City of Protests : India: The filming of ‘City of Joy’ has brought Hollywood to Calcutta and raised charges that the movie is ‘social pornography.’

At first glance, it seemed like just another Sunday morning in Mir Bahar Ghat, a teeming and gritty cobblestoned market street in the heart of an urban hell.

Flanked by the stench of disease and human waste, laborers and children scrubbed themselves in a poisoned well. A dozen filthy pigs nibbled their way through a steaming heap of yesterday’s garbage. Barefoot bearers, the baskets on their heads overladen with everything from cucumbers to cooking oil, elbowed through a human river that surged through the street.

And, as the temple bell clanged outside, tenements came to life as thousands awakened to what appeared to be just another day of poverty and hope for tomorrow.

But then, someone yelled, “Roll ‘em!” And then, “Action!” And suddenly Patrick Swayze, sweaty and bleeding and 10,000 miles from his ranch outside Los Angeles, was hurtling through Mir Bahar Ghat in a rickshaw pulled by veteran Indian actor Om Puri.

“Roll ‘em!”

“Action!!!”

There was Swayze running back up the street, chasing a motorcycle through the madness.

“Roll ‘em!”

“Action!!!”

And there was Swayze in a jostling match with a Calcutta cop--all under the eye of Hollywood’s intense, British-born director, Roland Joffe, and thousands of mystified onlookers who watched the strange marriage of fantasy and reality on their street.

But well behind the scenes, there was something far stranger taking place in Mir Bahar Ghat last Sunday. It was the simple fact that Joffe, Swayze and their army of assistant directors and technicians were there at all.

Sunday marked the first time that they were permitted to film in the streets of Calcutta, since a bitter controversy over their movie, “The City of Joy,” bubbled over into a court order just one month into the 13-week shooting schedule.

The March 7 order that banned shooting on location for “City of Joy” marked the culmination of street demonstrations, angry official condemnations and at least one firebomb attack on the crew’s set. The Calcutta High Court lifted the ban last week only after hours of intense debate. Thus, Sunday’s return to Mir Bahar Ghat represented a key victory for Joffe in a project that clearly has become far more than a film for him and for Swayze.

Already, the events swirling around this film have combined to make this a classic confrontation between Hollywood and the real world it seeks to portray.

Patterned loosely on passages from Dominique Lapierre’s novel, Joffe’s “City of Joy” had been sharply criticized by several of Calcutta’s leading leftists, artists and politicians as “the selling of poverty” even before filming began Feb. 9.

Such censure was expected by Joffe and his producers: In Calcutta, among the world’s last Communist strongholds, the ruling coalition of Marxists, Leninists and Stalinists tends to see neocolonialist and imperialist conspiracies not only by foreigners but even by India’s central government in New Delhi.

Much of the criticism has focused on Lapierre’s 1985 novel, based on hundreds of interviews in a bustee, or urban village. In the West the book was widely acclaimed, but here it was condemned by many as “social pornography.”

Now, it would seem, the alleged sins of the book have been visited on the movie.

Typical of the case against “City of Joy” was a speech last week by Buddhadev Bhattacharya, culture and information minister and heir apparent to power in the state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located:

“I have myself read the book and found that it is sickening and full of sky-high errors. I have even gone through the final, 13th version of the oft-amended film script, sent it to exclusive persons and obtained their opinion,” Bhattacharya said. “The book has been written from the racist viewpoint of the whites. That viewpoint has been preserved intact in the film script. It has been shown that the people of this city are unconcerned about the misery of their fellow citizens. Only the whites are the saviors.”

Bhattacharya equally made clear, though, that his government is legally incapable of stopping the filming, which was approved in 1989 by New Delhi. And indeed, it has not been the Calcutta government behind the angriest assaults on the project, but a single, crusading newspaper.

For the Bengali-language daily Aaj Kal, the campaign against “City of Joy” has become a cause celebre, particularly since the death of one of its reporters a few days after he covered an on-location shoot in the sprawling Horticultural Gardens.

