When a first-rate critic gets obsessive about a film and then wears his obsession nakedly on his sleeve – discussing various aspects of the movie at length, over the course of many essays - the results can be very stimulating. This is something that the Internet facilitates, of course, and in the last few weeks Jim Emerson has put up a number of posts about the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men on his excellent Scanners blog. Here are some of them (most of these links are recommended only if you’ve seen the film): a general analysis; the “ideological impulse” in film appreciation; the identity and motives of the killer Anton Chigurh (Homicidal lunatic or ghost? Materialist? Atheist? A personification of Death?); and an intense discussion of a key scene late in the film, when Sheriff Ed Bell enters a room where Chigurh may or may not be hiding – this discussion is continued here and here, on critic Glenn Kenny’s blog. Needless to say, the comments section on all these posts are just as vital, and Emerson and Kenny both give plenty of space to readers' feedback and opinions. (As we have noted elsewhere, blogs rule.)
P.S. Will try to do a review soon, not of the film but of Cormac McCarthy's very poetic novel (I loved them both but have already read too much about the film elsewhere and don’t think I can add anything to it).
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
A mosaic of men: Rossellini in India
In this post about the Nargis biography Darlingji, I mentioned the splenetic Filmindia editor Baburao Patel, one of the most feared columnists of the 1950s. Well, here’s this inimitable gent again, holding forth on Roberto Rossellini’s affair with a married Indian woman, in the July 1957 issue of his journal:
Chunks from this article are quoted by Dilip Padgaonkar in his Under Her Spell: Roberto Rossellini in India, a book that is itself a much more balanced and thoughtful account of the famous Italian director’s stay in India in the late 1950s, his acquaintance with Jawaharlal Nehru, his filming of a series of episodes about the newly independent country, and his relationship with Sonali. It was a relationship that caused an uproar in the Indian press at the time, Baburao Patel’s invective being only the most florid example of the many reports that appeared in newspapers and magazines. Eventually, Rossellini had to leave the country under duress (though Padgaonkar says the reports that Nehru had washed his hands off “that rascal Rossellini” were greatly exaggerated; Nehru and Indira Gandhi continued to maintain close ties with Roberto and Sonali in later years, after the two got married) and many critics felt that his film India, Matri Bhumi had an unfinished feel to it – almost as if reflecting the abrupt severing of his ties with the country.
I’ve just finished Padgaonkar’s book. It’s a good, solid read for anyone interested in the people involved, though it doesn’t deal with Rossellini’s career in any detail. The writing is mostly dry and functional; this is very much a reportage-oriented work written by a seasoned journalist. Though Padgaonkar knew Rossellini personally in the 1970s and also spoke to a number of people during his research, he stays discreetly in the background for the most part. (As it happens, I liked the voice that emerged on the few occasions that he does use the first-person: in the Prologue, where he recalls being a young, Hollywood-obsessed boy at the time of Rossellini’s visit to India, more interested in Ingrid Bergman than in neo-realist cinema; and later, when he offers a personal critique of India, Matri Bhumi, relating his own deepening response to the film after a second viewing.)
Perhaps Under her Spell is just a little too dry and restrained though, given that at the centre of this story is a tempestuous affair that complicated the lives of many people. We don't really learn that much about the Roberto-Sonali relationship, what drew them to each other and how the bond gradually deepened, and Padgaonkar is also reticent about their later years together. I thought there was a little too much journalistic detail in places: in the chapters describing the shooting of particularly troublesome segments of film, for example, we are meticulously told exactly how many feet of film were exposed each day – at one point it almost becomes a refrain with which to end every few paragraphs.
As a chronicle of an emotionally stressful time in the life of a famous – and famously complex – person, this book has a lot of merit. But it also feels somewhat disjointed, its chapters resembling little pieces of film – each intriguing in its own right – that haven’t quite been put together. These include vignettes on Rossellini’s earlier relationships; his often hidebound views about what made for “important” cinema (his opposition to “pretty pictures” and dramatic editing were laughably inflexible); his determination to capture facets of life in India as naturally as possible, and not to exoticise or depict tourist-friendly images (in his autobiography, he claimed that he turned his face away when his car passed the Taj Mahal and that he refused to see the Ajanta frescoes); the difficulties of shooting and of getting approval from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (there’s a surreal telephone conversation with a minister, who objects to an episode where a tiger becomes a man-eater); and, of course, the repercussions of the Dasgupta affair. Padgaonkar also underlines Rossellini’s prescient observation that India was destined to take its place in the front rank of nations within a few decades. “Contrary to most other foreign viewers, he argued that Indians were amongst the most rational people in the world. Indeed India was akin to an enormous stomach that swallowed everything, digested everything and provided nutrition for the country’s social and economic development.”
Rossellini comes across as a man ridden with contradictions: immensely generous at times yet capable of mean-spiritedness, warm and unmindful of social divisions yet also off-handed, hard-headed but boyishly vulnerable. Given this, I was surprised that Padgaonkar disapproves of the following description of Rossellini by the biographer Lawrence Leamer:
“Roberto was not a man but a mosaic of men. He was an intuitive genius; he was a fraud; he was a soothsayer; he was a charmer; he was a liar; he was an adventurer; he was a crook; he was a man of saintly generosity; he was a cheat; he loved humanity; he manipulated human beings; he was an egomaniac; he reeked of insecurity.”
Padgaonkar says this description lacks in generosity of spirit, but I think it’s a matter-of-fact recognition of the many qualities that can coexist in a temperamental artist. The portrait of Rossellini that emerges in Under Her Spell is not in its essence all that different from Leamer’s description.
This bald, 51-year-old Italian director of the neo-realist film Rome, Open City recently thought that Bombay was as open a city for seduction of married women as was his birth city (sic), Rome. But Bombay made it pretty hot for this obviously sex-obsessed Italian, when in April last year, Roberto was reported to have grabbed and taken to his Christian neighbourhood the 28-year-old anaemic and skeletal Sonali Dasgupta, a married Bengali woman with a husband and two children...Patel’s diatribe went on in this fashion as he found ways to insult various other people, including Roberto’s estranged wife Ingrid Bergman, Sonali’s husband Harisadhan Dasgupta, and, more generally, “elite Indian couples who roll their hips and masturbate their nerves on the rock-n-roll floors of our clubs and then go home to breed little monsters of modern culture”. (No, I didn’t understand any of that either, but it’s very entertaining and makes 1950s Bombay seem like an exciting place.)
Chunks from this article are quoted by Dilip Padgaonkar in his Under Her Spell: Roberto Rossellini in India, a book that is itself a much more balanced and thoughtful account of the famous Italian director’s stay in India in the late 1950s, his acquaintance with Jawaharlal Nehru, his filming of a series of episodes about the newly independent country, and his relationship with Sonali. It was a relationship that caused an uproar in the Indian press at the time, Baburao Patel’s invective being only the most florid example of the many reports that appeared in newspapers and magazines. Eventually, Rossellini had to leave the country under duress (though Padgaonkar says the reports that Nehru had washed his hands off “that rascal Rossellini” were greatly exaggerated; Nehru and Indira Gandhi continued to maintain close ties with Roberto and Sonali in later years, after the two got married) and many critics felt that his film India, Matri Bhumi had an unfinished feel to it – almost as if reflecting the abrupt severing of his ties with the country.I’ve just finished Padgaonkar’s book. It’s a good, solid read for anyone interested in the people involved, though it doesn’t deal with Rossellini’s career in any detail. The writing is mostly dry and functional; this is very much a reportage-oriented work written by a seasoned journalist. Though Padgaonkar knew Rossellini personally in the 1970s and also spoke to a number of people during his research, he stays discreetly in the background for the most part. (As it happens, I liked the voice that emerged on the few occasions that he does use the first-person: in the Prologue, where he recalls being a young, Hollywood-obsessed boy at the time of Rossellini’s visit to India, more interested in Ingrid Bergman than in neo-realist cinema; and later, when he offers a personal critique of India, Matri Bhumi, relating his own deepening response to the film after a second viewing.)
Perhaps Under her Spell is just a little too dry and restrained though, given that at the centre of this story is a tempestuous affair that complicated the lives of many people. We don't really learn that much about the Roberto-Sonali relationship, what drew them to each other and how the bond gradually deepened, and Padgaonkar is also reticent about their later years together. I thought there was a little too much journalistic detail in places: in the chapters describing the shooting of particularly troublesome segments of film, for example, we are meticulously told exactly how many feet of film were exposed each day – at one point it almost becomes a refrain with which to end every few paragraphs.
