Sita Sings the Blues

I've already seen this film twice this year, the second time at the Hardacre Film Festival in Tipton, IA, the first weekend of August. I simply love it. Nina Paley, the film's creator, finds what is universal in an ancient poem, The Ramayana, and relates it effortlessly to her own life--and by extension, our lives. Apparently, it's been criticized for disrespect to Indian culture, but I think that's a pretty narrow view. To me it seems obvious that she found the core of the epic's humanity, connected to it powerfully, and wanted to make it accessible to contemporary audiences. It's a cartoon, so it's fun as well. Humor is not automatically disrespectful--this film enjoys its subject and plays with it, but never mocks it. To draw an old distinction, it isn't solemn, but it is serious--and by that I mean it's a real work of art.



SITA SINGS THE BLUES

　
Sita Sings the Blues is unlike any animated movie you’ve ever seen, or probably ever will see. It is utterly unique, and altogether amazing. Creator Nina Paley—who writes, directs, animates, and provides one of the main voices—has concocted something very special in this sumptuous blend of fantasy, satire, and sex.

The film follows two basic storylines, the breakdown of Paley’s marriage and the tragic tale of the warrior god Ram and his wife Sita (as told in the ancient poem The Ramayana, one of India’s great epics), whose marriage ends badly as well. In the autobiographical half, Paley and her husband Dave live happily in San Francisco until he accepts a job in India, which distances him from her emotionally as well as physically. Although he asks her to visit him, he’s obviously lost interest when she arrives, and when she travels back to the States, he loses no time in sending her an email announcing the marriage is over. Alone and miserable in New York City, Paley begins reading The Ramayana, and is inspired to tell the story of the spurned wife Sita, for whom she feels an understandable sympathy.

Sita, Paley’s heroic counterpart, is the virtuous and faithful wife of Ram, a prince who has been banished from his father’s court because of his stepmother’s jealousy. He and Sita make the most of their exile, however, by enjoying an idyllic life in the forest, living only for each other’s love. Unfortunately, tales of Sita’s renowned beauty reach the ears of the demon king Ravana, who rules a faraway island. Consumed by lust, he kidnaps her and takes her to his palace, where she virtuously resists his advances and professes her undying love for Ram. Meanwhile, Ram searches for her, aided by Hanuman, leader of a band of monkey warriors. When he finally finds her, he attacks the palace with his simian troops, destroys Ravana and his demonic army, and rescues Sita. But Ram is suspicious of Sita’s fidelity during her captivity, and after inheriting his kingdom, he feels he cannot command the respect of his people by allowing Sita to remain his wife. So he banishes her back to the same forest, where she raises their two sons and pines for her hardhearted husband.

Personal, epic, satirical by turns, Sita is both a celebration of unbridled romantic love and a caustic rumination on the cruelty of unequal gender roles in a patriarchal society. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t really, really funny. Judging by this film, Paley’s take on the entire universe is ironic, and neither the excesses of heroic narrative nor the pettiness of modern relationships escape her witty and irreverent point-of-view. To begin with, the two stories are cleverly interwoven, matching similar stages in the decline and fall of each relationship. Nina and Dave in bed in their studio apartment in Frisco mirrors the bliss of Ram and Sita’s early marriage; Dave’s journey to India becomes the exile, with the faithful wife following behind; Dave’s crude dumping of Nina is the moral equivalent of Ram’s unjust suspicion and banishment of his innocent wife, etc. Somewhere Joseph Campbell is applauding.

But it’s the film’s audacious and inventive artistic design that makes it so unique. To watch Paley’s film is to experience the way imagination can take what seems like straightforward narrative elements and turn them into something not only magical but kind of crazy as well. The autobiographical tale is pictured in simple black-and-white line drawings, while the epic explodes across the screen in a riot of brilliant colors and contrasting animation styles, some taken directly from traditional Indian artwork. The cartoon Ramayana’s energy and scope highlights the paucity of excitement and adventure in today’s urban lifestyle; conversely, the contemporary story brings the high-flying passions and exotic atmosphere of the ancient tale down to earth and into the 21st century where anyone can relate to it. Separated by centuries, civilizations, and mythologies, people are still people and some things never change: a troubled marriage still hurts, and a selfish lout of a husband is still a prime source of complaint for a discarded woman.

And what better way to express that complaint than through the blues? By far the most distinctive and entertaining parts of the film are the musical numbers that Paley inserts into Sita’s tale of love gone wrong--numbers which not only provide the film’s highlights but also slyly spoof the Bollywood tradition of elaborate songs and choreography. In these sequences, Sita--drawn like an exotic Betty Boop, all round eyes and long lashes, her hourglass figure with its bared midriff gyrating seductively--sings blues and torch songs from the 1920s (“Mean to Me,” “Moanin’ Low” et al.) to highlight her emotional ups and downs. The voice is that of Annette Hanshaw, a popular jazz singer of the time who retired in the 1930s and unfortunately is little known today (she died in 1985). Paley had to take out a loan to pay the licensing fees for many of the songs, and the movie put her seriously in debt.

The self-reflexive nature of the film--it is, after all, a movie that documents its own origin--is hilariously mirrored by a trio of narrators, two men and a woman (represented onscreen by traditional Indian shadow puppets), who frequently interrupt the telling of Ram’s and Sita's adventures to offer their commentary, which most often ends in disagreement about the meaning of events, or even what events actually took place (like many ancient literary works, The Ramayana exists in more than one version). Their good-natured squabbling exposes the tenuous nature of story-telling in general, as well as the inherent difficulties in interpreting stories across generations and cultures. Despite the obviousness of the device, it never becomes heavy-handed, but instead communicates the charm of a bedtime story interrupted by a child’s innocent questions.

How did Paley do it? Pretty much alone, that’s how. Over the course of six years (2002-2008), she created this amazing work on her home computer. And she’s “distributing” it in a non-traditional way by making it available for anyone to view or download from the internet (it’s also out on dvd). In short, there’s little about this film that isn’t surprising. These days it feels like we’re living in a new golden age of animation, but however inventive, original, and moving many recent animated films have been, they pale when compared to the artistic bravado and emotional resonance of this film. Sita/Nina may both sing the blues, but after watching their tales unfold in such remarkable style, I predict you’ll be singing their praises.