It isn't often that I want to jot down notes about a book after reading only the first chapter, but well, the first 12 pages of Upamanyu Chatterjee's Way to Go seemed to demand it. The chapter is called "Missing Person" (never was a title more apt) and it takes the form of a conversation between a middle-aged man named Jamun (whom you might remember from The Last Burden) and an obtuse police constable. Jamun has come to the local police station to report that his 85-year-old father has vanished from his bed overnight; the constable is asking him questions pertaining to the disappearance.
Chatterjee's recent work hasn't been to many tastes - his humour is often scatological, vulgar, gratuitously mean-minded to a point where you wonder if he's testing the reader's endurance, and remarkably preoccupied with human excreta (run his last few novels through Wordle and I'm fairly sure "turd" will show up in a healthy font size). I expressed my own ambivalence about his last book Weight Loss here, and the present post isn't intended as an endorsement of Way to Go (which I've only started reading). But I thought "Missing Person" was funny, not so much in a laugh-out-loud way but in a chuckle-hopelessly-to-yourself-until-you-choke-on-your-own-phlegm way. It's what you might call morose humour.
Like so much of Chatterjee's writing going back to English, August, this chapter is about how both time and common sense are suspended when bureaucratic procedure takes centre-stage. Many things contribute to its effect. For example, there's the deliberate overwriting and over-attention to detail, as in the passage where the constable opens a register with "Bittoo" printed on its cover ("above the painting of a long-haired baby sucking its thumb with an adult expression in its eyes") and then begins "massaging" the stitching of the book's inner spine and doing sundry other things with his fingers until he finally locates a printed form containing the questions he needs to ask Jamun. (All this while an octogenarian might possibly be in need of speedy aid.)
Naturally, the interrogation itself is mechanically done, and shaped by the bizarre, illogical order in which the questions are printed on the form; there is no indication that the constable is capable of making a sensible connection between what he is asking and the information that has already been supplied to him. Thus, after Jamun has provided a full description of the situation and the missing person (his 85-year-old father), the constable shrewdly asks "Missing Person was Male or Female?" But what's even funnier is that Jamun answers with a simple, terse "Male". Much of the dark humour comes from our sense of his growing depression and inertia; he simply lacks the energy to jump up and start screaming at his sawdust-brained interrogator the way most of us would. Instead he glaze-eyedly observes the things happening around him, such as the wasp and the tea-boy entering the room at the same time.
Things get more surreal (and believable, for anyone who's ever been in a Kafkaesque cesspool of this sort - or, for that matter, anyone who's ever had to fill out a visa application form asking if they have committed genocide in one/many countries/continents). One question goes, "Did Missing Person thrash you or you him because of violent disagreements and tensions over your or his vices or addictions? Was the atmosphere of the house vitiated as a consequence?" and later, after the age of the Missing Person has been mentioned close to a dozen times, the constable asks, "Missing Person failed his school/college exams and therefore left home?"
By now Jamun is in a practically comatose state, reeling off dimly remembered sentences that he heard someone else say in a similar situation. When he replies "Such was not the case in the present instance," to a question, the constable nods approvingly; at last they are speaking the same language.
My latest adventure. I walk into the Musicland at Saket, see a very nice-looking DVD of the classic Bela Lugosi Dracula. On sale, Rs 149. With a long list of Extras mentioned on the back-cover, including the documentary The Road to Dracula, and feature commentary by film historian David Skal. So I buy it, come back home and immediately slip it into the player - something I wouldn't normally have done, but I'm eager to see if the "restored" print is any sharper than the print I remember from seeing the film on VHS years ago.
And on the screen is the 1979 version of Dracula with Frank Langella in the title role and Laurence Olivier hamming it up as Van Helsing.
This would have thrilled me back in 1987, when I was in my He-Man phase and had just seen Frank Langella as Skeletor in the live-action Masters of the Universe film. Today, not so much.
I'll return the DVD tomorrow but I can't figure this one out. How exactly are the Indian DVD releases of foreign films put together? (This one seems to have been jointly produced by BIG Home Video and Universal.) Do they procure the disc first and then separately search for a cover jacket to go with it (in which case a mistake like this was just waiting to happen)? Does anyone know?
