Mere paas maa waali kitaab hai

Delhi-wallahs, sorry for this deluge of invites, but please mark your calendars or your shiny Blackberrys for the launch of the Zubaan anthology about motherhood. Lovely book, and I don't say that because I have a piece about Hindi-film mothers in it. There are many good, varied essays and stories by a shining cast of writers including Urvashi Butalia, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur and Mridula Koshy. And it's for a good cause, with part of the proceeds going to Save the Children. So come. Invite below. (6 pm, March 5, India International Centre - New Building.)

P.S. any rumours you may have heard about my re-enacting the Disco Dancer electrocution scene at the launch are not to be believed, but the event should still be very enjoyable.

On ways of watching films (and connecting dots from The Apartment to the Bates Motel)

Yesterday I had the very happy-making experience of watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in a darkened mini-theatre, on a screen that, at a rough estimate, had a surface area around 12 times larger than that of my plasma TV at home (a TV with which I have sometimes tried to simulate the theatre experience). For selfish reasons I won’t say where this screening took place, but there were only two other people in the room, one of whom was my viewing companion, a huge Apartment fan. We had both seen the film recently enough for it to be fresh in our memories, so we murmured through parts of the screening, exchanging nerd-trivia and observations, imagining how much more subversive it would have been if James Stewart had played the manipulative corporate heel Sheldrake - and even remarking on the film’s tangential similarities with Hitchcock’s Psycho (naturally I was the prime culprit in this), which released in the same week in 1960.

(Have trouble linking the two movies? Well, think about illicit sexual liaisons conducted hurriedly in rented rooms; think social outsiders living lonely lives in stripped-down settings, photographed in sombre shades of grey. Think of one melancholy working-class girl, played by a film’s ostensible star, who dies unexpectedly in a shower before the halfway point, and another who almost dies in another bathroom after swallowing half a bottle of sleeping pills halfway through her film. Think of earnest, likable young men performing clean-up operations after crimes have been committed. And both films – it just occurred to me as I was writing this – have discomfiting scenes where a bullying man in a position of power casually, callously hands over money to an unhappy young woman, an act that precipitates a life-changing decision for her. The scene in The Apartment where Sheldrake, having strung the vulnerable Fran along for weeks, gives her a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, is one of the cruelest moments I can think of in a fiction film, and the look on Shirley MacLaine’s face is devastating.)

Anyway, the Apartment screening was a reminder that for all my mad love of old Hollywood, I have only rarely watched movies of that vintage on a big screen (what sort of screen can be considered “big” is of course a relative matter these days) and that one is at a vast remove from what the original viewers of these films saw and felt. It also reminded me of observations in two essays about cinema. First, one of my favourite film writers David Thomson***, in an entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Film:

Intensive film study and film scholarship now work by way of the TV screen. It is seldom possible to review the great movies “at the movies”. Suppose I wanted to see Sunrise, Duel in the Sun, and Ugetsu Monogatari on big screens – where would I go? […] Yet I might be able to summon them up on video, where I could see them as often as I liked, with “pause” to access the full beauty of the frame. Everyone is doing it, no matter that the colour is forlorn (the United States has the worst TV colour in the world), the image format is different, the sound is tinny…and the passion is not there. That passion is made by the dark, the brightness, the very large screen, the company of strangers, and the knowledge that you cannot stop the process, or even get out. That is being at the movies, and it is becoming a museum experience. How can one tell one’s students or one’s children what it was like seeing Vertigo (in empty theatres – for no one liked it once) or The Red Shoes from the dark. We watch television with the lights on! Out of some bizarre superstition that it protects our eyes. How so tender for one part of us, and so indifferent to the rest?

And here is Pauline Kael, from a 1967 essay titled “Movies on Television”:

Not all old movies look bad now, of course; the good ones are still good—surprisingly good, often, if you consider how much of the detail is lost on television. Not only the size but the shape of the image is changed, and, indeed, almost all the specifically visual elements are so distorted as to be all but completely destroyed. On television, a cattle drive or a cavalry charge or a chase – the climax of so many a big movie – loses the dimensions of space and distance that made it exciting, that sometimes made it great. The structural elements – the rhythm, the buildup, the suspense – are also partly destroyed by deletions and commercial breaks and the interruptions incidental to home viewing […] Reduced to the dead grays of a cheap television print, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – an uneven work that is nevertheless a triumphant conquest of the movie medium – is as lifelessly dull as a newspaper Wirephoto of a great painting.

Reading these quotes, it might seem that both essays are prim condemnations of how things are “now” compared to how they were “then”, but that isn't the case - they are both pragmatic acknowledgements that things change, and that our assumptions, attitudes and ways of looking shift with them. Thomson in particular, being from a generation after Kael and having seen many further variations (including the phenomenon of people watching films on YouTube, or even on smart-phones!), has often written insightfully – in such books as Have You Seen...? and The Whole Equation – about the complex ways in which we engage with our art and entertainment in the contemporary world.

Meanwhile, in another astute piece, “Movies too personal to share with an audience”, Jim Emerson provides an important counterpoint to the idea that film-watching is best as a communal experience. I myself have had a terrible time watching films such as Vertigo with large, mostly indifferent audiences, and I know that I wouldn’t have enjoyed The Apartment so much the other night – notwithstanding the screen size and the print quality – if the room had contained people who had just happened to stumble in and didn’t care about the film. Perhaps what we thin-skinned and over-sensitive movie buffs really need is permanent access to a private screening room along with programming software that tells us exactly who we should be watching a particular film with.

