The Narrative of the Multi-Linear Plot

The braided  storyline, used so stylishly in Dhobi Ghat, can actually be traced back to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

Dhobi Ghat is an innovative film, but it follows a long narrative tradition, a story-telling technique that is older than the novel and the play. It goes back to the epics, even to folklore, wherein stories of several characters are told separately, then coalesced into one central meeting place where they come together—perhaps a trading port, an ethnic gathering, or a devastating war, as in The Mahabharata, when all the brothers and cousins, with their individual personalities and narratives, finally meet in battle at Kurukshetra.

The condition of war is a natural setting for the multiple narrative in drama, cinema, epics and novels. Shakespeare’s Roman plays—particularly Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra—have a vast range of characters, each of whom heads towards his or her individual tragedy, unknowing of destiny, but guided by an inevitability that connects one to the other. The centrality of the individual in the scheme of the universe disappears entirely in the face of impending conflict. As Cassius says:  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

The novelist Tolstoy, pacifist by belief, presents the same array of multiple characters united tragically and unavoidably in War and Peace. Later, in the second half of the 20th century, in the medium of  cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky, Tolstoy’s modern  avatar in his reaction to personal, ideological and civil conflict in Russia,  links multiple characters, diverse experiences, various spaces and shifting time in the seven feature length films that he made between 1962 and 1986: My Name is Ivan, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice.

The world in these films is poetic and spiritual, and the director moulds the films to transcend the natural linear logic of human narrative. He achieves a state of existence in his films that is dreamlike. He tells you what it means to be human by giving you a world where time and space do not matter any longer, only joy or suffering does. This style of multidimensional narrative is best described by English novelist Virgina Woolf when she talks of her own ‘stream of consciousness’ approach. ‘Life,’ she says, ‘is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Surely, then, a narrative style that describes a  multiplicity of human experience within that semi-transparent envelope, is what a film like Dhobi Ghat tries to adopt in recording individual hurt and joy in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi-layered city like Mumbai.

It is in the viewing of the magic of Tarkovsky that we realise that cinema has perhaps the most flexible grammar, and the most dramatic impact, in the telling of many stories coupled with each other. This was noted right at the beginning of the evolution of cinema, in the early 20th century.  As the Russian film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein points out, his American contemporary, DW Griffith, was the first master of ‘parallel montage’, a narrative describing two actions, and by extension several characters involved in those actions, taking place simultaneously.

This happens very obviously, and controversially, in The Birth of a Nation (1915), the story of the US Civil War, where Griffith is able to piece an array of events across the nation into a cinematic whole that tells you about his historical perspective on the war.  It is silent cinema and Griffith does not even have the benefit of sound to bond his disparate characters, places and time periods together.

It is another matter, of course, that DW, being a gentleman from the deep South, presents a downright racist perspective of the role of African Americans, leading up to the Civil War and after. So, ideologically the film is regressive, but as pure multiple narrative cinema, it is up there with the best.

World War II and the arms industry may have helped  the US recover from economic uncertainty, but the plethora of Hollywood war movies did an equally good job, post war.  Interestingly, many of these films—The Longest Day, Battle of Britain, Tora! Tora! Tora!—are structured in the multiple narrative format, even though not one of them uses the technique to make a point about the futility of war or enhance your understanding of the history of the battles they depict.  They are nationalist  films celebrating the victory of the Allies, using myriad characters and simultaneity of action to show the huge sacrifice made in defence of the homeland.

It would be left to Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg, decades later, to show up the brutality of conflict, the randomness of death, the anonymity of  sacrifice and the complete absence of individual achievement felt by participants in that victory in the battle fields of Europe. His Saving Private Ryan shows courage and heroism on both sides, but in an activity that can only be called organised state sanctioned murder. He achieves this objective by using multiple perspectives on the same battle—different locations, a wide range of separate conflicts, soldiers and officers on both sides—and tells you that victory was achieved by the following cynical mathematics: the forward line will be massacred, but with enough men and equipment landing on the beaches, the second or third wave will eventually get through. 

If the life of an individual human being is peripheral in war, then it is also marginal in peace time, in the urban jungle of a metropolis.  This is a frequent post war subject in Europe, but in the last few years, with the expansion of urban India,  it is a huge subject here as well.

Three recent films come to mind: Anurag Basu’s Life in a Metro, Nishikant Kamat’s Mumbai Meri Jaan and Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha. The finest of these, in multi-linear terms, is Mumbai Meri Jaan, a movie about the bomb blasts on Mumbai trains in 2006.  It connects various characters affected by the blasts—a coffee vendor, a TV journalist struggling to report the tragedy, a corporate executive with post- traumatic stress disorder and a police officer on his last beat—to make a simple point elegantly, individuals construct the character of a city.

Dhobi Ghat, then, is a film that has naturally evolved from a sturdy tradition of cinematic documentation on urban landscapes.  By linking A to B, then C to D, and then connecting both A and B to C, the movie shows a commonality of human experience.  The only way we know we are alive in the city is to see our reflection in others.  Significantly and poignantly, D has been short-circuited and cannot make any more connections.

But to see this idea of presenting a great city, not just through individuals in the present but in the past, not just of experiences but of memory, not just in black and white but in colour, the movie to see is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. The year of its making is 1987, the city is Berlin, and the film is about two angels who look down at a multiplicity of characters who go about their business in the city. Nobody can cross the Berlin Wall, except the angels. Two years later, in 1989, the Wall actually comes down, and the body of Berlin, like in a fine multiple narrative movie, is connected to its soul once again.

About The Author

Ajit Duara