I’m very pleased with my DVD of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 classic Trouble in Paradise. Apart from the main feature – a lovely, elegant romantic comedy that provides immediate evidence of the fabled “Lubitsch touch” – the disc includes a silent film directed by him in Germany in 1917, long before he crossed the Atlantic to grace Hollywood with his distinct sensibilities. This older film, titled The Merry Jail and adapted from a Strauss operetta, is very much a product of its era – a jerky, broad comedy with hammy acting – but as a comedy of manners, mutual deceit and misunderstandings it provides glimpses of themes that would run through Lubitsch’s more mature work. The early films of great directors can be very revealing that way.
Lubitsch is often credited with bringing modernity to American cinema, taking Hollywood into its next phase after the D W Griffith era. He must have been a huge presence from the late 1920s to the early 1940s: whenever I’ve seen a reference to him in a memoir of a movie personality from that period, it’s obvious that he was among the most respected filmmakers of the time. Fellow directors envied his seemingly effortless, fluid touch and stars of the time queued up to be cast in his films. [Coincidentally there's a riff on this in another excellent film I watched recently, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, in which the starlet played by Veronica Lake wants only to be introduced to Mr Lubitsch.] His name is synonymous with sophistication, but what tends not to be mentioned so much is that there is always warmth and affection beneath the stylishness of his work. On the surface, Lubitsch films are full of impeccably well-dressed and well-spoken high-society types tossing bon mots at each other, but the people in his cinema never reach for cleverness at the expense of humanity; they are essentially likable and reveal unexpected depths just when you think you’ve got them marked down as stereotypes.
The very charismatic performances of Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis in Trouble in Paradise exemplify this. The quietly suave Marshall plays gentleman thief Gaston Monescu and the spirited Hopkins (one of the most underrated actresses of the time and a personal favourite) is a small-time pickpocket named Lily. As the film opens in a Venice hotel, each is posing as a member of nobility and during the course of a superbly performed dinner scene-cum-seduction, it transpires that they are aware of each other’s masquerade. Thus they realise that they are kindred spirits.
Lily: When I came here, it was for a little adventure, a little game which you play tonight and forget tomorrow. Something's changed me; and it isn't the champagne. Oh, the whole thing's so new to me. I have a confession to make to you. Baron, you are a crook. You robbed the gentleman in 253, 5, 7, and 9. May I have the salt.
Gaston: (passing the salt) Please.
Lily: Thank you.
Gaston: The pepper too?
Lily: No thank you.
Gaston: You're very welcome. Countess, believe me, before you left this room I would have told you everything. And let me say this with love in my heart: Countess, you are a thief. The wallet of the gentleman in 253, 5, 7, and 9 is in your possession. I knew it very well when you took it out of my pocket. In fact, you tickled me. But your embrace was so sweet.
On reflection, it isn’t enough to simply read this exchange: you have to watch Marshall and Hopkins act it out – to see how they transcend the slickness of the dialogue by showing the characters’ growing admiration for each other, the childlike delight they take in their misdemeanors, the affection that soon turns to love.
A year or so later, the scene having shifted to Paris, they decide to con a wealthy heiress named Mariette Colet (Kay Francis): Gaston contrives a meeting with her, passes himself off as a member of the “nouvelle poor” (the world’s financial markets are in a bad state) and gets hired as her secretary – which gives him control over her daily affairs and proximity to her riches. But then Gaston and Mariette become close and this sets up the romantic triangle.
Lubitsch was, by all accounts, not just a great filmmaker but an affable, bighearted man. In his delightful book Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven has a chapter on his experience as a nervous young greenhorn playing a supporting role in Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Excerpts:
...he sat me down on a sofa and proceeded to act out all my scenes – giggling and hugging himself as he explained the visual “business” he was intending to incorporate into them...he put his arm around my waist (because he could not reach my shoulders) and led me to the door. “Everyone will be nervous on the first day,” he said, “even the electricians in case they set fire to the studio – but we’re all going to be together for many weeks and I promise you, it’ll be fun! You’re a member of the family now!”
When Lubitsch described us as his “family”, it was no understatement and we all had complete respect for the father figure. I never once heard him raise his voice and he loved to be given suggestions, listened patiently to them and then just as patiently explained why they wouldn’t work.
I think this kindliness comes across in his work. Watching Trouble in Paradise, you get a sense of how the gentle, all-encompassing humanity of a Satyajit Ray or a Kieslowski might be accommodated in a sparkling Hollywood romantic comedy. For starters, the film is completely non-judgemental about its protagonists (who are, after all, crooks) and their sexual mores. The critic David Thomson pointed out that it was a rare example of a truly amoral film made in Hollywood, and it’s worth noting that it could only have been made before the Hollywood Production Code was enforced in 1934. Under the strictures of the Code, there’s no way Gaston and Lily would have been allowed to carry on blithely without getting their comeuppance, and some of the sexual innuendo – notably a dialogue about spanking – would have had to be toned down. 
Incidentally, there's an almost orgasmic quality to the moment when Lily, obviously aroused by the realisation that Gaston is a master thief (he stole her garter without her noticing it!), jumps up, sits on his lap and breathlessly demands that he tell her everything about himself. This is followed by their first tryst, with her reclining on a couch, his bending over to kiss her (“My little shoplifter. My sweet little pickpocket. My darling”), and the two of them simply fading from the shot, leaving the empty couch behind – a subtle visual suggestion that they’ve moved somewhere more comfortable; perhaps to the bed shown in the film’s opening credits.
It’s all too easy for a film with a witty screenplay to get tripped up by its own cleverness, but Trouble in Paradise never does; it’s considerate about its characters and their feelings. Gaston, Lily and Mariette have a fatalistic sincerity – an ability to shrug their shoulders, cut their losses and move on – which makes this “lightweight comedy” poignant in a way that many dramatic films can never be. It’s also very mature in its treatment of the love triangle: Mariette is neither a simpering victim nor a cold-hearted society lady who deserves to be robbed. She’s a pragmatic woman, capable of her own brand of tenderness, but with a firm head on her shoulders, and when she and Gaston part ways, there is a dignity to the moment that makes the scene very effective.
There's no mean-mindedness even when it comes to the treatment of such characters as the befuddled Monsieur Filiba, one of Mariette’s suitors who, in most other films of this type, would have existed only so the audience could get some cheap laughs at his expense. (The supporting cast is superb: Edward Everett Horton, Charlie Ruggles and C Aubrey Smith – who, by the by, was the founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club! – are just three among the dozens of fine performers who played stock supporting roles in 1930s Hollywood.)