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*** More on Thomson, and especially his book The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, in another post soon. And here are some other connect-the-dots posts: Mean Streets and Contempt, Ozu's Good Morning, Altman's 3 Women, and Peeping Tom and Psycho

Mini-review: Zero Dark Thirty

Saw this film yesterday. It is apparently a true story about the killing of a terrorist leader who knocked down some buildings in America a decade ago. This makes it sound modern and topical, but I thought it most intriguing for its use of tropes from the old epics. The protagonist, a young CIA agent, gets so personal and obsessive about her mission that when presented with Osama bin Laden’s mutilated corpse, she does a Draupadi and washes her lustrous amber tresses in his blood (and yes, the film is generally very fond of her hair). Then she does an Achilles and drags him around the military camp behind her Lamborghini until his dad shows up and says please can I have his body back. Then she quietly weeps as classical heroes do when, having vanquished their arch-enemies and fulfilled their life’s great purpose, they realise it's all downhill from here and that even the in-flight sandwiches on the trip home will be stale. I can’t guarantee that these are all accurate representations of what occurred in the film, but they were the interpretations my good friend Shougat and I preferred as we sat giggling through the final 15 minutes. Which can only mean one thing: expect Oscars to be bestowed.

(Okay, seriously? Didn’t think the film was too bad – some good moments in the midsection along with some almost-too-conscientious non-Hollywoodising – but it got a little trite in the end. Plus, watching a film with Shougat is a good way of ensuring that you spend much of your time laughing at it regardless of its overall quality. This is the same boy who savaged my Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King experience a decade ago by repeatedly imploring Frodo and Samwise to get down to actual making out instead of just looking chastely into each other’s eyes.)

Conversations with Baradwaj Rangan

Movie buffs (and Baradwaj Rangan fans) in Delhi, please mark your calendars: I'll be speaking with Baradwaj about his Mani Ratnam book - which was one of the publishing highlights of the last year in my view - and about films and film criticism more generally, at the India International Centre on the 21st. Do come. Here's the invite.

Notes on Special 26

If you study its surface, Neeraj Pandey’s Special 26 seems like an urgent, busy film: there are abrupt cuts, split screens, swish pans and many tracking shots where the camera retreats in haste as groups of men stride purposefully towards it. Yet I thought it was oddly inert and slack in some ways, not as focussed as Pandey's debut A Wednesday, and a good half-hour longer than it needed to be. Some of this has to do with a larger cast of characters and increased deference to the commercial star system: for instance, the narrative shudders to a halt during a superfluous dance number at a wedding where Akshay Kumar gets to be the gyrating hero in a smart sherwani (here is an example of a sequence that is very energetic on its own terms, yet is slowing the film down). I don’t want to indulge in kneejerk criticism of Kumar’s casting, especially since he is good enough in this role – as Ajay, a conman who conducts fake CBI and income-tax raids along with three friends across the India of the late 1980s – but this may have been a tighter film if the lead character had been played by someone whose star persona and contract do not necessitate the inclusion of scenes where he walks towards the camera in slow motion, removing his glasses stylishly.

Even otherwise, Special 26 has a little too much exposition and some redundant sequences, such as a flashback that shows us fragments from a heist operation after we have already seen the whole thing earlier in the film. Or the late scene where Wasim (Manoj Bajpayee), a real CBI officer, comes to a realisation and showy camerawork is used to over-dramatise the moment to the point of tedium. (Having finally pieced together the details of a plot that had eluded him – which we knew about before he did – Wasim then relates the whole thing to a subordinate for good measure.) Even the idea of the nemesis, or of two strong characters pitting wits against each other – which is central to Pandey’s work so far – is overemphasised here. (Compare the delicate moment at the end of A Wednesday, where Anupam Kher’s police commissioner and Naseeruddin Shah’s aam aadmi meet very fleetingly, with the strained and self-conscious hotel-bar scene between Ajay and Wasim in this film.)


This is not to overlook the good things about the film, notable among which are its solid recreation of period detail (I think I can speak for my generation in lamenting that a movie set in 1987 can now officially be thought of as a “period film”, and that young viewers might turn wide-eyed at the sight of rotary-dial telephones and black-and-white TV). There are also fine performances from most of the leads, especially Bajpayee as the sharp, honest CBI man who is good at his job but also struggling with an inadequate salary (and with this whole tedious business of being contentedly middle-class: in one funny, telling scene, he deadpans “rishwat lena shuru kar doon, sir?” to his boss), and Jimmy Shergill who can imbue a small gesture – or a single word like “Janaab” – with significance. (Unfortunately the talented Divya Dutta is lost in a thankless, one-joke role.)

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There has been a clear element of wish-fulfilment in both Pandey’s films so far. I remember A Wednesday drawing some flak on ideological grounds, for its apparent endorsement of the idea that it is okay for the Common Man to turn cold-bloodedly vigilante in special cases (such as when we conveniently know that undisputed criminals are about to slip through the legal system’s net). And it’s true that if you take the film at face value or as prescriptive, it can be seen as irresponsible, leading us down a very slippery moral slope. But what if one considers instead that fantasy – in many forms and degrees – is an important part of what makes life tolerable (at least for those of us who can make a basic distinction between the world as it is and as we would like it to be), and that for over a century movies have played the therapeutic function of letting people participate in pipe-dreams from a safe distance - whether it involves being able to eliminate Evil in one clean stroke or imagining, for a couple of hours in that dark hall, that the beautiful person on the screen belongs to us alone. A case can be made for viewing A Wednesday in those terms, rather than as a literal-minded call to anarchist justice. (I'm not saying that this is necessarily what Pandey intended, but based on a couple of his interviews when it came out, I got the impression that writing and making the film was a form of personal catharsis for him.)

In a similar way, it is possible to see Special 26 – for much of its duration – as a wish-fulfilling fantasy about “little people” forging their own path in an unjust, corrupt world. Having recently read Uday Prakash’s story “Mohandas”, in which a lower-caste man becomes a victim of identity theft and flounders while the upper-caste rogue who has stolen his name flourishes in a good job, I couldn’t help thinking that what Ajay and his gang do here – donning the identities of authority figures in order to loot corrupt people – is a sort of reversal of what happens in Prakash’s allegory. In other words the underprivileged are striking back, uncovering vast quantities of ill-gotten wealth hidden in a plush house (which, coincidentally, is similar to what happens in another Prakash story “The Walls of Delhi”). And the film does everything it can do to generate sympathy – or at least fondness – for the four conmen, all of whom are likable people in their own ways, and at least two of whom are leading hand-to-mouth lives.

But as it progresses, much of that sympathy is diluted. We see them robbing people who are not much better off than they are; what initially seemed like genuine attempts at character development soon make way for shortcuts and facile one-liners; by the time we learn that Ajay was a CBI aspirant who became bitter after failing the interview (and there is a picture-postcard, vaseline-coated shot of him sitting sadly in the rain), it’s hard to feel for the character unless you’re the most indiscriminating Akshay Kumar fan. And (Spoiler alert) I thought the final twist – where we learn that the foursome have perpetrated a double-con – was problematic in how it affects our attitude to the characters. Suddenly we have to start thinking of Ajay and cohorts as almost omniscient superheroes who will come out trumps no matter what, fashioning convoluted schemes for the thrill and challenge more than anything else; our view of the Anupam Kher character PK – who had latterly come across as a tired, nervous, scared old man on the horns of a personal dilemma – is especially altered; the film takes a right turn to become an Ocean’s Eleven-style movie where all that matters is getting the last laugh and coming out of a tricky situation without getting your hair mussed. I have nothing against that kind of heist film, but I got the impression early on that Special 26 was trying to be a more pointed social commentary with a feel for the complexities of the time and place it is set in. And given that assumption, it felt half-baked in the end.

Colours of funny - a column about satires

[Here's my latest column for Forbes Life, on some favourite literary satires and black comedies]

Humour at its core is accuracy, the novelist Manu Joseph said in a recent interview – when you’re uncompromisingly precise about something, it becomes funny. The best satirists have always known this, but it is also one reason why satire itself can be such an imprecise category in art. There will always be books and films that you can immediately identify as satirical because their tone is unmistakeable: even the most naïve readers and viewers will “get” it. But there are equally cases of understated works where one is not always sure of the line between plain realism and tongue-in-cheek comedy – or if such a line even exists.

Besides, real life usually stays a step ahead of the most acerbic spoofs; even when a satirical work is intended to be over the top, a time may come a few decades or even just a few years later when some of its content appears relatively commonplace. Discussing his 1968 novel Raag Darbari – a modern classic of Hindi literature, about corruption and factionalism in a small village named Shivpalganj – the writer-bureaucrat Shrilal Shukla noted that one of the criticisms directed at the book was that “it didn’t say anything new – it just described what everybody knew already”.

Even if this were true, it would take nothing away from Shukla’s incisive yet good-natured account of life in a place that the narrator likens to the all-encompassing Mahabharata: “What was to be found nowhere else was there, and what was not there could be found nowhere else.” Gillian Wright’s 1992 translation of the novel captures its many droll sentences and throwaway observations (“the theory of reincarnation was invented in the civil courts so that neither plaintiff nor defendant should die regretting that his case had been left unfinished”), of which there are so many, in fact, that it seems a waste to read this book over just one or two sittings. The experience has to be savoured, stretched out.

The story, filtered partly through the gaze of a visiting city boy named Rangnath, gradually reveals the self-deception in nearly every aspect of Shivpalganj’s life. A slothful sub-inspector mulls the great burden of his responsibilities: “There was so much work that all work had come to a standstill.” Doctors and engineers are in short supply, we are told, because “Indians are traditionally poets”. When politicians come to the village to make speeches, we learn that “a speech is really enjoyable only when both sides know that the speaker is talking absolute nonsense” – when some overenthusiastic speakers begin taking themselves seriously, the audience develops indigestion.

Two decades after Raag Darbari was published, another bureaucrat wrote a novel about a young civil servant posted in “a tiny dot” somewhere in the Indian hinterland. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August was rightly hailed as a milestone in modern Indian-English writing, but true satire fans – especially those with high tolerance for scatological content – should set themselves the task of rediscovering his other work. None of them are as consistently funny as August, but they all have passages that measure up to its heights. Consider the opening of his 2010 novel Way to Go where a man named Jamun comes to a police station to report that his 85-year-old father has vanished, the local constable interrogates him, and what ensues is 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. As bureaucratic procedure takes centre-stage (a recurring theme in Chatterjee and in much Indian satire), time and common sense are suspended. The conversation is shaped by the bizarre order in which the questions are printed on the form; there is no indication that the constable is capable of making a sensate connection between what he is asking and the information that has been supplied to him. Soon Jamun is in a practically comatose state, reeling off sentences mechanically. 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.

In fact, satire often thrives on a premise where two people discuss an urgent matter but fail to get anywhere because, for all their eagerness to understand each other, the gap between their beliefs and cultural reference points is unbridgeable. Aubrey Menen’s extraordinary 1947 novel The Prevalence of Witches contains just such a conversation between a village headman and an English administrator named Catullus. The former is patiently trying to explain how a witch goes about her spiteful work (witches being an accepted fact of life in the imaginary British Indian region of Limbo, populated by people who have no use for modern education or scientific thought), why she must be interrogated in a very precise fashion – by hanging her upside down and beating her – and why she may “choose” to be either alive or dead; the latter is making an honest effort to understand what is being said.

One might think Menen’s intention is to mock easy targets: the superstitions of “primitive” people. But The Prevalence of Witches is equally mindful of the hypocrisies of those who think of themselves as modern, and the often-dubious building blocks of what we call civilisation. Reading it, one understands why Menen’s equally forthright retelling of the Ramayana (“Despite following his moral and political preceptors with devotion, Rama finally managed to recover his kingdom, his wife, and his common sense”) has been one of India’s most high-profile banned books for decades.

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Humour is most effective, it is often said, when its shafts are pointed upwards: its targets should be those who are more powerful and privileged than the humorist. It is in this context that one must consider the 19th century social reformer Jotiba Phule’s scathing attacks on the caste system and on the Brahmin way of life. Phule’s tract Gulamgiri (Slavery) reveals him as an abrasive, first-strike radical, not above expressing strident views if it made a larger point about social hypocrisy.

