Tuesday, May 17, 2011
DEATH BENEFITS
Today's film was the Indian satire
India is trying to industrialize and is in the process of making farming impossible to continue. They want a rural move to the cities for labor.
This is nothing new. Stalin did it by killing and transporting the peasants against their wishes. India is doing it with bureaucracy and hypocrisy with many weird outcomes.
One is that farmers began to commit suicide at a high rate as result of government policies. So the government, in its haste to cover things over, decided to give a benefit to farmers who committed suicide as a result of the measures taken or not taken against them. A sweetener to the families and the liberal reformists as well as the agrarians who want India, like Gandhi, to revert to villages.
this is for real as is the suicides to get the money for the families to survive and keep the land.
This film stretches the point of the suicide benefit by showing one peasant's decision to kill himself after he loses his land to a government mortgage agency. A media and political freakout ensues. Everything gets twirled into the perfect storm. Media, politicians, state bureaucracy, federal institutions, local protection rackets, caste representatives and so on. All the while the guy who is doing this and his family are lost in the shuffle.
Funny but also tragic.
I liked this film because it gave what seemed to be an honest view of village life which I have never seen. The characters are funny in a nice way. The point is made. A lot gets said and done. It is not at all offputting as I expected. I am not naturally drawn to the sub-continent.
I will give it a 3 out of Netflix5.
Labels: films