The features on my DVD include a 10-minute introduction by the director/film historian Peter Bogdanovich and a feature-length commentary by biographer Scott Eyman. Taken together, these provide many insights into Lubitsch’s work and life: for example, that he had a lot of sympathy for actors doing bit roles as butlers or valets, which probably came out of his own experience playing such parts when he was an actor. This resulted in his giving these bit-players a few extra seconds of screen time when the spotlight was on them – it creates delightful little touches such as the scene in Trouble in Paradise where Mariette keeps changing her mind about whether or not she’s going to a dinner and her corpulent butler murmurs inaudibly to himself each time he has to descend the staircase with a fresh set of instructions. It's a wonderfully spontaneous moment.
Lubitsch’s acting experience also led him to perform each scene – right down to the most insignificant roles – while directing his actors. Bogdanovich speculates that this probably led to the idea of the “pure Lubitsch performance” to describe why actors were notably different while performing for Lubitsch than for other directors. From Niven’s recollections:
We started the comedy scene and I noticed that Lubitsch was crying. “Cut!” he sobbed helplessly at the end. “That was wonderful! You made me laugh so much I nearly choked. Now, just a couple of little suggestions...”
We probably played the scene a dozen times, each time our efforts were saluted by paroxysms of mirth by the master director and each time he managed to blurt out a “couple of little suggestions” before climbing back on to his perch. By the time we had performed the scene to his complete satisfaction we had, of course, like many before us, given performances of “pure Lubitsch”, and as Claudette Colbert pointed out, “And why not? He’s better than any of us!”
There’s no better introduction to the stylish 1930s Hollywood comedy than Trouble in Paradise – the only hitch being that nearly everything else in the genre will seem anti-climactic by comparison. Other Lubitsch films I recommend highly: The Student Prince, To Be or Not to Be, The Shop Around the Corner, Design for Living.
[A few earlier posts on Old Hollywood: Swing Time, Duck Soup, The Talk of the Town]
And while on pets, here’s the new addition to our family.
Looks coy and innocent but she's very street-smart, being one of the pups I mentioned in these posts. After the last of her siblings got adopted she was left by herself and the adult dogs in the neighborhood were snapping at her, so we decided to take her in – she spends the days with my mom (who pampers her outrageously) and then sulks when she has to come to our (considerably less exciting) apartment for the night. (It must feel like having to go to a boarding-school hostel each night, as my wife puts it.) She's long-limbed and has magnificent frown lines that remind me of Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff. The resemblance isn't immediately apparent, but trust me.
We’re still undecided on a name: informally she’s Foxy, because mum believes she’s reincarnated from a recently deceased dog she used to call by that name. I’ve suggested Flopsy because of her ears and because it sounds enough like Foxy for her not to get too confused at this late stage, but my mother objects that we’d then have to nickname her “Flop”, which would be pessimistic. She wants her to be a very successful dog.
(And no, I won't be sending photos of her to unsuspecting people on email. Can't afford to do that after all my rantings about parents who share baby pictures.)
On NDTV’s pet show Heavy Petting, Tusshar Kapoor and Raima Sen try to get their dogs to be friends.
Raima: Okay, Tusshar’s dog is a boy-dog and my dog is a girl-dog and we’re going to see if they like each other.
Tusshar (a giant “DUH” all but visible above his head): Ya, but do they even know the difference? I mean, a dog is a dog, right?
Yes, he really said it. Out loud, on TV. Now there’s an animal lover for you.
[Earlier post on Tusshar Kapoor here]
[Paul Newman died yesterday. Here’s a profile I wrote for the New Sunday Express early last year, when he had just announced his retirement from acting. I wasn’t very happy with the piece – would’ve preferred to write it after re-watching some of Newman’s seminal films so I could make a few points about specific performances, but the DVDs I needed weren’t available. However, it seems appropriate to the moment, so here it is.]
My earliest impressions of Paul Newman are from the first two films of his I saw, a few days apart. First came Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a toned-down version of Tennessee Williams’ play, with Newman as the embittered (impotent? Or – dare it be suggested – homosexual?) Brick, impervious to the charms of his wife Cat, played by Elizabeth Taylor at her most sumptuous. This was quickly followed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film I enjoyed much more (the undercurrents of the Williams play weren’t easy for a 13-year-old to grasp; besides, Cat... was bloody verbose), but one that also made me feel like two time periods were clashing in front of my eyes. Though everything around him had changed – the lush Technicolor of the earlier film had been replaced by grittier lighting, an understandable shift given that the two films were made 12 years apart – Newman himself seemed not to have aged at all. (Two additional wrinkles? Well, sure, but those were probably due to the harsher lighting.) I did a double-take when I saw the release dates in a movie guide and discovered that he was in his mid-40s when he played Butch Cassidy.
Of course, Paul Newman was no Dorian Gray; as the years passed, he did age, on and off screen, but he did it with the nonchalant grace we aren’t accustomed to seeing in celebrities who initially become famous because of their looks. His hair grew thinner and grayer, the wrinkles became more pronounced, but all of this simply had the effect of adding gravitas to irresistibility; even the celebrated blue eyes acquired hidden depths. Importantly, in the latter stages of his career, he continued to choose his roles with care, never taking on a part that would have been inappropriate to his age and physical appearance at the time. Watch him as the ice-hockey coach in Slap Shot (1977), the weary lawyer in The Verdict (1982), the estranged father in Nobody’s Fool (1994); these are lessons in growing old with dignity.
To be honest, I wasn’t impressed by Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He seemed a prettier, less edgy (and therefore, to an adolescent’s eyes, less interesting) version of Marlon Brando, whose smouldering performances in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire I had recently gawped at. But Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid showed me that here was an actor with a distinct personality of his own. His Butch – a jovial, wisecracking rogue whose bicycle ride with his friend’s wife to the tune of “Raindrops keep Fallin’ on My Head” supplied moviedom with one of its most exuberant vignettes – was worlds removed from the pouting Brick and hinted at a solid, unselfconscious versatility that I discovered anew each time I saw a Newman film from then on: movies that range on the time-scale from the 1956 boxing film Somebody Up There Likes Me to Sam Mendes’s The Road to Perdition nearly half a century later.
Newman, born in January 1925, was only a few months younger than Brando, but took nearly a decade longer to become a full-blown star, and – like most other American Method actors of his generation – he spent the early years of his career in the shadow of The Great Mumbler. Given this, it’s interesting to note how much more durable and less erratic his career turned out to be, how consistent a star-performer he remained through the seismic changes (the decline of the studio system, for example) that took place in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s.