The graphic novel A Gardener in the Wasteland, written by Srividya Natarajan and drawn by Aparajita Ninan, tells the story of Phule’s life and work with a panache that the man himself would have approved of, beginning with a passage that likens 1840s Poona to the lawless American Old West: “it was a hellhole of a town. A mob runs it: a Brahman mob”. Decadent, hoodlum-like Brahmins (“Pass the Gangajal, will you,” one says to another, crudely probing his ear with his finger) lord it over the “lower castes”. Subtlety is beside the point here: this is satire that sets out to wound and shock, as a way of getting its back on centuries of oppression. Righteous anger fuelled Phule’s skewering of the creation myth about the four castes being born from Brahma’s mouth, arms, groin and legs (did Brahma menstruate in all four places, was his sarcastic response) and his irreverent deconstructions of the Vishnu avatars.

In any case the line between “cutting” and “outright nasty” can be as thin as the line between those classic categories Horatian and Juvenal satire – what matters more is the execution. It is also worth noting that the best judges of such works are not those with weak stomachs or an easily offended aesthetic sense. When Jonathan Swift wrote his famous essay “A Modest Proposal”, proposing that poor people might sell their infants to serve as food for society’s rich (“a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled”), some readers were outraged because they took the suggestion at face value; others were offended because, though they understood Swift’s intent, they didn’t much care for the tastelessness (pun unintended) of the thought.

Among modern works, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho turned many readers off with the grisliness of its narrative about an attractive young investment banker who is also a psychopath (or deeply delusional), but the book was a startling indictment of a consumerist society, and its narrative form was vital to its effect (it’s another matter that barely 20 years after its publication, parts of it already seem dated!). This is equally true of some of the work of Chuck Palahniuk, notably Fight Club, which uses unsettlingly staccato language and narrative misdirection to comment on such aspects of modern life as hyper-masculinity and the inability of people to connect with one another, or with themselves.

At the same time, mere shocking isn’t enough. Another graphic novel, Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India – written by Gautam Bhatia and drawn by the Rajasthani miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa and Birju Lal Bhopa – has much going for it: it is an unremittingly dark work that satirises many aspects of modern Indian life, notably the class divide and the apathy of politicians towards their constituencies. The many little vignettes include a just-born baby girl being deposited into a movie-hall’s trash can with the family-size popcorn bag, and a state chief minister flying over a drought-ravaged area in an aircraft that has been retrofitted with a swimming pool and a shopping arcade. But the book is often heavy-handed and there is a disconnect between content and form; the drawings are barely given the space they need.

Too much anger can also undermine the effect of a good literary satire. “I sat down to pass moral judgement. I was not wise enough then,” Mahesh Elkunchwar noted several years after writing his play Party, a coruscating satire of Bombay’s intellectual circles. The play is about a party held at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane, the guests including writers and poets at various stages of their career: fat cats made complacent by fame, lean hangers-on desperately aspiring for it, sermonising faux-liberals. Over the evening details of character emerge, epiphanies are experienced and the conversation converges on an absent figure, a poet named Amrit, who is fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic man becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers – their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to contempt – and for a penetrating examination of the artist-human being divide.

The play (which was also the source material for one of our cinema’s most skilfully crafted chamber dramas, Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film) was born out of Elkunchwar’s reflexive response to encounters with famous people who were all talk and little action. It remains a hard-hitting work in some ways, its central theme still very relevant, but one can see why he thought it was facile in its judgements. It might be said that one characteristic of good satire is that rather than taking the easy way out by deriding individuals, it allows us to see the conditions and systems that can make well-intentioned people pathetic or loathsome. And so, to two of my favourite political satires that achieve this.

To say that Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a novelised treatment of the final days of Pakistan’s Zia ul Haq would be to convey little of its skill and comic richness. The dictator’s story – told in the third person – alternates with the voice of a junior officer named Ali Shigri, which, in its irreverence and blithe disregard for the supposed dignity of the Army, resembles that emblematic modern satire, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. But the most engaging sections of Hanif’s book are the ones that deal with Zia’s growing paranoia and childlike dependence on his inner circle. Though placed at the centre of some lowbrow comedy, Zia is also, in a strange way, humanised: there is something poignant about his desperate need for attention and his speculating that he might be ruling a ghost country. It would be a stretch to say that he becomes a sympathetic figure, but there is some ambivalence in our response to him.

If Hanif’s book is political satire with elements of magic realism, the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1936 novel War with the Newts belongs partly to the still-nascent genre of science fiction (Capek coined the term “robot”). This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways. Secret temples for worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches bathe in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work – this in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; and there are references to the political and social realities of the time, such as Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

This funny, far-reaching novel of ideas is a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others and the whimsical, often ludicrous ways in which our civilisation has been organised. Čapek doesn’t single out any system for attack (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for instance), but his book is a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become. It carries within it a view of the very long picture, vindicating the idea that no other genre does clear-sightedness in quite the way that satire does.

[Two earlier Forbes columns: true crime and popular science]

About Listen... Amaya

Memory, the many forms it can take and the different ways in which it moulds lives and relationships – this is a theme of the new film Listen... Amaya, which centres on a paradox: on one hand there is a young woman – described as “free-spirited” and leading an apparently modern, forward-looking life – who is trapped by the past, idealising her long-dead father to the extent that the thought of someone else sharing her mother’s bed is sacrilege; on the other hand, there is a much older person who believes – perhaps because his mind has begun playing tricks on him and his memories are slowly drifting away – that life is not just the sum total of your yaadein (“yaadein zindagi nahin hoti”), it is also about what lies ahead. And that memories can even be stored in photos and then tucked away for a bit while one sets out to create new experiences.

This tension between the young and the old – the girl is Amaya (Swara Bhaskar), the man is a photographer named Jayant/Jazz (Farooque Shaikh), friend and eventual lover to Amaya’s widowed mother Leela (Deepti Naval) – supplies the film’s main narrative arc. In Leela’s quaint little cafe-cum-library, the sort of place that has lately been mushrooming in the more hipster (or wannabe-hipster) quarters of Delhi, Amaya bonds with Jayant and they decide to do a coffee-table book together (she will write, he will take the pictures) - but things get complicated when the young woman realises that the two older people are more than just friends.