P.S. here's an old post about bats in Sheila Dikshit's garden
The novella is sometimes viewed as an outlander – it’s thought by many to lack the respectability of a full-length book while also lacking the compactness and balance of a good short story. But there are certain types of stories that adapt extremely well to this in-between format. George Orwell’s social allegory Animal Farm was a famous example. Closer home, and less well known, is another caustic allegorical work, Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s 1997 Urdu novella Numberdar ka Neela, about a village administrator who uses a fearsome blue bull to keep people under his thumb. Happily, Ashraf’s book is now accessible to an English readership via a fine translation by the Pakistani writer Musharraf Ali Farooqi.
Ashraf’s story isn’t told in a strictly linear fashion, but the gist of it becomes clear within the first few pages. Shortly after a theft occurs in his village house, the despotic Thakur Udal Singh (who owns property in a village, a town and a city) begins to bestow special attention on a calf named Neela. Fed on a diet unusual for a creature of the wild, Neela grows into an exceptional animal that strikes terror into the hearts of anyone who might wish to oppose the Thakur. A cycle of oppression thus begins, culminating in the rape of a village girl by the Thakur’s son Onkar, and the subsequent deaths of three people associated with the crime.
This book is a careful portrait of village life, but even those who have never been to a village will find much that is immediately familiar in its subtle detailing of the relationship between persecutors and their victims. This is a world where supposedly impartial judges at a local assembly secretly owe their allegiance to the Thakur; where a cordial exchange of greetings at a wedding party can, in the blink of an eye, turn into a nasty display of clout and deal-making; and where illiterate people are trained to parrot statements they don’t even fully comprehend. Consider this wry account of the unfolding of one such incident:
Two days before the farmers recorded their statement in the city, Thakur had had those farmers gathered in the courtyard of the village house. He had brought along a city lawyer to prepare them for the cross-examination that awaited them.
Thakur showed the farmers the blue and red receipt books and asked, “Do you recognise these?”
The farmers answered with one voice: “No, we do not recognise them!”
The city lawyer looked askance at Thakur, and began drawing in his cigarette with quick puffs.
Thakur gnashed his teeth and told the farmers that they recognised those receipt books because they had their thumb-imprints on them. Then he made all of them put their thumb-imprints on the books.
In the Income Tax office, the farmers said with one voice: “Now we recognise these books, and all the potatoes in the cold storage belong to us, and these books are called account books, and they carry our thumb-imprints!”
Later, when things spiral out of control and people start to openly complain about the destruction wrought by Neela, Udal Singh plays the religion card: the bull is part of the mother goddess’s extended family; putting him to death would be a sin beyond measure, bringing calamity on the village. That the villagers fall for this casuistry makes it possible for us to understand why the Thakur has such an uneasy relationship with the headmaster of the village school. Education, which encourages people to ask questions, poses special dangers to a man who thrives when those around him are shrouded in darkness. (In a funny passage, we find the Thakur mulling that school textbooks could easily do without references to such dictators as Ravana and Hitler, as well as the “worrisome passages in the sociology textbooks which caused village lads to deem themselves equal to everyone else”.)
Something of the flavour of a particular language is inevitably lost in translation, but Farooqi’s English rendition goes a long way towards conveying the contrasting moods of Ashraf’s tale: playfulness, sarcasm, even coarseness. When Onkar casts his lascivious eye on a young woman rolling dough for puris, we are told that “it was natural for her whole body to swing when she rolled out the dough. It was also natural that those parts swung most heavily that weighed on Onkar’s mind”. (At another point the word “pots” is used as a double entendre – or perhaps merely as a euphemism – for a woman’s breasts.)
