Oh, Calcutta!

Oh, Calcutta!

City of Joy
Patrick Swayze in a film by Roland Joffe
Reviewed by Brian Brunton

If you think of City of Joy as Hollywood's Salaam Bombay 2, you've got most of it. But not all. Because this is a movie that tells us almost as much about ourselves as it does about India. It's a movie about the commodifying of Asian poverty.

Patrick Swayze plays a North American surgeon who loses to the bottle when one of his patients dies. He goes to Calcutta, where Om Puri and his family have just arrived after being turned off their land by a moneylender.

On Swayze's first night, he goes out (somewhat reluctantly) with a young prostitute, who gets him drunk and has him mugged: North meets South.

Puri ends up in the hands of the local hoons who run all the rackets and control rickshaws. Because Puri wants to raise the dowry for his daughter, and to get his land back from the moneylender he sells himself to the hoons as a rickshaw driver.

Swayze meets up with Joan Collins, who plays a sort of Mother Theresa type, running a clinic for the urban poor. After a lot of hand wringing and posturing, the three get together to organise the people to get rid of the hoons in general, and the bull hoon Art Malik in particular.

In the climax, Art Malik is defeated in a fight with Puri, but Puri is stabbed. The lesson for Swayze and the rest of us is to leave the Third World to sort out its own problems.

The best thing about the movie is the photography of Calcutta's slums, and the music. Joan Collins' Irish accent is incomprehensible, and the nourished actors from India's central casting get through their lines in a schooled English unpractised in the shadows of the Howrah Bridge.

Despite its hackneyed story-line and a third-rate script, the movie raises serious issues about Third World development, and the relationships between individuals in the west and the Asian poor. But it does so superficially, saying nothing of the colonial history that created Calcutta's poor. In fairness, the ambiguous social status of the hoons, as both oppressors and victims, is one of the finer points drawn in the movie.

Nevertheless, as a political statement, beside Salaam Bombay, City of Joy doesn't rate. But go and see it in any case ... for Calcutta, for the unnamed Indian extras, and the masses, and the poor, and the Hooghly, and the Howrah Bridge, and the carrion crows, the lepers, the children, the women, the old men, the beggars and those who survive ... oh, Calcutta!

From GLW issue 59