That Listen...Amaya will probably be a likable, charming film is something a viewer might guess beforehand. Much of its initial appeal, for a generation of Indians with fond memories of the so-called Middle Cinema of the early 1980s, lies in seeing Deepti Naval and Farooque Shaikh together after all this time, and it is a whimsical, possibly unintended detail that a film about memory can be so enhanced by a viewer’s nostalgic relationship with these actors’ past work (it even tosses in a “Miss Chamko” reference, as if the point needed to be underlined). But to focus too much on the casting and the associations it creates in our minds might be to ignore how good Shaikh and Naval are here, in these roles, and how beautifully they have aged.

They are reasonably well-served by a film that acknowledges the value of its three principal performers (all of whom are terrific, though Bhaskar struggles with an under-written part in the second half) by giving each of them respectful long takes and held shots – including some shots where two people are in the frame, not “doing” very much, simply observing and reacting. Some of the best of these scenes are the ones with little dialogue (or little over-expository, “meaningful” dialogue), where a glance or gesture becomes an insight into the changing shades of a relationship. We see how the buddy-buddy rapport between mother and daughter (Amaya tells her mom about slapping a boss who made a sexual proposition, and Leela reacts stoically) gives way to friction when the young woman is unable to cope with the idea of her mother as a romantic or sexual person. We sense the emotional bond between the lovers – a bond that probably began with shared tragedy and loneliness but deepened into a love so clearly founded on friendship that one flinches at Amaya’s insensitivity when she asks her mother “Is it just about the sex?” – and we see the complex relationship between Amaya and Jazz as they explore the physical bazaars of Delhi, from Chandni Chowk to Hauz Khas Village, while also exploring their own private memory palaces. There is often a real sense for the small, throwaway moment, as in a scene where Jazz calls Leela from his landline to tell her “Mera phone kho gaya” and she reflexively responds “Kahaan?” before shaking her head at the silliness of what she’s just said (and meanwhile we see him silently spread his hand out in a “what the...” gesture, even though he knows she can’t see him).

But there could have been more of these moments, rather than the clunky psychoanalysis that weighs the story down. The film is also stifled by its tonal unevenness. There are jarring asides where side-characters play Greek chorus in increasingly annoying ways (starting with the guitar-wielding, coffee-loving, so-cute-you-want-to-strangle-them kids dancing in the cafe in the opening sequence, carrying on to a dead-on-arrival subplot about a couple who become entangled in the problems of the central trio). The often-intrusive background music is among the worst I have heard recently: what is with that terrible, ululating sound when Jazz recalls the accident that killed his wife and little daughter? (In any case, even at the level of the dialogue, the scene is prolonged and static.) The tribute-remix song “Ek Ladki Bheegi Bhaagi Si” – the fantasy of a goofy, over-helpful young man with his Heart in the Right Place – is pleasant on its own terms (and nice to watch in a context removed from the film, such as on a music channel), but what is it doing here? (In a sense, of course, that question is as old as Hindi cinema, given the episodic structures of even our best commercial movies. But Listen... Amaya’s strengths lie in very different terrain, and if one comes to feel – as I did – that the sole reason for the existence of a song is to provide a marketable number for promos, well, it breaks the fourth wall in a not-very-good way.)

More than anything, and though I liked this film on the whole, I wish it had trusted its lead performers to carry it all the way through, and paid a little more attention to character development rather than piling on the cutesy side-shows. “There’s some magic in your coffee today,” those kids warble at “Mrs K” in that opening sequence. Yes, but also a little too much artificial sweetener.

A most improbable murder - on Keigo Higashino's creepy new mystery

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

Keigo Higashino's thriller Yōgisha X no Kenshin - which became an international publishing sensation as The Devotion of Suspect X when it was translated from Japanese into English two years ago - was a most unusual kind of murder mystery; strictly speaking, not a murder mystery at all, since the killing, committed in self-defence, occurred within the first 30 pages, with the reader made privy to everything that led up to it (only at the end did one realise that a small but vital piece of information had been withheld). The suspense came from the way the narrative moved between the police investigation and the murderer’s attempts at alibi-creation, and the final twist – involving the nature of the cover-up – was ingenious. But the book’s lingering quality – its ability to stay under a reader’s skin long after its secrets had been disclosed – hinged on its portrayal of two people who match wits: one a brilliant physicist-sleuth named Yukawa (also known as Detective Galileo) and the other a criminal with almost unfathomable, monk-like reserves of personal dedication and forbearance.

Now another Higashino novel is out in translation, as Salvation of a Saint, and it has all the qualities that made the first book so gripping. As in The Devotion of Suspect X, the suspense lies not so much in the murderer’s identity (though in this case there is some second-guessing on that front too) but in how the crime was pulled off – and the solution is just as jaw-dropping.

These are the facts of the case: a man named Yoshitaka lies dead in his house, a spilt cup of poisoned coffee by his side. Yoshitaka was not, we learn, particularly sensitive in his treatment of women (Higashino does seem to derive literary pleasure from turning unpleasant men into murder victims!), and there are basically two suspects: his wife Ayane and his lover Hiromi. Once again, the reader is allowed to be a step ahead of the investigating detectives – we know Hiromi is not guilty because most of the early events, leading up to the discovery of the body, have been presented through her shocked perspective. Also, within the first few pages, we have been told that Ayane at least intended to kill her husband and had the means to do so. The rub is, she was hundreds of miles away, visiting her parents, when the coffee was made and consumed. As the detectives try to postulate scenarios where she might have pre-planned the killing before she left, they come up against a wall – and eventually the sardonic Yukawa is brought in to weigh the options.

What he discovers – and I feel I can write this without giving away any spoilers – is something very close to the perfect crime, with a solution that is simultaneously very simple and dangerously outlandish. When it is revealed, your gut response might be to snort “Impossible” (which is basically what the detectives listening to Yukawa do). I even felt a little cheated at first, as if the author had blindsided me by stepping outside the permissible limits of the genre. But further reflection shifted my view of what was possible and what wasn’t; I began to see the peculiar internal logic of the denouement in light of the personalities and the lifestyles involved, and the crime no longer appeared so unfeasible.