But running through the tale is a deep-rooted concern for the downtrodden and the exploited. Including, perhaps, Neela himself. Though the Thakur treats him as nothing more than a tool for his own ends, the omniscient narrator occasionally invites us to see the bull’s perspective on things, reminding us that this is a sentient creature with an interior life of his own. And in the ultimate fate of the exploiter and his instrument, one comes away with the sense that the scales of justice have, at least temporarily, been aligned. The Beast is a multilayered story about the lengths to which the power-hungry will go to retain their power, even when a more composed inner voice warns them that they are on the road to self-destruction.
[Earlier posts about Farooqi's translation of the Hamzanama here]
The variety of DVDs available in music stores like Planet M and Musicland is much more exciting than it was a year or two ago; walk into a medium-sized store and you're sure to see a rack filled with old and contemporary "World Cinema" titles released by Palador, Shemaroo or NDTV Lumiere, along with dozens of classic American and British films. But as someone who still does the bulk of his DVD-buying in Palika Bazaar (Rs 150 per disc for "original copies" from the Criterion Collection and such), I'm confounded by two things. First, the prices in the legit stores: anywhere between Rs 400 and Rs 600 per DVD (though Shemaroo's World Cinema titles were priced at Rs 350 last I checked). Second, the absence of extras/special features on the majority of these discs. The assumption seems to be that Indian buyers, even the ones who would willingly purchase a movie made 50 years ago, are unconcerned about such things. (In this post written years ago, I mentioned my surprise that many DVD-watchers here didn't even know about Extras, or how to navigate a disc menu; I'm not sure things have significantly changed since then.)
Much incredulous head-shaking has been done over a DVD series titled "Pure Gold". It's a collection of old Hollywood movies - Singin in the Rain, Roman Holiday, North by Northwest, many others - and it's very pleasing to look at, each DVD coming with a colourful cardboard jacket. If your principal reason for buying DVDs is that they look good on a shelf, you'll want the whole lot. But you have to shell out Rs 600 - four times the Palika price - for the stylish packaging, and of course the disc itself has only the movie on it. Nothing else.
On the positive side, there was a nice "3 DVDs for Rs 500" deal for a couple of months at Planet M recently, and one sometimes discovers a "50 per cent off" tag on a DVD that people aren't queuing up to buy - Police Academy 4, for example. But our music stores clearly have a way to go before they start offering the equivalent of the round-the-year deals one sees at international stores like HMV.
P.S. I'm not sure how Enemy at the Gates fits in the Pure Gold collection, but let that pass for now.
[Other DVD-related posts and rants: bizarre subtitles, jacket typos, a tip for Palika hounds, of porn and Pasolini, in praise of pirates]
[Did this short interview with Roddy Doyle before I moderated his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival; a version of this appeared in M magazine. Roddy said many other interesting things during the actual session, but I don’t yet have a transcript]
Intro: For over two decades now, the Irish writer Roddy Doyle has nimbly straddled the line dividing “popular writing” and “literary writing”. Doyle’s work has been immensely popular, both in his country and abroad: most of his books, including The Commitments (which was made into a very successful film by Alan Parker) and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, have been bestsellers; his 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is among the most widely read Booker Prize winners ever. His fiction, driven by conversation, working-class slang and short, staccato sentences, is accessible to a large readership. But Doyle, now 51, is also a very respected writer, particularly acclaimed for his ability to bring very different types of characters to life: the voice of the 10-year-old protagonist in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is pitch perfect, as is the book’s non-linear structure, which mirrors the restlessness of a young boy’s mind; Paula Spencer in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is one of the most convincing female narrators ever to be created by a male author.
A testament to Doyle’s versatility is that he participated in three sessions at the Jaipur Literature festival this year: the first dealt mainly with his novels, the second was about writing for children and young adults, and the third was about screenwriting (in the company of the director Stephen Frears, who made the movie versions of Doyle’s novels The Van and The Snapper).
Have you been to India before? What are your expectations of the literature festival?
No, I haven’t been here before. What to expect? The company of people who love books, and food that will bring a shine to my bald head!
But I’ve been following developments in Indian writing in English – I’m a great admirer of the work of Rohinton Mistry, and I wish Arundhati Roy would write another novel. I recently read Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which shocked and entertained me – two things I love in a book. I suppose one of the things I look forward to in Jaipur is being told what other Indian fiction I must read!
