by Christine Westwood
Described as the democratisation of verse and a cousin of hip hop, slam poetry, or spoken word poetry, started as an open mic event in the mid 1980s, and has provided a platform, especially for women, youth and marginalised groups, ever since.
One night in 2012, filmmaker Partho Sen-Gupta, a recent immigrant to Australia, attended Bankstown Poetry Slam and was so struck that the image of one of the performers became the seed that generated his current movie, Slam, premiering this weekend at the Sydney Film Festival.
“A woman in a hijab came on stage and she had this extremely strong voice,” Sen-Gupta told FilmInk, “As a filmmaker I felt this was such a contrast to the ideas that we are fed that these women are oppressed and have no voice. This woman had a presence, she was strong. Later I was standing outside when she came out, then she walked away into the darkness. That’s when my mind started to click and I thought, ‘what happens if she disappears tonight? What ideas would it bring up in this xenophobic and racist world?’ I thought I have to write about this symbol of the veiled Muslim woman and use it in some way to tell a story. In the first lines I wrote that this woman disappears, so it was about the absence of the symbol.”
Sen-Gupta used this story device of a missing person to generate mystery and speculation in the viewer to great effect in his previous film, Sunrise. Slam is even more powerful for drawing us in and compelling us to explore the themes and threads of the director’s challenging take on modern society. He has been making films all his life, from the art department of big Bollywood productions to film school in France, but Slam is his first Australian movie. He’s come out of the gate with a hard hitter and spoke of being nervous to see what an Australian audience will make of it.“I’m a recent migrant and I’m talking about issues that are strong, but they concern me, and I’m speaking from my heart and from my experience. I’ve always been in this position of not belonging and with age and experience of living in three countries, I have a critical analysis of that experience. I’m no longer the naive 20-year-old, who felt that ‘I’ll learn the language and I’ll be part of this place and no one will know that I wasn’t from here!’”
His central character is Ricky, the brother of politicised Slam poet Ameen who goes missing, provoking a storm of speculation, accusation and fear. Ricky was ‘Tarik’, but he has moved away from his Arab origins to become a cafe owner with his Anglo pregnant wife. It was a crucial piece of casting to get right, as we have to empathise with Ricky as an ordinary, sensitive man who finds himself in the crossfire of an impossible situation.
“All my films are about masculinity and how society creates this idea that men have to behave in a certain way to fulfil that role, and we often fail,” Sen-Gupta explains. “When I wrote the film, I hoped I would have hundred percent Australian casting, especially Ricky, but I couldn’t find anyone. The pool of Australian actors of Arab origin is very small, maybe 5 or 6 in that age group. Then there’s the gym culture of people in their 20s and 30s and I never saw this character to be visually that sort of built up hyper masculine or muscular man, but more someone who you could feel a sense of melancholy from, a sensitive man who has run away and escaped because he does not fit into this masculine society. I found Adam Bakri (Omar). He worked hard on preparation, including with a dialect coach to ‘Aussiefy’ his English. And he is that ordinary guy, but because of his racial origin, when some crazy person picks up a gun or a bomb, he’s asked ‘what are you going to do about it?’, and he says ‘what can I do I just run a coffee shop’. He’s just a simple guy whose wife is pregnant. I’m a father and I remember that period being a very vulnerable one. As a modern man and a migrant – my partner’s from Ireland – we were on our own and I transferred that experience.”
Another strong theme in Slam is ‘mothers.’ Apart from Ricky’s pregnant wife, and his own mother, distressed at her daughter’s disappearance, there’s a knockout performance from Rachael Blake (Lantana, Rake, Cleverman) as the police woman investigating the missing persons case. As ever, Blake is skilled in expressing complexity, intelligence and fragility in equal measure. Following her to the empty, neglected apartment and enduring harassment from her ex-husband, we learn that she lost her son to the war in the Middle East, and the experience has broken her. In the tense and escalating story, she becomes a powerful anchor point.
“I was reared by my mother, my father was absent. I wanted to connect these stories of mothers in the film. Mothers bear the violence of everyone, first they carry the child, birth them, then the child is taken for war. There’s a song that Rachael sings to her dead son, it’s from the First World War. Australian mothers who had lost their children would stage protests to try and save their sons.”
The song is an echo of the incendiary opening poetry slam when Ameena (Danielle Harvat, Sea Patrol, Here Come the Habibs) addresses her words to ‘Mother.’ “These stories from your womb to my mouth,” she says, “I bleed these stories etched into my existence.”
So, Slam is about male identity, mothers but also about the violence we all are framed by. Sen-Gupta is very skilful with giving viewers clues, so we participate in the story, then playing with emotions and expectations to challenge our assumptions. The media doesn’t come up well. Television is depicted as an angry space where we are provoked, the journalists who quickly appear at Ricky’s door badger him with leading questions, ‘has your sister gone to Syria’, ‘is she involved in this and that’, and physically intimidating his family with their unrelenting presence.
For all its tough subject matter, Slam is a gripping, entertaining mystery. You can’t turn away from it until the very end. In the process, the director makes an intelligent exploration of his themes, including what he describes as Ricky’s “failure of assimilation. He believed he could leave his past and become something else. He was Tarik but he hated that milieu, so he left it and ran away. He met Sally and created this lovely little world. I don’t criticise it, I live in that world myself, it’s a nice world as long as you can block out certain things that are happening, you can get up in the morning and have brunch and your soy latte… Ricky lives in that space and suddenly he’s jerked back and he has to think about these things that he’s run away from. There’s nothing wrong with leaving family to find your own identity. I’ve done it myself. I’m not Muslim, I’m Hindu but I have extracted myself from my community and I’ve lived in France and England and now Australia.
“I think it’s important when you’re making a political film that it’s a personal narrative. Ricky shows someone with all these expectations from society, his mother, father in law and wife, ‘who am I supposed to be to all these people?’ And Rachael’s character also was a working class white woman, with expectations on her, including that her son went to war.”
Slam is a good looking film and effectively uses sound design to support tension and mystery. Sen-Gupta says his experiences in Mumbai and France gave him wide skills in knowing how to work his medium.
“With very little money I can make a film look rich. It’s a case of deciding what I want to see in that two-dimensional frame, so I can put all the money into that frame and concentrate the impact. I probably piss off the producers because I micro-manage all the filmmaking aspects!”
Slam is in cinemas from October 17, 2019