As a chronicle of an emotionally stressful time in the life of a famous – and famously complex – person, this book has a lot of merit. But it also feels somewhat disjointed, its chapters resembling little pieces of film – each intriguing in its own right – that haven’t quite been put together. These include vignettes on Rossellini’s earlier relationships; his often hidebound views about what made for “important” cinema (his opposition to “pretty pictures” and dramatic editing were laughably inflexible); his determination to capture facets of life in India as naturally as possible, and not to exoticise or depict tourist-friendly images (in his autobiography, he claimed that he turned his face away when his car passed the Taj Mahal and that he refused to see the Ajanta frescoes); the difficulties of shooting and of getting approval from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (there’s a surreal telephone conversation with a minister, who objects to an episode where a tiger becomes a man-eater); and, of course, the repercussions of the Dasgupta affair. Padgaonkar also underlines Rossellini’s prescient observation that India was destined to take its place in the front rank of nations within a few decades. “Contrary to most other foreign viewers, he argued that Indians were amongst the most rational people in the world. Indeed India was akin to an enormous stomach that swallowed everything, digested everything and provided nutrition for the country’s social and economic development.”Rossellini comes across as a man ridden with contradictions: immensely generous at times yet capable of mean-spiritedness, warm and unmindful of social divisions yet also off-handed, hard-headed but boyishly vulnerable. Given this, I was surprised that Padgaonkar disapproves of the following description of Rossellini by the biographer Lawrence Leamer:
“Roberto was not a man but a mosaic of men. He was an intuitive genius; he was a fraud; he was a soothsayer; he was a charmer; he was a liar; he was an adventurer; he was a crook; he was a man of saintly generosity; he was a cheat; he loved humanity; he manipulated human beings; he was an egomaniac; he reeked of insecurity.”
Padgaonkar says this description lacks in generosity of spirit, but I think it’s a matter-of-fact recognition of the many qualities that can coexist in a temperamental artist. The portrait of Rossellini that emerges in Under Her Spell is not in its essence all that different from Leamer’s description.
Friday, April 25, 2008
A childhood skin-deep
Completely missed this – apparently little Shirley Temple turned 80 a couple of days ago! Via the Bright Lights blog, here’s an excerpt from Graham Greene’s controversial review of the Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie from 1937:
Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult...she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry...Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.Full piece here. It was written more than seven decades ago, to describe the carefully cultivated, "sexualised" screen persona of a specific child star, but I think it’s just as relevant to all the little boys and girls who appear on TV reality shows like Boogie Woogie today, enthusiastically simulating the dance movements of adult Bollywood heroes and heroines, while their parents watch fondly in the audience. In the age of 15 minutes of fame, you don't have to be a Hollywood superstar to grow up too fast.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Bawl boy
My favourite quote of the day comes from the comments space on the TennisWorld blog, after the unheralded (and unheard of) world number 137 Ruben Hidalgo threw away a 5-1 lead – along with a priceless, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to beat Roger Federer – in the final set of a Monte Carlo Masters match:
“Hidalgo will sleep like a baby tonight. He will wake up crying every two hours.”
Harsh but true. I was scoreboard-watching the match (saw the repeat later) while following the TennisWorld discussion, and it was an escape to beat all escapes – lots of credit to Federer, of course, but he almost certainly wouldn’t have got out of that situation if he had been facing even a slightly more experienced player. It was one of those familiar, and cruel, sporting moments. Hidalgo was playing with freedom and confidence for most of the final set – right up to the moment where he was just two points away from the match. In sight of the biggest achievement of his life, the freakish enormity of what he was about to do must have sunk in. “I’m going to beat Roger Federer!” he must have thought to himself, and off he went on a walkabout. He’ll still have a good story to tell his grandkids 40 years from now, but it won’t have the ending he would have wanted.
(The European clay season is finally underway. I’m nervous because this should be the year that Rafa finally loses some of his unreal dominance on the surface, especially given the number of points he has to defend and how packed the schedule is. But Vamos! anyway.)
“Hidalgo will sleep like a baby tonight. He will wake up crying every two hours.”
Harsh but true. I was scoreboard-watching the match (saw the repeat later) while following the TennisWorld discussion, and it was an escape to beat all escapes – lots of credit to Federer, of course, but he almost certainly wouldn’t have got out of that situation if he had been facing even a slightly more experienced player. It was one of those familiar, and cruel, sporting moments. Hidalgo was playing with freedom and confidence for most of the final set – right up to the moment where he was just two points away from the match. In sight of the biggest achievement of his life, the freakish enormity of what he was about to do must have sunk in. “I’m going to beat Roger Federer!” he must have thought to himself, and off he went on a walkabout. He’ll still have a good story to tell his grandkids 40 years from now, but it won’t have the ending he would have wanted.
(The European clay season is finally underway. I’m nervous because this should be the year that Rafa finally loses some of his unreal dominance on the surface, especially given the number of points he has to defend and how packed the schedule is. But Vamos! anyway.)
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
To have and have not: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger
The jacket of Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger carries a blurb by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, and reading the book it struck me that the narrative framework is similar to that of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. That novella took the form of a (possibly imaginary) monologue directed by the narrator, a Pakistani who has returned home from the US, to an American tourist in Lahore. In The White Tiger, the narrator is a man named Balram Halwai, who introduces himself as a Bangalore-based entrepreneur; his epistolary narrative is addressed to no less than the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India to learn about how business is conducted in this large, “shining” democracy. But Balram has other, darker revelations to make about his country, the sort that a visiting dignitary would be shielded from.
A deeper connection between The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The White Tiger is that both books are about men who become restless and discontented as they learn about the huge gap that separates the world they come from and the world they aspire to (in the first book the gap is cultural, in the second it’s one of class), and how they are perceived by the privileged members of that other world. But while Hamid’s protagonist Changez becomes defensive and parochial about his identity, fiercely rejecting the other side, Balram decides to bridge the divide between himself, a lower-class man, and the rich “masters” in front of whom he has so far been grovelling. He is determined “to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant”.
With admirable wit and insight, The White Tiger details Balram’s back-story, his journey from a small village on the banks of the Ganga (a dark land suffocated by “the black river”, as he calls it) to the metropolis of Delhi – more particularly Delhi’s glitzy suburb Gurgaon – and his gradual understanding of the difference between India’s haves and have-nots. Working as a driver (and generic domestic help) for “Mr Ashok”, a rich landlord’s son, he marvels at the pace of life in the big city; he hangs about with other drivers and becomes acquainted with their favourite pulp magazine, Murder Weekly; he watches as the rich make deals with corrupt ministers; and he reflects that millions of people in India are no different from birds in a rooster coop, aware of their fate and resigned to it: “A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent to exist in perpetual servitude, a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”
Balram decides that he will be the one to break out of the coop – he is no mere rooster, after all, but a white tiger, a name once given him by a school inspector to suggest the rarest of animals, a creature of initiative and daring, which comes along only once in a generation. We will discover near the end of the book exactly what his life-altering act of “social entrepreneurship” is.
Recent months have seen the publication of many non-fiction studies of modern India – books like Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods and Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, which, in one way or the other, deal with the many contradictions in this complex country: the contrast between the smooth narratives about economic growth and prosperity that are being sold to the world, and the stark realities of the lives of most Indians. One of the achievements of Adiga’s novel is that it successfully employs fiction – and engrossing, fast-paced, drolly funny fiction at that – to a similar purpose. At its best, The White Tiger is just as insightful as any of the big “India books”. It also provides a worm’s-eye perspective – the perspective of the frustrated little person – that there hasn’t been enough of in Indian writing in English.
This is a very dark novel, something that isn’t immediately obvious because the tone is so chatty and conversational. Almost as if in determined opposition to all the India-rising narratives, it unflinchingly chronicles many of the harsher truths about the country: the perpetually wary relationship between the deprived and the privileged, with the resentment and hunger of one set against the paranoia, guilt and insecurity of the other; the dealings between “masters” and “servants” and the ways in which even relatively liberal people (represented here by the US-returned Ashok, different in many ways from his feudal-thinking father and brother) can be patronizing in their attitudes towards the lower-class. It makes the uncomfortable point that morality is very easily compromised when you want to make your way forward in this jungle. “Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi,” observes Balram at one point, “but it isn’t glory that I’m after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man – and for that, one murder is enough.”
Adiga has an authentic, unforced talent for irreverence, as when Balram mocks the continuing eagerness of people to “kiss some God’s arse”, never mind that the country’s 36 million Gods “seem to do awfully little work – much like our politicians – and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year”. Or when he reflects that in post-Independence India there are only two castes, men with big bellies and men with small bellies. I also liked some of the imagery – the description of a bullock cart carrying chandeliers, for example – and the many imaginative touches such as the villagers’ imputing of animal and bird qualities (and names) to the local landlords: one becomes the Stork (because “he took a cut of every catch of fish from every fisherman in the river”), another the Wild Boar. There is a similarly chilling zoopomorphic effect when Balram sees waiters cleaning tables at a small tea shop as human spiders, “crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys’.” (Incidentally, some of Balram’s musings about certain groups – white people and Muslims, among others – are far from tasteful: a reader who makes the mistake of confusing the narrator's voice with that of the author will find much to be offended about here.)
The device of Balram addressing the Chinese Premier didn’t always work for me – it sometimes felt like a forced attempt to make The White Tiger as topical as possible (given economic competition, and the popular thesis that the future belongs to India and China). Also, the writing is slightly precious in places (e.g. the repeated use of the capitalised “Darkness” to refer to the village setting where Balram grew up). But these are minor flaws and they have little effect on the book's flow. (Similarly, the tampering with Delhi’s geography can be forgiven as novelistic licence, though I balked at the passage that makes driving from Gurgaon to Jangpura sound like a 5-minute jaunt! As it happens, it's possible to include this in the very short list of "Delhi novels", though that would hardly be the primary classification.)
The White Tiger is a book that can cut uncomfortably close to the bone for anyone who’s ever reflected that the bill they just paid for a restaurant meal amounted to half of their driver’s monthly salary (and I’m not talking five-star hotel restaurants). Or for anyone who’s seen their domestic staff chatting with friends in the nearby park while casting occasional glances at the house, and wondered about the nature of the gossip being exchanged. Adiga makes us think about these things as well as about the many Indias and the different types of aspirations and frustrations they represent, but he does it within the framework of an absorbing novel. This is a very impressive debut.