Durable, consistent...these are not qualities one normally associates with brilliant performers. Cold logic tells us that Paul Newman should have continued working in a comfort zone, never pushing himself too hard, doing just enough to ensure that good looks and moderate talent combined to keep him in the public eye (Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis are examples of Hollywood hunks whose career followed such a trajectory). Instead, he built up a stunning body of work, continued to grow as an actor over the decades and somehow managed to do this without compromising on his swoonability quotient.
This made for one of the most remarkable star trajectories in film history. Among American leading men, James Stewart and Spencer Tracy are possibly the only ones with a comparable body of work over a long period, but neither of them had to bear the cross of being devastatingly good-looking. The closer comparison is probably with Cary Grant, who didn’t have as varied a career (partly because his outstanding comic talents led to image-setting very early in his career; partly because the Hollywood of his heyday in the 1930s and 40s was a very different place from the one Newman peaked in) – but then, with these men, being “versatile” in the superficial sense of that word was never the point anyway. Like Grant, Newman was less successful in roles that played against type – his leering Mexican bandit in the Rashomon remake The Outrage was a whole-hearted stab at doing something different, but it required a huge suspension of disbelief for the audience, and wasn’t as effective as the performances where he worked within the confines of an established screen image.
Having worked in an average of one film every 3-4 years in the past two decades, Paul Newman has now announced the end of his acting career. Almost every time a beloved movie star dies or retires, you see clichés like “the end of an era” in newspaper reports (it makes you wonder if there are as many eras as there are stars). But Newman gives the cliché weight and substance. He was a giant who straddled three of Hollywood's most eventful decades, a dedicated professional who also happened to be a matinee idol; who, in fact, almost single-handedly carried that phrase years beyond its sell-by date. If you think the concept continues to have any meaning in today's Hollywood, compare the best work of Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner with Newman's performances in Hud, Cool Hand Luke or The Hustler. Class will tell.
[This Q&A with Alice Albinia is a companion piece to this earlier post about Empires of the Indus. It should have been more detailed but I discovered after the interview that something had gone wrong with the dictaphone – a scratchy background noise made transcribing very difficult in places. Had to supplement whatever I could retrieve of the conversation with the shorthand notes I had jotted down. Will add to this post later if I have the time to listen to the tape again.]
Albinia studied English Literature at Cambridge, then came to India in 2000 and lived and worked - as a journalist and editor - in Delhi for two years. This conversation took place at the British Council office in Delhi.
How did your interest in the Indus river come about?
My interest in South Asian history really began during my time in Delhi. Of course, I’d always wanted to go to India – as many people in Britain do – and on reaching here, I found there was a lot to learn. My reading was very omnivorous. There were many debates about Indian history in the media at the time – about the rewriting of textbooks and so on – and that caught my attention; the subcontinent has such a rich and complex past. I also became interested in Pakistan, which is such an enigmatic land to an outsider who doesn’t know it firsthand. But when you step down from the train for the first time it’s so reminiscent of India.
Anyway, I went back to England and to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which was the only place in Britain where you could major in South Asian history. That was where I initially researched the history of the Indus.
When you visited Pakistan for the first time, did you have this book in mind?
Yes, I did – I thought about it while I was in Delhi. Then, when I went to SOAS, I realised I needed a year of concentrated study and research before I could actually begin my travels. Finally, in 2003, I went to Pakistan – to the Indus – for the first time. Up to that point my knowledge of the river was literary, academic, and to actually see it for the first time – in Sindh and in Karachi – was a very different experience.
What were your initial impressions of Pakistan?
The thing that took me a long time to come to terms with was the great religiosity of Pakistan – I had never really encountered anything like that, even though I grew up in a religious Christian family. As I mention in the book, in Pakistan almost every utterance seems to be punctuated by a holy expression – even when people are simply going about their mundane, worldly tasks.
I think this showy religiousness probably came in at the time of Zia. At any rate, it was a great contrast to my experience of India, where I hardly knew anyone who was so religious. In Pakistan, even if someone isn’t particularly religious, they’d never say it out loud – you have to be really careful about these things.
How did you settle on the book’s part-history, part-travel structure – the idea of moving backwards in time while simultaneously traveling upstream?
About it being a history and a travel book rolled into one...I suppose I could have made the decision to sit in a library and write it but it would have been a very different book then – and possibly not a very good book! For me it was very exciting, having done a year of academic research on the Indus, to actually travel along the river and see how that history was still being played out today, in Pakistan.
Going upstream also seemed like the natural thing to do: it’s how the first human beings tracking the river would have learnt about it in the first place – they would have followed it all the way to its source, gradually moving out of the plains and riverside settlements and approaching the more dangerous, remote terrain in the mountains. It seemed appropriate.
Post-Partition, the Indus has been on the fringes of the Indian consciousness. Do you believe its importance to the history of the subcontinent is in danger of being forgotten – in India, in particular?
Absolutely. There’s a funny story about (former Home Minister) L K Advani, which I mention in the book – about him visiting Ladakh in the 1990s, asking his hosts “What is the river here?” and being bemused when told it was the Sindhu (the Sanskrit appellation for the Indus). He founded the “Sindhu Darshan” pilgrimage after he returned, but it’s telling that even someone whose business it is to know about these things had almost forgotten about this river.
Also, Advani’s memory reaches back to the pre-Partition days, when the Indus was very much a part of India.
Yes – so if he can forget, it’s obvious that younger Indians are much less likely to know anything about it.
It’s strange how the Indus seems to have been forgotten, given that the name of India comes from it – even “Hindu” is a variation of Sindhu. It’s the principal river in the Rig Veda, where the Ganga is relatively minor river – ancient Indians were living and flourishing on the banks of the Sindhu.
The writing in Empires of the Indus is very accessible. Would you agree that we don’t have enough of that kind of historical writing about the Indian subcontinent? That much of it is too dry and academic to engage the casual reader?
Well, I think there’s a place for dry, academic writing too – when I was doing my research for this book, I read a lot of history and that sort of writing was very useful to me, for the way in which it set down facts in a straightforward way rather than making a lot of diversions. It’s an important foundation stone for a researcher. But yes, it was very important to me that my own book be readable, that there be a narrative and an exploration and so on – I was writing about what interested me and I wanted to write a book that I would want to read.
Any particular books on Indian history that helped you?
I have to say that in India, I was helped more by the rich tradition of journalistic writing than by history books – people in the media were talking about history and discussing culture in provocative ways, and that was very useful.
