By Sneha Rajaram
Of all the Pongal movie releases last weekend, The 33 (which released in Chile in August 2015) caught my eye because it seemed to be a story rather than a theme. And I was in the mood for a well-plotted, absorbing story.
The 33 retells the true story of 33 miners who were trapped underground in a Chilean mine for more than two months in 2010, after parts of the mine collapsed. All of “Los 33”, as they became known, miraculously survived and were rescued. And naturally, a film adaptation must follow.
Patricia Riggen, the film’s director, is a woman. There are plenty of women characters in the film, too – strong and not-so-strong – all from the families of the trapped miners. But this movie isn’t really about them. Nor is it possible for The 33 to pass the Bechdel test, since the women all talk to each other about their trapped husbands/fathers/brothers/sons/boyfriends. (One of these women,María Segovia, played by Juliette Binoche, has a brother trapped in the mine and spearheads the families’ agitation against the government’s inaction; and one of the men, Mario Sepúlveda, played by Antonio Banderas, is the leader and public face of the trapped miners.)
That’s okay, though. That’s not what the movie’s audience is looking for anyway, because the film doesn’t have particularly feminist aspirations. But here’s the thing: sometimes, a self-proclaimed feminist film can be less feminist than a movie with no feminist agenda at all. I like to think that that’s because women’s interests are so dependent on, embedded in, interwoven with everyone else’s, that sometimes, just sometimes, they shine brighter when the full story is told – when the focus isn’t just on them.
How does that work in The 33? In a gruesome version of an upstairs-downstairs drama, we’ve got 33 miners, all men, trapped 700 metres underground for almost 70 days, and we’ve got their families and the Chilean government working to rescue them above ground. The men trapped underground have very little food and water. They starve, they steal from each other, they quarrel and have physical fights. Some have been injured by the cave-in. They suffer from panic attacks, withdrawal symptoms, silicosis (a miner’s lung disease), and bipolar episodes, to name a few things. One could easily expect a group bromance or a faux male bonding movie.
But if you want to teach “How To Never Make Another Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara 101” at a film college, you need to show your students The 33. This is not a movie about privileged men who’re mining their lives for meaning by exploring their wild sides and bucket lists. It’s about actual miners: gold and copper miners; it’s about the people on whose backs you and I stand, who fall sick, live and die underground so that we can use metal in our lives – copper in our electrical wires, gold in our ears. (To understand gold miners’ lives closer to home, see this archival footage of the former Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka.)
Yes, women have been working in mining since the 1800s at least, but “Los 33” of 2010 were all men. That makes The 33 a story about a group of men who are trapped together in a life threatening situation. Yes, they fight, steal, bully, attempt murder. But they’re demonstrative, men – they also cry, apologize to, forgive, hug, kiss and comfort each other. There are old and young men, thin and fat men, kind and mean men, trustful and distrustful men, happy and not-so-happy men, likeable and unpopular … all of Old MacDonald’s farm. If this movie were fiction, one might be tempted to reject the sentimentality. But, since those 33 miners did make it out alive, I will believe any emotions that the actors portray on screen, as long as they ring true. And they do.
It’s precisely this unstinted display of feeling – love, anger, shame, weepiness –that’s so feminist about The 33. Just imagine a world where all men hug, kiss, cry to each other on a daily basis, a world where young boys’ feelings aren’t suppressed and ridiculed, a world that knows that demonstrativeness is a survival trait, as it was for “Los 33”. Women, don’t you want a world like this?