You have a talent for getting under the skin of very diverse characters. When you first began writing, did you consciously set out to stretch yourself as much as possible, to do something notably different with each new book?
It wasn’t a conscious decision at the start. I just wrote a book (The Commitments), finished it, and started a new one. As I finished one book, I’d be thinking about the next, and, I suppose, by the end of the third I was consciously deciding to stretch myself. I wrote Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in the first person because I’d never done that before and thought it would be interesting to try it. I found that I enjoyed the first-person voice, so I did it again with the next book, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors – but with a very different type of narrator. I try not to repeat myself.
The characters, or narrator, often drag the style of a novel behind them. Young characters will bring their language, rhythm and preoccupations; a mature woman will bring hers. I decided to write the second Paula Spencer book in the third person because I didn’t want to write a “sequel” to the first, or to try and repeat it. The first book was about an entire life, to the time of the book’s conclusion, but the second book was a single year in Paula’s life. Different book, different approach. Again, I wanted to avoid repetition.
What sort of research is required to “get” the cadences of the speech of people like Paula Spencer and Paddy Clarke?
I did no research for Paddy Clarke. I used to be a 10 year old boy; that seemed to be enough. I was a school teacher when I wrote it, all the time listening to young people yapping away: that helped. I’ve always loved the sound of people talking; I grew up listening to the neighbours and my parents mimicking the neighbours. If I was to set Paddy Clarke in 2010 instead of 1968, its rhythm would be somewhat different – different slang, different grammatical rules broken, but the same energy.
With Paula Spencer, the cadence came easily; the narrator, Paula, is about the same age as me, from the same part of the world etc. Other aspects of the book were foreign to me – the gender, the violence, the poverty, the dependency on alcohol. These slowed me down; I had to work hard to fashion the sentences that would bring her life to paper.
You deal largely with the working class – with the little triumphs and disappointments of “working-class heroes”. Have you ever been tempted to write a novel set in a completely different milieu?
In Ireland when I was growing up, there was a grey zone between working class and middle class, where most of us lived, one foot in each camp, so to speak. I’m comfortable, and more interested in, writing about the working class, the world of the Rabbitte family [in the Barrytown Trilogy], and the lower middle class, where Paddy Clarke comes from – where I come from, I suppose. I’ve been writing short stories for a while, about new arrivals into the country – Africans, East Europeans – coming into contact with people born here, in Ireland. Because of the nature of the work they do, for example, child minding, they often work in “big” houses. I’ve also written a novel, Oh Play That Thing, set entirely in the US.
Do you often get feedback from readers in other countries – Asian countries, for example? Because I wondered if your distinct sense of humour – often driven by Irish colloquialisms and local references –translates well to other cultures.
I don’t get much feedback. I often don’t “get” a joke because it’s being told ten miles up the road. So I’d always assume that people from outside Dublin or Ireland would have problems – but isn’t that one of the reasons why we read fiction? I read Adiga’s The White Tiger, not in the hope of finding the very familiar, but to read about a “foreign” world that was also very human and, therefore, familiar. I never think about readers as I write but I try to make sure that, if I use a colloquialism, there are words and phrases surrounding it to reveal, or hint at, its meaning.
Contemporary Irish writers are often expected to be spokespersons for their country or to explicitly deal with its history. Are you personally affected by these expectations?
The short, and honest, answer is No. I find the temptation to be a spokesman for my country very easy to resist, although I love the place. It’s never boring in Ireland.
Unlike your earlier work, the current series (The Last Roundup) is set in a distant time period. Did that involve a lot more research than the other books? Also, tell us something about the forthcoming book, The Dead Republic.
I often wonder, if I’d known how much research I’d have to do to write the three novels of The Last Roundup, would I have started? Probably – but I think I’d have drawn a deeper breath before starting. Luckily, I love reading! The first book is set in Dublin in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly in the slums. Some of those slums were still standing, still frightening, when I was a child. Being middle aged has its advantages! The final book, The Dead Republic, brings the narrator, Henry Smart, back to Ireland, from the USA, in 1951. He tries to settle into a quiet life but becomes involved with the IRA – not recommended if you crave the quiet life!