P.S. Here's a long interview I did with Mohsin Hamid last year. His view (expressed in the conversation) of the hyper-nationalist rah-rahing done by the-powers-that-be in contemporary India could be one reason why he thought highly of The White Tiger.
A deeper connection between The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The White Tiger is that both books are about men who become restless and discontented as they learn about the huge gap that separates the world they come from and the world they aspire to (in the first book the gap is cultural, in the second it’s one of class), and how they are perceived by the privileged members of that other world. But while Hamid’s protagonist Changez becomes defensive and parochial about his identity, fiercely rejecting the other side, Balram decides to bridge the divide between himself, a lower-class man, and the rich “masters” in front of whom he has so far been grovelling. He is determined “to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant”.With admirable wit and insight, The White Tiger details Balram’s back-story, his journey from a small village on the banks of the Ganga (a dark land suffocated by “the black river”, as he calls it) to the metropolis of Delhi – more particularly Delhi’s glitzy suburb Gurgaon – and his gradual understanding of the difference between India’s haves and have-nots. Working as a driver (and generic domestic help) for “Mr Ashok”, a rich landlord’s son, he marvels at the pace of life in the big city; he hangs about with other drivers and becomes acquainted with their favourite pulp magazine, Murder Weekly; he watches as the rich make deals with corrupt ministers; and he reflects that millions of people in India are no different from birds in a rooster coop, aware of their fate and resigned to it: “A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent to exist in perpetual servitude, a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”
Balram decides that he will be the one to break out of the coop – he is no mere rooster, after all, but a white tiger, a name once given him by a school inspector to suggest the rarest of animals, a creature of initiative and daring, which comes along only once in a generation. We will discover near the end of the book exactly what his life-altering act of “social entrepreneurship” is.
Recent months have seen the publication of many non-fiction studies of modern India – books like Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods and Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, which, in one way or the other, deal with the many contradictions in this complex country: the contrast between the smooth narratives about economic growth and prosperity that are being sold to the world, and the stark realities of the lives of most Indians. One of the achievements of Adiga’s novel is that it successfully employs fiction – and engrossing, fast-paced, drolly funny fiction at that – to a similar purpose. At its best, The White Tiger is just as insightful as any of the big “India books”. It also provides a worm’s-eye perspective – the perspective of the frustrated little person – that there hasn’t been enough of in Indian writing in English.
This is a very dark novel, something that isn’t immediately obvious because the tone is so chatty and conversational. Almost as if in determined opposition to all the India-rising narratives, it unflinchingly chronicles many of the harsher truths about the country: the perpetually wary relationship between the deprived and the privileged, with the resentment and hunger of one set against the paranoia, guilt and insecurity of the other; the dealings between “masters” and “servants” and the ways in which even relatively liberal people (represented here by the US-returned Ashok, different in many ways from his feudal-thinking father and brother) can be patronizing in their attitudes towards the lower-class. It makes the uncomfortable point that morality is very easily compromised when you want to make your way forward in this jungle. “Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi,” observes Balram at one point, “but it isn’t glory that I’m after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man – and for that, one murder is enough.”
Adiga has an authentic, unforced talent for irreverence, as when Balram mocks the continuing eagerness of people to “kiss some God’s arse”, never mind that the country’s 36 million Gods “seem to do awfully little work – much like our politicians – and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year”. Or when he reflects that in post-Independence India there are only two castes, men with big bellies and men with small bellies. I also liked some of the imagery – the description of a bullock cart carrying chandeliers, for example – and the many imaginative touches such as the villagers’ imputing of animal and bird qualities (and names) to the local landlords: one becomes the Stork (because “he took a cut of every catch of fish from every fisherman in the river”), another the Wild Boar. There is a similarly chilling zoopomorphic effect when Balram sees waiters cleaning tables at a small tea shop as human spiders, “crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys’.” (Incidentally, some of Balram’s musings about certain groups – white people and Muslims, among others – are far from tasteful: a reader who makes the mistake of confusing the narrator's voice with that of the author will find much to be offended about here.)
The device of Balram addressing the Chinese Premier didn’t always work for me – it sometimes felt like a forced attempt to make The White Tiger as topical as possible (given economic competition, and the popular thesis that the future belongs to India and China). Also, the writing is slightly precious in places (e.g. the repeated use of the capitalised “Darkness” to refer to the village setting where Balram grew up). But these are minor flaws and they have little effect on the book's flow. (Similarly, the tampering with Delhi’s geography can be forgiven as novelistic licence, though I balked at the passage that makes driving from Gurgaon to Jangpura sound like a 5-minute jaunt! As it happens, it's possible to include this in the very short list of "Delhi novels", though that would hardly be the primary classification.)
The White Tiger is a book that can cut uncomfortably close to the bone for anyone who’s ever reflected that the bill they just paid for a restaurant meal amounted to half of their driver’s monthly salary (and I’m not talking five-star hotel restaurants). Or for anyone who’s seen their domestic staff chatting with friends in the nearby park while casting occasional glances at the house, and wondered about the nature of the gossip being exchanged. Adiga makes us think about these things as well as about the many Indias and the different types of aspirations and frustrations they represent, but he does it within the framework of an absorbing novel. This is a very impressive debut.
P.S. Here's a long interview I did with Mohsin Hamid last year. His view (expressed in the conversation) of the hyper-nationalist rah-rahing done by the-powers-that-be in contemporary India could be one reason why he thought highly of The White Tiger.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
DVD review/film classics: A Streetcar Named Desire
Have been trying to find time to watch my DVDs of old American films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s – dozens of discs of such movies (mostly films I last watched in my early teens) have piled up and I haven’t made adequate use of them. (News flash: legit stores like Planet M or Musicland have begun stocking a variety of Hollywood and British classics, often under attractive discount schemes; among my recent acquisitions are The Caine Mutiny, Fail-Safe, Lifeboat, Forty-Ninth Parallel, Sunset Boulevard, Cool Hand Luke and The Desperate Hours – all for between Rs 200-300 each.)
I’m a huge fan of DVD extras, as I’ve written before, but it’s rare to find good special features on discs of old movies. Which is why one of my most cherished purchases is a two-disc special edition of A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan’s superb filmisation of the Tennessee Williams play. Among the goodies in the Extras section is a 75-minute documentary on Kazan’s career, with insights on seminal films like On the Waterfront, East of Eden and America, America, his status as an immigrant who remained a Hollywood outsider all his life, and his infamous ratting on Communists during the McCarthy witch-hunt. There are also a few shorter documentaries about Streetcar’s transition from stage to screen, the film’s music score and Marlon Brando’s iconic performance as the uncouth Stanley Kowalski (with outtakes and screen tests featuring the young mumbler) and a commentary track featuring two movie historians and actor Karl Malden, who played Stanley’s (relatively well-mannered) friend Mitch in the film. Excellent stuff, all told.
Of course, all this comes a distant second to the film itself, which I enjoyed much more this time than when I first saw it more than 15 years ago. A Streetcar Named Desire is probably best known today for unleashing the young Brando and his forceful Method acting on a world that was scarcelyprepared for him. It wasn’t Brando’s first film, technically speaking, but his Stanley – a character he had played on stage for two years before the movie was made – is his definitive early performance. As the film opens, Stanley is living with his wife Stella in a cramped apartment block in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Into this world comes Stella’s coquettish elder sister Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh), a refined Southern lady with a possibly murky past. She moves in with them and is as shocked (and intrigued) by Stanley’s coarseness as he is amused by her prim mannerisms.
The stage is thus set for a clash, not just of characters but of entire worlds, for this play, like much of Tennessee Williams’ other work, is laden with symbolism. One doesn’t need to have any knowledge of the American Old South to see Blanche as representative of a fading upper class that has lost its footing in the modern world and refuses to accept it, retreating instead into a world of make-believe. But in her attitude towards working-class people and immigrants (Stanley is Polish-American) leading “unrefined” lives, Blanche is equally a symbol of social snobbery and moral hypocrisy. Stanley, on the other hand, stands for a younger, brasher attitude common to people who live tough lives, work hard and drink harder, aren't very polite in their dealings, but are essentially direct and unpretentious. (This makes the casting of Brando even more interesting: his shockingly brusque, straight-to-the-point acting style must have been as much of a shake-up for the more orthodox screen performers of the time as Stanley’s behaviour is for Blanche.)
Streetcar is a great film on most criteria, with the writing and the acting being obvious highlights (they would have to be: the film is driven by these elements). I don’t agree with the idea that Brando’s performances were more “realistic” in some overriding sense than those of the best older Hollywood actors of the time, but his style made it possible for a certain type of character to be convincingly portrayed on the American screen. He has many attention-grabbing scenes here – the obvious ones being the sudden bursts of rage when he breaks the radio or “clears the table” after Stella has given him a dressing down, and his childlike contrition after a display of brute force – but he’s just as good in the less showy moments. (I particularly like the forced, goofy smile on his face when he says hi to Blanche shortly after an unpleasant confrontation.) His magnetism makes it possible to undervalue Vivien Leigh, but she's superb too, as Blanche's carefully cultivated facade of poise and self-assurance slowly cracks to reveal the instability underneath - a build-up to the painful final moments where she falls into hysteria.
