An Enemy of the People (Satyajit Ray, 1989) (Patreon)

There are a few particularly interesting things about Ray's take on Ibsen. First, until about a year ago, Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People) was largely considered to be one of Ray's very worst films. Reviews I've read strongly imply that Ray, who was ill at the time of the film's production, had completely lost his touch. Basic elements like editing and blocking are roundly criticized, giving the sense that for certain commentators, Ray had slid not only into dotage but incompetence. I think there are some things to say about this, certainly.

But the other thing that makes An Enemy such an oddity is the fact that in the past year, it has accidentally become a COVID-19 allegory avant la lettre. The same could of course be said of Ibsen's original play, suggesting that the social problems involved have been with us for a very long time. Apart from the one thematic wrinkle of the protagonist Dr. Ashoke Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) and antagonist city manager Nishith (Dhritiman Chatterjee) being brothers, this is a fairly basic tale of common welfare vs. capital.

Seeing contemporary resonances in an older work is always a tricky prospect, since the circumstances won't entirely match up. Unless you are a diehard presentist, who is only interested in immediate relevance, it's these inconsistencies that make the film a richer viewing experience. After seeing a strange number of patients coming down with hepatitis, Gupta tests the local water and finds that it's contaminated. He expects public officials in his town of Chandipur to correct the problem, which would mean closing down the local Hindu temple indefinitely. Alas, his brother and the city bigwigs refuse, since this would harm Chandipur financially. If you go to Letterboxd, you'll see numerous commenters comparing Dr. Gupta with Anthony Fauci, and it makes sense. We do have a kind of Fauci vs. Trump situation, where powerful interests resist the pandemic lockdown for the same reasons.

But Ray also suggests that Chandipur, and perhaps India more broadly, have been so conditioned by crooked holy men and a craven press that they cannot be expected to act in their own best interest. There is nothing here on the level of official suppression of Dr. Gupta's findings, as was the case in Wuhan and the government blackballing of Dr. Li Wenliang, although Nishith uses parliamentary chicanery to thwart a public health meeting. Ray is clearly concerned with capitalism's corrupting influence on democracy, and the relative ease with which whistleblowers are painted as malcontents or kooks. (Or, in the case of the Modi government, they are simply subjected to mob rule.)

As far as the formal aspects of An Enemy of the People, this is an open question. A high degree of one's attitude on this point depends on what exactly you're looking for. Comparing Ganashatru with Pather Panchali, as some critics did, seems fundamentally wrongheaded. Ray isn't attempting lyricism and coming up short. This is an openly political work, presented with a rather didactic approach to the material at hand. This can be seen in the final shot, or the fact that Ray radically altered the ending of Ibsen's original text. If a film like Pather Panchali is about the expansive qualities of existence, An Enemy of the People is about possibilities closing down, so the fact that Ray mostly stages it as a domestic Kammerspiel is hardly to its detriment.

It's true that the editing is purely functional, and there is a declamatory aspect to the performances that seems like a kind of quick-and-dirty Brechtianism. It's certainly possible to miss this, and just think the film is bad, because Ray hasn't applied these distancing techniques in any systematic way. At the same time, the focus on public speech -- news articles, lectures, pamphleteering -- suggests that we should look as much as how ideas are disseminated (or not) as the ideas themselves. If An Enemy of the People is a bit of a political placard itself, it's also a Rorschach test. By not conforming to entertainment or art-cinema standards, it reveals the extent to which ideology and spectacle are nearly impossible to overcome.