Two 'family' films

Both Udaan and The Godfather Part II track father-son relationships.

When you watch a lot of varied films in a short span of time, you notice small connections between movies that don’t, on the face of it, have much in common. Last weekend, I had a serendipitous experience involving two very different types of films — one a new release, the other an old favourite now available in a breathtaking DVD print.

In terms of structure, scale and plot details, there’s little to link Vikramaditya Motwane’s intimate slice-of-life tale Udaan with Francis Ford Coppola’s staggering epic The Godfather Part II, and it isn’t my intention to draw false parallels between these movies. But in diverse ways, both films deal with aspects of the father-son relationship, and how people can be stifled by the perpetuation of tradition.

The Godfather Part II contrasts two lives in two time-frames: in one story, Vito Corleone (the original don in the first Godfather film) comes to America from Italy in the early years of the 20th century and gradually rises to the status of a respected mafia chief; in the other, set decades later, his son and successor Michael is falling to pieces under the burden of his self-defeating efforts to legitimise the family business.

The artful juxtaposing of these two stories slowly builds towards a tragedy of great dimensions. Al Pacino’s Michael is an unforgettable anti-hero, his features becoming darker as he spirals further into crime and alienates precisely those people who could have provided him moral support. We are never allowed to forget that this man who is becoming a monster in front of our eyes was once the innocent of the Corleone clan — the youngest son who didn’t want to be involved with his father’s business. Nor do we lose sight of how Michael has been tainted, from the beginning, by the family legacy. A scene where the young Vito, having just committed a murder, returns to his family and picks up the baby Michael, taking the infant’s little hands into his own, is chilling in its directness; the sins of the father will quite literally be visited on his son.

Bhairav Singh, the father in Udaan is no mafia don, merely the owner of a modest steel factory, but he’s equally terrifying in some ways, being a grim-faced disciplinarian given to bouts of violent rage. He barely knows his 17-year-old son Rohan, but he knows what he expects from him — Rohan must forget his dreams of becoming a writer and gear up for a career in steel. Man and boy occupy different worlds; like Vito and Michael, they might as well be in different time-frames.

But because Udaan portrays its main characters as multi-dimensional people, one can also see that Rohan and Bhairav are potentially two stages in the life of a single person. At one point, Bhairav remarks that if he had ever back-answered his own dad, his bones would have been mashed in the factory. We are never told what dreams he may have had, but there’s no doubt that much of his personal frustration comes from his own childhood experiences. Conversely, Udaan’s urgency and emotional force depends on the viewer’s understanding that Rohan must take flight, otherwise he could end up becoming his father one day. He could even end up as a small-town version of Michael Corleone — a shell of a man, alone, consumed by the past.

Udaan is currently playing in theatres; Coppola’s film is part of a brilliant DVD set titled “The Godfather Restoration”, which any movie buff should queue up to own. Perhaps you won’t see the similarities between them that I did, but that won’t dilute the impact of either film. You could do a lot worse with your time than watching them both.

(Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer)