Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Dhokha in Aatish Taseer’s Sectorpur (and a bit on LSD)

Just a couple of days after watching Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha – with its horrific ending to the romance between a film student and his actress-girlfriend who naïvely thought their story would follow the Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge route – I finished reading a passage about “honour killings” in Aatish Taseer’s fine novel The Temple-goers. The narrator of this book happens to be a young man named “Aatish Taseer” but Delhi’s fictitious satellite towns are “Sectorpur” and “Phasenagar”; both are just on the outskirts of the capital, but technically they are part of the amusingly named breakaway state of “Jhaatkebaal”. In these towns and in other parts of north India, the notion of savage retribution for “lost honour” is so much a part of the social mindset that even police officers privately approve of it. The context of the passage is that the chopped up body of a young girl, who recently got married on the sly, has just been found in four black bin bags, and her own male relatives are under suspicion:
It was an easy mistake to make, easy to think of the border between Sectorpur and Delhi as only administrative. But it had a significance deeper than she knew. It was the border between town and country, between old ways and new, city way, between rural poor and urban middle class, between the mall-goers and the wild men of Jhaatkebaal. And across that border, where women in brightly coloured clothes worked in fields and men lazed on charpoys drinking tea, young girls did not wear capris, or send text messages, or have boyfriends; and they certainly did not marry out of turn. Just miles into that country of truck drivers and dangerous moustaches, with Delhi still visible, people thought nothing of killing a girl who had dishonoured their name. It was from this world that the bulk of Jhaatkebaal’s police force was recruited.

And so when revelations broke about Aakash and Megha’s secret marriage, and romantic text messages came to light, and Airtel’s call register revealed late-night phone calls made from Megha’s phone, not just to Aakash but to other “strange persons”, it was with some sympathy for a brother, understandably forced to silence so loose a sister, that the police arrested Kris. They would just as happily have arrested his father, but Mr Aggarwal was over seventy and out of town at the time of the murder.
There’s much more of interest in The Temple-goers, and I’ll post a review soon.

I also hope to write about Love, Sex aur Dhokha sometime, but only after a second, more attentive viewing: at this point I don’t trust myself to say anything intelligent about it. Need a closer look, mainly for technical reasons – to work out the little places where the camera's perspective stops being subjective (that is, as seen through the handycam, the store CCTVs and the spycam) and becomes “objective” (the filmic equivalent of the omniscient narrator). Also, the timing of some of the cuts.

Two things I will say: one, I was blown away by the final scene where the characters in the hospital room point at the television and there's a segue to the heavily stylised music-video version of the store shooting (with the great title song and the closing credits). Brilliantly done, and a fine comment on how news channels take banal, unglamorous crimes and sex them up for the consumption of their viewers at prime time (remember the creative videos that accompanied news reports on the Aarushi Talwar murder a few months ago?). It’s all the more effective because this last sequence looks so different from the rest of LSD; it’s the only scene in the film that could recognisably have come out of a “normal” multiplex movie. In other words, some of the stuff we can see on our news channels now is more filmi (in the conventionally defined sense of the word) than some of the stuff we might actually see in our films. (I also thought there was something sly about the fact that the words “Directed by Dibakar Banerjee” first appear as this scene begins, almost as if he’s telling us, “Well, this music video is the bit that I directed – the rest of the film is just handycam and CCTV footage.”)

Secondly, the film-within-the-film in the first segment was too over the top for my liking. Even if one accepts that Rahul is an incompetent, dork-ish film student, the movie he’s making seems like a deliberate parody of mainstream Bollywood rather than a tribute. This diluted the impact of the segment for me, because it too thickly underlined the already-obvious divide between the world of DDLJ (with the girl’s stern father melting in the end) and the “real-life” story of Rahul and Shruti. And I’m not sure about this, but part of the problem could be that Dibakar Banerjee himself is openly contemptuous of the DDLJ brand of moviemaking, and not particularly interested in concealing this contempt. The segment would have been more effective if we were allowed to empathise just a little more with Rahul’s romantic idealism and mainstream-movie love, rather than see him as a fool whose mind has been addled by Bollywood.