Of course, a 370-page book has to be more than its climactic disclosure, and Salvation of a Saint is tense and well-paced. It does contain at least one over-familiar trope of the police procedural or noir – a detective becoming attracted to an apparently vulnerable woman, perhaps compromising his own integrity in the process – though this isn’t stretched to the point of derivativeness. The actual writing has some of the functional woodenness that you find in most commercial fiction of this sort – too many references to a character’s eyes “widening in surprise”, for example, or hands gripping a phone tightly when unexpected news is received – but these are genre tics, easy enough to ignore up to a point. (Besides, as has often been observed, Japanese writing translated into English can seem a little stilted and over-formal, especially when the reader is from a culture that doesn’t understand why a detective might remove his shoes outside a house before going in to question a murder suspect.)

This book is about a crime born of very deep passion, but with no sudden bursts of action, no explicit violence or dramatic confrontations, it is unnerving in ways that more conventional thrillers are not. And despite the fact that the setting is a homogenous modern city and the characters are in some ways indistinguishable from upper-middle-class people living anywhere on the planet, there is something distinctly Japanese about it, something of the deceptive placidity of the filmmaker Ozu or the novelist Ishiguro. One senses a neat and ordered contemporary world with mystical rumblings beneath its surface, like the Sheep Man in Haruki Murakami’s novels, hidden in a forgotten corner of a glass-and-steel skyscraper, or a videotape being employed by supernatural forces in Koji Suzuki’s Ring series. Higashino’s book is set in a world of tidy kitchens with coffee-makers and bottled mineral water, of dating parties and urbane dinner-time banter, but underlying it all is something much more primal. The image I was left with at the end was the indelible one of a spider watching quietly, attentively over her web.

[A short post about The Devotion of Suspect X is here]

50 shades of Ray (and other glimpses of a cinematic heritage)

[An essay I did for the Delhi Art Gallery’s splendidly produced catalogue to accompany the Nemai Ghosh photographic exhibition]

Writing about Chris Marker’s short film La Jetee – a post-apocalyptic story made up almost entirely of still pictures – the critic David Thomson observed that this may be our perfect commentary on "the special way in which photographic images work with time to make the explosive equation of moving film”. In the film’s most spellbinding scene, lasting only a few seconds, the pictures on the screen “move” – the way they do in most regular movies – and a woman, hitherto seen only in photographs, comes alive before us. The result is a startling contrast between still images and images that, in Thomson's phrase, “work with time” – especially apt to a story that is about both time travel and the haunting, illusory nature of memory.

Motion pictures are, of course, a series of photos run together so fast that we can discover a narrative in them. And yet, when we think of our favourite movie scenes, we often think of specific shots frozen in time – shots that might be “unreliable” because they are idealised constructs of our brain, but which can capture something truthful and essential about a film. Similarly, a good photograph of a movie scene (or of a scene being filmed) can enshrine a moment for all time. It can reveal a good deal about what that movie means to its culture and about the circumstances in which it was made. At times it might even enable us to “play” a slightly different version of the scene in our head.

In the early days of filmmaking, the photographer loitering about the set was not always a welcome presence – actors were not usually happy about having to recreate a scene after the shot had already been taken. (The invention of the sound blimp, which allowed the still camera to do its work silently, placated many nerves.) But today, everyone agrees about the vital role played by a good still photographer, and Nemai Ghosh has been among the most dedicated and scrupulous of them all. His output would have been admirable in any place and time, but it acquires a special resonance in the context of a country that has never cared enough about its cinematic legacy. The story of preservation in Indian cinema has been a depressing one involving countless miles of deteriorating or lost film stock and an astonishing lack of written or pictorial records, even when it comes to major films. But Ghosh’s photographs are a wide-ranging documentation of movie memories, with a special focus on the work of India’s most widely celebrated filmmaker.

His association with Satyajit Ray – a life-changing one, by his own account – began during the shooting of Ray’s 1968 fantasy classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, which is among the best-loved of all Indian films. A chord was struck very early on. In his worshipful book Manik-Da: Memories of Satyajit Ray, Ghosh recalls the frisson of excitement he felt when the photographs he had taken were first presented to Ray, and when the great man looked up and said “You have done it exactly the way I would have, man, you have got the same angles!” Thus began a collaboration that lasted nearly a quarter-century (towards the end of which period Ray would write that Ghosh had been for him “a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen”).

A case can be made that the photographer missed out on some of the director’s best work. Not many film buffs would argue that Ray’s post-1968 output equalled the sum of what he had done up to that time: an oeuvre that included the three films of the Apu Trilogy as well as Jalsaghar, Devi, Mahanagar, Teen Kanya, Kanchenjanga, Nayak and arguably his most formally accomplished film Charulata. The heart sinks a little to think of what Nemai Ghosh’s eye and camera might have achieved if he had had a chance to shoot the magnificently crumbling haveli of the zamindar in Jalsaghar; the large house in which Charulata feels restless and unfulfilled; the ghostly mosquito nets that are such a constant, haunting presence in Devi; the lovely vistas of Varanasi where Apu’s father Hari breathes his last in Aparajito; or even the nightmare scenes (the telephone, the skeletal hands and currency notes) of Nayak. Imagine some of the location shots he might have captured for Ray’s lovely short film “Samapti” (a segment of Teen Kanya), in which a city-educated lad (Soumitro Chatterjee) becomes gradually drawn to, and also a little repulsed by, a feral girl-child (played by the young Aparna Dasgupta, later Aparna Sen) in his village. Imagine the mists of Kanchenjanga as seen through Ghosh’s frame.

