The Mystic Masseur

anyone who knows anything about trinidad/trinidadians would immediately realize within the first five minutes of this movie that these people don't seem to take their subject matter seriously. why go and waste loads of money on a movie, when your actors cannot pull off a half-decent trinidadian accent? throughout the movie we have either indian or british-indian actors making a sorry attempt at mimicking trinidadian speech. why not go and hire a full cast of trinidadian people? the movie did feature a few native trinidadians and their perfect accents made the other actors' poor accents show up even more. i truly wonder why v.s. naipaul let his book get treated in this careless manner.

The look and feel of this film is of a "real" story, based at least somewhat on facts, although it seems rather too preposterous to be real. We are presented with a semi-literate, backwater Hindu cracker, in love with "books" the way people of limited literacy tend to be, desiring nothing so much as to write some himself, but with barely enough talent to produce more than grandiose pamphlets. Similarly, with no actual training or experience to draw from, he imagines himself to be a gifted masseur. Evidently in the more rustic districts of Trinidad, where superstitions run high, people were greatly impressed by such pretensions, and he does rather well for himself. Soon he is holding "court" on his potato patch, with lines of rural boobs waiting their turn to be blessed or have their marital quarrels adjudicated. The film has a Hindu flavor of the American Evangelical movement of the 1920s, somewhat squalid and shabby intellectually. It is presented in retrospect form the point of view of a young fellow who experienced a "spiritual healing" from the pundit in his childhood. The lettered rube is therefore treated with the greatest respect, as though nearly a Gandhi or Nehru! It is exceedingly well done technically and artistically, if only the story was less peculiar and doltish.

A half century ago, Trinidad was an outpost of the waning British Empire and, like most British holdings, attracted immigrants from the jewel in the crown, India, who established villages on the island. Novelist V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, grew up there. His first few novels wryly explored the comic clash between his fellow Indians and their exotic setting.

Now The Mystic Masseur, his first novel (1957) , comes to the screen directed by Ismail Merchant, best known as the producer half of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team. Naipaul published it a few years after leaving Trinidad to study at Oxford, hoping for a career as a writer. The novel, narrated by a young Trinidad Indian at Oxford, refracts elements from Naipaul's early life into a story about another islander with similar but misplaced ambitions.

Ganesh Ransumair burns to make his mark in the world of letters. The trouble is, Trinidad doesn't offer much scope for a man with little learning and less talent. In his poor village on the outskirts of the colonial capital, books are so rare that a conniving shopkeeper with a marriageable daughter tries to score points with Ganesh by showing off his library, a collection of tattered paperback mysteries he's obviously never read. The daughter wins a few points, though, with her beauty and odd enthusiasm for English punctuation, of all things. A marriage is arranged and the new wife waits impatiently for her husband to finish the book that will make them rich. It turns out to be a pamphlet on Hinduism that fails to sell. Ganesh is then persuaded to try his hand as a masseur – actually, a faith healer – and once he gets the patter right and performs a few miraculous cures, he's on his way. Now the books he writes sell like hotcakes, not because Ganesh is a great author, but because he is a famous mystic. He parlays his fame among island Indians into an election victory, winning a seat on the colonial council.

Caryl Phillips' screenplay starts where Naipaul's novel ends, with a young Oxford student, an Indian from Trinidad, sent to meet an island statesman named G. Ramsay Muir at the railway station. Muir turns out to be Ganesh, thoroughly Anglicized and eager to visit the dreaming spires of the university town. Phillips invents scenes of Ganesh gushing at the riches of the Bodleian Library, marveling at all the learning he was never able to acquire. In the novel, learning that Muir is the ex-masseur is a comic punch line that caps the story of a man eager to reinvent himself. Phillips' decision to start there and then backtrack to Ganesh's rise leaves the movie without an ending and skews its themes.

But the movie works best where the novel also succeeds, in characters who wait impatiently while young Ganesh works out his mission in life. Chief among these is Ramlogan, the shopkeeper played by Om Puri, a veteran of Indian cinema. Wily, crass, but always polite, Ramlogan seems to smell the money this poor scholar might make. His daughter Leela (Ayesha Dharker) steals a few scenes when she wonders aloud why Ganesh isn't making any. As for Ganesh, Aasif Mandvi's performance seems driven by the plot, not the character. James Fox shows up twice in a weird cameo role as an Englishman gone native.

The Mystic Masseur is wildly comic when Merchant can get Ramlogan, Leela, and Ganesh into his lens. Then the interplay between Ganesh's ambition and the more practical concerns of his wife and father-in-law get laughs. Their dialect, Indian English with a Caribbean flavor, is also fun to listen to, although hard to follow at times. But Merchant is not much of a director, with too many flat shots of characters talking in the middle distance and cutaways to show their reaction. The languid editing also deadens the pace.

Coming so soon after Monsoon Wedding, a much more lively film, Mystic Masseur seems slow and unconvincing once it gets past village scenes. It aims at themes its characters never quite hit. Comedy comes from situations Ganesh finds himself in, not from the wobbly arc of his upward career. What's missing in this adaptation is the affectionate wonder of Naipaul's narrator who can laugh with but also at Ganesh but who also, in the novel, offers an implicit contrast to his ambitions. As Ganesh strives to become something more than the mystic masseur, he crashes into a theme Naipaul would develop in his later novels: the troubled identity of the exile caught between different worlds. In 1957, when Naipaul was just starting out, he could look back on Ganesh with wry affection, confident that his path would follow that of his narrator instead. A half century later, with laurels, a knighthood, and long residence in England, Naipaul himself seems to have hardened into a smarter, more successful G, Ramsay Muir.

after making a special effort to get to see this movie..i was so disappointed..attracted by merchant,naipul, and trinadad..what a letdown..slow,dull, with a story that went nowhere..it definitely a film to miss

Being from a similar culture as Trinidad, I couldn't resist picking this one up. Atypical of Merchant/Ivory films, this one is a period piece set in pre-independent Trinidad and follows the rise of Ganesh from a frustrated teacher in Port of Spain to an elected member of parliament. Overall, the film does tend to be slow in some parts, but the lively dialogue is very good.

This film follows the Indo-Caribbean culture of the West Indies very closely. I found myself identifying closely with the people and found them to be very credible characters. The juxtaposition of Colonial Trinidad and a country on the verge of independance is hinted at throughout the film. However, the political tensions were kept to a minimum. It would have been nice to have seen how Ganesh and his cronies dealt with the coming age of independence.

One of the great scenes of the film occurred when Ganesh tries to talk to the striking dock workers. The emotion is clear when he realizes his rise to power came at the cost of his charisma. Overall, a very good film.