More later.

51 comments:

  1. I had similar thoughts about the first segment. It seemed like a deliberate overdone spoof.

    But did you hear about the whole inter-caste angle allegedly diluted by the censors? I would really like Dibakar to talk about this. Like someone on twitter was asking Dibakar, "Where can we see your movie?"

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  2. I saw the movie for the second time yesterday and in the first segment, you can see that there are parts where caste names have been dubbed over (esp when the goons come in; rem when Rahul says "Special category" wale hain na. I seriously believe the removal of the caste references would dilute the first part.
    On the final song, totally agree. In fact it was almost like the Mika incident, exploiting the kiss to make a music video.
    Would love to see your take on the most interesting bit in the movie, the second story.

    Two tangential questions, I remember an earlier post by you on FTII diploma films (Bonga etc), any idea where I can find a copy? The palika bazar guy? Second, when is the book on Jaane bhi do yaarone expected?

    -Rahul

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  3. Gradwolf: yes, I know about the inter-caste angle and agree that covering it up hampered the film. Unfortunately I doubt Dibakar's movie will be seen anytime soon - maybe a director's cut on DVD in a more permissible climate sometime in the future.

    Zutty: the diploma films are Extras on the Palador World Cinema DVDs. Bonga was on the DVD of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, I think - though it would also be on the DVD of a few other films.

    The JBDY book...no idea, really. I finished it in November and have moved on since. Will have to make a few revisions at some point, of course, but can only do that once my editor gets back to me. (He's told me they are looking at a July-August release but I find that very unlikely at this point.)

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  4. Reading your blog for the first time. I don't know if anyone has pointed this out but the green background is really making reading painful.

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  5. Dheeraj: haven't been motivated enough to change the template in over five years. Really should sometime. But meanwhile you can try subscribing to the blog on email or through some feed-reader. That will save you from the blindness-inducing green.

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  6. In my opinion, the last bit was brilliant. I was instantly reminded of Mika and his sleazy song about the Rakhi sawant charade.

    Too many pop singers have stylized incidents from their life and incorporated them into catchy songs. Some were making a statement, most others were chasing money, or cheap popularity. Nevertheless, it was an item song making a genuine point, and a clever way to counter their pointlessness in our films, and the DDLJ spoof.

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  7. Please warn about spoilers!

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  8. Rahul: sorry! Any post I do about LSD will necessarily be a full-on discussion of the film, rather than a review that avoids disclosing key plot points. Or were you referring to the Taseer book? There's a bit of a spoiler for that here too.

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  9. One of the other things about the movie was that it did not have any of the established stars in it, not even of the Multiplex movies (Vinay Pathak/Ranvir Shorey you get the drift) which I thought gave the whole movie a much more starker feel than would have been otherwise possible. And in one of your previous posts of an interview with Naseeruddin Shah he makes much the same point.

    About the caste references, it is interesting that the censor board did not allow it in the movie, while a relatively new TV soap serial had a tagline of "Ek Brahmin ka beta aur kayasth ki beti". Food for thought...

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  10. jai, please don't change your template. people like me, who've been following the blog for years, have, i think, come to associate the green with the comforting thought of rich reading ahead, and would hate to have to re-acclimatise.

    DK

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  11. NightWatchmen: yes, and Naseer's other point about making a (relatively) low-budget film that's commercially viable also applies here.

    DK: if I change the template I'll keep the current colours (green and white) and upgrade to one of the new template designs where text can be spread out over a larger area.

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  12. Every moron, except Dibakar, understands that Hindi cinema is a fantasy of what we'd like to be as a nation -- a country of love and harmony amidst extreme bigotry. Guys like Dibakar are just journo types who've had their head soaked in the docu-drama as cinema kind of gutter sewage that some consider "art", and so a bunch of cheap trying-to-be-avande-garde wannabes in the British Raj indoctrinated media are getting their rocks off watching this nonsense that does nothing to resolve the country's multiple crises. Give people dreams, sell love, not Indian Express on celluloid.

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  13. And yeah, DDLJ rocks, by the way. LSD sucks

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  14. Anon: yes, yes, because it's clearly impossible for different types of movies to co-exist. Everything must be homogenised. The country's "multiple crises" must be resolved exclusively through multiple viewings of DDLJ. Yes, I totally get your point.

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  15. I meant the movie. Didn't read the review beyond the first few lines once I realized there were spoilers, no big deal really.
    Now I have seen the movie and though everyone will deconstruct their experience of the movie in their own way- this movie worked for me in every which way,I felt a very visceral connection to the movie. I am still not sure why I liked it so much, that will come out slowly I guess.
    Have you seen any of Jafar Panahi's work? Or Mike Leigh ? Or any of the Dogme 95 movies?
    It was immensely satisfying for me to see a work like those above, in a Hindi movie.
    The torch of the avant garde cinema in India has been passed over to DB. Anurag Kashyap seems like Manmohan Desai compared to him.

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  16. Rahul: I've seen most of Mike Leigh's films (Naked is one of my favourite movies) and a few of the Dogme films, though I think Leigh's work is fairly different stylistically from Dogme (in its final effect, I mean - though I believe the way he prepares and assembles his films is quite similar).

    Still waiting to see LSD again before I form a stronger opinion about it. I had minor reservations about the way in which the subjective cameras were used for the second segment (the positioning of the characters in the key scenes being convenience-driven, which made the device seem somewhat gimmicky), but on the whole I thought it was a very stimulating film.

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  17. re. Zutty/Rahul about FTII diploma films

    http://www.rudraa.com/main/masterstrokes.htm

    (also check out http://www.rudraa.com/main/Home_ent.htm)

    if you don't mind watching them streaming or capturing .flv for offline viewing using something like Orbit etc)

    www.cultureunplugged.com/storyteller/Pankaj

    (many other gems on the main site)

    best,

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  18. @Rahul : "Anurag Kashyap seems like Manmohan Desai compared to him." That is exactly the feeling I had and got into a lot of trouble with my colleagues over the lunch table since I told them that DevD pales in comparison to LSD.

    @Jai : About the first segment, even I had problems with it in so far as that I thought that a lot of screen time was taken up by it and much of it could have been edited over to make it a much more compact work which is what the second and third segments were. And by the way the general audience around me in the theatre seemed to be enjoying the first segment till its end where I could hear all the gasps and somewhere halfway through the third segment a large section seemed pretty bored!! Which seems diametrically opposite to your notes on the movie as well as my experience where I really got sold into this being a really excellent piece of movie making sometime into the second segment.

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  19. ...got into a lot of trouble with my colleagues over the lunch table since I told them that DevD pales in comparison to LSD.

    NightWatchmen: I'm sure there are lots of good reasons for people to prefer LSD to Dev D (or the other way around) but I don't much care for the automatic assumption that the more "verite" or "realistic" (in the narrow Dogme sense) a film is, the better it is. Personally I have a problem with this continuum that goes "Manmohan Desai < Anurag Kashyap < LSD" based on nothing more than the perceived "realism" of their movies.

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  20. I have to come back here everyday just to check the very many literate comments this blog gets.

    Is there any way to keep up with comments without commenting oneself?

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  21. Jai,
    The short answer to that is , that comment was with respect to just one aspect- pushing the boundaries.There is a part of the brain that reacts to innovation, there is nothing more or less to it.
    Traditional is called so only because it works well if done well,and there was no value oppressive assumption in there.
    The long and the more objective answer could be sought for on the lines of why would a viewer feel engaged more with a Dogme style and why it is superior art- but I myself do not buy, or have any argument for,the latter though I can argue for the former.
    In any case,this was not implied earlier.

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  22. I have to come back here everyday just to check the very many literate comments this blog gets.

    Nimit: I take it you weren't referring to "And yeah, DDLJ rocks, by the way. LSD sucks"?

    Is there any way to keep up with comments without commenting oneself?

    Why refrain from commenting? Stream-of-consciousness works fine for me!