But such “what ifs” are exercises in pointlessness – and besides, the very fact that we can rue these things is a testament to the value of what actually did emerge from the collaboration. Consider the films Ray made between 1968 and 1991, and the range of themes, moods and time periods they cover. There is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and its much later sequel Hirak Rajar Deshe, two of our cinema’s towering achievements in whimsical, timeless fantasy. As companion pieces to these “light” movies, there are the detective Feluda films, Sonar Kella (based on one of Ray’s breeziest, most pleasing stories and shot on location in Rajasthan) and Joy Baba Felunath. On a grittier note, there is the Calcutta trilogy of Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya (and a key film that can be seen as a precursor to them, Aranyer Dinratri, about four men trying to escape city life by heading off into the forest for an excursion).  Then there is the period drama Shatranj ke Khiladi, Ray’s only feature-length Hindi film, based on Premchand’s story about nobles and Englishmen on the eve of the 1857 war of independence. The Government-produced Sadgati, a somewhat pedantic (by the director’s standards) examination of untouchability. Ghare Baire, an elegant adaptation of Tagore’s story about the personal and the political. And the comparatively lesser works of the final years – Ganashatru, Shakha Prashakha – which have their own merits but in which one also senses an artist stricken by poor health and beginning to wind down.

Every one of these films is represented – usually at incredible length – in Ghosh’s photography. “Incredible” because this was the pre-digital era and reels of actual film were being used up in the taking of these photographs; their number and variety tell us something about Ghosh’s personal dedication to his art, and about Ray’s capacity to inspire. And because many of the films are so iconic, these photographs provide us with some defining glimpses of our cinematic heritage. Through them, we get a tantalising picture: Ray as observer and chronicler of the many aspects of a culture, and Ghosh with his camera, observing the observer.

As the eye turns greedily from one picture to the next, a host of memories and associations come alive. Here is the filming of Ashani Sanket with the girl bathing in the river, an instant reminder of the haunting opening sequence of that movie with the fighter planes – “as beautiful as a flock of cranes” – passing overhead. Here, from the same film, is Soumitro as the young Brahmin in the bullock-cart, his director looking urbane and dapper next to him – the shot is an amusing reminder that some of the earliest Western critics who saw Ray’s work made the mistake of assuming that he was from an indigent, uneducated background himself and that the Apu Trilogy, with a young village boy making his way in the world, was an autobiographical story!

Here, from Shatranj ke Khiladi, are two noblemen as wastrels, looking on indolently as “interesting times” pass them by. An extraordinary photograph from this series has Wajid Ali Shah framed in a circle formed by the coiled tubes of a hookah; the image is a beautiful representation of a weak ruler trapped by history, and Amjad Khan – one of our most photogenic actors ever – is as tragically imperious here as he was terrifyingly imperious in his most famous role as Sholay’s Gabbar Singh.

Far removed in space and time from 1857 Lucknow, the great Bharat Natyam exponent Bala Saraswati (about whom Ray made a documentary, Bala) practises her art on a beach. And here is a more famous cinematic dance – precious shots of the staging of the extraordinary ghost-dance sequence from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, with the bright white background contrasting with sharp dark costumes for an otherworldly effect. These stills should send a frisson of excitement through anyone who recalls the atmospheric sequence, as should the candid photos of the film’s unforgettable old magician Barfi (imagine a goofier version of Tolkien’s Saruman, high on mishti doi) on the set.

Here too is a feel for real places: the protagonist of Pratidwandi captured against the background of his bustling – often impersonal – city. And vistas from Sikkim, the subject of Ray’s long-censored 1971 documentary. “We traversed the entire length and breadth of Sikkim, shooting at various places,” Ghosh noted in his book, “From schools to slums to palaces – nothing was left uncaptured on camera.”

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“Humanist” is a word often used – to the point of cliché – to describe Ray’s work; it usually denotes that there are few bad people in his films, that ill-fortune flows not from the actions of a villainous “type” but from circumstances acting alongside the whims of personality. But the word is also a reminder of the director’s interest in the possibilities of the human face. He was an illustrator long before he became a filmmaker, and his drawings and paintings show an intuitive understanding of people’s behaviours, gestures and inner states – some of which Ghosh must have picked up over the years. Even in Ray movies that have stylistic flourishes, the first images one usually thinks of are faces in a variety of moods. The dreamy-eyed inwardness of the young Siddhartha in Pratidwandi; the look of unabashed delight on Goopy’s face when he realises that the king of ghosts really has given him the boon of a magical voice; Soumitro’s expressive visage in a range of contexts, from period rural drama to urbane Feluda adventure; Amjad Khan’s sensuous, melancholy gaze as Wajid Ali Shah contemplates oblivion. And the women: the impish, knowing smiles of Sharmila Tagore in Aranyer Dinratri and Seemabaddha; Shabana Azmi as the sullen wife in Shatranj ke Khiladi; the young Simi Garewal in one of her most atypical roles, as an inebriated tribal girl who catches the eye of a wanderer from the city.

Ghosh catches all these moods and countless others, but a striking aspect of his photos is how rarely they resemble the conventional ideal of a promotional still – something that has a long tradition in mainstream cinema in the West, with attempts being made to encapsulate the basic idea of a scene in one image and actors striking representative poses for the cameraman’s benefit. Much of Ghosh’s work, to the contrary, is characterised by the intimacy that can only occur when the still photographer has become an essential part of the unit – an unseen presence, silently observing and recording, with his subjects barely even conscious of his presence. There is an artlessness in these compositions that makes them an enormously effective record of the inner workings of an art form. (The exceptions are usually tied to the subject matter: so grand is the mise-en-scene of Shatranj ke Khiladi, for example, that many stills from that film inevitably look posed and self-consciously soaked in meaning.)

If Ghosh’s admiration for Ray, the tall (in every sense) Renaissance Man, can be seen on each page of Manik-Da, it is also clearly visible in his photos of the director. You can see it in the way Ray becomes the central, magnetic presence in nearly every frame, even when flanked by people like Akira Kurosawa and Indira Gandhi. You can see it in how the Gallic actor Gerard Depardieu – one of the most striking film personalities of his generation – seems almost to be dwarfed by Ray on the sets of Ganashatru. Without ever coming across as a minatory figure, Ray looms over actors and crew, a breathing redefinition of the term “larger than life”. We often see him behind the camera – though he did detailed storyboards for most of his films, he was also a very hands-on director on the actual set (not for him the Hitchcockian dictum “I never need to look into a camera”). An amusing photograph shows Soumitro and his director seated on adjacent sofas, making a “V” sign simultaneously though neither is looking at the other; a suggestion of the near-telepathic relationship that develops through long artistic collaboration?