I thought the film was beautifully shot, especially in the way the lighting toys with Blanche’s features (she constantly tries to look younger than she is, staying in half-light until a late scene where her features are brutally exposed), and the DVD print (a restoration, I think) accentuates this. The set design - built around the shabby tenement where Stanley and Stella and their neighbours live, brawl, drink, make love and play cards late into the night - is very impressive as well.
At one point in the DVD’s audio commentary track, someone observes that despite the actors having played these parts for months in the theatre, the movie seems completely fresh and “cinematic”. I’m not too sure about that – I thought it was a bit stagey in parts, though this is inevitable given the nature of the material. Williams’ plays tend to be intense, wordy and claustrophobic, and no one can accuse his vivid, poetic lines of sounding like natural speech (this isn’t a criticism). Also, as mentioned earlier, while his characters are well-realised people, they are also symbols, and this comes across in some of the self-conscious monologues (“I don't want realism, I want magic,” Blanche says, “I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”)
I haven’t read the play, but watching the film I could imagine how it must have unfolded on the stage – where the curtain would have fallen to mark the end of an Act (in the film, naturally, there are cuts and fade-outs instead), how a certain character would have entered and exited a scene, and so on. None of this reduces the movie’s impact - it's tense and gripping all the way through.
[Some earlier posts on old films: Yojimbo, Fearless Vampire Killers, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nanook of the North, Fiddler on the Roof, The Talk of the Town, Swing Time, Peeping Tom, Eraserhead, Closely Watched Trains, Paths of Glory, Badlands, Judgement at Nuremberg, Duck Soup]
I’m a huge fan of DVD extras, as I’ve written before, but it’s rare to find good special features on discs of old movies. Which is why one of my most cherished purchases is a two-disc special edition of A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan’s superb filmisation of the Tennessee Williams play. Among the goodies in the Extras section is a 75-minute documentary on Kazan’s career, with insights on seminal films like On the Waterfront, East of Eden and America, America, his status as an immigrant who remained a Hollywood outsider all his life, and his infamous ratting on Communists during the McCarthy witch-hunt. There are also a few shorter documentaries about Streetcar’s transition from stage to screen, the film’s music score and Marlon Brando’s iconic performance as the uncouth Stanley Kowalski (with outtakes and screen tests featuring the young mumbler) and a commentary track featuring two movie historians and actor Karl Malden, who played Stanley’s (relatively well-mannered) friend Mitch in the film. Excellent stuff, all told.Of course, all this comes a distant second to the film itself, which I enjoyed much more this time than when I first saw it more than 15 years ago. A Streetcar Named Desire is probably best known today for unleashing the young Brando and his forceful Method acting on a world that was scarcelyprepared for him. It wasn’t Brando’s first film, technically speaking, but his Stanley – a character he had played on stage for two years before the movie was made – is his definitive early performance. As the film opens, Stanley is living with his wife Stella in a cramped apartment block in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Into this world comes Stella’s coquettish elder sister Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh), a refined Southern lady with a possibly murky past. She moves in with them and is as shocked (and intrigued) by Stanley’s coarseness as he is amused by her prim mannerisms.
The stage is thus set for a clash, not just of characters but of entire worlds, for this play, like much of Tennessee Williams’ other work, is laden with symbolism. One doesn’t need to have any knowledge of the American Old South to see Blanche as representative of a fading upper class that has lost its footing in the modern world and refuses to accept it, retreating instead into a world of make-believe. But in her attitude towards working-class people and immigrants (Stanley is Polish-American) leading “unrefined” lives, Blanche is equally a symbol of social snobbery and moral hypocrisy. Stanley, on the other hand, stands for a younger, brasher attitude common to people who live tough lives, work hard and drink harder, aren't very polite in their dealings, but are essentially direct and unpretentious. (This makes the casting of Brando even more interesting: his shockingly brusque, straight-to-the-point acting style must have been as much of a shake-up for the more orthodox screen performers of the time as Stanley’s behaviour is for Blanche.)
Streetcar is a great film on most criteria, with the writing and the acting being obvious highlights (they would have to be: the film is driven by these elements). I don’t agree with the idea that Brando’s performances were more “realistic” in some overriding sense than those of the best older Hollywood actors of the time, but his style made it possible for a certain type of character to be convincingly portrayed on the American screen. He has many attention-grabbing scenes here – the obvious ones being the sudden bursts of rage when he breaks the radio or “clears the table” after Stella has given him a dressing down, and his childlike contrition after a display of brute force – but he’s just as good in the less showy moments. (I particularly like the forced, goofy smile on his face when he says hi to Blanche shortly after an unpleasant confrontation.) His magnetism makes it possible to undervalue Vivien Leigh, but she's superb too, as Blanche's carefully cultivated facade of poise and self-assurance slowly cracks to reveal the instability underneath - a build-up to the painful final moments where she falls into hysteria.I thought the film was beautifully shot, especially in the way the lighting toys with Blanche’s features (she constantly tries to look younger than she is, staying in half-light until a late scene where her features are brutally exposed), and the DVD print (a restoration, I think) accentuates this. The set design - built around the shabby tenement where Stanley and Stella and their neighbours live, brawl, drink, make love and play cards late into the night - is very impressive as well.
At one point in the DVD’s audio commentary track, someone observes that despite the actors having played these parts for months in the theatre, the movie seems completely fresh and “cinematic”. I’m not too sure about that – I thought it was a bit stagey in parts, though this is inevitable given the nature of the material. Williams’ plays tend to be intense, wordy and claustrophobic, and no one can accuse his vivid, poetic lines of sounding like natural speech (this isn’t a criticism). Also, as mentioned earlier, while his characters are well-realised people, they are also symbols, and this comes across in some of the self-conscious monologues (“I don't want realism, I want magic,” Blanche says, “I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”)
I haven’t read the play, but watching the film I could imagine how it must have unfolded on the stage – where the curtain would have fallen to mark the end of an Act (in the film, naturally, there are cuts and fade-outs instead), how a certain character would have entered and exited a scene, and so on. None of this reduces the movie’s impact - it's tense and gripping all the way through.
[Some earlier posts on old films: Yojimbo, Fearless Vampire Killers, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nanook of the North, Fiddler on the Roof, The Talk of the Town, Swing Time, Peeping Tom, Eraserhead, Closely Watched Trains, Paths of Glory, Badlands, Judgement at Nuremberg, Duck Soup]
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Cruising through Alzheimer’s: a rant about U, Me aur Hum
[Looking at all the positive reviews this film has got, I have a feeling I'm going to be lynched for this post. Never mind - at least it'll balance out all the times I get asked "HOW could you write good things about that dreadful book?! Did you have some kind of arrangement with the author?" The one thing this post should make clear is that there was no exchange of monies between the Devgans and me]
Ajay Devgan’s directorial debut U, Me aur Hum is one of the most grating and poorly written films I’ve seen in months. This is two bad movies for the price of one: the first half is a shrill, overwrought comedy full of insufferable characters (I yearned for the relative tastefulness of the Kader Khan-Shakti Kapoor tracks in 1980s films) and redeemed only by some nice cruise footage; then it changes tack midway to become an equally shrill, overwrought drama about the effect of Alzheimer’s on a sufferer and her loved ones. But predictably, having decided to take on a “serious” issue (perhaps because of the respectability tag), it simply cops out in the end.
The story begins with a young (and fabulously rich) psychiatrist named Ajay (Devgan) goofing about on a cruise vacation with four friends (two couples, whose tiresome shenanigans and vulgar jokes get an astonishing amount of screen time). When bar-girl Piya (Kajol) asks Ajay “Anything you desire, sir?” and he replies “Yes. You”, we must obediently accept the film’s word that “true love” has struck. (Shortly after this, Ajay jumps on to the bar to announce that all drinks are on him, and a bump-and-grind song sequence follows, featuring back-up dancers presumably hired from Devgan’s recent films like Cash.) He woos Piya in increasingly silly ways. She reciprocates. There is a misunderstanding. They part ways. She comes back to him. He’s waiting for her, with a house that’s done up entirely in white (her favourite colour) and a dog named Mr White, and they get married (I mean Ajay and Piya). Strangely, she fails to do the first thing any conscientious spouse would have done – that is, give marching orders to his quartet of moronic pals.
Then it turns out that Piya has Alzheimer’s, and on this note the Intermission sign appears: “You can go to the snack bar for your Dispirin now.”
U, Me aur Hum is consistently wrong-footed, its tone lurching (sometimes within the same scene) from unfunny screwball comedy to intense psychological horror to cutesy romance. (The bouncy song “Saheli jaisa Saiyyan”, incongruously deposited in the middle of a high-drama scene late in the film, exists for no reason other than to provide TV channels a standard romantic music video.) The screenplay is littered with convoluted faux-philosophical discussions (never use one sentence when you can use five, is the motto), homilies, spin-offs from corny Internet jokes and general vagueness. (“Dukh ki baat yeh hai ke isme khushi ki baat nahin hai,” says a doctor, making a bittersweet announcement.) No premium is placed on political correctness either: in Ajay’s office, his receptionist passes him the phone with the words “Doctor, someone wants to talk to you. Serious mental case lag raha hai”.
