The irony of a film named Last Man in Tower, that released in theatres on Sept. 11, would probably be lost on no one. The director, Ben Rekhi, is American (of Indian origin).
The film itself, set in a Mumbai housing society, ofc, has nothing to do w/ the attack on twin towers of WTC, 2001, or its 25th anniversary.
Although one could argue, most of the world’s major political events/disputes, somehow, point to the issue of real-estate, after all.
Responding to the unintended irony still, filmmaker Ben tells me, “While the release date did play on our minds, it wasn’t in our hands, & Last Man in Tower is the title of Aravind Adiga’s book [the film is based on], which couldn’t be changed either.”
Ben’s uniformly well-performed pic is set in 2010. The book released in 2011.
It’s about an old, obstinate man, Yogesh Mishra (Manoj Bajpayee), standing like a dilapidated wall, getting in the way of fellow residents (such as Divya Dutta), & the builder (Boman Irani), who’s offered a lottery of sorts, in return for their apartment building’s redevelopment.
Ben and been in talks w/ the author, Aravind, over years.
Its timing is, however, more apt, when you consider how Mumbai, 2026, feels like the redevelopment capital of the world — what w/ sounds of jackhammer being the sprawling metropolis’s jarring background score, & lunar craters dotting its cramped, dug-up landscape.
I’d met the entertainingly erudite Aravind, once, when he was Time magazine’s correspondent in Mumbai — hoping the escapades of that drunken night didn’t show up in a book he was writing on the city then.
The casual fear was naturally unfounded. As w/ The White Tiger (2008; also, a killer movie), he was still working on Indian fiction, including, much later, Selection Day (2016), that’s a Netflix series.
Aravind wrote the evidently prescient Last Man in Tower from a Mumbai apartment that was then set for reconstruction. He’d got drawn into its negotiation process.
He asked Ben to head over to the building for research. It’s still there.
For privacy concerns, Ben doesn’t name me the Mumbai building, but he says Vakola’s “Vishram”, as in the film, is a play on it.
What about it?
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