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  23. The long and the more objective answer could be sought for on the lines of why would a viewer feel engaged more with a Dogme style and why it is superior art...

    Rahul: nothing objective about such an answer - it would be subjective by definition. But anyway, most of my previous comment was in response to NightWatchmen. I know you clearly specified in your comment that "the torch of avant garde cinema in India has been passed over to DB..."

    Having said that, though, I'm a little perplexed by this widespread assumption that DB has done something that has never been attempted before in Indian cinema. A few of the offbeat movies of the 70s and 80s - Kumar Shahani's work, for example - experimented a lot with what could loosely be called Cinema Verite (though of course it wasn't modern, Dogme-style Verite). I remember Satyajit Ray in one of his essays showed impatience with what he saw as the self-consciously drab approach of Shahani and Mani Kaul.

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  24. Having said that, though, I'm a little perplexed by this widespread assumption that DB has done something that has never been attempted before in Indian cinema

    Actually, I wanted to make this point but it slipped my mind earlier.
    The reason why many people are talking about Dogme 95 is not because of the technique itself but because it gave us 3 or 4 extremely powerful movie experiences. So, the other aspects of LSD are in danger of getting overlooked in the buzz generated by the style. People will have different reasons for liking this movie, but there can be many, from the Delhi characters that DB has down to a beat, the exploration of the role of voyeurism and sensationalism in the society etc.
    The point is, the reason why he may be remembered as the pioneer,and deservedly so in my book, is because he has created a powerful movie experience using that technique.
    If somehow the movie hadn't come together well, many people would have blamed the technique.

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  25. @Jai : I totally agree. What I was trying unsuccessfully to convey to my colleagues and here as well was that the LSD experience left me with much more of a buzz than DevD.

    And I do not think that just portraying "realism" makes for a fine director, I would not be a Brian De Palma fan if such were the case.....

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  26. Rahul: just to clarify, no question in my mind that Banerjee is among the two or three most interesting directors working in the country just now.

    I would not be a Brian De Palma fan if such were the case.....

    NightWatchmen: GO, DEPALMA! *Whoops, high-fives*

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  27. Rahul, NightWatchmen, others: just a couple of general thoughts on realism, since I've been enjoying the last few exchanges. (Don't treat this as a direct response to any particular comment.)

    Even if you leave aside the fact that Realism isn't automatically a superior mode of artistic expression (though many people who have a relatively low-level engagement with cinema, or literature, or whatever, seem to think it is), I have a problem with the concept of realism in cinema, because it can be such a misunderstood/simplified idea. Eventually all movies, even documentaries, have a certain basic artifice built into the very process: a man-made device called the camera is used in various pre-planned ways (some of which give the impression of being more "realistic" or "natural") to capture a series of events.

    Many different elements contribute to this process (in different proportions), and it often happens that a particular movie or a particular scene gets labeled as "realistic" because of the impact of one of those elements, working in near-isolation. Random example: in the climactic scene in A Wednesday where the Common Man delivers his monologue, Naseeruddin Shah's performance brought integrity and believability to the scene, even though 1) there was nothing minimalist about the staging - the camera was darting and jump-cutting all over the place, drawing attention to itself, and 2) the monologue itself, as written on paper, was a little too pat to be considered a truly "realistic" piece of writing. If a lesser actor (or a big superstar known for his trademark mannerisms) had played the same scene, it might have seemed very fake, even if the camera had stayed trained on his face, in the same position, from beginning to end.

    I'm very excited by LSD myself, but when I hear people say that it's an exceptionally realistic film, I'm not completely sure what that means (and why it should be relevant to an overall assessment of the film). The second segment, shown entirely through the CCTVs in the store, is an unconventional way of telling a story (and mostly very well executed), but is it realistic in any truly meaningful sense of the word? If it were, why would we be able to hear what the characters are saying to each other? (CCTVs don't provide high-quality digital audio.) Why would all the key action in the story be set directly in front of one of the four cameras? (Though here I recognise that there's poetic licence being used to make a point about how ubiquitous cameras have become in our lives.)