Then there is Ray standing near a busy street, pipe in mouth, an expression of intense concentration on his face, while his beloved city’s trams pass in the background. Here he is taking his own photos of the women and children of Sikkim; with two other shining lights of world cinema, Kurosawa and Michelangelo Antonioni, at the Taj Mahal; sitting on a ledge along a slope from a Rajasthani fort, eating lunch with the crew of Sonar Kella.

Different moods coalesce in many of these pictures. He looks affectionate but also a little distracted as a child actor throws his arms around him and kisses him on the cheek. Standing on set, a microphone in hand, he seems benevolent and impatient at the same time, a kindly uncle set to turn into a martinet if his crew keeps him waiting for much longer. He hunches in the bonnet of an Ambassador car with his camera equipment and he stands pensively beneath a chandelier during a shoot (and manages to look equally dignified in both situations). Here is the man of letters, the product of 200 years of Bengali high culture, reading on the set while perched delicately on a makeshift bench; and there is the man of the world, playing blackjack in a casino during a break in the shooting of Hirak Rajar Deshe.

And everywhere, there is evidence of the multi-tasking auteur keeping a sharp eye on every element of the production process: looking down in deep concentration as he listens to his music performers; adding the finishing touches to an actor’s facial makeup. One lovely shot has Ray reading with two pairs of violins in perfect symmetry next to him; like the awed people who had the privilege of working for him or observing him at work, the instruments seem almost to be standing at attention, awaiting further developments.

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Viewing these images, one gleans the full meaning of Ghosh’s words “My experiences were but small pebbles that I picked up from the shores of a mighty ocean called Satyajit Ray.” Yet these words might also make one wonder: was the photographer a one-man Boswell, finding true creative inspiration only when touched by his idol’s presence? On the evidence we have, the answer is no. Many of the other film-related photographs he took – from Bengali and Hindi cinema – are just as stirring, in a number of ways.

They span both the mainstream and the non-mainstream, frequently giving us insight into what those categories really mean and whether they should be placed in neat opposition as they so often are. Thus, on the one hand, there are stills from such films as Gautam Ghose’s serious-minded Paar, about a villager trying to cross a river in spate with his pregnant wife and a herd of pigs. (That plot, along with the fact that the leads are Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah – who won a best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for this role – tells you everything you need to know about what sort of film it is.) But at the other end of the spectrum, there is Amitabh Bachchan in one of his most unabashedly commercial roles, as “John Jani Janardhan” in Manmohan Desai’s extravagant Naseeb, caught in a climactic song sequence with the glamorous Hema Malini. And somewhere between these extremes is an international production casting a loving gaze at Indian poverty more than 15 years before Slumdog Millionaire: Roland Jaffe’s City of Joy with Patrick Swayze and Om Puri. Other highlights from this series include stills from the Rekha-starrer Utsav, directed by Girish Karnad, the very young Anil Kapoor with an outlandishly swank car in a film you probably haven’t heard of, M S Sathyu’s Kahan Kahan se Guzar Gaya, and rare pictures of a corpulent, middle-aged Shashi Kapoor as Feluda in Sandip Ray’s TV series – a sad reminder, perhaps, of the compromises required in making a commercial project.

It is the juxtapositions and contrasts that make these photographs so interesting. How tempting it is, for example, to set the Bachchan of Naseeb against the Bachchan of nearly a decade earlier – a 1973 photograph of Amitabh with Jaya Bhaduri, before they were married and when she was the bigger star: a time before superstardom and its attendant threats, before the cares of domesticity, children and political pressures. The photograph makes it possible to postulate an alternate future for the superstar-in-waiting – a future where this lanky, awkward-looking young man made a brief career playing intense second leads (as he once really did in films like Parwana and Gehri Chaal), and eventually faded away. In this other universe, Bachchan might not even have looked out of place as the young marketing manager in Ray’s Seemabaddha!

Photographs can confirm the dominant images we carry in our minds, but the best of them also erase labels by capturing people in unusual moods or contexts. Consider the shot of a badminton match involving that most macho of north Indian actors, Dharmendra, with that most coquettish of Bengali actresses, Moushumi Chatterjee. The image – which one feels tempted to label “Di and Paaji” – is from the set of a film titled Dawedaar, so obscure that despite being made in 1982 and having a high-profile cast, there is practically no reference to it online. By this time Dharmendra was well past his sell-by date and mostly doing macho roles in assembly-line films, but looking at this picture one is reminded of the reticent bhadralok characters he played in such 1960s films as Anupama and Bandini (made by those other prominent Bengali directors, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy).

Here and elsewhere, Ghosh’s photographs of movie stars are testaments to wide-ranging careers and other possibilities for the history of Indian cinema. There is the heady glamour of commercial cinema, but there are also unobtrusive, stripped-down contexts. Here is Shatrughan Sinha, wearing sunglasses and outfitted in the style of the flamboyant Hindi-movie hero of the early 1980s, but he is flanked by – of all people – Ray and Soumitro, and one almost fancies that the director is giving him a patronising look, as if to bring him down to earth. To view Utpal Dutt as the king in Hirak Rajar Deshe is to see an artiste evincing a very different personality from that of the comical-old-man roles he was playing in Hindi cinema at exactly the same time.
 
For the eclectic movie-buff, the experience of viewing these images is a strongly affecting one: the divides between different “types” of cinema (commercial and art, loud and unobtrusive) begin to fall away and one sees these films, their directors and actors as part of a single continuum – with subtle shifts along the line coming to define entire careers and influencing entire generations of movie-watchers. And Ghosh was around to capture so much of this. In much the same way that Ray’s cinema illuminated so many worlds (both internal and external), these photographs give us a breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, complex view of Indian cinema and its many personalities.

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Here are two photos of the catalogue. (That “SR” in the second image represents Ray’s scrawl of approval on a series of photos.) 

[An earlier post on the Nemai Ghosh exhibition - with more photos - is here]