(continued from here and here)
A dramatic scene featuring Naseer and Vipin Sharma (who played the stern dad in Taare Zameen Par)...
...and the actors in a more relaxed mood. The rocks seated up to seven or eight people during the outdoor shoots.
More worrying was when some of the crew members would fall asleep near the edge (see extreme right). Wake up suddenly and there's a 70 percent chance of rolling right off.
Naseer gets his body makeup done for a scene involving blood...
...and later, plays the biking stud with the ladies.
Meet Shaji Fernandes D’Souza, the most sardonic jeep-driver in Kerala. “I am three people in one,” he said as he told us his full name. (“So am I,” I replied, announcing mine.)
It takes a scoundrel to know a scoundrel, and I credit myself with having realised, very early on, that Shaji was a poker-faced practical joker. The others in our small sightseeing group took everything he said at face value and gasped in outrage when he proclaimed that he would charge us Rs 500 for waiting at a spot for a few minutes or Rs 100 for playing a particular radio channel. They also bitched about him in Hindi and were suitably mortified when he told us, at the end, “Mujhe bahut achhi Hindi aati hai”. I thought he was enormously entertaining. Only people like him should be allowed to procreate.
One thing we learnt about Vagamon was that every major tourist spot is called “Suicide Point”. Initially we thought there was one; later we learnt there are as many suicide points as there are jeep-drivers in the vicinity. Most of these spots are so beautiful, however, that death loses its attraction once you’re there, which makes it more like Suicide Pointless.
Abhilasha takes a picture of Aahana and Meghna near a suicide point.
A Shiva temple near another suicide point, with small rock carvings of lizards, would you believe. The ladies made filmi poses near the edge of the cliff, but we won’t put up those photos here.
Silhouette shots from one of the loveliest, most idyllic places I’ve ever seen, the Vagamon meadows, full of picture-postcard hillocks and no trees, so you get a clear view for miles around (no greenery in these pics, but we wouldn't have got the right effect anyway).
Of course, the hillocks and the “plains” were all situated atop a mountain range – we were already 1500 metres up to begin with – but you could scarcely make that out. This is a popular location for para-gliding.
We also went to the nearby Belgian monastery, famous for doubling up as a dairy farm and supplying thousands of packets of milk to the region every day. Very colourful flowers on their grounds; Aahana’s camera did them some justice (mine didn’t).
The monastery has these very Swiss-looking cows.
In general, the cows in Vagamon are not benign creatures. Possibly they resent human intrusion on their territory. One cow, locally known as Mrs Antony, was part of the shoot and everyone was mortally scared of her. (“We need a milder cow,” Anup said to me in one of his more candid moments, “but the problem is where to get one?”)
Two rabbits were also part of the shoot, but for most of us the scene where Naseer had to carry one by the ears was cringe-inducing. He wasn’t too happy about the whole thing either.
At one point, after doing particularly well in a take, Tipu the star dog bounded towards a rabbit-containing bag, thinking perhaps this was to be his reward. “Would it be too logical to keep the dog separate from the rabbits?” asked the soft-hearted Jessica – Satish’s wife – caustically. She cradled one of the rabbits more adeptly than anyone else in the crew had managed so far.
(There’s a joke here involving “Jessica Rabbit” but I can’t think of it)
Later, on the rocks, I spoke with Naseer about Maarten ’t Hart’s essay “Rats”, about his experiences as a rat-trainer on the sets of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu and his horror at how thousands of domesticated rodents were treated on the sets (boiled alive in a muddleheaded attempt to dye white rats brown; starved so that they turned carnivorous). Naseer agreed that this was unconscionably cruel but added “Look at the films [Herzog] made though! Anyone would be willing to go very, very far for a director like that.” The constant lugging of heavy shooting equipment through steep and winding hill roads reminded me (on a much more modest scale, naturally) of the ship being transported over the hill in Fitzcarraldo.