One of the things I thought was sad was that here’s such an important river and the current situation is so bleak and yet there is hardly any literature available on it. A river that once sustained so many civilisations is on the verge of being dammed out of existence.
Is there a serious ecological problem there?
Yes, very much so – the way in which the river has been used has been very problematic. The British were the first to dam the river and they did so without a proper understanding of the eco-system of the delta; they thought the water going down to the sea was a complete waste.
There is some anti-dam protesting going on in Sindh these days – Sindhis feel they’ve been hard done by. And local irrigation experts in Pakistan are asking for a different kind of model. These dams can cause a lot of problems for the land in terms of water-logging, desalination, displacing hundreds and thousands of people. The whole model is problematic.
This isn’t limited to Pakistan, of course – in the last chapter of my book, I describe the shock I felt on seeing a large new dam in the town of Ali in Tibet, near the river’s source. It’s happening everywhere.
Your enthusiasm for discovery shines through your travel narratives. What was your most awe-inspiring experience during your travels?
Definitely my time exploring the northern areas in Pakistan. In general, Northern Pakistan has a very beautiful culture and history, and it’s a very relaxed place too, very different from the rest of the country. In the valley of Hunza, the literacy rate is three times that in the rest of the country.
There was a beautiful stone circle near Yasin in the Gilgit valley – sadly, it's been disassembled now, because these relics aren’t properly maintained and people keep coming and taking away individual stones. Then there was the Paleolithic carving of a huntress in the Burzahom area – I was lost for words when I saw it. Here was this barren, rocky terrain and then all of a sudden you come across this incredibly beautiful, sprawling work of perspective art, like late-period Matisse.
In Europe, the pagans have been completely wiped out – whereas in a country like Pakistan, which is otherwise known to be fundamentalist, you still have these small traces of an ancient way of living.
We do tend to have a simplistic view of our past – there’s very little we know about the Kalash people, whom you met in northern Pakistan, or the Bons – another religion with pagan associations.
Yes, and even if you properly read the Rig Veda, which is the principal book of Hinduism, it’s so strange and fascinating. Here’s something that has been passed down orally over thousands of years, almost like a recording of the voices of all these generations of priests – and they were worshipping nature, attributing godly powers to rivers and fire and so on. I find that very endearing. To actually read that book is to discover something very different from some of the mainstream portrayals of Hinduism.
Incidentally, I’m always amazed by the work being done by Pakistani archaeologists – they have minus budgets, archaeology is the lowest priority for the government, there’s very little tourism in Pakistan so there’s no direct benefit, and yet these people continue excavating and discovering new things – often things that might be inconvenient for the mainstream way of thinking.
And what was the most distressing experience?
Meeting people around the LoC was saddening – there was a village whose natural connection with Ladakh was cut off and they were in the midst of rocket fire from India. The condition of the Indus delta was sad to see as well also. And of course, seeing that giant dam in Tibet, where the Indus had been stopped.
Without comment, here's the synopsis for two consecutive episodes - yes, two full, 30-minute episodes - of Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki, as provided on the Tata Sky menu.
Aunty asks Radha not to think about Krishna as her father wouldn’t allow her to marry him. Radha tells her that she is attracted to Krishna and can’t help thinking about him. Radha’s father arranges for her marriage. Sudhir informs Krishna that Radha wants to meet him near river Yamuna. Radha tells Krishna that her parents are getting her married. They part ways.
After she leaves, Krishna plays with his flute. You know what teenage boys are like these days.
Okay, okay, the last bit is my contribution to the saga. Ekta should totally pay me to do this.
(Earlier Kahaani posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
...or new techniques in self-perpetuation. Spotted on a park bench in Saket:
Note to DVD-buyers in Delhi who are interested in “offbeat” cinema (usually defined as anything that isn’t mainstream Bollywood or contemporary-mainstream Hollywood): there’s a much greater variety of titles available in legit stores like Musicland and Planet M than there was even a couple of months ago. The advent of distributors such as Palador and NDTV Lumiere has helped things along. Palador, in collaboration with Moser Baer, has been distributing titles by iconic directors (Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Kieslowski) as well as relatively less-known ones (Tsai Ming-Liang, Kihachi Okamoto), and there are a few interesting box-sets on the way. (More details on their website – their titles can be bought online too.) One thing I especially like about their DVDs is that each one includes a short film by an Indian director as an Extra. Haven’t seen any of these yet but I’m sure it’s a good value-addition and a nice way of highlighting short films that have slipped under most radars.
Meanwhile, NDTV Lumiere – which has already done a good job of enabling the improbable commercial release (in multiplexes!) of foreign-language films such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys – has tied up with Excel Home Videos to distribute DVDs. There’s a limited and fairly random selection available in stores right now (Louis Malle’s The Lovers, Christian Petzold’s Yella and Philippe Aractingi’s Under the Bombs among them, last I checked) but I’m sure it’ll expand with time. Simultaneously, I’m hoping the prices will reduce – the Palador and Lumiere DVDs cost between Rs 400 and Rs 500, which is still quite steep; I don’t see why original DVDs shouldn’t be routinely available in the Rs 200 price range.
Happily, shops like Musicland seem to have finally cottoned on to the concept of discounts and special offers when it comes to the more mainstream titles. While taking stock of my DVDs the other day I realised that most of my recent purchases have been from official outlets (with the trip to Palika last week being a one-off). This isn’t because I suddenly grew a conscience and decided to cut down on the pirated stuff – it’s because these shops are finally offering the sorts of discounts that you get around the year in London’s HMV stores. It’s now common to see shelf labels that say “Buy 2 DVDs, get one free” and other such nice things. Hope that continues. Movie buffs shouldn’t have to keep descending into underground caverns for their monthly fix.
Estragon: Shall we go?
Vladimir: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
- Waiting for Godot
When people ask me why I got out of the office grind and started freelancing, I make the usual noises about not wanting to be restricted to a ball-and-chain routine, about working on my own time rather than taking the path well-trodden by the bleating herds, and so forth. But one reason I usually don’t disclose is my fervent dislike of office meetings, which have to be among the most pointless of man’s many pointless inventions.
The specifics of office meetings vary with the profession – for instance, I’m told marketing people use slideshows, wear shiny suits and ties with Mickey Mouse designs on them and say things like “we’re cutting costs without cutting corners” as if they learnt to say them while still in the cradle – but this is roughly how it works for a team of feature journalists.
