CITY OF JOY
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Dominique Lapierre's THE CITY OF JOY is a dense nonfiction (with blessedly short chapters) that has the momentum of a novel written as a collection of portraits of unimaginably joyous survivors of the worst slums in all of India and probably the world -- those of Calcutta. Starting out as a depressing travelogue, we quickly come to feel we're going to know the city more than we might really want -- and come very dangerously close to reeling in indigenous epigrams and platitudes: "Coal doesn't change its color when you wash it. What can't be cured must be endured"; "My memory is like camphor. It evaporates with time"; "Fishes can't afford to live on bad terms with the crocodiles in the pool." By the fifth chapter, Lapierre settles down and digs into Calcutta -- "a mirage city to which in the course of one generation six million starving people had come in the hope of feeding their families...(a) metropolis situated at the heart of one of the world's richest yet at the same time most ill-fated regions, an area of failing or devastating monsoons causing either drought or biblical floods. This is an area of cyclones and apocalyptic earthquakes, an area of political exoduses and religious wars such as no other country's climate or history has perhaps ever engendered...(one) earthquake in 1937 caused hundreds of thousands of deaths ...six years later a famine killed three and a half million people in Bengal alone...in 1965 a cyclone (hit India with the force of) ten three megaton H-bombs...Calcutta condemn(s) its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million of them who squeeze into its slums have sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each." You begin to feel you have to be a masochist to go further, because the descriptions of the living conditions in Calcutta's largest slum -- Anand Nagar, the City of Joy -- are tummy-turning: the rot of the tin and cardboard shacks, the hunger, the lepers, eunuchs and the scorching heat and pestilence match the revulsion of the residents regularly wading through waste-high excrement that floods through the slums when the rains come or the sewers get backed up because of the endless strikes. Albeit upchucky, Lapierre's diary is absorbing and in some cases you might even re-read passages again and again out of total disbelief: your mind wanders in unspeakable directions when you come upon lepers having sex, and it's indescribable your feelings when one leper gives birth. (There are no precise numbers but it's estimated that India has as many as five millions lepers.) Lapierre writes about the dwellers of the City of Joy: "No amount of wretchedness, not even utter destitution on a piece of pavement in Calcutta, could alter that they are the world's cleanest people." And they do it with less than a pint of water for each daily public bath.
If you're a sinner like moi, you'll be absolved of all sins when you finish the first half, and if you make it all the way through -- this should be easy to do because you'll be hooked by then -- you're likely going to be a candidate for sainthood. While there's mention of and a bit of history about Mother Teresa, this isn't her story. It's about a real Polish Catholic priest and (during the last third of the book) a real American Jewish doctor who join forces to provide, with scant financial resources, whatever medicinal comfort is feasible. It can't come as any surprise to the reader that though their work is needed, admired and honored, it is within these two outsiders that the City of Joy has its ironic impact. (And it has impacted readers around the world: by October, 1986, Lapierre had received over 40,000 letters, many of them containing donations, so moved were they by the emotionally wrenching stories. The author has also donated one half of his royalties to Anand Nagar's inhabitants.) Reading some copy about the movie version, the feature writers are describing the book as "sentimental" but it's no such thing: though immersed in awesome poverty, this book isn't schmaltzy fictionalized pap -- it doesn't cheapen or romanticize or distort the residents of the City of Joy.