(Continued from here. Click pics to enlarge)
This was pretty much my first view of the shooting. After a climb up a rough mountain road near Anup Kurian’s family house in Vagamon, we stumbled out of some foliage to find the crew shooting a scene with three singers (sisters) from Nagaland, atop a large rock. We had been walking through largely desolate terrain for the better part of an hour, so I couldn't resist saying "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" to Anup as I shook his hand.
In the background are the Naga sisters, carrying traditional music instruments shaped slightly like scythes – which is appropriate, since they are associated with death in the film.
Yes, that IS Naseeruddin Shah on the left.
It was his idea that Colonel would have dreadlocks, so he had these long braids stitched onto his real hair before arriving for the shoot. It seems like an overly flamboyant touch at first, but Naseer pulls it off really well, and having read the script I think it suits the character. (“There was no way I was going to wear a handlebar moustache just because the character is referred to as Colonel,” he told me.) It’s very uncomfortable though, especially in hot weather – he’s had to keep the braids on around the clock for over 30 days now, and will only be able to get rid of them once the shooting is over.
Naseer told me something interesting when we spoke later in the day. He conceptualised the Colonel as an older version of the cop he played in the 1987 film Jalwa (a remake of Beverly Hills Cop). “This is the man who busted a narcotics ring, shot the head guy and then, for his pains, was dismissed from the service. It fits in perfectly, because such a thing WOULD happen to an inspector who goes and shoots a Dawood-like character; he would be fucked for life. So he has nothing to live for and he says okay, I’m going to grow marijuana and survive. Fuck honesty, fuck the police force after what they’ve done to me.”
I thought it revealing that he could trace a character arc like that, from a completely unrelated (and very different type of) film made two-and-a-half decades ago. For many of us who were kids when Jalwa was released, the film was an introduction to a new Naseeruddin Shah: the arthouse actor recast as a muscular man of action. Naseer tells me he was in a gym recently when a beefy young man came up to him and said, "Sir, when I saw you in Jalwa I decided to start body-building. I thought to myself, if YOU can do it, then ANYBODY can do it!" Backhanded compliment, what?
Naseer on a new Royal Enfield bike that initially stalled a bit – not an advisable thing for a bike to do on steep mountain roads. It eventually settled into the groove of the shoot though.
On the left is Meghna Gandhi who does makeup, and on the right is Aahana Kumra, the bright young actress who plays Jaya; she was Naseer’s student at Whistling Woods a few years ago and is understandably thrilled about acting with him in her first feature.
They rehearse a scene together.
In the background are the greenhouses with the marijuana plants – more accurately, large cloth plants flown in from China!
Tipu the German Shepherd who plays Kuttapan (originally named Slumdog), with his trainer.
At age three Tipu is already a veteran, having worked in around 50 Malayalam films. This role was a bit exacting for him because there are lots of reaction shots – lots of acting - whereas in his earlier films he mainly played police dogs who ran after criminals. But he’s nothing if not a professional, and Naseer was very impressed by him. ("It's the humans who are the problem," he says laconically when things go wrong during the shoot. I submit that this is generally true of life as well.)
On most days, lunch was served at the little stream that runs near the two principal outdoor locations. Grab a plate, pour out the rice and rasam, pick a rock, sit down.
After a scene is shot, the crew gathers around as Naseer studies the take on a little screen.
Standing in the bright blue shirt is Yuvraj, Naseer’s Man Friday who has worked with him for 15 years – we were mighty impressed by his Jeeves-like efficiency and powers of anticipation. At extreme right in the white shirt is Vishwamangal Kitsu a.k.a. Mangal, the director of photography.
During a scene with an elephant in Vagamon town, Anup’s friend Satish Menon – an imposing presence in his orange kurta and straw hat – stands in the middle of the road, directing traffic and ensuring that car horns and other sounds don’t interfere with the shoot.