First we enter a conference room that is either large and plush with a fancy coffee-maker machine placed in a corner (if the publication is rich and driven by Advertising) or dingy and underlit with a spider mournfully plunking the strings of its cobweb along the ceiling (if the publication is poor and driven by Courage and Integrity). In either case, the same scene unfolds. The first 15 minutes are spent gossiping about the higher increments given to other departments in the newspaper, especially the pampered news-desk people. Then the editor coughs meaningfully, shuffles a few papers and invites story ideas. There is a profound silence. Everyone studies their coffee mugs.
A newly recruited intern, still in the first flush of journalistic zeal, launches into a brief for a great new story. Someone interrupts him midway: “Didn’t we do that a few months ago?” The intern feels betrayed, he had no clue that this publication did stories before he joined them. He feels the first stirrings of an unfamiliar emotion: in a few weeks, he will know what it’s called (Bitter Hopelessness) and he will experience it every moment of his working day until the end of his life. But for now he is rescued by a world-weary middle-rung editor who announces that since all feature journalism consists of recycled stories, they might as well do this one again; after all, as everyone knows, there are no new ideas under the sun. (This creates an awkward moment since everyone present at the meeting had been asked to “bring at least three new ideas to the table”.) The editor saves face by telling the intern to go ahead "but find an interesting peg, see if something new has happened, and get quotes from at least three people".
Then someone makes an offhand remark about a carelessly written cover story in a rival publication and this keeps the group busy bitching for the next 20 minutes. What little “ideating” does happen takes place in the final three minutes of the meeting, by which time no one really cares what is being discussed. At the end of the session the editor has a perfunctory list of story ideas for the coming week, most of which he doesn't completely understand. But he feigns satisfaction because the marketing team is outside with briefcases full of slides, waiting to use the room.
It goes without saying that none of the stories discussed will ever actually see the light of newsprint, at least not in the form they were presented at the meeting; come production day, the paper will be filled by random snippets thrown together at the last possible moment. This proves that office meetings are exercises in creative time wasting and those conscientious few among us who care to get some work done wisely stay away from them.
[From my Metro Now column. See, that's the real reason why I don't attend meetings - my columns would never be published if I had to get them approved first]
I liked Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Lear overall, though the ending was somewhat desultory and unsatisfying and I thought some characters should have been better fleshed out. The film establishes its downbeat mood straightaway – though it opens on a Diwali night, none of the protagonists are in festive spirits and the interiors, where most of the drama unfolds, are gloomy and claustrophobic: a darkened movie-hall inside which a director, Siddharth (Arjun Rampal), waits distractedly for his film to premiere; a poorly lit apartment where the film's lead actor Harish/Harry (Amitabh Bachchan) lies in a near-comatose state, looked after by his night nurse Ivy (Divya Dutta) and a lady named Vandana (Shefali Shah), whose relationship to him is not immediately clear. This dark tone will dominate the film, notwithstanding a few liberating scenes that depict an outdoor shoot in the hills.
Through the memories of Harry’s co-star Shabnam (Preity Zinta) and those of a young journalist who was partly responsible for the retired theatre actor making his film debut, we flashback to a few months earlier, when the crusty old Harry – fossilizing in his room like a modern-day Miss Havisham – is approached by Siddharth to act in his film. Initially the idea is beneath the old man’s contempt: on stage, an actor is in control of his performance; in a film, he is at the mercy of such arcane things as camerawork and editing; he is broken up into fragments, the camera alternating between close-ups and long-shots, or even cutting away whenever it chooses to. (“I’ve heard you were brilliant as Prospero,” says Siddharth. “Ah, but which Prospero? The one in Calcutta, Bombay or some other city? The one in Act II or Act IV?” cackles Harry, summing up the delicate, personal nature of theatre acting and the special appeal it held for him. It’s quite a thrill to hear Bachchan – whose peak years were spent playing essentially the same character again and again in a series of mainstream films – speak these lines.)
But slowly Harry comes around. Underneath his hard veneer is a little boy who can’t resist the attention, the chance to ply his trade once more on a different type of stage. Besides, the role Siddharth wants him to play – a clown whose art is dying along with the circus – is close to the bone for obvious reasons.
The Last Lear is full of charming moments, including a wonderfully performed scene between Bachchan and Zinta, where the old actor encourages the diffident model-turned-actress to "throw her voice" towards the mountains across the valley by imagining that the man she is angry at is standing on the other side; a sudden burst of Bengali (“Eta ki fair?!”) in an emotional situation by Harry, who has thus far appeared incapable of speaking or thinking in any language other than English; Harry and Siddharth making up stories for the people they see on the CCTV the old man has installed in his flat; and the sudden transformation of a quiet scene into grand theatre – complete with sound effects evoking a tempest - when Harry declaims Prospero’s lines. I also liked the framing device of the three women sharing their problems, slowly opening up to each other as the night wears on. (Shefali Shah and Preity Zinta are very good in these scenes, but Divya Dutta speaks with exaggerated, meaningful pauses; this is something that occasionally afflicts self-consciously arty cinema - it’s as if talking naturally would be a lowbrow thing to do.)
Pre-release hype told us that The Last Lear marks Bachchan’s career-best performance. Such hype is usually self-defeating, but this really is a role that AB impressively sinks his teeth into. He has a grand old time here, alternating between self-possession and vulnerability, disdain and childlike enthusiasm, snapping “You get samples in a fabric shop, not on the stage!” when asked for samples of his best work, performing the “Once more unto the breach” soliloquy from Henry V. All of it leads up to a key scene where Harry has to abase himself for the integrity of his art – in the end the theatre actor retains his dignity, but at heavy cost, and the movie director has the final say.
The Last Lear is a good enough film to make me wish it had gone further in its reflections on life and art, theatre and cinema, that a stronger connection had been made between Harry’s own life and the role he is playing, and that the characters of Shabnam and Vandana in particular had been more fully explored; what one is left with is snapshots of interesting people whom we would have liked to know better. But even with these limitations, this is an elegant, lovingly made work that deserves to be seen outside the festival circuit and that should be rewarding for an attentive viewer, even one who doesn’t know Oberon from Oberoi.
Prem Panicker has been working on an English-language re-telling of M T Vasudevan Nair’s Randaamoozham, which is the Mahabharata from the point of view of the Pandava Bhima. It’s been going brilliantly so far: here are episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4, with many more to follow; Prem promises a couple of installments per week. (Note: the website is problematic, so refresh/reload a couple of times if it doesn't open at first try.) Wish I could read some of the other literature he mentions in his introductory post, but I don’t think there are any translations available.
