can be seen making mental calculations of how much his every move would cost him and how he is going to profit from so-and-so person and so on.

Amy is an American photojournalist married to Zeb (Sheikh Amer Hasan), an ex-pat who has recently returned to Karachi. The character of Amy provides an outsider’s point of view into the lives of the elite that she is exposed to and her curiosity and quest for covering something meaningful leads her to Babu. She sees in Babu an honesty that is not contained in others. Although the point of view she represents tends to bring out some very interesting facts and observations, Amy’s innocence and seemingly angelic appearance tends to get a tad bit too much here and there.

The auditorium in which the movie was being shown was packed, with some people sitting on the stairs, it seemed as if not a single person had decided to skip the event. The dialogues were clever and well-scripted and invited thunderous applause from the audience whenever a political or a social comment was made. The scenes themselves were short and the transitions slightly abrupt, but that style of editing seemed to grow on one’s self and the abruptness of the change in the scenes wasn’t noticeable in the end. The script of the movie had been well-written with facts thrown in here and there making it informative enough not to confuse a viewer with too-much-information. the only critique in the way it was rendered that one can find is that every person who drinks is shown as getting utterly and completely wasted (save for this one small group of individuals in one story out of the very many in the film), which is not always the case.

Post-premiere talk with Shahzad revealed that the characters are named after the roles that they play and have been inspired by real-life people and the storylines in the movie by real-life incidents. He hopes the film, after going through Pemra’s censorship would hit theatres by November. The film is planned for launch in theatres in India and will be shown at a South Asian film festival being held in New York this year as well. Other then theatres, Shahzad plans to release a DVD version of Botal Gali as well.

There aren’t many who have dared to make a movie about subjects that we know off but don’t speak about. Those that do end up being made aren’t allowed to run for long on big screens or aren’t given adequate publicity and eventually fade away into oblivion. Botal Gali speaks of a subject that most aren’t comfortable depiciting via the electronic media. It is an unapologetic look at what happens when you lose yourself in the jungle that surrounds us, giving more value to social acceptance and materialism to the point of forgetting who you are, and how these individuals end up shaping a community as a whole.

photos: screen shots from the BG
1) Babu with his hands in the washtub,
2) Babu trying to mend a broken bottle
3) Amy photographing Babu


First Published:
Images
September 24th, 2006