Shouts of “HORN! OFF!” and “OFF! HORN!” rent the air, and Satish had quite the sore throat at the end of the day. However – and this is apparently a worldwide phenomenon at location shoots – onlookers can NEVER be made to understand that they are supposed to be quiet or not make faces at the camera. My favourite was the guy who made a reassuring “I understand perfectly” gesture when he was asked to simply walk past, but who then proceeded to look intently into each of the crew’s faces as if he expected the Meaning of Life to be hidden therein.
Abhilasha reads Sidin Vadukut’s Dork in between takes of the elephant scene, when things aren’t too exciting.
Shameless plug: we both enjoyed the book hugely. The trope of the unreliable narrator is something I usually associate with serious literary fiction, but Sidin pulls it off very convincingly in a fast-paced comic narrative. His protagonist Robin Verghese is magnificently clueless about what’s really happening around him.
(Photos 2 and 10 courtesy Aahana Kumra. More from Vagamon in the next post)
When Anup Kurian - director of the 2004 film Manasarovar and a longtime online acquaintance - invited me to watch some of the shooting of his second feature (tentatively titled "The Hunter") in Vagamon, Kerala, I was immediately interested. Nearly anyone who's watched a film being made will tell you that it's a tedious, banal process, one that quickly disabuses you of any delusions about the "glamour" of moviemaking. But as a longtime armchair film buff who’s never been close to a movie set before, I didn't want to pass up an opportunity like this, especially since “The Hunter” is very low-budget, and I wanted a firsthand sense of the challenges that go with making a film on limited resources.
The second attraction was that the lead role is being played by the peerless Naseeruddin Shah, a man whom I've long admired not just for his acting (and his dedication to acting as a craft that must continuously be honed, even when you're already acclaimed as one of the finest performers around) but also for the forthrightness and intelligence that always comes through in his interviews and writings. Anup's invitation seemed especially serendipitous in light of the fact that I had had a couple of phone chats with Naseer a few months ago (in connection with my book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro - another low-budget film made in very trying conditions 28 years ago!) but never got to meet him.
So off Abhilasha and I went to Vagamon, which is a very beautiful hill town located around 100 km from the Cochin airport. Our five days there were deeply satisfying, despite the fact that stretches of the shoot were expectedly slow (mainly the ones that took place in the middle of the day, under a fierce sun). Really, when you watch the filming and re-filming and re-re-filming (over several hours) of what will eventually be a 30-second scene, you wonder how a movie ever reaches its finished form.
A quick word about the film: it centres on a recluse known mostly as “Colonel”, living with his dog Kuttapan(!) in a forest retreat secured by high-tech surveillance equipment. Here he cultivates a potent variety of marijuana, an activity that makes him the object of unwanted attention (mainly from his unscrupulous buyers), and his life is further complicated when he is forced to play host to a young woman, Jaya, who is in mortal danger.
I'll be writing a feature about the visit at some point (it might take a while) but for now I’m putting up a few posts with photos and snippets. The film's release is at least 4-5 months away, but Anup has given me the go-ahead to publish the low-resolution photos I took with my own camera. Watch this space over the next few days.
Abhishek Chaubey’s (or should that be Vishal Bhardwaj’s?) Ishqiya is set in the dark heart of a Gorakhpur populated by gun-runners, small-time and big-time hoodlums, double-crossers and avenging angels. The film’s leading men Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) are crooks too, but they are fleeing a sadistic boss (some things stay constant across cultures and settings), and in this landscape they are practically innocents abroad – a bit like R2D2 and C3PO fumbling their way through the desert in Star Wars. Then Krishna (Vidya Balan), a widow with an enigmatic past, invites them into her house, but the lighting and framing makes her look like a spider at the entrance of her web, and this is no reassurance that Babban and Khalu are any safer than they were on the road. Is Krishna pari or tawaif, or a combination of both, or something much more lethal?
At any rate, things are equally dangerous inside and outside. This is a place where crime, betrayal and violent recrimination are taken for granted. Thakurs and Pandeys are determinedly assembling their little armies and gun-stacks to resolve feuds that have been raging for generations; minions must dig their own graves if they fall out of favour; when a businessman calls his wife to say he needs money, her first, almost matter-of-fact response is, “Kidnap ho gaye kya?” Everyone is debauched, and ostentatiously religious too (a man with a fondness for S&M meets his whip-wielding mistress in a room with a large Radha-Krishna poster on the wall). From a salty little exchange between Babban and a street-smart young boy, we gather that children in the region are taught how to use rifles before they are toilet trained; later, a hilarious scene gives us visual confirmation of this.