Personally, I don’t think this film deserves measured analysis – I would have been perfectly happy to do a jokey review recording some of the unkind thoughts that went through my mind during the cruise scenes (e.g. “The appearance of a deadly iceberg would conclusively prove the existence of God” or “Now would be a good time for the Jaws shark to leap out of the ocean and into this 12-storey boat”), or to speculate that Ajay and Kajol might be Clark Kent and Superman respectively, given the camera’s odd refusal to show them in the same frame in the ship scenes. But since U, Me aur Hum touches (however facilely) on a serious issue, and since many people believe that putting down such movies amounts to being “insensitive” (as if making fun of a badly made film were the same thing as making fun of Alzheimer’s), I feel almost obliged to make a few considered points. So here goes, and the hell with spoiler alerts:
- Given that the story is about a relationship deepening and maturing in the face of adversity, a strange thing happens in the last few scenes (which should be preserved in a film museum as the definitive word on paying lip service and then chickening out). After much soul-searching, Ajay has made the difficult decision to take Piya home and look after her himself, rather than leave her in a care facility. “I promised her that we would go on a cruise to celebrate our 25th anniversary,” he tells his friends, “and I intend to keep that promise.”
This is very heartwarming, but at this point the film (which has already spent oodles of time on buffoonery and annoying supporting characters) simply decides to wind up. For all the preaching about your responsibilities towards those you love, not the slightest effort is made to engage with the difficulties and adjustments that a couple living together in the shadow of such a disease must face (they're a nuclear family, he's a working man who needs to be out of the house most of the time, her condition has nearly resulted in the accidental death of their child, and she is subject to mood swings and hysteria). Instead, it fast-forwards more than two decades ahead to reassure us that this made-for-each-other couple did in fact manage that 25th anniversary cruise together. (In these scenes, I got the distinct impression that the anniversary is the only thing that really matters and that the intervening years of these characters’ lives are mere background detail.)
Further, the middle-aged Ajay has clearly made the most of a bad situation – as he tells fellow passengers listening to their love story, he gets to “patao” his wife afresh nearly every day (because she keeps forgetting who he is, or how they got together), and then there are those “bonus” days where she remembers everything and all is normal. When he finishes the story (to the moist-eyed applause of the other vacationers), it turns out that this was one of those bonus days: Piya, who had been listening to the story as if it was new to her, was only pretending to have forgotten him. Voila. What a warm, fuzzy way to wrap things up. Starry-eyed couples everywhere will be wishing that one of them gets Alzheimer's – it sounds so much more exciting than your regular relationship, which dies painfully within a few months since neither of the partners ever forgets anything.
- Technically speaking, there are moments that betray a lack of cinematic common sense. Take the lengthy sequence where Kajol places her baby in the bathtub with the water running, goes out of the room and then zones out – distracted by the sight of a lizard stalking an insect on the wall, she forgets about her infant, leaving him in mortal danger. This is intercut with shots of Ajay reaching home and making his way upstairs; the house attendant chatting with a friend at the door, unaware of what’s happening inside; the family dog barking loudly; the water level slowly rising above the baby’s head.
Viewed in isolation, this is actually a well-constructed sequence straight out of the how-to-do-suspense textbook. Built around the question “will the child be saved in time?”, it demands a certain emotional investment from the viewer, and the cross-cutting is skillfully enough done. But looked at in context it’s simply gratuitous and unnecessarily prolonged – because, you see, in the scene before this one, we have already seen the baby being brought to the hospital, treated and revived. The bathtub scene is a flashback that is shown after the doctor asks Ajay what happened. So there really wasn’t any suspense to build in the first place. It’s an example of a first-time director trying too hard to experiment (with chronology, in this case) and abandoning basic sense in the process.
But I’m getting way too analytical now. The eventual message of U, Me aur Hum, and it's one that's hard to argue with, is that life is basically a series of great cruises with a bit of Alzheimer’s thrown in to add some grimness to the mix. This means that Star Cruises, which is one of the film’s advertising partners, has got the best deal out of the project. (The worst deal is reserved for Devgan and Kajol’s real-life children, who will grow up to watch the most embarrassing home movie ever.)
P.S. Anyone interested in a list of the five scenes I actually liked in this film, feel free to email.
P.P.S. Over at Ultrabrown, a commenter describes what the Farrelly Brothers might have done with this material. Now that's one film I'd love to watch.
Ajay Devgan’s directorial debut U, Me aur Hum is one of the most grating and poorly written films I’ve seen in months. This is two bad movies for the price of one: the first half is a shrill, overwrought comedy full of insufferable characters (I yearned for the relative tastefulness of the Kader Khan-Shakti Kapoor tracks in 1980s films) and redeemed only by some nice cruise footage; then it changes tack midway to become an equally shrill, overwrought drama about the effect of Alzheimer’s on a sufferer and her loved ones. But predictably, having decided to take on a “serious” issue (perhaps because of the respectability tag), it simply cops out in the end.
The story begins with a young (and fabulously rich) psychiatrist named Ajay (Devgan) goofing about on a cruise vacation with four friends (two couples, whose tiresome shenanigans and vulgar jokes get an astonishing amount of screen time). When bar-girl Piya (Kajol) asks Ajay “Anything you desire, sir?” and he replies “Yes. You”, we must obediently accept the film’s word that “true love” has struck. (Shortly after this, Ajay jumps on to the bar to announce that all drinks are on him, and a bump-and-grind song sequence follows, featuring back-up dancers presumably hired from Devgan’s recent films like Cash.) He woos Piya in increasingly silly ways. She reciprocates. There is a misunderstanding. They part ways. She comes back to him. He’s waiting for her, with a house that’s done up entirely in white (her favourite colour) and a dog named Mr White, and they get married (I mean Ajay and Piya). Strangely, she fails to do the first thing any conscientious spouse would have done – that is, give marching orders to his quartet of moronic pals.Then it turns out that Piya has Alzheimer’s, and on this note the Intermission sign appears: “You can go to the snack bar for your Dispirin now.”
U, Me aur Hum is consistently wrong-footed, its tone lurching (sometimes within the same scene) from unfunny screwball comedy to intense psychological horror to cutesy romance. (The bouncy song “Saheli jaisa Saiyyan”, incongruously deposited in the middle of a high-drama scene late in the film, exists for no reason other than to provide TV channels a standard romantic music video.) The screenplay is littered with convoluted faux-philosophical discussions (never use one sentence when you can use five, is the motto), homilies, spin-offs from corny Internet jokes and general vagueness. (“Dukh ki baat yeh hai ke isme khushi ki baat nahin hai,” says a doctor, making a bittersweet announcement.) No premium is placed on political correctness either: in Ajay’s office, his receptionist passes him the phone with the words “Doctor, someone wants to talk to you. Serious mental case lag raha hai”.
Personally, I don’t think this film deserves measured analysis – I would have been perfectly happy to do a jokey review recording some of the unkind thoughts that went through my mind during the cruise scenes (e.g. “The appearance of a deadly iceberg would conclusively prove the existence of God” or “Now would be a good time for the Jaws shark to leap out of the ocean and into this 12-storey boat”), or to speculate that Ajay and Kajol might be Clark Kent and Superman respectively, given the camera’s odd refusal to show them in the same frame in the ship scenes. But since U, Me aur Hum touches (however facilely) on a serious issue, and since many people believe that putting down such movies amounts to being “insensitive” (as if making fun of a badly made film were the same thing as making fun of Alzheimer’s), I feel almost obliged to make a few considered points. So here goes, and the hell with spoiler alerts:
- Given that the story is about a relationship deepening and maturing in the face of adversity, a strange thing happens in the last few scenes (which should be preserved in a film museum as the definitive word on paying lip service and then chickening out). After much soul-searching, Ajay has made the difficult decision to take Piya home and look after her himself, rather than leave her in a care facility. “I promised her that we would go on a cruise to celebrate our 25th anniversary,” he tells his friends, “and I intend to keep that promise.”
This is very heartwarming, but at this point the film (which has already spent oodles of time on buffoonery and annoying supporting characters) simply decides to wind up. For all the preaching about your responsibilities towards those you love, not the slightest effort is made to engage with the difficulties and adjustments that a couple living together in the shadow of such a disease must face (they're a nuclear family, he's a working man who needs to be out of the house most of the time, her condition has nearly resulted in the accidental death of their child, and she is subject to mood swings and hysteria). Instead, it fast-forwards more than two decades ahead to reassure us that this made-for-each-other couple did in fact manage that 25th anniversary cruise together. (In these scenes, I got the distinct impression that the anniversary is the only thing that really matters and that the intervening years of these characters’ lives are mere background detail.)Further, the middle-aged Ajay has clearly made the most of a bad situation – as he tells fellow passengers listening to their love story, he gets to “patao” his wife afresh nearly every day (because she keeps forgetting who he is, or how they got together), and then there are those “bonus” days where she remembers everything and all is normal. When he finishes the story (to the moist-eyed applause of the other vacationers), it turns out that this was one of those bonus days: Piya, who had been listening to the story as if it was new to her, was only pretending to have forgotten him. Voila. What a warm, fuzzy way to wrap things up. Starry-eyed couples everywhere will be wishing that one of them gets Alzheimer's – it sounds so much more exciting than your regular relationship, which dies painfully within a few months since neither of the partners ever forgets anything.
