The cinetrix is the sort who keeps her optimism wrapped in several layers of cynicism at all times. This innate cautiousness might explain the mixed reaction I had to the Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels, a film, to be fair, that I might not have seen left to my own devices. Like all people of good will, I am for disadvantaged kids catching breaks. But I am deeply suspicious of the motives of the adults making those breaks happen.
It's been a week now since I saw the film [and engaged in a rather intense "discussion" of its morals and aesthetics with a friend afterward], and I still don't know what I think.
The kids will break your heart. They're bright, talented, deserving. Codirector Zana Briski, a photographer, spent time living among them in the brothels while she documented the lives of sex workers in the red-light district of Calcutta. Ultimately, it's the brothel kids who capture her gaze and win her heart. She teaches them photography and decides to document their lives.
Because without the photography class, there is no story, Briski must appear on screen. However, from there, it's a short leap, it seems, to sequences showing her trying to place the brothel children in schools, working with Amnesty International to use their photography in a fundraising calendar, and attempting to get a passport for the most gifted, Avajit, to travel to Amsterdam for a children's photography conference.
If you know anything about documentary filmmaking, you know how much depends on luck in choosing your subject[s], and then how much depends on editing your raw footage to create a compelling narrative. Potential principals often fall by the wayside during shooting or editing as you realize that the real story lies elsewhere.
Knowing this, I can't stop wondering about what happened to the kids who didn't make the cut, and even those who did, after Briski went home. Who's on the cutting room floor or relegated to the DVD extras? What happened to the girls who aged out of childhood too quickly and were pressed into a life on the street? What happened to the kids for whom boarding school was too alien to manage? We should celebrate the successes, yes, but what about the other kids?
And what does Briski get out off this? I know no one could go into such a project thinking of Oscar glory, but no one's that selfless, either. Where did the money come from to get these kids schooling, underwrite their travel, hell, simply pay for their cameras? And what sort of connections and hook-ups did Briski have, in addition to her dogged confidence, that allowed her to negotiate truly byzantine Indian bureaucracies? She was an outsider, and a woman, in a society that often runs on relationships--was there an off-camera uncleji who knew people? You don't want the story to become Briski's, of course, but too much of the process, the how, is elided for my taste.
Maybe co-director Ross Kauffman's quickness to spell out that he and Briski were no longer romantically involved--from the stage at the Academy Awards, no less--is at fault. His "ladies, I'm available" announcement left such a bad taste in the cinetrix's mouth that perhaps I couldn't see past the flawed people who made the film [and the suggestion of the White Man's burden that lingers in the corners of each frame] long enough to appreciate the good that has resulted from this film. Maybe. I'm still not sure.