    Okay, I'm going to stop for now, but will expand some of these thoughts later, and maybe put them up as a separate post. Meanwhile, I'd appreciate your continuing inputs on the subject.

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  28. LSD - brilliant narrative, perfect cast, out n out director's movie. Mediocre camera work, seen before. Indian noir comedy has come of age. Could have done without the hacking bits, and the Tehelka preaching bit. Hard hitting.

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  29. If it were, why would we be able to hear what the characters are saying to each other? (CCTVs don't provide high-quality digital audio.)

    Okay, second thoughts on this bit: I'm clearly out of touch with how advanced CCTVs are these days. (Though I still doubt that a store of the sort shown in this film would have such an advanced security system.)

    Really, really need to see this film a second time. Also really, really need to stop talking to myself on this comments space.

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  30. I have a problem with the concept of realism in cinema, because it can be such a misunderstood/simplified idea.

    I totally agree with you.The fact of the matter is that every bit of theorizing about cinema is done AFTER it has happened. It is a way of deconstructing the experience into already defined cognitive schemes in your mind.That is how human mind works. Sometimes one can correlate the shooting styles etc with realism sometimes it could be method acting. But the fact is that the primary in every case is HOW YOU FEEL when you see the movie!
    That is why I have started to say movie experience instead of movie because I want to underline the subjective part involved in it, and also the fact that experience is the king! Movie making and movie viewing will always be an organic process and it would refuse to be characterized by any descriptors.IF you feel real its realism, that's about it.

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  31. Interesting discussion.
    I'm often intrigued by the constant "mainstream vs offbeat" debate.

    What with the emergence of the multiplex audience and increased piracy online, a lot of the current crop of films are designed to appeal to a very small segment of the general population (20-30 year old yuppies mostly). I wonder if this is a desirable trend.

    One of the distinctive features of motion picture as an art form is that it is a communal experience as opposed to say books or paintings. But since the sixties, I think movies have lost their universal appeal and have increasingly become the preoccupation of young urban men.

    This shift has been very marked in India especially over the past 15 years. Which is why I empathise with the anonymous commenter on this thread. A movie like Citizen Kane, for all its "artiness", is a more mainstream production with far more universal appeal and relevance than a Dev D or a No Smoking

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  32. I'd even go so far as to say that Citizen Kane is more mainstream than Hirani's 3 Idiots. The latter appeals to a much smaller segment of the general population than the former.

    Given the increasingly personal brand of filmmaking, I wonder if its fair for studios to complain about declining crowds at movie houses and shorter runs in the box-office.

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  33. I'd even go so far as to say that Citizen Kane is more mainstream than Hirani's 3 Idiots. The latter appeals to a much smaller segment of the general population than the former.

    Shrikanth: I don't think this comparison is particularly relevant. If you're defining mainstream as something that appeals to the largest segment of the general public, we might as well accept that the only "mainstream" Indian films of the past decade have been movies that most of us urban viewers have never even heard of: the dozens of "patchwork" B-grade and C-grade movies (in Hindi and Bhojpuri) that Mithun Chakraborty and other aging action stars have been making every year on shoestring budgets, with plots and even scenes recycled from 1980s movies. Those are the films that really play in ramshackle single-room "theatre houses" in large swathes of rural India, where Mithun-da is still a much bigger star than Shah Rukh Khan.

    My point is that there's no real way of comparing the complicated social framework of India - the urban-rural divide, the vast difference between the multiplex audience and the rural movie-watcher, and so on - with that of the US in 1941. (The US did of course have its "cattle belt", where the majority of the population might not have been sophisticated enough to appreciate a Citizen Kane - but those viewers, to the best of my knowledge, didn't have an entire alternate cinematic culture available to them the way India does outside towns and cities.)

    Just by the way, I was checking one of my books for the top 10 US box-office hits for 1941, and the list includes Abbott and Costello in the Navy, A Yank in the RAF, Hellzapoppin and The Road to Zanzibar. The biggest grosser for that year was Gone with the Wind, which was released two years earlier. (The most successful of the films actually released in 1941 was Sergeant York.) Needless to say, Kane isn't on the list.

