Passage to India

An underground comic artist mines her own heartbreak for a film of mythic proportions

By Martin L. Johnson

Special to Metromix
May 1, 2008

Three years ago, Nina Paley was living the quiet life of an underground comic artist and animator. But then her husband was offered a job in Trivandrum (in southern India), and she followed him there, where she immersed herself in Indian culture...including the epic myth “Ramayana,” central to Hinduism and other religions.

After a few months in India, her life took another unexpected turn. While she was in New York on business, her husband, already in a midlife crisis, ended their marriage by e-mail. Suddenly homeless, she moved to Brooklyn to begin work on her first feature film, “Sita Sings the Blues,” which had its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“I started with the musical numbers,” she tells Metromix, describing the many inventive musical scenes in the film (hello, Bollywood?). “I thought I was just going to do a short, but I had the story, and the songs would fill it in.”

The film tells the story of Sita and Rama, two gods in human form whose marriage dissolves after Sita is captured by an evil god. Although she refuses the evil one's advances, Rama no longer believes Sita is pure after her rescue. She is then forced to live in the forest, where she gives birth to Rama’s two sons and eventually ascends back to the heavens.

In “Sita,” though, Paley writes herself into the film, making the breakup of her own marriage an inexact parallel to Sita and Rama’s problems. She also gives Sita, whose speaking voice is played by Reena Shah, the singing voice of Annette Hanshaw, a now-forgotten white blues singers from the late 1920s.

And, if that’s not enough, Paley uses a Greek chorus where three Indians argue about the meaning of “Ramayana.” Paley says she employed the Greek chorus to emphasize that the story is open to interpretation.

“I wanted to show that there are multiple ‘Ramayanas,’ so I asked three different friends to come into a recording studio,” she said, noting that their unscripted dialogue, recorded in just an hour, proved to be a perfect fit for the film. “Whenever I talk to Indians about this project, they’ll start hitting on the same themes.”

Paley—whose previous work, the animated short “The Stork,” played well on the festival circuit—also watched the many film and television versions of the story, and read as many graphic novels, books and essays. She says that the lesson she draws from the story is a simple one, but it’s still hard to take.

“The moral of the story is that life is difficult,” she says. “Even gods, when they’re incarnated as human beings, struggle as well.”


Photo: Nina Paley / www.sitasingstheblues.com