Mystical stormchasing with Monsoon’s Sturla Gunnarsson

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      One of the key images in Monsoon depicts a bunch of kids jumping from a bridge into a raging river in Mumbai. The sky is grey, the water brown, but the joy is palpable, and so is the humidity, which seems to waft from the very film itself.

      “That’s how people respond to monsoon,” says filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson, meeting the Straight for a swift half at a Kitsilano restaurant. “It’s been so pent up. You’ve been waiting and waiting for weeks now and it’s so hot and steamy and druggy, and then, pfoof—it’s like a baptism. And it’s life, right? Not in the sense of somebody in Bombay thinking, ‘Monsoon provides a hundred percent of the fresh water we need to live here.’ But they know it in their hearts. This is what sustains and generates life.”

      The veteran Canadian filmmaker has been thinking about monsoon for almost 20 years, ever since he completed the India-set feature Such a Long Journey and missed the onset of rainy season by a week. He remembers the tangible anticipation. Indeed, India’s fortunes—economic, political, and ultimately spiritual—depend on the vast and unpredictable weather system that blankets the country for four months.

      “It was sorta lodged in my head,” he says. “I really wanted to experience a monsoon, and then the word itself just started to become a romantic word in my head. It’s a beautiful word.” Gradually Gunnarsson noticed the presence of monsoon in everything from the epic 5th century poem Meghdoot to the ubiquitous rain dance sequences in Bollywood pictures.

      “And you start listening to the malhar ragas,” he continues, “this whole subcategory of music that’s only played during monsoon. It doesn’t sound right any other time because of the thickness of the air. And you start hearing about these legendary singers whose voices were so pure that when they sang the malhar raga, they could summon the rain. Little by little it grew in my mind as something I was just enchanted by.”

      With no cue from Gunnarsson, producer Ina Fichman eventually (and somewhat serendipitously) floated the idea of a documentary on the subject. What Gunnarsson ultimately delivered was a personalized film essay akin to something by Chris Marker (“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says. “He’s my hero.”) 

      As it proceeds, via an array of characters Gunnarsson meets as he wanders from weather stations in the south to the Himalayan plains where the storm finally peters out, Monsoon—which opens Saturday (April 25)becomes more of a trance than a movie. It’s tempting to read a kind of awakening into the filmmaker’s onscreen path. Indeed, Gunnarsson admits that we’re witnessing a “personal journey."

      "There’s a guy trying to come to terms with faith and mystery and that kind of stuff," he says. "Trying to understand what it is about this that I find so moving.” He adds that he remains a “non-believer”, but it’s interesting to hear that behind-the-scenes chatter in the “production bus” frequently turned to the au courant topic of new atheism.

      “[Richard] Dawkins and [Christopher] Hitchens and those guys,” he says. “Politically I kinda sorta live where they live, but what I felt intuitively at the time and now I feel more clearly is that they leave no room in there for mystery. They’ve eliminated the idea of mystery from their universe; they believe that everything can be captured by words and through reason and fact, and I think I’m at a place where there’s more room in my heart for mystery. Just mystery—and having your breath taken away by things you can’t explain.”

      Follow Adrian Mack on Twitter @AdrianMacked

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