The movie is simply called “Court,” and the generalized title is as potent here as it is with Kafka’s nightmare novel “The Trial.”
The story line follows the process of a specific case in India, but the movie’s reach is big enough to imply that an entire legal apparatus is under indictment. In the early going, a white-bearded folksinger named Narayan Kamble is arrested in mid-performance. (He’s played by non-actor Vira Sathidar, a vivid real-life Pete Seeger type.)
The charge against him has something to do with the idea that one of his songs inspired a sewer worker to commit suicide while on the job, although there’s zero evidence that the death wasn’t a workplace accident due to hazardous conditions. The fact that Narayan’s songs are acidly anti-government is not mentioned in the prosecution’s case.
A case that, as writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane patiently plays it out, will drag on for months. The charge against Narayan seem to hang on an arcane 19th-century law and the 21st-century idea that a song could be a weapon of terror, yet the judge (Pradeep Joshi) blandly kicks the proceedings down the road, again and again.
In the meantime, we get glimpses of the lives of the participants. The defense attorney (Vivek Gomber) comes from an upper-class background in Mumbai, but insists on taking public-defense cases, to his parents’ exasperation.
The prosecutor (Geetanjali Kulkarni) is from a lower-class background and would seemingly be in sympathy with the folksinger’s politics, but her career ambitions are tied to perpetuating the system. Robotic in court, we see her relaxing like a normal person with her family, and then attending a play that has a pronounced xenophobic nastiness.
Tamhane, making his feature debut, is up to some very specific things here. The unmoving camera keeps a formal distance from the action, draining the melodrama — sometimes just the drama — from the story.
We hang around in the courtroom scenes long enough to witness snippets of other cases, as though our central story had been randomly selected to occupy center stage.
In the enigmatic final reels, the system keeps lurching along, with no change in sight, crushing some and rewarding others. The outcome of Narayan’s case doesn’t actually matter, and isn’t the point of the movie, as it would be in a John Grisham yarn. The system is the story.
“Court” (three stars)
A folksinger is arrested for murky reasons, and undergoes a trial in the Mumbai court that drags on for months. This very formal film avoids big drama in favor of depicting how messed-up the process really is. In Marathi, Hindi, and English, with English subtitles.
Rating: Not rated; probably PG for subject matter
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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