CALCUTTA -- A tiny man with bananas on his head has been turned in the proper direction, a fat shirtless worshiper has been told for the second time when to ring his bell to goddess Siva, jute sacks, oil drums and carrot trays have been hoisted by dhoti-clad laborers, and now -- for the briefest moment -- Calcutta's madness is frozen in place.
"Action!"
Patrick Swayze dashes up a cobblestone lane, blond hair tousled and shirt wet with sprayed-on sweat. Thump! Down goes a cucumber vendor. Thwack! Swayze is stopped by a stick-wielding cop. They argue briefly. But before the clapper boards have clapped, marking the scene's end, applause cascades from the rooftops, slum balconies and fetid alleys where hundreds upon hundreds of rail-thin Calcuttans have swarmed to watch Hollywood create a celluloid dream about their impoverished city.
The applause aggravates the sound technicians, but it is sweet music to Swayze and director Roland Joffe, who have endured many miseries while filming "City of Joy," Dominique Lapierre's best-selling novel about hope and despair among Calcutta's wretched poor. A month ago, protesters hurled bombs onto the set, calling the book an insult to the city because of its depictions of prostitution, poverty and corruption.
A lawsuit brought by agitated citizens kept Joffe and crew off Calcutta's streets for most of March; a settlement was reached last week that allowed filming in public areas on weekends and holidays. A popular local daily has accused two of Joffe's assistant directors of contributing to the death of one of its reporters by beating him up several days before the reporter apparently died of cancer. Joffe and the assistant directors adamantly deny the charge. Joffe and Swayze blame the few serious incidents on a handful of professional agitators and say most Calcuttans have openly welcomed them.
"This city has a strange way of hugging you even while it kicks your ankles," says Joffe, who previously made "The Killing Fields" in Thailand and "The Mission" in Colombia's rural cocaine country -- each with comparable ease.
"You saw the crowds. You saw the love that comes from these people," says Swayze, Hollywood's latest blue-eyed box office icon, the costar of last summer's hit, "Ghost." "When you see the problems happen, it's obviously three or four hired suckers stuck in the crowd to agitate, to start throwing stones."
Still, Swayze concedes, "It's very scary when they start throwing bombs on your set."
The troubled filming of "City of Joy" is the story of what happens when modern Hollywood meets modern India. It is about art imitating life, life imitating art and each side feeling that the other has it all wrong. At bottom, it is about Calcutta, an urban paradox of sinking bridges, collapsing buildings, broken telephones, erratic electricity, filth, disease, abject poverty -- but also a city of palpable spirit and ambition, high culture and even higher pretensions.
"We are volatile people, we are aggrieved, we are moved," says Ashok Dasgupta, editor of the Calcutta daily Aj Kal and a leader of the campaign against Joffe's film. "But at least we are not dead people."
With that much, Joffe and his colleagues agree. In fact, they say, it is exactly why they fought so hard and long to come to Calcutta in the first place.
French author Lapierre published "City of Joy" in 1986 after conducting hundreds of interviews with Calcutta's slum dwellers, lepers, lame and blind. The book is as much documentary as novel, but its center is the fictional story of a rickshaw puller from rural Bihar state who is forced from his land by a series of unimaginable disasters, travels to Calcutta, meets a Polish priest and an American doctor (played by Swayze) and then endures another series of unimaginable disasters.
The book's theme is the resilience of the human spirit, but Calcuttan intellectuals showed little patience for it. A few civic leaders welcomed Lapierre after his book came out, but others denounced him as another in a long line of Western writers and filmmakers who have depicted Calcutta as the world's most miserable city. Arguments against the book vary -- some call it inaccurate; some offer a leftist critique, saying the book exploits poverty by selling it to wealthy consumers in the West; and some say it unfairly ignores the city's proud traditions of poetry, sculpture and painting.
"Like everybody else in the world, we thought 'City of Joy' was a tribute to Calcutta," says co-producer Iain Smith. "It was only when we started getting close to {filming} that we understood that Calcuttans and some Indians saw it as an attack."
At the center of the film -- and at the center of the controversy -- are universal questions about poverty. "Calcutta may be the future of every city in the world," Joffe says. "I don't hold with anything that says, 'This is a private world that only the people on the inside can understand' ... We should stop viewing Calcutta as something strange or different."