Prem and I had an email discussion about the malleability of the Mahabharata and of old myths in general – how the plot specifics, and the way different characters tend 
to be regarded, vary greatly as you travel from one part of this vast country to another. Just two among the countless examples of what I’m talking about: the temples dedicated to Duryodhana in parts of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal; and the contrasting myths about Shiva's wife Sati that have arisen in various pilgrimage spots around the country where different parts of her body supposedly landed after her corpse was sliced up by Vishnu's sudarshan chakra. (More on that gruesome story and its aftermath here.)
As I've indicated before on this blog, I believe that the Mahabharata is in many ways a work in progress, demanding constant reinterpretation and extrapolation - the only way to do justice to a story so complex and multidimensional is to read as many different versions, written from as many different perspectives as possible. While characters like Draupadi, Karna, Bheeshma and Ashwatthama will always fire the popular imagination, I think it's high time someone did something on the more low-key characters, like Yudhisthira. He's usually thought of as insipid by most casual readers of the epic but there’s lots of potential for a deeper examination: the burden he always had to carry of being the embodiment of Dharma and how that might have affected his relationships with his brothers, wife and cousins, who were all more in touch with their baser feelings; the implications of the non-divine version of his birth, which has it that his real father was Vidura and that he was therefore the grandson of a low-caste woman – further muddying the issue of who “deserves” to be king.
(In a thoughtful essay on Yudhisthira in his book The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, Krishna Chaitanya points out that he isn’t as boringly moralistic and self-satisfied as he is made out to be; that he undergoes commendable personal growth over the course of the epic much like Karna does – though Yudhisthira’s growth trajectory, and life in general, are much less dramatic than those of his elder brother, with whom he shares many vital qualities. Chaitanya also alludes to the little-mentioned passage in the Mahabharata where, shortly after the Pandavas have been exiled, Yudhisthira confesses to his wife and brothers that he had accepted Duryodhana’s invitation to play dice in the hope that he would be able to win Hastinapura for himself.)
Anyway, back to Prem’s re-telling of Randaamoozham. You can read all the installments in order here.
And here's a relevant portion from the longer version of a piece I recently did for Tehelka, about mythological serials; it touches on some of the things Prem and I discussed on email.
----
[...My criticism of Kahaani… isn’t based on a rigid preconception of what the Mahabharata should or should not be. To the contrary, my own (irreligious) view of the epic is not as a holy text with lessons that are set in stone but a complex, fluid work of literature privy to constant rethinking and re-analysis. One of its great qualities is that it can be interpreted in many ways, ranging from Kamala Subramanian’s unabashedly sentimental view of the characters to Irawati Karve's clinical, anthropological take, which analyses the less-than-savoury ulterior motives of even the revered Bheeshma.
Read closely, the Mahabharata offers easy answers to no one, except, perhaps, to those who are determinedly seeking only the easiest answers (in which case the simple-minded 1960s film version – a collection of audience-pleasing setpieces about the heroics of Bheema and Arjuna, played by Dara Singh and Pradeep Kumar respectively – should suffice). Once freed from the shackles of an instructive morality play, it provides imaginative filmmakers and scriptwriters with many rich possibilities.
For example, it’s possible to depict Krishna as the dewy-eyed God of the Bhakti tradition, omniscient, forever in control, naughty smile permanently in place (which is how all the mythological serials I know of inevitably choose to depict him), but it’s equally possible to show him as a shrewd Yadav chieftain with a powerful understanding of the hearts and minds of other men. Or even an Avatar who has only a dim view of his role he must play in the larger picture, and who is frequently swayed by the human dramas around him. (Ramesh Menon’s renderings show Krishna as a lonely, almost frightened God as he prepares to impart the Bhagwad Gita to Arjuna, knowing that this is the moment that his whole life has led up to, and wondering if he will pass the test. Incidentally, this aspect of the Krishna portrayal reminds me of Gandalf in J R R Tolkien’s universe, a divine being who is an incarnation of the demi-God Olorin but in his present form often vulnerable and confused about his role in the larger picture.) Each of these interpretations could be fascinating and insightful if done well, but realistically speaking only one of them – the first one – will ever make it to our mass audience-pleasing mytho-soaps.
The criticism of Kahani... that I don’t agree with is that the Greek-centurion look of the show – inspired by films like Troy and 300 - is inauthentic. This is a ludicrously myopic argument. Who gets to define “realism” or “authenticity” when it comes to a work like the Mahabharata? Go down this dubious road and you’d need a dark-complexioned Krishna and Draupadi (and what are the chances of any of our mainstream TV shows doing this, especially if Fair and Lovely lined up as a possible sponsor?). Peter Brook's version of the epic used austere gowns and robes that could scarcely be regarded “realistic” in terms of what was worn in the India of 3000 years ago, and it had actors from around the world playing the lead characters, but it captured the epic's nuances better than most of the Indian versions we’ve see. It also highlighted what a universal human story the Mahabharata is.
The real problem with the look of Kahaani... is its inconsistency: while the mortal characters sport sharp-looking costumes designed by Manish Malhotra, the divine personages like Ganesha and Brahma are laughably tacky. (Frankly, the Troy look just doesn't coexist well with supernatural elements. It’s no coincidence that Wolfgang Petersen’s film – which, interestingly, got a lot of flak for not adhering to the Iliad, even though it had never set out to do so – consciously dumped the divine subtexts of Homer’s epic. When Eric Bana’s Hector asserted that "the Gods aren’t going to fight our battles for us", it was completely in tune with the look of a film that was self-evidently about the conflicts – external and internal – of mortal men.) Consequently, Kahani’s attempt to be stylish comes across as half-baked. The shoddiness of the script and direction and the gross simplification of the epic’s characters adds up to a strange mishmash: a show that tries to be cool and new-age but still bends over backwards to kowtow to popular sentiments. At the time of writing, it was in such a rush to get to the story of Krishna’s birth in time for this month's Janmashtmi that it had fast-tracked its way through three generations of Kuru princes, not even bothering to depict the arrival of Yudhisthira and Bheema...]
(Edited version of this piece - which draws on my earlier posts about the new TV Mahabharata - here)
-----
Most of what I learnt (by rote) from History and Geography textbooks in school has long been forgotten - or in some cases re-learnt from less drab sources later in life - but among the earliest of the details to have stuck in the memory are the names Sutlej, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Jhelum. These were presented to us as the five tributaries of the mighty Indus river and for one reason or another they are as much a part of my childhood mythology as the names of the Mughal emperors or the planets of the solar system.