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  34. J'wock: Kane's lack of box office success could've been because of Hearst's threats and several exhibitors refusing to show it. Nevertheless apparently it did fare reasonably well "in cities and larger towns" (quoting wikipedia).

    By "mainstream", I wasn't referring to its box office appeal per se, but the general universality of its themes. The subject of Megalomania and power are of far greater interest to the general public than the evils of rote learning! I could show my grandmother Citizen Kane and rest assured that she would atleast like it mildly. But I'm not sure she'd warm up to a Dev D or a 3 Idiots

    It might be too much to expect a film whose appeal transcends the enormous urban-rural divide in India. However, I'd atleast expect films to have a wide enough appeal across different age groups. Right now, I can't imagine a world weary 50 year old getting too excited about Aamir Khan's "message" films or the youth-centric Anurag Kashyap/Dibankar Bannerjee films.

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  35. shrikanth: I get much of what you're saying, but I have issues with some of the specific points. An admirer of 3 Idiots might reasonably argue that the film is about much more than just "the evils of rote learning", and that its examination of the education system is extremely relevant to every young Indian. Another 3 Idiots fan with a lower-level engagement with cinema might simply say that it's a hugely "entertaining" film, and therefore has very universal appeal.

    Also, do you really want to take Citizen Kane (of all films) and reduce it to a story about "megalomania and power"? I would think a true Citizen Kane fan/cinephile would be able to watch that movie with the sound turned off and simply delight in the things Welles does with the tools available to him - without ever thinking too hard about the narrative or the "message" of the film.

    Btw, I must say your grandmother sounds like a very highbrow movie buff. I wouldn't be able to show Kane to most of my friends - they'd find it plain boring or esoteric. (Basically, I don't think this film is a very good example to make the points you're trying to make - maybe we should start over with another, more narrative-driven movie from the same period.)

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  36. ...Nevertheless apparently it did fare reasonably well "in cities and larger towns"

    Even so, I seriously doubt that the average American movie-watcher thought Citizen Kane was anywhere near as accessible as the average Indian movie-watcher thinks of 3 Idiots. The comparison just doesn't work for me.

    Ironically enough, a better comparison might be between Kane and LSD - not because I'm comparing the content or execution of the two films but because I think Indian critics and certain types of middlebrow/highbrow viewers are getting just as excited about LSD (as a "pathbreaking" film) as American critics got excited about Kane.

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  37. Maybe Kane wasn't the right example. I should've probably picked say Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives. Now there's a truly great film which is as mainstream as one can get!

    I seriously doubt that the average American movie-watcher thought Citizen Kane was anywhere near as accessible as the average Indian movie-watcher thinks of 3 Idiots.

    It may seem hard to digest. But I still think that a lot of these small multiplex films may seem very alien to large sections of our society. No wonder we find a lot of people yearning for a throwback to the mid 90s (as we see in this thread). I'm not suggesting that those 90s blockbusters were great movies by any stretch of imagination. But they definitely did appeal to a much wider audience and were intended to be enjoyed communally and not in the privacy of your bedroom.

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  38. shrikanth: I don't see what's so wrong about enjoying a film in the privacy of one's room rather than communally (once again, 3 Idiots is definitely not such a film anyway - it's best seen with a large audience, and it was the biggest box-office success of 2009). In my post on Vertigo I provided this link to Jim Emerson's reflections on movies that are too personal to share with an audience (which includes another link to an interview with Steve Erickson). You've commented on that post, so you might have seen the links too.

    But I still think that a lot of these small multiplex films may seem very alien to large sections of our society.

    Of course they will, but so what? Does that mean there should be no space for films like Dev D and LSD? In any case, this brings me back to my earlier point about the B-grade Mithun films that the largest segments of Indian viewers still prefer to watch today. So what's your point? Are you completely disregarding the tastes of non-urban viewers and talking only about urban/metropolitan viewers aged 50 or more? I think I'm missing something in this discussion.