- Technically speaking, there are moments that betray a lack of cinematic common sense. Take the lengthy sequence where Kajol places her baby in the bathtub with the water running, goes out of the room and then zones out – distracted by the sight of a lizard stalking an insect on the wall, she forgets about her infant, leaving him in mortal danger. This is intercut with shots of Ajay reaching home and making his way upstairs; the house attendant chatting with a friend at the door, unaware of what’s happening inside; the family dog barking loudly; the water level slowly rising above the baby’s head.
Viewed in isolation, this is actually a well-constructed sequence straight out of the how-to-do-suspense textbook. Built around the question “will the child be saved in time?”, it demands a certain emotional investment from the viewer, and the cross-cutting is skillfully enough done. But looked at in context it’s simply gratuitous and unnecessarily prolonged – because, you see, in the scene before this one, we have already seen the baby being brought to the hospital, treated and revived. The bathtub scene is a flashback that is shown after the doctor asks Ajay what happened. So there really wasn’t any suspense to build in the first place. It’s an example of a first-time director trying too hard to experiment (with chronology, in this case) and abandoning basic sense in the process.
But I’m getting way too analytical now. The eventual message of U, Me aur Hum, and it's one that's hard to argue with, is that life is basically a series of great cruises with a bit of Alzheimer’s thrown in to add some grimness to the mix. This means that Star Cruises, which is one of the film’s advertising partners, has got the best deal out of the project. (The worst deal is reserved for Devgan and Kajol’s real-life children, who will grow up to watch the most embarrassing home movie ever.)
P.S. Anyone interested in a list of the five scenes I actually liked in this film, feel free to email.
P.P.S. Over at Ultrabrown, a commenter describes what the Farrelly Brothers might have done with this material. Now that's one film I'd love to watch.
Monday, April 14, 2008
"Directed by Jewels Dashing"
One of the many benefits of buying pirated DVDs from Palika Bazaar is getting to read the typos on the (hurriedly printed) cover jackets. Just noticed the following sentences on my DVD of Jules Dassin’s excellent film noir Night and the City:
“Dull-layered DVD, region 9"
"Includes:
English subtitles for the dead and hearing-impaired
Excerpts from a 1672 French interview with Dassin
Full-length audio cemetery by film schooler Glenn Erickson”
(Actually, come to think of it, if the director was around in 1672, it makes sense to have an audio cemetery and subtitles for the dead.)
“Dull-layered DVD, region 9"
"Includes:
English subtitles for the dead and hearing-impaired
Excerpts from a 1672 French interview with Dassin
Full-length audio cemetery by film schooler Glenn Erickson”
(Actually, come to think of it, if the director was around in 1672, it makes sense to have an audio cemetery and subtitles for the dead.)
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The Palace of Illusions: the good, the bad and the Titanic
I was a bit harsh with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions when I mentioned it in an earlier post. Having sped-read it at the time (out of idle curiosity, not for a review), my rough impression was that the narrative lacked intensity, which one doesn’t expect when the narrator is someone like Draupadi (or Panchaali, the name she prefers here). Haven’t changed my view about this, but reading the book more thoroughly I could appreciate its strong points - it’s possible that as a Mahabharata-pedant, I underestimate the value of an accessible, reasonably well-written version. Divakaruni’s book should be given that much credit.What I liked
The lighter passages (e.g. the badinage between Krishna and Panchaali when they discuss their past lives) are well-handled. Also, the device of the childhood game between Panchaali and her brother Dhrishtadyumna (Dhri), where one of them starts telling a story (about other characters in the epic), the other continues it and so on – it’s a nicely intimate scene and a creative way of filling gaps in the narrative.
Were the stories we told each other true? Who knows? At the best of times, a story is a slippery thing. We’d had to cobble this one together from rumours and lies, dark hints Dhai Ma let fall, and our own agitated imaginings. Perhaps that was why it changed with each telling. Or is that the nature of all stories, the reason for their power?Some of the character analyses go beyond the clichés found in basic translations of the Mahabharata. For instance, conventional tellings regard Bheeshma among the most unblemished characters (along with the less interesting Yudhisthira and Vidura), but one can argue that in his rigid adherence to his principles and his famous vow, he often disregards basic, common-sense humanity. (Even Satyavati, in whose interests Bheeshma took the vow in the first place, begs him to break it for the common good. His refusal to do so reminds me of the uncompromising "righteousness" of the very religious – people who are more interested in staying on the good side of their personal God than in their dealings with human beings.) In The Palace of Illusions, here’s Panchaali on Bheeshma:
I wanted to warn my husbands that one couldn’t depend on a man who plucked frailty and desire so easily out of his heart. How could he have compassion for the faults of others, or understand their needs? Protecting a [dead vow] was more important to him than a human life.(For more on this side of Bheeshma, see Iravati Karve’s reading of the character as someone who, having voluntarily renounced many of the pleasures of worldly life, occupied a higher ground than everyone else and saw himself as being accountable to no one.)
I also liked some of Divakaruni’s turns of phrase, such as when Panchaali expresses the cruel futility of the Kurukshetra war in her descriptions of dead bodies on the battlefield (“My father, his mouth drawn back in a grimace of disappointment, for he did not live to see the vengeance he had spent his entire life planning...the blood-encrusted face of Duryodhana’s son Lakshman Kumar, his eyes wide with surprise as though he hadn’t expected death to win this game of tag, blurred into the face of one of my boys.”)
What I didn’t like
One advantage of a point-of-view telling of the Mahabharata should be that it shows us how much greater the epic is than the sum of its parts (the 10-year-old who hero-worships Karna or Arjuna might disagree with this, but most of us do grow up). In such retellings, we get to see people and events through the (naturally biased) perspective of a particular character, and once we have enough of these perspectives, they add up to complete a fascinating tapestry. One problem I had with The Palace of Illusions is that the book doesn’t always acknowledge the subjectivity of Panchaali’s viewpoint. Too often, she becomes an all-knowing sutradhar figure, not very different from Vyasa himself, and we’re expected to believe that she has the real inside dope on many things, including other characters’ motivations and struggles.
An illustration of this. Duryodhana is a completely unsympathetic character in this book, which would be perfectly all right if it were made clear that this is because Panchaali sees him that way: that she deeply fears and loathes the man who did her so much harm, and has had no occasion to see his good side. The problem is when the narrative feigns objectivity: at one point, Panchaali relates a conversation in the Kaurava camp, conveyed to her by her spies, and the Duryodhana we get here is a one-dimensional Hindi-film villain. (There is the implication that Balarama is his friend only because he once sent him a cartload of alcohol. In other passages, we gather that Karna isn’t so much genuinely attached to Duryodhana as obligated to him. Gone is the multi-dimensional Kaurava prince who was a generous, sympathetic ruler once he had got the Pandavas out of the way, and who earned – rather than purchased – the friendships of some of the noblest characters in the epic.)
The Panchaali-Karna relationship (specifically, their secret feelings for each other and her lifelong questioning of whether she did the right thing by humiliating him at her swayamvara) is tritely handled. I thought it was reductive to take two enormously complex characters and define them primarily in terms of their forbidden love for one another – don’t want to sound like a purist, but I didn't care for the scene where Kunti tries to persuade Karna to join the Pandavas and he is briefly swayed only when she tells him Draupadi will be his wife. I didn't think it was consistent with his character. (By the by, it might have been more fun if Divakaruni had retained the original version of this episode, which had Krishna making this offer to Karna, and turned it into a nudge-wink frat-boy dialogue: "Join the Pandavas, dude, you'll totally score!")
Karna and Draupadi as Jack and Rose
When Karna dies, something happens that (as Panchaali solemnly tells us) Vyasa didn’t put down in his version. The glow from the fallen warrior’s body travels straight to the weeping Draupadi: “It grew into a great radiance around me. A feeling emanated from it that I have no words for. It wasn’t sorrow or rage. Perhaps, freed of its mortal bondage, Karna’s spirit knew what I hadn’t ever been able to tell him.”
This is a giggle-out-loud moment to compare with the best of them, but nothing trumps the book’s ending, when (I hope this doesn’t require a spoiler alert) Draupadi reaches heaven and is reunited with her great love. Remember the lavish final scene of James Cameron’s Titanic, with the spirits of the doomed lovers Jack and Rose finding validation in a shimmering afterlife? Remember them kissing in the ship’s ballroom while people of all classes, including those who used to call Jack sutaputra (or something) stand around and applaud lustily? In The Palace of Illusions, Jack and Rose go by the names Karna and Panchaali, and their great big ship is heaven itself. They don’t actually kiss, this being against Indian culture, but as an enthusiastic Panchaali puts it, “Karna is no longer the forbidden one. I can take his arm in view of everyone. If I wish I can embrace him with all of myself.” In heaven, you can frolic for all eternity. The great war was worth it after all.[Earlier posts on the Mahabharata: Karna and the Madrakas; how Rukmi avoided the war; astonishing births; Yuganta; Bhasa's plays; old tales, new renderings]
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Persistence Resistance film fest: notes, mini-reviews
Just a pointer to a festival of documentaries and short films taking place at the India International Centre, New Delhi between April 28-30. “Persistence, Resistance” is organised by the Magic Lantern Foundation and nearly a hundred films, Indian and international, will be screened; these will include retrospectives of the work of Madhushree Dutta, R V Ramani, Sehjo Singh and Paromita Vohra, all of whom will take part in conferences at the venue.The screenings will be in the IIC’s auditoria, but a notable initiative is the setting up of eight video parlours on the Fountain Lawn. (“We’re exploring new ways of seeing films,” says Gargi Sen, director, Magic Lantern Foundation.) Each of these parlours will screen four-hour loops – made up of selected films, played one after the other – thrice a day, allowing visitors to sample what’s on offer, pick the films they want to watch and the order in which they want to see them. For viewers unaccustomed to non-mainstream cinema, this should be a relaxed, informal way of discovering the variety of films being shown.