But that is precisely what Calcuttan intellectuals fear about Joffe -- that he will distort their city into some grotesque amusement, a fun house of child prostitutes, lepers, thieves and cripples. "The whole idea is to portray Calcutta as a very dark city, where skeletons are sold, where cockroaches are in the big hotel, where boys sell boys for sex," says Aj Kal editor Dasgupta. "Calcutta has so many sides that are not dark."
To the filmmakers and actors, that attitude smacks of dishonesty. "If I started putting rich people in this film, I would distort the truth of this city," says Joffe.
"It seems like people here wanted to deny that poverty exists," adds Swayze. "I think people want it to be different so badly here. ... It seems like people want to lie to themselves."
To Joffe, "what this film is about is that each human being, when it comes to it, no matter what their difficulties are, is responsible for the choices they make."
Calcuttans and Indians seem quick to blame their problems on others, he says, or to excuse them by saying that poverty is the mother of all evil. "If you do have people who live without much, and you say, 'Well, everything's excused by poverty,' you've denied the greatness of those people who are poor but also honest. And that's a terrible thing to do."
Joffe says he cast Swayze as the initially suicidal, ultimately redeemed American doctor Max Loeb in part because he thinks Swayze is underrated as an actor, but also because he wanted someone energetic, optimistic and even naive who would arrive in Calcutta for the first time and be forced to cope, as the film was being shot, with the overwhelming moral and physical challenges Calcutta poses to any new arrival from the developed world.
Swayze says he has been reeling with emotions and questions since he first arrived in Calcutta. "I expected the smog and the traffic and the throngs of people," he says. "But it is disconcerting -- these people who live in such sorrow, how can they have such beautiful smiles and be so willing to show them to you? They've got a line of something we don't."
What, then, has Swayze discovered about Calcutta and himself? "One thing is, how dare any of us bitch about our little problems, our little sorrows in our lives, when these people have lived with this for centuries and still find a way for radiance to come from their faces. ... it blows the Western mind away."
Swayze, a former dancer who emerged as a national heartthrob in 1987's "Dirty Dancing" and has struggled to build a reputation as a serious actor, found himself preparing for his role by working with the dying in Mother Teresa's Calcutta clinic just a few months after "Ghost" and its $500 million in revenues catapulted him to the first rank of Hollywood stardom.
He says that is just the way he wanted it. "This film is about my insides screaming to move further as an actor, to see what's on the other side," Swayze explains over coffee at the Grand Hotel, where he has lately set Calcutta on its ear by dancing for several hours in the hotel discotheque on Saturday nights.
"This is one of the heavyweight films. This is potential Academy {Awards} material."
On the set, onlookers swarm in shifting masses, arms draped around each other's shoulders, feet shuffling forward to where Swayze and the other actors -- Art Malik, who played Hari Kumar in "The Jewel in the Crown," and Pauline Collins, who starred in "Shirley Valentine" -- sit on folding chairs under the eaves of a four-story tenement. When the Calcuttans reach the actors, they do not ask for autographs or attempt to start a conversation. Instead, they stare and stare, silently, unrelentingly, until a policeman comes and smacks them with his stick, driving them back 20 yards.
Across the way, a pig family naps in a garbage dump. A bearded holy man wanders into the alley and circles aimlessly; he is mistaken for an extra until an alert assistant director realizes he is merely lost. "Truth is more wonderful than fiction," says producer Smith as the holy man is led away.
In the crowd that has gathered to watch Hollywood interpret Calcutta this morning, few seem to be seriously worried about what Joffe andSwayze might do to their city's reputation. "I enjoy it as a picnic," says Salila Auddy, who owns an incense shop in the alley. "I take it as art. In a town there is two sides: the bad side and the good side. I want to see the joy. If the film is handled by a good director, as good art, then a nasty scene will be presented as a good scene."
That's Calcutta -- even the shopkeepers are film critics.
Calcutta, with all of its suffering "brings out people's greed, but it brings out their compassion, their fear, but also their strengths," says Joffe later at the hotel.
Speaking as much about his attempt to make a film here as about the drama of "City of Joy" itself, he says, "Life will change in the blink of an eyelid from something that will drive you to suicide ... and in the same flicker you can look at it and suddenly that same situation is about courage, optimism, struggle, the will to survive.
"Here we all are," he concludes, "torn between optimism and despair."
And then Calcutta's power grid fails again, the hotel lights go out, and Roland Joffe is sitting in the dark.