According to Aaj Kal, reporter Soumitra Ghosh, 25, “was attacked by ‘City of Joy’ musclemen in front of the police. These musclemen caught him and beat him up; they kicked him with their boots on the knees and abused him filthily, using foul language. Their attitude was that they had powerful backing and could do what they liked. Ghosh fell on the ground, and they still hit him on the chest with a stick. Ghosh ran limping from the horticultural park.” And, a few days later, he died.

But according to police, Ghosh was suffering from terminal cancer, the official cause of his death. A post-mortem showed no signs of a beating, and many Calcuttans accuse Aaj Kal of exploiting the film and the issues behind it in the same way that the paper accuses Joffe of exploiting Calcutta’s poor.

In an interview, Aaj Kal editor Ashok Dasgupta, who sells 200,000 copies of his paper daily to a largely young, idealistic audience, said: “We represent a very volatile segment of the population. Let the film come, and, when they see that the film has put Calcutta in a very, very bad light, they will remember Aaj Kal--and they will know that Aaj Kal, under the leadership of Ashok Dasgupta, fought against it. We think with this protest we have just given honor to our responsibility.”

Dasgupta and other protesters against “City of Joy” insist that they do not deny poverty exists in Calcutta, but, like some who are the subjects of a work of art they cannot control, they passionately believe Joffe is highlighting it in isolation.

“I have got a house, and there are darker sides in my house,” the editor said. “But no one has a right to point a harsh torchlight on those dark corners only. . . . So when only the darker side is emphasized, we have the right to protest. When you represent a city and give the film to the rest of the world, you have to respect the people.”

Respect. That, and the Bengalis’ undying dedication to their own personal dignity, is what lies at the heart of the protest.

But in interviews with Joffe and Swayze, it was clear that “City of Joy” has profound personal and professional implications for both. And for both as well, an almost constant crisscrossing blurs the line between the fantasy of the script and the reality of their own lives and understanding of life in general.

Still covered with sweat after 11 hours in the streets of Mir Bahar Ghat on Sunday night, Swayze made it apparent that he not only is sensitive to the criticism but also that he believes it could not be more unfounded.

His first impressions of Calcutta: “The thing that hit me the most was, I expected the smog and the traffic and the throngs of people and this kind of thing. But it is disconcerting, just like the book and just like the script, that these people who live in such sorrow can have such beautiful smiles and be so willing to show them to you.

“They’ve got a line on something that we don’t have, and that’s a big part of the reason why I’m here and why I want to make this movie. India has always held something for me very powerful.”

Swayze, a 38-year-old Buddhist, added, “I’ve always wanted to come to India, because I feel this is the place. This is the temple of faith and hope, which we all strive for in our lives. . . . And that’s what ‘City of Joy’ is all about. It’s what the film has to say about the dignity and beauty of all of us as human beings, no matter what walk of life you come from.

“So this movie is not about Calcutta. It’s about its people and the world’s people--and it’s quite different from the book.”

Indeed, the film has little to do with Lapierre’s book. Joffe, best known for directing “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” found the seed for the script, written by Mark Medoff and Gerard Brach, as he finished shooting “The Mission” in Colombia. It was five years ago, and he was reading the novel.

“There were 700 pages, with one kernel that I thought was absolutely universal--the story of the rickshaw puller,” Joffe said. “It is the story of a man who can exist and pull his own family along, in spite of a web of pessimism, by hanging onto a single strand of optimism. And I felt that to see a Westerner at sea in Calcutta would also be rather wonderful . . . (a cultural conversion) to show how we are all imprisoned by what we believe.”

Two minor characters from Lapierre’s book became Joffe’s lead roles: Hasari Pal, the rickshaw puller, played by the celebrated Indian actor Om Puri, and Max Lowe, a shallow young American doctor who comes to a Calcutta ashram in search of truth and his own soul, only to find more than he can handle in the bustee known as City of Joy.

