The Mani shots: Baradwaj Rangan on his book of conversations

[A shorter version of this Q&A is in the new issue of Time Out magazine]

INTRO: In Conversations with Mani Ratnam, the National Award-winning critic Baradwaj Rangan has engaged the reclusive film director in a deeply reflective series of conversations about his work. A chat with Rangan about the book.

What was your first experience of Mani Ratnam’s cinema in the 1980s?

It was with this rather generic (and morbid) romance called Idhayakoyil, which was about a singer who pines for a lost love. Even Mani Ratnam agrees it’s his worst film. But in the sense of an actual Mani Ratnam movie, in his voice, it was Mouna Raagam.

What did he mean to you as a viewer? Did his films play a part in honing your critical sensibilities?

I think every film you see plays a part in honing “critical sensibilities”, if you want to use so lofty a phrase. There are two types of viewers, those who see a film and forget about it and get on with their lives, and those who carry it home and have it gnawing away at them for various reasons. For me, the real excitement of Mani Ratnam’s early cinema was in finding a voice so close and so much in sync with my own experiences as someone brought up in Madras.

You mention in your Intro that at some point – around the time he made Roja – the “Madras Movie” phase of Ratnam’s career ended and something very different began. Can you elaborate on this?

This was where he stopped making specifically Madras-oriented movies and moved on to bigger themes, and a more national platform. We tend to slot filmmakers, especially when they do one particular thing so well, and when they try something different, we resist it at first – especially if we are very close to what they did earlier. Some of that is what happened to me (and I suspect to a lot of others) when Roja happened. But this is also when he began to genuinely experiment within the mainstream format. Earlier, the subjects were new and the filmmaking was dazzling, but you wouldn’t call those films experimental films exactly, because they spoke directly to the audience. You laughed, you cried – that sort of thing. But with Iruvar or Dil Se, for instance, there’s a lot of innovation, whether it’s in the way the scenes are structured or the songs are employed. It’s very difficult to push the envelope while still being rooted in the mainstream, and his films in the post-Roja phase  stand out in this regard. They’re almost always interesting films, even if your emotional response to them varied according to your mileage.


How do you feel about his Hindi films vis-a-vis his earlier work?

I’m closer, certainly, to his Tamil work, because that kind of whiplash-smart sensibility no one else had (or has) in their cinema. In Tamil cinema, they depict modern women, for instance, as dressed in the most outlandish Western outfits and so forth. But Mani Ratnam’s cinema had these very ordinary, salwar kameez- and sari-clad women, who were modern in their outlook, in the way they spoke, in the way they dealt with things. He showed that the traditional girl from Madras was not somebody with a ton of jasmine flowers in her well-oiled hair, but someone who was modern in subtle (and not just superficial) ways. This is just one aspect, but I could go on. But I am also a huge fan of, say, Dil Se, which I feel is one of his most underrated works. That stretch in that barren landscape where nothing happens except Shah Rukh and Manisha just talking and getting to know each other is a brilliant bit of mood and dialogue in a mainstream film.

There has been a narrative about Ratnam’s art becoming somewhat “compromised” by commercial dictates after he became a giant. Do you feel there is something to this?

Actually no, because he has always been a commercial filmmaker. It’s not as if he was making Pather Panchali and suddenly woke up one morning and made Guru, so there’s no question of a “compromise” as far as the filmmaking is concerned. But that said, I think people feel this way because of two things. One, they grew up with a certain kind of Mani Ratnam movie and store that away as a nostalgic reference, so they want him to keep making the same kind of films, the kind that feels like home to them. Two, people have very strange and strong ideas about how such a subject should be made this way only and how songs and dances should not be there and so on.

It’s not as if I feel that every single film of his is a masterpiece. But every single one is certainly a commercial venture, targeted at a large audience, and if you have a problem with the tropes of that kind of cinema, then you shouldn’t be watching his films. Because if you feel Raavan is compromised because of commercial dictates, then you could say Anjali is too, because that’s the story of a differently abled child, and it has all these huge production numbers. It’s his way of telling a story, and that’s never changed. Yes, some films may work and some films may not, but it’s not because of these “commercial dictates”, which has always been a part of his DNA.

He has a reputation for being reticent and not very interview-friendly. How did you get him to participate in such an extended series of conversations?

When I met him first about the book, I just wanted to tell him I was doing a series of essays about his films. But he surprised me by saying: “You like cinema. I like cinema. Let’s just talk and see what happens.” So I guess at some level he wasn’t averse to talking. But still, the first few sessions weren’t easy, because I’m not the most open and friendly of people either. (Which probably explains why I’m able to speak more easily to people on my blog, rather than face-to-face.) The early chapters in the book are somewhat stiff and formal, you’ll see, because my questions were to the point and his responses too were straightforward. But gradually we became comfortable with what we were doing, and the tone of the book broadened. There were times I’d joke with him. There were times he’d get combative. So the book is as much a record of how such a series of conversations unfolded in real time as it is about what we talked about.