As I began reading Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus, I realised that the Indus had completely slipped out of my mind since I read about it in those school years; for all I knew, it had dried up and no longer existed. Subconsciously, I suppose I’ve always been aware of its importance – the growth of the Indus Valley Civilization around its banks, the fact that India’s very name derives from that of the river – and I had a vague understanding that much of what remained of the Indus was now in Pakistan, but I never had occasion to think consciously about it. Growing up, other rivers – the ones that flowed in India and the ones that were given prominence in Hindu mythology as I had read it – acquired disproportionate importance (it seemed like the Ganga had always been the pre-eminent river of the subcontinent, stretching back to the earliest times).
In many ways, then, reading Empires of the Indus was a form of re-education. I was a bit puzzled by the first chapter, which is partly a primer to the creation of Pakistan in 1947 (an act that left most of the Indus in the newly created country, relegating it to the fringes of the consciousness of most modern Indians) and partly an account of Alice Albinia’s own visit to Karachi and her encounters with lower-caste sewer workers. There’s very little in this chapter about the Indus itself, apart from references to its exploitation and the slow poisoning of its waters, but soon it becomes clear what Albinia is trying to do. It turns out that her book is equal parts a history and a travelogue: in its former capacity, it moves more than 5,000 years back in time to tell the story (in reverse-chronology) of the great river and the civilisations that flowered under its aegis; simultaneously, as a travelogue, it covers a distance of 2,000 miles, from Karachi – near where the Indus ends in the Arabian Sea – all the way upstream to the Senge Khabab, the mouth of the river in Tibet. This is the author’s modern-day journey of discovery, one that reveals a great deal about the millennia-old relationship between rivers and human settlements.
It’s a journey that takes Albinia north from Karachi, through the Indus Delta to the old port of Thatta, where she meets the Sheedis – descendants of African slaves brought to Sindh by Muslim traders – and visits the tombs of Sufi saints; from here on to the west Punjabi village of Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, who founded Sikhism (a religion that has water at the heart of its rituals) in the late 15th century; across the border and through the Khyber crossing into what is today Afghanistan, where she reflects on the conquests of Mahmud of Ghazni; and back east towards the hillside capital of Mingora, an Buddhist centre (“Today, Islam and Buddhism appear to be at opposite ends of the religious spectrum: no two religions, perhaps, have such different modern reputations. Yet in north-western India, along the banks of the Indus, the two came into prolonged contact with each other...”).
She then travels further back into the past by shadowing the route taken by Alexander the Great (“whose downfall was caused by something harder to grapple with than military opponents – rivers in spate”) along the Indus to the mountaintop Pirsar; she visits the Kalash villages in northern Pakistan, home to an ancient religion that both predates and shares features with the Rigvedic culture; and the Gilgit valley, one of the migration routes of the ancient Aryans. She finds rock carvings and enigmatic stone circles that attest to pagan cultures and belie the reductive picture of the subcontinent’s past that is often presented to us today. Moving past the ruins of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, she crosses finally into Tibet, where the journey ends on the sacred mountain of Kailash or Kangri Rinpoche. At this point, it has become possible to look beyond human history – which is insignificant on the geological timeframe anyhow – and to think of the pre-human inhabitants of the river, and of its sustenance of life on a much broader scale.
The Indus itself flows majestically in the background of Albinia’s twin stories, a constant if non-intrusive presence (any biography of a river is necessarily the story of the empires it nourished). But just when you’ve become engrossed in a historical tale and almost forgotten about the Indus itself, Albinia drops in an unexpected reference (e.g. the one about Mahmud of Ghazni always returning from his conquests with large quantities of booty, except when his baggage was washed away in the Indus; or the Sindhi poem that laments the drowning of the potter’s daughter Sohni in “the tempestuous, treacherous Indus”) to remind us how much the long, chequered history of the subcontinent owes to this river.
It’s difficult to say whether I enjoyed Empires... more as a travel-book or as a history; each half is dependent on the other for its effect. Albinia’s descriptions of her travels – the potential dangers, the serendipitous and thrilling discoveries of ancient frescoes, having to undertake parts of her journey dressed in a burqa, the melancholy of seeing a giant dam in a Tibetan village – bring a personal, immediate touch to a book that might otherwise have been put together by someone sitting in a library for months on end. This personal touch helps make the book an entertaining and absorbing history lesson.
Empires of the Indus is a capacious work about a river that has long been a silent witness to the transience of human endeavours and human conceit, and of what we call civilisations. Along the banks of the Indus, many different empires, cultures, social codes and religious systems have arisen, thrived and crumbled in the blink of an eye, and this is humbling knowledge. More disturbing is the realisation that a river which (as Albinia points out) the Atharva Veda called saraansh (“flowing for ever”) is now in real danger of being dammed out of existence. “When I think of the Indus now, I remember the eulogies of Sanskrit priests, Greek soldiers and Sufi saints,” she says, “their words come down to us across the centuries, reminding us of all there is to lose.”
[Alice Albinia’s website is here; the photography page has many pictures of people and places mentioned in the book]
Further to this post, here’s the synopsis on the cover of a just-obtained pirated DVD of John Ford’s Stagecoach:
The story took place in 80 ages 19 century,A stagecoach with passengers went across Arracksan’s plain,It went to Rotsbao,on the way,It experienced layer a lof of difficulty to cross,It finally got to destination,There wre impossible-looking senery,desolate mountain and enormous cactus in Mexico state,There was difficulty on stagecoach and Indian was tight and tight to chase.
(Sic) (sic) (sic) (sic)
Classy way to describe the film that Orson Welles called a cinematic textbook. Anyway, this Indian was tight to chase a stash of DVDs in Palika Bazaar yesterday afternoon – went to that shop for the first time in months, picked up a whole lot of “original copy” discs including long-sought-after DVDs of old favourites such as Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, the Fredric March Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and two great silent films: Murnau’s Faust and Lang’s Dr Mabuse, der Spieler. Also the early Scorsese Boxcar Bertha, Bergman’s Summer Interlude, the controversial Swedish docudrama I am Curious – Yellow, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi and a few others.
Usually when I get a big haul of DVDs from the Electronic Zone I have to allow for the possibility that a couple of discs won't be in working condition and I’ll have to return to Connaught Place to exchange them for something else. Occasional hazard of getting high-quality prints of films not easily available elsewhere, at cheap rates. This time the discs all seem fine, but I encountered another facet of the carelessness inherent in the piracy process. Apparently the version of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch that I bought was originally spread over two discs (along with a lot of special features), but the pirates unthinkingly copied only Disc A and packaged it as the complete film. So I have half the movie with me now, along with a couple of Extras. Will have to go back.