“Taught how to use rifles before they are toilet-trained”?! What sort of lame attempt is that to translate this film’s dialogue? (You’re spending too much time in Select Citywalk, Jabberwock.) Actually, it’s pointless, in a post written in English, to try to convey the rustic, bawdy vigour of Vishal Bhardwaj’s script; it has to be experienced firsthand, and as spoken by these actors. How to express the precise way, for example, in which Arshad Warsi (in a performance that’s every bit as good as his career-defining Circuit) says he has a bad case of acidity, pronouncing it so it sounds a bit like “STD”? Or his “May-ter [matter] kya hai?” when something seems to be wrong. Or the cheerful lewdness of his banter with the young boy whom he asks to show him the local red-light area. I admired the way Ishqiya throws us full-heartedly into this milieu, providing no safety nets for the big-city multiplex viewer who isn’t intimately familiar with the cadences of speech in rural Uttar Pradesh. (Bhardwaj’s Omkara did this too, but there the informed viewer at least had the bulwark of knowing that the film was based on the Othello template – which made the story and character arcs easier to follow. In this one, we're more adrift.)
Though I liked Ishqiya a good deal, I felt a sense of dissatisfaction at the end, a sense that I hadn’t spent enough time with the three principal characters; that I needed to know them better and see how their strange inter-relationships play out. And no, this doesn’t mean I wanted the film to be longer (two hours is a comfortable running time) – I just thought it became more convoluted than it needed to be, investing too much time and attention on side-characters who weren’t nearly as interesting as the three leads. The romantic-triangle-that-isn’t-quite-a-romantic-triangle between Babban, Krishna and Khalujaan is the most compelling thing about this film (along with the great score); everything around it is embellishment, or should have been.
I’m not a fan of most of Vidya Balan’s early work, but she’s made some sensible career choices in recent times, and she can be quite good when she isn’t darting her eyes about in that self-conscious, coquettish way. I remember thinking, when I drifted off while watching Eklavya (as described in this post), that she’d make a very convincing psychopath if given half a chance. Well, she doesn’t quite play a psycho in Ishqiya, but her potential for darkness is certainly tapped: Hindi cinema has waited many decades for a convincing portrait of the sari-clad small-town widow as femme fatale, and now at last we have one. There’s a stretch in the film when you can see that Krishna is cynically manipulating both men in line with their different personalities – tugging at Khalu’s heartstrings with one hand (he’s a middle-aged romantic who loves old Hindi songs and has soft-focus daydreams where he and Krishna are doing nothing more scandalous than getting married) and at the sex-starved Babban’s pyjama-strings with the other hand. We aren’t sure about her motives, and for once the trace of something manipulative behind the familiar Balan smile is completely appropriate to the role. Earlier, when she played goody-goody heroines, I was the only one – on or off the screen – who could see the menace lurking behind that smile, and it drove people around me crazy. Now I feel vindicated.
P.S. The shot of Babban and Khalu sitting glumly in a grave they’ve just dug for themselves reminded me of this publicity still from Manorama Six Feet Under – another fine rural noir.
Chatterjee's recent work hasn't been to many tastes - his humour is often scatological, vulgar, gratuitously mean-minded to a point where you wonder if he's testing the reader's endurance, and remarkably preoccupied with human excreta (run his last few novels through Wordle and I'm fairly sure "turd" will show up in a healthy font size). I expressed my own ambivalence about his last book Weight Loss here, and the present post isn't intended as an endorsement of Way to Go (which I've only started reading). But I thought "Missing Person" was funny, not so much in a laugh-out-loud way but in a chuckle-hopelessly-to-yourself-until-you-choke-on-your-own-phlegm way. It's what you might call morose humour.