Since I was doing a festival preview for a magazine recently, I got to see a few of the films. Among the ones I liked was Rehad Desai’s Bushman’s Secret (65 minutes), which is a moving, expertly shot account of the marginalisation of a dignified people – the Kalahari bushmen. The Johannesburg-based Desai meets a traditional healer and examines the controversy that has risen around a cactus plant called the Hoodia, used for its medicinal properties by the bushmen for centuries but now being patented by a pharmaceutical company. Intellectual property being a “ridiculous notion” to the bushmen, they are ripe for exploitation by the faceless corporation. I thought the supplanting of a traditional, nature-based way of living by cold modernity is poignantly summed up in a scene where an old woman is shown the sterile-looking white tablet manufactured by the company. “I don’t recognise this Hoodia,” she says disapprovingly, “I like it when it’s green and raw and has the little thorns.”
Another engrossing film is Bishakha Datta’s Taaza Khabar (31 minutes), about a fortnightly newspaper called Khabar Lahariya, run by a group of barely literate women in a small Chitrakoot village. Even as we shake our heads at mainstream media’s celebrity obsession and the general fading of journalistic integrity, these self-taught patrakaars have been doing everything they can to cover the news that affects the life of the common man. The film shows us their impromptu “edit meetings”, their nervousness about going for interviews alone, the way they exchange feedback on illustrations (“is this a sweeper cleaning a drain? Looks like he’s playing badminton”), deal with power cuts on production day and chronicle unsavoury social realities, such as a husband being garlanded when his wife has won an election. It’s an eye-opener about the painfully difficult process of news reportage (and dissemination) in the hinterland.I also liked Planeta Alemania (40 minutes), which is about people living and working in Germany without legal papers. “The word ‘illegal’ is like a plague that covers my body,” says the protagonist, a woman who notes, ironically, that she isn’t permitted to appear on public television, and that therefore the documentary will have to find creative ways to film her. (One of the solutions is to show extreme close-ups of her lips while she speaks monologues.) She talks about poor work conditions, discrimination, lack of medical aid, having to learn German only so she can defend herself against the authorities, the strong inner conflict she feels when in a public place (“it’s like being in a cage without being in a cage”). She envies birds. “They can go to another place without showing a visa. We humans are complicated.”
Some of the films I saw deal with gender constructs in one way or the other. These include Harjant Gill’s Milind Soman Made Me Gay (27 minutes), in which four gay men – all of south Asian origin, now living in the West – tell us about the personal journeys they made in coming to terms with their sexual preference and seeking acceptance from others. In the process, larger questions about identity are raised. Recalling his family’s experiences during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, one of the men ponders the labeling of people, and “our relationship with the world around us”. Another, a Pakistani, recalls being concerned that his sexual leanings might amount to a betrayal of his culture and religion.The theme of how the performing arts can unloose the shackles of gender constraints is explored in Madhushree Dutta’s Sundari: An Actor Prepares (30 minutes), the story of a renowned female impersonator in the Gujarati theatre of the early 20th century. Then there’s Roz Mortimer’s Gender Trouble (24 minutes),
which features first-person accounts by four “inter-sex” women. They speak about their experiences: the shame and self-doubt, the often-unbearable pain of treatment (one of the women holds up dilators, of progressively bigger sizes, that she has to use to enlarge her vagina), the complications created by societal and cultural attitudes – a UK-based Indian woman, Saraswati, is told by her family doctor that the need for surgery can only be ascertained after she gets married, an assumption that she won’t be having sexual relations before then. A running theme is how people who lead relatively “normal” lives are discomfited by variation. “I find ‘hermaphrodite’ to be quite a poetic word actually,” Saraswati says at one point, “but it has a freakish connotation. It would be nice if society could think more flexibly about us.” That’s the least one should expect, given that one in every 2,000 people is born with an inter-sex condition.There are dozens of other films, of course, and I’ll write about some of them later. I don’t think the festival schedule is online yet, but anyone who wants it can email me.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Notes on Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been taking time out for a very rare and precious activity - reading for pleasure, without worrying about having to put down a book every few pages to make review-notes. Since old habits die hard, I might post mini-reviews later of some of the books I’ve read and enjoyed in this period, notably Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, Indra Simha’s Animal’s People and Peter Robinson’s In a Dry Season, and some I didn’t like so much, such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, a strangely prosaic, bloodless telling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective. But for now, some notes on a book I liked moderately, the new Jhumpa Lahiri collection.
Inevitably, any discussion of Lahiri’s work must be headlined by a mention of the type of writing she specializes in: about the immigrant experience, more specifically the lives of first-generation Bengalis and their alienated children in the US. This sort of thing draws mixed responses. Many readers of Indian writing in English have come to be suspicious of the sub-stratum popularly known as “Diaspora fiction”, a common allegation being that such writing panders to a Western readership by creating an exoticised picture of Indians and their adjustment problems. However, this amounts to tarring all such writing with the same brush, implying that all such authors deal with the clash of cultures in a simplistic or patronizing manner. The related allegation that there is little variety in Lahiri’s work isn’t particularly useful from a critical perspective either. Many authors have built great careers by writing only about the people and settings that they know about, and they have done this thoughtfully, intelligently, and with a display of versatility and variety that transcends the limited definitions of these words. As ever, the question that should be asked while appraising their work is not “what” but “how”.
In my view Lahiri still has a way to go as a novelist (poignant and perceptive though The Namesake often was, it tended to ramble and break up into a disjointed series of vignettes), but when the question “how” is applied to her short stories, the answer is that the best of them are notable for their restraint, for their economical character portraits and for quiet, seemingly effortless insights into people’s thoughts and actions. Many of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth have these qualities. At first glance, the book’s title appears to be about a shift to a foreign country (which is what many readers familiar with Lahiri’s earlier work would expect), but reading the stories one realises that it can refer to many other actions or experiences that bring a sense of dislocation with them: moving to a new house shortly after the death of a beloved parent, for example, and trying to think of the place as home despite knowing that the deceased person had never even seen it.
In the title story, a woman nervously awaits a visit by her widowed father with whom she has rarely been alone in the past (her mother having always served as the go-between). In “Only Goodness”, a rehabilitated alcoholic, estranged from his family, attempts to return to the fold by getting in touch with his elder sister. The tentative interactions between these sets of people show us how circumstances can lead even the most intimate relationships into unaccustomed territory. This is also the case in the intriguing “A Choice of Accommodations”, in which a man named Amit travels with his American wife Megan to the mountain town where he once went to school, to attend the wedding of an old friend (and onetime crush). This story has a dreamlike quality that contrasts with Lahiri’s usually straightforward narratives. Initially we don’t sense much wrong between Amit and Megan beyond the ennui that can settle in after several years of marriage, but soon little details accumulate: they are disappointed by the hotel they have booked for their two-day stay; a tear in Megan’s dress seems like a bad omen; the setting recalls the loneliness of Amit’s youth and his failure to pursue the things he was really interested in; at the wedding, he forgets the name of an old classmate and upsets someone with a casual remark about how most marriages “disappear” after some time; he goes back to the hotel room to make a call and falls asleep, leaving his wife alone. Here, as in Lahiri’s most subtle work, nothing is spelt out but we sense how interior lives can impinge on mundane daily routines and threaten relationships.
There are a few weak links. “Hell-Heaven” – about a housewife’s attraction towards a younger man, supposedly a brother-figure – is mildly engrossing, without ever demanding much of the reader. The main point of interest in “Nobody’s Business”, where a student named Paul gets involved in the personal affairs of his housemate Sangeeta, is that the perspective here is that of a non-Indian. And the gardening analogies in “Unaccustomed Earth” are laboured (“he had toiled in unfriendly soil, coaxing new things from the ground”), providing just the right ammunition for critics who would dismiss Lahiri’s work as, dare one suggest, coaxing new clichés from the soil of immigrant fiction.
The good news is that the book ends on a strong note with the elegiac three-chapter novella “Hema and Kaushik”, which brings together many of Lahiri’s ideas about lives that have been set adrift. One of the central characters here is a photojournalist who travels around the world but for whom unaccustomed earth, the place where he feels most like an outsider, is his own home in Massachusetts, where his father’s new family has supplanted memories of his late mother. It’s another reminder that sticking the Diaspora tag on these stories amounts to limiting them, even if most of the characters are Indians abroad.