I wish I could say the movie doesn't, either, but I can't: director Roland Joffe and screenwriter Mark Medoff have indeed cheapened the story in every way and worst of all is they have taken the good American doctor -- played by Patrick Swayze -- and turned him into an example of the pretensions of the "art" of dramatic writing right out of Lajos Egri's college text. They've given him a false crisis, made his character diametrically the opposite of what he is in Lapierre's book in order put him into repeated conflicts that Loeb only rarely or never encounters, made him inexplicably suicidal, and gave him a resolution that, evidently satisfying to the members of the audience who don't know how Lapierre ends his story, is simply hackneyed. The next worse things they've done: they eliminated entirely the priest -- it's now Pauline Collins as Sister (Saint) Joan -- and have created a super vicious slum Mafiosi, played by Art Malik. Anyone who reads the book can see it as a ready-made screenplay and all an honest director needs is a cast, a Steadicam and a story editor who has respect for the material. There are more scenes of real conflict, heartbreaking drama, spiritual wonderment and impossible-to-believe-but-true vignettes in the book than a moviemaker could ever hope to use -- for example, the young doctor amputating without anesthesia a leprous arm and watching "a mangy dog carrying it off in its mouth" -- but why Joffe and Medoff had to go dreaming up new ones is beyond the pale. In the book -- and his first appearance comes about half way through and becomes focal only in the last third -- Miamian Max Loeb, who's just about to get his medical degree from Tulane, has read all about the selfless priest of Calcutta and decides, because he needs "a change of air, to be of service," to join him. In the very first scenes of the movie, he's Max Lowe -- changed to a less Jewish-sounding name because the movie was being filmed during the Gulf War and there were constant anti-American and anti-Israeli protests -- and already an established doctor from Houston who abruptly decides to abandon his profession because he lost a child-patient on the operating room table. (What drives him to Calcutta specifically is never adequately explained except by the all-purpose search for "enlightenment.") In the book Loeb, on his first day in the slums, helps deliver a breeched baby to a leper couple. In the movie, Lowe checks into a seedy hotel, entertains a prostie and is set up to get drunk, beaten and robbed by local Mafia terrorizer Malik. And this movie Max sort of stumbles onto the slums. (He eventually gets to that leper's baby, though.)
Objecting to what Joffe has done to Lapierre's book might not have been necessary had he at least been faithful to the atmospherics of the slums even half way right. At first glance the faked City of Joy, photographed approximating the color of diluted urine, appears wretched and diseased, and when we see the blackened open trench that snakes its way through the slums, we expect to get a dose of biological reality -- that is, shown how the dwellers poop. As we get into the book, we wait for Lapierre to account for the disposal methods, since there are no bathrooms as Westerners acknowledge the meaning. He doesn't disappoint; as horrific and appearing-to-be lacking of dignity as it might seem, it's quite the reverse, and a queer sense of admiration occurs within the reader when the Polish priest says, "Before reaching the public conveniences, I had to cross a veritable lake of excrement. This additional trial was a courtesy of the cesspool emptiers, who had been on strike for five months. The stench was so foul that I no longer knew which was the more unbearable: the smell or the sight. That people could actually remain good humored in the middle of so much abjection seemed quite sublime to me. They laughed and joked -- especially the children who somehow brought the freshness and gaiety of their games into that cesspool. I came back from that escapade as groggy as a boxer knocked out in the first round." (And they don't use any form of toilet paper -- only a tinful of water to wash up afterwards.) Joffe not only avoids what has to be running through the minds of viewers when they see that sewer, and avoids the common overspills of the sewer into the homes, he also avoids the bathing practices which are even more of a marvel. (The women are able to fully clean themselves while still in their saris.) Part of the omission most likely has to do with the persistent protests that occurred during the filming -- many Indians felt that Joffe might be robbing residents of their self-respect if all aspects of life in the City of Joy were documented. But in that Joffe faked his city and flood, could he not fake the urges or baths elsewhere? And perhaps do it in longshot? Readers will also note what other elements are missing: cobras and infestations of rats and bugs; how the people use cow dung cakes as fuel to cook their food (made ultra spicy because much of it is rotten); and the ravages of the heat -- so hot that the bare feet of the horses who pull the rickshaws would stick to the pavement of the streets and the callous outer skin would peel off and the under skin would become bloody and infected.
