As a follow-up to The Cloud-Capped Star, which had so much music, some of us decided to watch The Disciple on Netflix, a film in Marathi directed by Chaitanya Tamhane. It's about a singer of North Indian classical music who is a purist about his art but whose talent doesn't qutie live up to his own high standards. The measured pace of the film allows tension to develop between his ascetic ideals and moments of musical connection and the harsh realities of practice, performance, lessons, self-doubt, impatience, jealousy: what to wear to a performance, caring for his teacher's aching joints, a sore throat before a concert, mean comments on a video, a music historian's contempt for his masters.
A recurring motif in the film is the singer riding his motorbike through the streets while listening to the taped lectures of Maai, a revered singer whose impossible standards he holds over himself. The film manages to show the motorbike alone on the road as if in a dream, and these sequences are hypnotic counterpoints to the inventory of insecurities he endures as a student, as a performer, and finally as an entrepreneur attempting to preserve North Indian classical music with a production company. The last sequence shows the singer with a wife and child on a train, as a busker sings in the aisle; the music hasn't disappeared but it's heard in completely new contexts. If he wasn't able to reach the heights of his youthful ideals, he has made a life with his music and beyond his music. That has to be enough.
There are quite a few musical performance set-pieces in the film. I wish I knew more about the music iself., but I appreciated the opportunity to get a glimpse of that world. I lived with a singer (in the Western classical tradition) for a while. I thought of him as I watched this movie. He worked incredibly hard and was very talented. But I got a back seat view of just how difficult it is to make it as a singer of any kind. It's not enough to be good; you have to be great. It's not enough to work hard; you have to have luck, connections, incredible persistence, an entourage of agent, manager, and probably a partner who picks up your tuxedo at the cleaners. You have to make so many sacrifices. There's no money in it for most. You may end up singing or teaching, but very few make a living as performers, and even fewer reach an audience that will consecrate their talent. My friend ended up singing for free in small regional productions, sang in a major opera chorus, and eventually giving voice lessons, but the elusive goal of getting hired in Europe to start a career never worked out. It's hard to adjust one's expectations and ambition to these limits. The Disciple really communicated the love and anguish of that vocation so well.
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