In a scene from Ship of Theseus—an independent film written and directed by Mumbai, India–based Anand Gandhi—a spelunker is plunging deep into a cave, the beam of his flashlight washing away the darkness. The passageways are narrow and tortuous, and we see the explorer’s crisp shadow hovering on the cave walls, advancing like a ghost. All around are scintillating rocks and breathtaking formations—nature’s treasure tucked away in a place few venture to go. Then, before we arrive at an apparent destination, the scene ends.
Seeking truth, the animating theme of Gandhi’s film, is something like this, pressing farther and farther into a dark cave. (Western mystics tell of a “divine dark,” in which God, or Truth, resides.) At bottom, Ship of Theseus is anxious to shine a flashlight, to illuminate and thereby arrive at enlightenment. So it goes without saying that the film’s mode is that of philosophical inquiry: The above scene, with its cave and shadows, evokes Plato’s allegory, in which we come to see Reality—not its false impressions—by elevated thought.
Yet, as the scene’s conclusion—or absence thereof—suggests, rarely do we attain full knowing. Exploration begets exploration, for the path to enlightenment is long and arduous. The Katha Upanishad, later echoed by W. Somerset Maugham, describes the path to Truth as “sharp like a razor’s edge … difficult to traverse.” But, as the cave’s sparkling rocks and musical formations promise, the path is worth it: Ship of Theseus makes the filmic argument that grappling with the Big Questions is worthwhile, is enough even if we don’t find clear answers.
The film comprises three 45-minute-or-so vignettes, and each involves its own inquiry and its own exploration. Aliya (Aida El-Kashef), an Arab girl living in Mumbai, is blind as a result of a corneal infection. She takes up photography and relies for her art upon hearing and touch. For the most part, she seems satisfied, maybe fulfilled, with her method and her work. But after she undergoes a corneal-transplantation procedure and regains her eyesight, Aliya loses something, and she struggles to produce good photographs.
Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi) is a Jain monk with an academic bent, and an animal-rights activist. (Roughly: Jainism, like Hinduism and Buddhism, holds that the purpose of life is to attain Enlightenment—that is, to transcend ego and achieve unity with God, or Truth, or cosmic energy. Jains place a special emphasis on nonviolence toward all living things, all of whose life force derives from the selfsame energy that animates every human being.) However, when Maitreya is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis—whose treatment will necessitate taking drugs that have been tested on animals—he must confront the consequences of his deepest spiritual-philosophical convictions.
Navin (Sohum Shah) is a stockbroker with few interests and even fewer aspirations, besides making money. While in Mumbai for a kidney transplant, he stays with his cultured, socially conscious ajji, or grandmother, who scorns the corporate-minded Navin for his general apathy. But when Navin discovers that a working-class man had his kidney stolen around the time of his transplant operation, he is stirred from his slumber.
Ship of Theseus’ three stories each focus on a different facet of truth: respectively, aesthetic truth, or beauty; metaphysical truth, or ultimate, universal Truth/Reality; and moral truth, or righteousness. Each exploration, on the narrative plane, motivates a transformation in each vignette’s protagonist, such that the film also becomes concerned with identity. The film’s title comes from a Plutarchian thought experiment testing the concept of identity: If each plank from a ship is replaced, does it remain the same ship? If each discarded plank were used to assemble a new ship, which of the two is the original ship?
The manner of filmmaker Gandhi’s storytelling largely complements his thematic and narrative material. He makes extensive use of long takes, giving tension—almost always internal, psychic—room to bubble up. (In this regard, especially, Gandhi’s actors are uniformly excellent.) His pacing is slow, and his soundtrack mostly silent, yielding a contemplative atmosphere, goading his audience to do what it rarely does in a movie theater: think. Above all, his photography is masterful. The astonishing beauty of Ship of Theseus’ images works to defamiliarize the mundane; Gandhi wants us to see the world anew, with awe and wonder—an aesthetic choice that echoes his core theme, for we approach the vastness of truth with that very awe and wonder.
Ship of Theseus’ three vignettes work very well as engrossing, involving stories (to say nothing of the mature social commentary). But there are many moments when the audience is reminded of the artifice of storytelling. The principal culprit is Gandhi’s self-conscious dialogue, which occasionally robs the stories of their authenticity; the Jain-monk vignette, in particular, suffers from this ailment. Conversation between characters is little more than a verbal Ping-Pong rally on points of philosophy. It might be intellectually engaging, but it isn’t organic: More often than not, you hear Gandhi’s voice, not the characters’ voices. Similarly, despite the overall brilliance of the cinematography, there is the odd stray shot that sticks out as a self-aware “artistic” image.
But these criticisms do not deny that Ship of Theseus is an achievement. There is a final element in the aforementioned scene of the cave explorer. The scene itself is contained within a film that is being projected for an audience: it is a film within a film. And it is this cinematic device, deployed so ambitiously by Gandhi, that reminds us of the potency of cinema as a medium of art. As the explorer illuminates the cave with a flashlight, an orb of movie-projector light hovers above the audience members’ shoulders, offering its own illumination. In its attempt to confront complexity, Ship of Theseus produces only greater complexity; there are no answers. Perhaps this is what makes Ship of Theseus a good film. But what makes it an important film is that it testifies that cinema can—and must—push farther into the dark.
Austin-based Indie Meme, a limited theatrical distributor for independent Indian narrative and documentary films, will be screening Ship of Theseus at 7 pm, on Thursday, March 6, at the Angelika Film Center & Cafe – Plano. Writer-director Anand Gandhi will attend.