So what do we get in the movie version? Instead of endemic cholera, there's frequent Mafia-administered punches into Max's stomach and a stab into rickshaw puller Hasari (played by Om Puri), who also suffers from a badly treated case of tuberculosis. When the monsoon arrives and then the flood, instead of numerous bodies and dead rodents, dogs and other animals floating through the alley streets of the slum, there's Max nearly drowning after saving a leper and his baby. In the book, Max is exasperated by a lack of medical supplies and though he's often discouraged -- he periodically heads to one of Calcutta's grand hotels for a little R&R -- he's faithful to Hippocrates; movie Max has to be goaded into staying true to his oath. (One assumes that because Joffe and scripter Medoff reversed Loeb at the start, they could redeem themselves by having movie Max stay indefinitely in Anand Nagar, slyly one-uping Loeb, who eventually returned to America, though he founded an organization to supply the slum with medicines and equipment, and makes regular return visits.)
Had Joffe only condensed the material, he might have provided Patrick Swayze with the role he excitedly told Oprah and Larry King had changed his life. You want to believe his humbleness when he said that this is his best work so far as an actor, but if he could say this, and tell us that when he first arrived in Calcutta Joffe sent him directly to work with Mother Teresa before filming started, and that he's playing a role of a doctor whose life has been fundamentally changed because of his experiences in the City of Joy, it's not suspiciously disingenuous, it's a little more like too sincere star-thumping. He's doing his own advance work on his still unformulated humanatations. (He even admitted his emotional discombobulation to King.) If Swayze had played his Max as he's promoting himself, he'd have been a sensation, and not coincidentally much closer to the real Max. It's not Swayze's fault that the part is now about a stereotypic angry young man, yet given the confines of such, he's far from bad. In fact, what saves him is his own deportment -- his own sense of agog; he's at once thrilled and yet disbelieving that he's playing so life-changing a role. And there's something quite appealing about his slightly Oriental face, which, perhaps because he fell ill for three weeks during production, has finally lost its fattiness, and its repellent grubbiness; in his Bugle Boys and sun-bleached hair, he's warm, personable. (Even the real kids of Anand Nagar liked him enormously.) If he can't redeem the awful scenes in which he's mouthing the silly, badly written bitterness that's supposed to be telling us something about his character, the fact is no one could (Joffe originally wanted Richard Dreyfuss; Lapierre wanted Mel Gibson) because Medoff disemboweled the book's Max, who was skeletal to begin with. (Two scenes from the thirty minutes cut from the theatrical release include Max's attempted suicide, which never happens in the book, and a seduction of Sister Joan; in the book, Max has an Indian sexual outlet as part of his R&R.) Swayze does affect us during a few of the movie's dramatic wallops, and in one I got quite flushed with feelings and teary-eyed. The problem is, I can't remember the exact moment anymore -- it has completely vanished from my mind. This fleetness is central to Joffe's vamoosed vision; he's made not a movie version of THE CITY OF JOY but one about The City of Vapors. Everything that's genuinely moving about the book has been evaporated.
Joffe is most faithful to the book's rickshaw puller Hasari, who is the salt of Indian earth. Om Puri's performance is unquestionably the movie's major asset, though you find yourself losing patience with his mania for honor. (You could discreetly skim over his virtues in the book but you're stuck enduring them in the theatre.) Pauline Collins is wasted as an amalgam of the religious characters that Joffe thought could be vacated without spiritual loss. (One of the small surprises of the book is that even in the Anand Nagar Christian Christmas is celebrated.) This may be, more than anything else, what tells us is so dummy-headed wrong with the movie. It's maddeningly compromising when no dilution is necessary. So what if Indians were protesting? When do they not? But you know why Joffe phonied it up -- he's got one eye on the potentially huge box office of India. (There's a funny line at the beginning when an Indian woman tells a young child to keep away from the movie houses -- Indians being among the world's most avid moviegoers.) What will rankle lovers of the book and probably enrage fair-minded Indians about the movie THE CITY OF JOY is that if this is the movie that Joffe really wanted to make, it's even more insulting to the Indians he placated because it makes so many of them look like the fools he and Medoff made of themselves.
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