The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane, 2020)

One of the enduring portraits of failure, in both the theater and the cinema, is Peter Shaffer's hypothetical rendering of Antonio Salieri. This very real composer is imagined in Amadeus as a bitterly jealous rival to Mozart, but that's only part of the story. The tragedy of Salieri is that he completely understands what excellence in music sounds like. Amadeus makes sure to show that in many instances, only Salieri truly appreciated Mozart's genius, while various members of the royal court were either baffled or annoyed by it. F. Murray Abraham's performance conveys the depths of the character's thwarted ambition, his full recognition of his own mediocrity. Loving an artform with every fiber of one's being is no guarantee that one possesses the talent needed to invent, to transform, to leave one's mark.

Surely I am not alone in having identified with Shaffer's Salieri from time to time. When I was in college, I pursued the visual arts. I could draw and paint with reasonable skill, and my professors generally accepted my work with warmth and patience. I even got the chance to exhibit my work on several occasions. But looking back, I could see that I was a hopeless prisoner of influence. Everything I made looked like a hodgepodge of my favorite artists. I enjoyed making the work, but came to realize I had nothing much to say in the visual medium.

The Disciple is another story of passion and mediocrity in the fine arts, this time set in the world of Indian classical music. One of the remarkable things the writer-director, Chaitanya Tamhane, accomplishes in this film is a strange meld of the contemporary and the timeless. Until one sees the main character, Sharad (Aditya Modak) riding his scooter through the city streets, one could reasonably mistake The Disciple for a period piece. That's partly because the struggle to keep the Indian classical tradition alive entails devoting oneself to an almost monk-like vocation, spending decades under the tutelage of one's guru in the hopes of one day attaining the skill and depth of feeling needed to be a master.

We see Sharad, along with two other students, working with their master, who they call Guruji (Dr. Arun Dravid). One of Tamhane's signal achievements in The Disciple is his ability to communicate to the viewer quite clearly that Guruji is a master of the art, the other two students are very gifted (especially Deepika Bhide Bhagwat), and that Sharad simply isn't. I know almost nothing about Indian classical music, but it's still painfully evident that Sharad's performances are timid and formulaic, that his voice simply doesn't soar.

Sharad was raised to appreciate the classical tradition by his father (Kiran Yadnyopavit), himself a frustrated performer who eventually became a critic and academician. The Disciple presents a complex picture of Sharad's father, since it is obvious that he is a learned man with a great knowledge of the classical tradition. He wrote numerous books, gave presentations on TV and radio, and served as an ambassador for the artform. But we know that he would rather have been a great artist, and he simply wasn't. Sharad lives under this legacy of compromise, loving a man who taught him so much but couldn't realize his dreams.

In almost painstaking detail, The Disciple articulates the process of Sharad's recognition that like his father before him, he will never be great. Sharad's guru corrects him in the middle of public performances. We see contest judges nod and shrug at Sharad's work, as if acknowledging that he has basic chops but just cannot distinguish himself. And all around him, Sharad sees a culture that is more than happy to forget the classical tradition, embracing Bollywood playback music, Western fusion, and American Idol style pop. He arrogantly defends his chosen art against all gainsayers, but he cannot embody or exude it.

Tamhane is careful not to make the cheap, banal criticisms that artists often level at non-artists. Teaching, writing, and critique are shown to be honorable vocations, not just the slag heap of "those who can't do." Instead, The Disciple proposes a somewhat more complicated problem. To achieve excellence in one's art, one must imbibe its vast history, understand why the tradition is the way it is and how it manifests itself in the present. However, this contextual knowledge may not help one find their place in that tradition, or what creative gestures are necessary to move the art forward. History can sometimes be a dead weight. For Sharad, the struggle is about keeping a tradition alive, but also keeping it exactly as it is. Like Salieri, Sharad possesses a firm grasp of "how it's done," but this only establishes him as a paragon of mediocrity, keenly aware but hopelessly lost.