Fig Fruit and the Wasps

Prakash Babu’s Fig Fruit and the Wasps is a meditative, abstract film.

  A documentary filmmaker Gowri and her assistant Vittal go to a remote Indian village to interview a musician but he’s engaged elsewhere. They meet a few people, taste the town, see the corpse of an acquaintance, then leave. When nothing seems to happen everything hides its tacit signification. 

Both filmmakers seem dour and troubled. A flashback to Gowri’s unsympathetic husband helps explain her, as Vittal is defined by his perfunctory attempt to seduce her. The village teacher is carried home drunk by his daughter every night, while his wife tirelessly sews for a living. The village men seem to stand around idly whether to wait to be picked up for a job or just to wait. When anything happens, like one man’s work with a mysterious bright welding job, a crowd gathers to watch him. 

Occasional patterns emerge. A drawing-like intersection of power lines in the sky is rhymed by intersecting lines formed by reeds on the ground. Gower and Vittal change music stations on her car radio but otherwise the “music” is made up of the sounds of nature — crickets, birds, a monsoon — or the clatter of mankind, like the woman’s sewing machine. 

That brings us to the film’s central theme, which is the filmmaker’s project. They’re interviewing a musician who contends that musical instruments are influenced by the regional population and their rhythms of life.  That’s this film: an apparently passive recording of a community’s rhythms of life and the music, not necessarily instrumental, that arises there.

We  may not realize it but the film works. Its uneventful process, punctuated by the occasional poetry reading and a death, draws us into a rhythm with which our normal cinema has made us unfamiliar. We have an experience of people, community, nature, both visual and aural, that willy nilly alters our rhythm and awareness. Its effect is more like music than like narrative fiction.
     Sometimes the narrative pauses for an eruption of the surreal. One shot features a row of ceramic vases; in the next they have been mysteriously encrusted. Another sequence presents a wooden chair and table which are oddly blown away. The last scene is totally enigmatic. These fractures in the narrative provide an alternative rhythm or punctuation. 

     The title refers to a scene where a man draws a pattern of circles on a table surface with fig juice, which attracts a few wasps. Preferring neatness, a woman brusquely wipes away his construction but the remnant arc still attracts a wasp. Man makes his mark, watches it disappear but nature persists. The scene encapsulates the creative and transitory human presence amid the larger and uncontrollable rhythms of nature and our life. There's something Indian about that, a sense we have lost.