Smoke and Mirrors

Woody Allen’s refusal to screen Blue Jasmine in India citing the country’s intrusive anti-smoking health advisory revives an old debate over whether art must lead society by example or be left alone by it

For a six-year-old Ammu seated in the multiplex waiting to watch Despicable Me, what preceded the yellow multitude of minions was a gory advertisement. Her eyes were glued to the mucky sponge being squeezed on the big screen during the anti-tobacco health advisory issued in public interest by the Government of India. Wide-eyed and startled, she nudged her father, “Is this how your lungs are, Papa?” The beaker on screen was now brimming with tar; her father, wearing a cold smile, fumbled in the dark for the right words.

Woody Allen may not have sat through the 30-second clip, but it was one of the reasons he cancelled the release of his new film Blue Jasmine in India. Allen couldn’t stand the thought of anti-smoking statutory warnings surfacing at the bottom of the screen every time one of his characters lit a cigarette. “In a survey we conducted in theatres, six out of ten [people] admitted that they stepped into the theatre [only] after this ad was shown,” says Anita Peter, director of Cancer Patients Aids Association.

What you and I and filmmakers misunderstand is the underlying intension of the advisory. It is not a means to inform us that smoking is harmful; it is, instead, a deliberate attempt to create a distinct disturbing image that will linger.

This is something Vishal Bhardwaj can never digest. “It is a Nazi approach!” he explodes. “If there is a line in a book where a character smokes, will there be a footnote saying smoking is injurious to health? If that sounds absurd, why are we doing this in films? The answer is simple: because here, films are not treated as art or literature. [Their] individuality is not respected. Ours is the only country with such a stupid rule. Doesn’t this mean something is wrong with us? A Woody Allen can afford to ignore this market. I, on the other hand, am helpless,” he says, heaving a long sigh.

Kids, adults, smokers, non-smokers, moralists and libertines all huddle up and recline on their seats watching the Health Ministry’s warning, but who can say how effective this approach is? Who can say whether six-year-old Ammu will grow up to be a smoker or not? Children spend years gathering morals, but somewhere, as they grow, these are given away along with their undersized shirts.

Trailing the crumbs back to her childhood, the writer of this article recollects that she was never fond of smoking. The first time she tried it, she closed her ears and nose so that she would know, for once, how it felt to inhale the smoke. Almost a year later on a rainy night, skin-soaked as she walked into her apartment, she gave it a second try.

What began then as an occasional indulgence slowly graduated to a routine. Every night, a lit cigarette in hand, she eyed the blind bats screeching in the guava tree next to her balcony as the city lights went off one after the other. She had begun to like the roughness that spread on her palm as she took a long drag, the powdery soot here and there on her fingers, the feeling that her feet rose an inch or two above the cold floor. A few months later, the cigarette gave her nothing, neither a headiness nor relief. Without any reason, she withdrew from it.

Why does one smoke anyway? In Chapter 8 of his much acclaimed book The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell calls smoking an epidemic and goes on to explain that a possible reason people get addicted to nicotine is depression. When you are depressed, your serotonin levels are usually low; a cigarette, a dose of nicotine, prompts your brain to produce more serotonin, giving you momentary solace, sometimes a faint high.

Chandrasekhar Rath was seven when he first saw a cigarette, 17 when he first smoked one. Right hand clasping one of the rusty bars of the window, left hand holding a cigarette; pausing occasionally to take drags as he hummed along with the transistor: ‘Chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jaaye hum dono’ (Come, let us become strangers once again). This image—watching his uncle smoke by the window—is still vivid in Rath’s memory.

He doesn’t remember the first film in which he saw a hero smoke. A documentary maker by profession, his daily count was five packs, sometimes six. He quit smoking after he went to Tata Cancer Hospital to record footage for an anti-smoking advertisement he made for the Cancer Patients Aid Association.

“As I watched them wriggle in their beds regretting every drag, I knew they would give up anything to exchange places with me. Something inside me churned; I walked out and threw [away] the entire packet. I haven’t smoked since then. In the initial few months there were days when I had to drag myself away from the shop near the alley where I usually bought my daily quota from. I even had to stay aloof from my friends who smoked and parties and fun for a while,” Rath says. He was 37 when he quit.

Jasmine, played by Cate Blanchett, is seen holding a bottle of rum, clinking wine glasses at a party and sipping cocktails on and off nine times in Blue Jasmine’s two-minute-long trailer. Had the film released in 30 theatres across India as scheduled, only two scenes would have required statutory warnings. Yet, Allen wouldn’t compromise. “It was his personal choice to go against the rules of our land which force a warning sign every time a character on screen lights a cigarette,” says filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt.

“He just used his right to ignore the Indian market,” says Bhatt, “ [rather] than imagine that his audience would [be distracted] from his film, an illusion that he so painfully created.” Bhatt had previously filed a case against the ban of smoking in films during the production of Raaz 3.

In the 1970s and 80s, bidis and cigarettes were vices that escorted the villain, very rarely a self-destructive habit the good guy picked up after he was wronged or abandoned. According to a WHO study, tobacco use is portrayed in 76 per cent of Bollywood films, with cigarettes making up 72 per cent of all portrayals.

When Aswini Malik plays a scene from Sholay on screen before his class, the lights are switched off and phones are on silent; such is his respect for films. “Nothing should distract you while experiencing a film,” says Malik. “It is totally absurd when an anti-smoking warning scrolls in [during] the film.

Moreover, it interferes with the emotional engagement of the audience.” Malik is a scriptwriter and a professor at Whistling Woods International Institute of Film, Fashion and Media in Mumbai.

Why does one have to state the obvious? Would you buy a carton of milk if it revealed that it contained traces of tar? Would you buy a pastry if it showed an obese woman wedged in a doorway? Every pack of cigarettes is now an ode to sincere marketing. No matter the brand, each pack of cigarettes and each flimsy green wrapper of gutka bears a pictogram of a pair of lungs indicated by a red arrow followed in bold by ‘Warning: Smoking Kills’. How much more can you educate a society? In a country where a 20 year old hangs himself because his favourite superstar’s film was not released in his town, how well educated is well-educated?

Some 4.5 trillion cigarettes and 40.3 trillion bidis have been produced between 1910 and 2010, and are estimated to be responsible for nearly 100 million premature deaths in adult men above 35 years of age. The Government appears to believe Bollywood is a culprit, though there is no data for it. In May 2005, a ban was implemented prohibiting actors from smoking on screen. It took four years for the Delhi High Court to overturn the ban and a couple of years more to come up with the current measure of screening an anti-smoking warning in the beginning and during the film.

Anusha Rizvi, whose film Peepli Live had countless smoking sequences, blames the arbitrary nature of decision-making in India. “The film is a visual medium,” she says, “Tampering with an image means disrespecting hundreds who have worked behind every scene. It is like pouring ink over a few pages of a novel. Even if it is just a scroll, it becomes part of the bigger picture. A director cannot morally avert all possible risks; it is a story being told, not a moral science lesson.”

Blue JasmineDespicable MeWoody Allen