    One more thing, and I hope you don't mind my saying this: you're an intelligent viewer/commenter, so do think twice before "empathising" with an anonymous troll whose only purpose in coming here was to stir the pot by making asinine remarks to the effect that all cinema should be DDLJ cinema. Try discussing Citizen Kane - or even The Best Years of our Lives - with that troll. I don't think you'll get very far.

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  39. It's not just "low-engagement viewers" of cinema who seem to think that way about the place of realism in cinema though:

    Roger Ebert wrote this about Avatar:

    "3D is a distracting, annoying, anti-realistic, juvenile abomination to use as an excuse for higher prices."

    Whatever the merit of this statement, and considering he was only trying to express the gimmicky way in which 3D had been used, he pre-supposed realism to be a virtue.

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  40. J'wock: I think we agree on most points. My point was that for a person weaned on Bollywood style wholesome "family oriented" cinema of the 90s, it is difficult to make the adjustment and readily take to films like Dev D or LSD. I'm sure American viewers weaned on classic narrative cinema of the 40s and 50s must have been similarly disconcerted/perplexed by the emergence of the New Wave as represented by Cassavetes, Godard and the rest in the early sixties.

    Some of the troll we're seeing is a result of such discomfiture.

    Also, I guess it is fair enough to say that "New Wave" cinema (be it the Indian "new wave" of late 2000s or the French "nouvelle vague" of 1960s) is in general less amenable to popular taste and communal viewing than classic narrative-driven cinema. I'm not taking a stance here. Both kinds of cinema can co-exist.

    With regard to MithunDa flicks ruling the roost in rural India: I've seen parts of his D-grade flicks. And I must say they're not necessarily significantly worse than an iffy "new wave" film like Dev D. Yet, while critics go gaga over the latter, the former get shunned completely.

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  41. Nimit: I'd take that sentence as an aberration; generally speaking, I don't think Ebert has had problems with non-realism, though I do vaguely recall something about one of his LOTR reviews - or was it Narnia - that puzzled me. (Maybe he just has problems with specific varieties of non-realism!)

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  42. This is interesting, though: 40-odd comments and not a single one about the Taseer book!

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  43. Yet, while critics go gaga over the latter, the former get shunned completely.
    I don't think a normative view needs to be applied to this.I think its inherent in the nature of writing that a critic is more likely to engage with a movie at a more personal level, when he is reflecting upon it in solitude in front of a computer.
    But then readers of such reviews are also preparing themselves to engage with the movie on a personal level,aren't they?
    Perhaps some readers would like the critic to engage his experience and write about it on a more immediate level, for example .- "There was a whistling competition between the balcony and upper house sections of the theater" or "Many of the audience members started dancing when the song began", because such acts do enhance the movie experience.
    I guess that it is a fair point that film criticism could do a bit recognizing the communal experience and expressing it.
    Anyway I am not sure where I am going with this.

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  44. Dude the last scene and the song when the credits roll. It's been a day since I saw the movie and I cannot get it out of my mind, largely because of the way it wrapped up.

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  45. Been a bit late in responding about the question on realism.

    To me realism is directly proportional to how accurately the director is able to capture the milieu of the setting he is depicting. So for example "Chintuji" even though needs a high suspension of disbelief on my part seemed much more "realistic" to me than a "Bachna Ae Haseenon" or for that matter any of Madhur Bhandarakar's movies

    I agree that realism by itself does not make a movie or a work of art superior. What really gets my goat though is when the director/cast of a movie claim on interviews that their movie is "realistic" or "contemporary" but the movie as in has this whole (To quote Naseeruddin Shah) synthetic look to it. Post DCH we have had a lot of movies about the urbane rich or the powerful (I guess I include all the movies dealing with the underworld here). Personally that is why a Manorama Six Feet Under (a small town lower middle class bureaucrat) or LSD (stories of the not-so affluent urban populace) even a Iqbal (a small town cricketer) appeal much more to me rather than say a Wake Up Sid. That in part also may explain the kind of reaction that "Slumdog Millionaire" generated, where Bollywood which was living in a denial that the vast majority of our country is poor had to face up to the paucity of the work depicting it. Again a very subjective opinion is that while Bollywood movies have become much more "polished" than the movies of the past, the kind of suspension of disbelief they need are probably similar.