Why did you choose to write the book in the Q&A format? And what were the challenges in doing it this way?

I wrestled for a while with other options, but I settled on this format because he’s never talked at this length to anyone before, and it made sense to honour his participation in this project. It’s a terrible thing for a writer to do a book this way, because you have to suppress your writerly vanity and constantly remind yourself that this is not about your writing skills but about the back-and-forth of the conversation. But that said, I do feel that conversational books (as opposed to mere Q and A's; and I hope readers will come away with the impression of having read a series of conversations and not just a set of questions and answers) come with their own set of challenges. The preparatory work is no different from any other type of non-fiction: you still have to do your research, come up with a list of things the book is going to be about, formulate those into questions, be prepared for accidental discoveries, and so forth. But there’s the problem of catching someone in a mood to answer your questions even when they may not be the most flattering. It’s easy to write a book about someone by talking to those around him and putting facts together, but when you’re talking to the person himself, you have to balance your job as a journalist (i.e. getting the hard facts) and your job as a facilitator (i.e. creating an ambience that makes it comfortable for so reticent a creator to open up, even when your questions are somewhat less-than-complimentary about his work).

Where this type of book becomes easier is in the end, because once you’ve transcribed your recordings, you’re almost there. Though even afterwards, I moved things around, grouping different subjects under different films while still maintaining that “real time” sense. And I removed every trace of incidental emotion. You won’t find a sentence ending with "(he laughs)", for instance. Because I thought the reader should come to their own conclusions about the tone in which the answer was given, which, in some sense, empowers the reader as a “critic”. I wanted them to read into these conversations without me guiding their emotional responses from the sidelines with the writer’s equivalent of a music track.

One of the most enjoyable things about this book is that one gets a sense of Ratnam becoming more comfortable with you over time, and it turning into a conversation between equals. But essentially, the relationship between a director and a critic tends to be fraught and uneasy. At one point, when you make an observation about two songs coming very close together in Guru, Ratnam snarkily says “I think you watch films with a stop-watch”. Was there a certain edge to the discussions throughout? Did this ever impede your interaction?

I’m happy you got “snark” out of this, because someone else told me they found this a joke, as if he was ribbing me. Yes, that kind of emotional graph was built gradually over time. At first, I was a little intimidated, not just because this man was a god to a lot of us way back when, but also because of the fact that I am a critic, and I didn’t want him to think that I was criticizing him so much as asking him why he did this or that. But you can never keep your personal feelings away from art – which is what makes discussions about it so fascinating – and there were times, like when we discussed Roja, where that “edge” did creep in. But by that time, I wasn’t intimidated, and even he – despite his annoyance with certain things I was asking – had come to know that my questions weren’t accusations so much as coming to grips with certain choices in his films.

You have discussed the making of his films, but also conducted subtextual analysis and made connections between movies that might not, on the face of it, have very much in common. Your own criticism is characterised by indepth, deeply analytical and personal engagement with films – focussing on the tales rather than on the tellers. How did he respond to this?

He is not someone who’s comfortable with subtextual analysis, and I’ve seen (rather, read about) this with many filmmakers. But then, when he discusses some films, you’ll see that he has been thinking far beyond the text, or the image on screen. Different people have different attitudes about how far beneath the surface you dig for meaning (and in my opinion and experience, this is something at a completely subconscious level; I have no control over it), but again, I think he got to know this about me and I got to know that he’s not a fan of what he calls “intellectualisation”, so that was some place we agreed to disagree. Though if you read the conversations carefully you may find that there’s a lot of subtext here too. I think it’s more interesting when two people from slightly differing schools of thought talk about things, otherwise it’s like being in an echo chamber, and there’s no “edge”, as you call it.

In your view, what is Ratnam’s abiding legacy – what is his place in the history of Indian cinema?

He’s still making films, so I don’t know that we should hang an “abiding legacy” on him yet. As for his place in Indian cinema, he is easily one of the most important mainstream filmmakers. You may not have liked this film of his or that one, but no one can deny each one of them has been made to challenge himself and, in some ways, his audience. He’s never made a lazy film in his career. There’s always something exciting, something intriguing in the way he tells his stories. Today, in the multiplex era, we have people making ultra-edgy films for niche audiences, and there is something almost absurdly touching about a single man’s belief that he can carry along huge masses of viewers with spectacle, style and substance.