Moral lesson #58: if you’re buying pirated DVDs from Palika, do take the time to study the back-jacket. If the literature says anything about a Disc A and a Disc B, and the version you’re holding contains a single disc, avoid it.
[Earlier posts on DVD-hoarding here, here and here]
As a book reviewer, one of my favourite chance discoveries was Rajorshi Chakraborti’s debut novel Or the Day Seizes You (review here, author interview here). Its urgent, dreamlike narrative was among the most distinct by a new Indian author in a while and it was a book very few people seemed to have heard of: writing about it was more satisfying than reviewing a high-profile, widely felicitated book that was already guaranteed space in a dozen newspapers and magazines.
Or the Day Seizes You was a very ambitious work, but Chakraborti’s second novel Derangements is even more so, and its structure is more complex. It spells out its meta-fictional intentions right at the beginning, through an “Editor’s Note” wherein we gather that a writer named Raj Chakraborti has recently disappeared in suspicious circumstances and that his editor has subsequently received a manuscript from him. What follows is the full text of this manuscript, which includes parallel stories: episodes from Raj’s own life – scattered, hazy, like many passages in Or the Day Seizes You – alternate with the first-person narrative of one of his invented characters, Charles Robert Pereira, a serial killer contacted by a mysterious clique of people who want him to work for them. (A tiny illustration of a pen or knife – the instrument of choice for writer and killer respectively – accompanies each chapter.) The connections between the two narratives – or between the lives of Raj and Charles – aren’t immediately obvious but slowly they begin to converge (in a manner that reminded me of an even stranger book, Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). In each narrative, the line between what “really happens” and the dream-world is frequently unclear.
As this synopsis might indicate, Derangements isn’t light reading. Though Chakraborti’s prose itself is elegant, one needs intense concentration to follow the twists and turns in the stories, to make connections between one strand and another, and to process the many recurring ideas and images. Like his first novel, this is a book of vignettes, full of hallucinatory imagery (a complicated network of footpaths on a lake; humpbacked hills envisioned by a character as “gigantic whales run aground”; a vision of a bus standing in a desolate lane, which finds an echo elsewhere in the narrative), sequences that are built on impressions and barely remembered incidents (Raj’s childhood recollection of a late-night drive with his father) and moments of outright surrealism, as in a poignant scene involving a woman who turns into a cat.
Running through the dual narratives is a constant sense of paranoia, both about the world at large and about personal relationships. In fact, a running theme in both Chakraborti’s books has been that of the life that has lost its bearings; a protagonist unsure of his place in the world and, increasingly, of the world itself. Speaking about heroes from Greek and Indian epics, one of the narrators in Derangements reflects that
...though their lives resume their expected courses, they are all past their prime, haunted by losses and scars, and their best years have been spent either wandering further away from their destinies, or merely struggling to survive until they can come home. The lesson seems to be that such is the nature of life itself, composed solely of twists and derangements, and yet it is the only thing we have, to make the most of and call our own. If we refuse to accept it because it hasn’t run according to plan, that would be the true exile, as we would then be homeless in our own lives.
In a sense, Derangements is also a book-length riposte to that most clichéd (and most pointless) of questions that fiction writers regularly have to contend with: “How autobiographical is your book?” At its heart lies the question of how distanced a writer can become – in some cases, must become – from the business of living (“the infinite variety of the world – the principle to which I have paid lip service all these years: perhaps it has been decades since I was last in touch with any of its actual content,” muses Raj) and how difficult it can be to distinguish between real life and imagined life. What, after all, is a writer’s Rosebud (a word borrowed from Citizen Kane to denote the non-existent key that might unlock or conveniently “explain” a life)?
In my view Chakraborti is one of the most interesting writers now operating in Indian fiction. I find his work provocative in a similar way to that of Raj Kamal Jha – both deal with dark and subversive ideas unselfconsciously (and without making a pronounced effort to be “different”) and both are brave writers, willing to take risks (though it’s likely they don’t see it that way themselves; maybe they just write what they have to write) that can distance the majority of readers from their work. In this old interview, Jha told me:
“There will always be people who won’t get from my writing what I get out of it...Personally, I feel lucky if just 4-5 people like something in my book. Even if a single paragraph works for them, that's very satisfying… I think paras can work in isolation, pages can work, even individual lines can work in isolation. Fleeting scenes from movies leave a strong impression on me.”
I can’t claim to know Chakraborti’s feelings on the subject, but his writing shows a similar private integrity, a willingness to stay away from the safety nets that are so important to many writers. Like I said, Derangements doesn’t make for easy reading – and I have a troubled feeling that a book like this should ideally be read a second time before one ventures to review it – but it has a haunting, lingering quality that very few writers can achieve.
[Earlier related posts here and here]
I’m very pleased with my DVD of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 classic Trouble in Paradise. Apart from the main feature – a lovely, elegant romantic comedy that provides immediate evidence of the fabled “Lubitsch touch” – the disc includes a silent film directed by him in Germany in 1917, long before he crossed the Atlantic to grace Hollywood with his distinct sensibilities. This older film, titled The Merry Jail and adapted from a Strauss operetta, is very much a product of its era – a jerky, broad comedy with hammy acting – but as a comedy of manners, mutual deceit and misunderstandings it provides glimpses of themes that would run through Lubitsch’s more mature work. The early films of great directors can be very revealing that way.
The very charismatic performances of Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis in Trouble in Paradise exemplify this. The quietly suave Marshall plays gentleman thief Gaston Monescu and the spirited Hopkins (one of the most underrated actresses of the time and a personal favourite) is a small-time pickpocket named Lily. As the film opens in a Venice hotel, each is posing as a member of nobility and during the course of a superbly performed dinner scene-cum-seduction, it transpires that they are aware of each other’s masquerade. Thus they realise that they are kindred spirits.
Lubitsch was, by all accounts, not just a great filmmaker but an affable, bighearted man. In his delightful book Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven has a chapter on his experience as a nervous young greenhorn playing a supporting role in Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Excerpts:
Incidentally, there's an almost orgasmic quality to the moment when Lily, obviously aroused by the realisation that Gaston is a master thief (he stole her garter without her noticing it!), jumps up, sits on his lap and breathlessly demands that he tell her everything about himself. This is followed by their first tryst, with her reclining on a couch, his bending over to kiss her (“My little shoplifter. My sweet little pickpocket. My darling”), and the two of them simply fading from the shot, leaving the empty couch behind – a subtle visual suggestion that they’ve moved somewhere more comfortable; perhaps to the bed shown in the film’s opening credits.