For Joffe, the story would lose its power and intensity if the film were made anywhere but Calcutta. And the director, who has lived and traveled extensively elsewhere in India, said he was fully prepared for the criticism and controversy his project has drawn.

“I felt the very act of our coming here would bring to the surface all of the pride Calcuttans have in their city--but also all of their fears. And it would bring back all the memories they have of how they’ve been treated in the past,” he said, speaking of a metropolis long devoid of resources but swelled by millions of refugees from Bangladesh and elsewhere in India.

“So I knew that we would raise phantoms and ghosts in people’s minds as well as the feeling that maybe we were going to do something that would reverberate well for the city. It’s a very proud city, and you also have to understand that.”

But the artistic end seems to justify the bumpy ride Joffe has had in reaching that understanding with Calcuttans. The film, he said, will declare: “Here we all are, torn between optimism and despair--optimism being that thing that pulls us forward . . . and despair that thing that can hold us back.

“I think this city is a wonderful expression of that, and the struggle of the people of this city expresses that in a way that I’ve never seen so vividly.”

What is more, Joffe insists that Calcutta’s decay contains an even more universal message that the world must share--a warning for the future, rather than an ugly memory.

“We’re not living 100 years ago,” he says when asked whether it is fair for an artist to criticize his own culture but unfair to expose that of others. “We’re living now. The world is too small for that. I know people want to protect their own patch, but nobody has a patch anymore.

“Calcutta may be the future of every city in the world. The fact is that we know, if we’re sensible, that our resources are beginning to run out. We know, if we’re sensible, that the Third World cannot industrialize. There’s going to come a stage when either we’re going to have to learn how to ride out this particular wave . . . or we plunge into more wars.”

And it is here that Swayze has found that in many ways, he is Max Lowe. It showed when, two days after he arrived last month, the actor started working as a volunteer in Mother Teresa’s hospice for the dying and home for lepers.

“It blows you away,” he said of the experience. “But I found it was hard not to tune it out. I found it was opening me up too fast, and Max needed to stay shut down as a human being--not caring and not having the ability to commit and being screwed up inside and suicidal and angry.

“So I backed off. Now, I’m just starting to move into the parts of Max where he actually starts changing--starts becoming something resembling a whole human being. So I’ll start working in the clinics again.”

“So who is who? Is Max you?” Swayze is asked.

“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s why I’m doing it. I went through this guy’s place. My destructiveness was not slitting my wrists. It was pitting my skill up against the odds, in terms of motorcycles and cars and diving off cliffs in Acapulco--you know, really crazy stuff. I should be dead, but I’m not.”

Indeed, Swayze’s weeks in Calcutta are pure therapy, leading to deeply personal confessions not unlike those of many world travelers who pass through here.

“You realize there’s hard-core demons down there that scare you to death. I’ve had to allow myself to wallow in those demons in this role. . . . Always, growing up, I never liked myself very much. I felt I was this product, this machine, this thing my mother created that could do anything with this body. I didn’t even know if there was a person inside--to the point where I was so sure, so scared, that was true, that I went around proving it.”

It is such self-effacing insight that helps clarify Joffe’s choice of an actor whose more enduring screen image is from the film “Dirty Dancing.”

“I don’t consider myself a dancer,” Swayze said, clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion that Joffe has cast a dancer in one of the most powerful roles he has ever tried to portray on screen. “I haven’t been a dancer for close to 20 years.”

But still, as always, there is time for dancing. Whether it’s purely for exercise, as Swayze insists, or as a crucial diversion from his daily revelations in one of the world’s most intense cities, one can find him most nights, either alone or with his wife, Lisa Niemi, at the Pink Elephant, the Oberoi Grand Hotel’s swank discotheque.

After a 12-hour day on the sweltering streets of Calcutta, the actor said, smiling, “There’s just no better way to stay in shape. And, really, I do love dancing.”