Inevitably, any discussion of Lahiri’s work must be headlined by a mention of the type of writing she specializes in: about the immigrant experience, more specifically the lives of first-generation Bengalis and their alienated children in the US. This sort of thing draws mixed responses. Many readers of Indian writing in English have come to be suspicious of the sub-stratum popularly known as “Diaspora fiction”, a common allegation being that such writing panders to a Western readership by creating an exoticised picture of Indians and their adjustment problems. However, this amounts to tarring all such writing with the same brush, implying that all such authors deal with the clash of cultures in a simplistic or patronizing manner. The related allegation that there is little variety in Lahiri’s work isn’t particularly useful from a critical perspective either. Many authors have built great careers by writing only about the people and settings that they know about, and they have done this thoughtfully, intelligently, and with a display of versatility and variety that transcends the limited definitions of these words. As ever, the question that should be asked while appraising their work is not “what” but “how”.In my view Lahiri still has a way to go as a novelist (poignant and perceptive though The Namesake often was, it tended to ramble and break up into a disjointed series of vignettes), but when the question “how” is applied to her short stories, the answer is that the best of them are notable for their restraint, for their economical character portraits and for quiet, seemingly effortless insights into people’s thoughts and actions. Many of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth have these qualities. At first glance, the book’s title appears to be about a shift to a foreign country (which is what many readers familiar with Lahiri’s earlier work would expect), but reading the stories one realises that it can refer to many other actions or experiences that bring a sense of dislocation with them: moving to a new house shortly after the death of a beloved parent, for example, and trying to think of the place as home despite knowing that the deceased person had never even seen it.
In the title story, a woman nervously awaits a visit by her widowed father with whom she has rarely been alone in the past (her mother having always served as the go-between). In “Only Goodness”, a rehabilitated alcoholic, estranged from his family, attempts to return to the fold by getting in touch with his elder sister. The tentative interactions between these sets of people show us how circumstances can lead even the most intimate relationships into unaccustomed territory. This is also the case in the intriguing “A Choice of Accommodations”, in which a man named Amit travels with his American wife Megan to the mountain town where he once went to school, to attend the wedding of an old friend (and onetime crush). This story has a dreamlike quality that contrasts with Lahiri’s usually straightforward narratives. Initially we don’t sense much wrong between Amit and Megan beyond the ennui that can settle in after several years of marriage, but soon little details accumulate: they are disappointed by the hotel they have booked for their two-day stay; a tear in Megan’s dress seems like a bad omen; the setting recalls the loneliness of Amit’s youth and his failure to pursue the things he was really interested in; at the wedding, he forgets the name of an old classmate and upsets someone with a casual remark about how most marriages “disappear” after some time; he goes back to the hotel room to make a call and falls asleep, leaving his wife alone. Here, as in Lahiri’s most subtle work, nothing is spelt out but we sense how interior lives can impinge on mundane daily routines and threaten relationships.
There are a few weak links. “Hell-Heaven” – about a housewife’s attraction towards a younger man, supposedly a brother-figure – is mildly engrossing, without ever demanding much of the reader. The main point of interest in “Nobody’s Business”, where a student named Paul gets involved in the personal affairs of his housemate Sangeeta, is that the perspective here is that of a non-Indian. And the gardening analogies in “Unaccustomed Earth” are laboured (“he had toiled in unfriendly soil, coaxing new things from the ground”), providing just the right ammunition for critics who would dismiss Lahiri’s work as, dare one suggest, coaxing new clichés from the soil of immigrant fiction.
The good news is that the book ends on a strong note with the elegiac three-chapter novella “Hema and Kaushik”, which brings together many of Lahiri’s ideas about lives that have been set adrift. One of the central characters here is a photojournalist who travels around the world but for whom unaccustomed earth, the place where he feels most like an outsider, is his own home in Massachusetts, where his father’s new family has supplanted memories of his late mother. It’s another reminder that sticking the Diaspora tag on these stories amounts to limiting them, even if most of the characters are Indians abroad.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Matrimony in a time of cyberspace
When I was 20, I was convinced that the concept of the generation gap would soon cease to exist – that liberal-minded youngsters of my age had seen it all and could never be surprised by anything that the next generation did. Well, as I’ve indicated in earlier posts, the gap is just as wide as ever. New developments such as high-rise underwear have poured cold water on our smug certainties, and who knows what may lie ahead?
The cold and steely talons of technology have a firm grip on everything now, even the matchmaking process. In the pre-Internet days, there were matrimonial ads in newspapers for those of us who weren't seriously "going around" with someone. These ads typically sought to seduce members of the opposite sex (or their parents) with classy sentences like “i want a girl with no smokings and good ability in home work. if she wants she can wear jeans in house but while stepping out of house she should give respect to our cast”. They are still around, of course, but today’s youngsters also have access to better technology, and one of the notable sociological trends of our age is that of the “half-love, half-arranged” marriage that begins with young boys and girls “meeting” on matrimonial websites.
In many cases, these interactions are monitored by parents who set up profiles for their children (especially daughters), look at lists of prospective candidates and determine eligibility based on such criteria as caste, vocation, family status and type of fairness cream used; though the boy and girl are permitted to chat each other up and even plight their troth in cyberspace, the first real-world meetings often take place between their respective parents. (Unbeknownst to these parents, once a certain sort of understanding has been reached, the boy and girl frequently manage to sneak away together for a little pre-nuptial vacation in order to test the far more important criteria of physical compatibility. As a sweet young thing, a former colleague of my wife, put it, “If I’m going to marry this guy, I need to make sure he has adequate knowledge of positions.”)
Anyway, this manner of mate-finding brings its own complications, as I discovered when a New Zealand-based friend sent across an email exchange he had had with an over-ardent young lady shortly after they had got around to chatting on a matrimonial site. She was visiting Christchurch (where he lived) on work and offered to extend her stay on her own expense, so they “could spend an ample amount of time together”. Don’t alter your plans especially for me, he replied, mentioning that he might be a little busy with exams at the time, and that they could meet during her official trip. “Oh no, my parents have a lot of expectations of us meeting, and it takes more than one time” she said, adding several smiley icons for good measure, and went ahead and made her plans anyway.
As he had anticipated, my friend could only meet her once, at a dinner with other people present and not much opportunity for personal interaction. A few days later, he received a frosty email asking him to compensate her to the tune of 200 Australian dollars for the money she had “wasted on travel and accommodation”. In wifely fashion, she even gave him her bank account number so he could transfer the funds. He did the husbandly thing and obliged her, but not before writing a sarcastic reply pointing out that she was the one who had wanted to rush things.
My first thought on reading the mail exchange was that this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime pairing, given the excellent start they had made in the matter of bickering and passing blame back and forth – key ingredients of any healthy marriage. Later, my friend’s mother told me that the girl’s parents (probably unaware of what had transpired) had contacted her, mentioning that their children had met and asking if she knew what had come out of it. “You should have told them that they had a very good weekend together,” I suggested, “and that your son paid their daughter $200 for services rendered.”
The last I heard, he's thinking of recouping his losses by putting a new clause on his online profile, requiring any interested girl to deposit a provisional sum as pre-dowry. Best of luck to him.
The cold and steely talons of technology have a firm grip on everything now, even the matchmaking process. In the pre-Internet days, there were matrimonial ads in newspapers for those of us who weren't seriously "going around" with someone. These ads typically sought to seduce members of the opposite sex (or their parents) with classy sentences like “i want a girl with no smokings and good ability in home work. if she wants she can wear jeans in house but while stepping out of house she should give respect to our cast”. They are still around, of course, but today’s youngsters also have access to better technology, and one of the notable sociological trends of our age is that of the “half-love, half-arranged” marriage that begins with young boys and girls “meeting” on matrimonial websites.
In many cases, these interactions are monitored by parents who set up profiles for their children (especially daughters), look at lists of prospective candidates and determine eligibility based on such criteria as caste, vocation, family status and type of fairness cream used; though the boy and girl are permitted to chat each other up and even plight their troth in cyberspace, the first real-world meetings often take place between their respective parents. (Unbeknownst to these parents, once a certain sort of understanding has been reached, the boy and girl frequently manage to sneak away together for a little pre-nuptial vacation in order to test the far more important criteria of physical compatibility. As a sweet young thing, a former colleague of my wife, put it, “If I’m going to marry this guy, I need to make sure he has adequate knowledge of positions.”)
Anyway, this manner of mate-finding brings its own complications, as I discovered when a New Zealand-based friend sent across an email exchange he had had with an over-ardent young lady shortly after they had got around to chatting on a matrimonial site. She was visiting Christchurch (where he lived) on work and offered to extend her stay on her own expense, so they “could spend an ample amount of time together”. Don’t alter your plans especially for me, he replied, mentioning that he might be a little busy with exams at the time, and that they could meet during her official trip. “Oh no, my parents have a lot of expectations of us meeting, and it takes more than one time” she said, adding several smiley icons for good measure, and went ahead and made her plans anyway.
As he had anticipated, my friend could only meet her once, at a dinner with other people present and not much opportunity for personal interaction. A few days later, he received a frosty email asking him to compensate her to the tune of 200 Australian dollars for the money she had “wasted on travel and accommodation”. In wifely fashion, she even gave him her bank account number so he could transfer the funds. He did the husbandly thing and obliged her, but not before writing a sarcastic reply pointing out that she was the one who had wanted to rush things.
My first thought on reading the mail exchange was that this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime pairing, given the excellent start they had made in the matter of bickering and passing blame back and forth – key ingredients of any healthy marriage. Later, my friend’s mother told me that the girl’s parents (probably unaware of what had transpired) had contacted her, mentioning that their children had met and asking if she knew what had come out of it. “You should have told them that they had a very good weekend together,” I suggested, “and that your son paid their daughter $200 for services rendered.”
The last I heard, he's thinking of recouping his losses by putting a new clause on his online profile, requiring any interested girl to deposit a provisional sum as pre-dowry. Best of luck to him.
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