    And by the way it somehow seems fair game to make fun of the 60/70s movies Om Shanti Om style while if DB does a spoof of DDLJ it seems a travesty to quite a few of my friends (who by the way were impressionable 13-years old when DDLJ was released!!)

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  46. Post DCH we have had a lot of movies about the urbane rich or the powerful. Personally that is why a Manorama Six Feet Under (a small town lower middle class bureaucrat) or LSD (stories of the not-so affluent urban populace) even a Iqbal (a small town cricketer) appeal much more to me rather than say a Wake Up Sid.

    NightWatchmen: I completely understand that stories about the not-so-affluent populace personally appeal to you more than films about the urbane rich. But should that necessarily be conflated with the "realism" quotient of the films concerned? Sure, Satyaveer (the engineer in Manorama Six Feet Under) is a believable character, but are there any particular grounds for thinking that the three youngsters in DCH or Sid in Wake up Sid aren't believable people too? (Irrespective of the fact that you and I might not find such people as interesting as Satyaveer or the LSD youngsters.)

    If we get the impression that Wake up Sid is a "synthetic" film (compared to Manorama or LSD), is that artificiality a flaw of the film itself or does it flow from the nature of its protagonists? I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think the question is worth asking.

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  47. Shrikanth: yes, that Brando-Cotten analogy is quite relevant to a lot of the discussions currently happening around contemporary Hindi cinema. The idea that Stanley Kowalski is somehow a more "real" person than a suave, urbane character played by Joseph Cotten (or Fred Astaire or Cary Grant for that matter) is highly simplistic. We had a discussion along these lines on one of my older posts as I recall - maybe the A Streetcar Named Desire one.

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  48. Although a little late in the day, let me say that however cynical you may call Dibakar's films (all three were quite cynical/bleak) he does not have the heart for a non-happy ending.

    Case-in-point:

    1. Khosla Ka Ghosla: he gave quite easily in to Jaideep Sahni's demand of letting the Khosla family win at the end.

    2. OLLO: In real life, Bunty-chor was finally caught and has now gone lunatic. He calls himself a genius scientist who has been captured by the special order of the Prime Minister/foreign hand.

    3. LSD: He uses the technique (also used in Pulp Fiction) of keeping the last scene from the middle of the time line so that an illusion of a happy ending is created.

    Of course, he just cannot write a scene that does not induce you to laugh at the situation, or/and (mostly) at the people.

    Even when Lucky is sitting surrounded by his loot towards the end, the ringtone that plays is "Billo Rani" and it becomes a funny and a sad scene at the same time.

    This may have something to do with his admitted influence of the " great humanity of Satyajit Ray" of which he spoke about briefly at Osian's Cinefan.

    Any other thoughts?

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  49. @Nimit: I agree. Having revisited KKG and OLLO (haven't seen LSD), I wonder why Dibankar is hailed as "avantgarde". These films are very much classical in style and narrative driven with a beginning, middle and an end.

    Yes. They are "offbeat" in that their content appeals to a certain type of viewer. But they are fairly conservative in their style. Not that I mind it, being a fan of the classical, unobtrusive style myself. But the adjective "avantgarde" seems somewhat misplaced in the context of DB's films.

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  50. He uses the technique of keeping the last scene from the middle of the time line so that an illusion of a happy ending is created.

    Nimit: true, and I'd also read something into the fact that the last "subjective" camera in the film is wielded by an innocent child. But there's a flip side to this as well: in the final shot before the closing credits, the kid moves the camera (and her gaze) towards the television set until the image on the TV fills "our" screen. What we (and the impressionable child) are now watching is a stylishly made music video that takes a real social problem and trivialises it for pop consumption. In my view, it's possible to interpret this as a very bleak ending in its own way - make bleaker precisely because the music video is so compulsively watchable.

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