Mihir Sharma wrote this piece about Ship of Theseus – and by extension, about Hindi cinema – in today’s Business Standard. To say everything I want to say in response would take up several thousand words (and it would entail regurgitating many things I have written about popular cinema in the past), but here are some condensed – and, apologies for this, hurriedly put together – thoughts.
First, as will immediately be obvious to most readers (including many readers who aren’t particularly fond of Hindi films), Mihir makes a few sweeping assertions. Any piece that begins with the sentence “As is widely known but rarely articulated, most Indian films are terrible” is either 1) a deliberate, tongue-in-cheek attempt at being a devil's advocate, or 2) reflective of a sensibility that has a basic contempt for – or an inability to relate to – the language of regular Hindi cinema.
Now of course no one is under any obligation to understand or relate to this language (I’d feel a bit hypocritical making such a suggestion, given that I spent 10-12 vital years of my own movie education at a remove from Hindi films). And there is no denying that there IS a large amount of crud in our cinema, and that many filmmakers approach their work with the assumption that viewers have single-digit IQs. But I would tentatively say that if you’re writing professionally about film, you might at some point want to recognize that Good Cinema is not required to follow a specific, restricted model (say, the model of psychological realism as established by the European avant-garde or the American indie movement).
In this context, the question that ends the piece – “if it's a movie that comes out of the Mumbai film industry, but every part in it is different, is it really a Mumbai movie at all?” – is similarly reductive. The term “Mumbai movie” is a very wide one, encompassing not just the many (often misleading) categories that were once used to differentiate cinema types – “commercial”, “art” and “middle” – but also very different directorial sensibilities within each of those categories. Though this is not something you will grasp if you look at all Hindi cinema (especially popular Hindi cinema) though a lens indicating that here is a single, amorphous blob made up of “escapist” or “silly” things like songs and dances, plot simplifications and hyper-exaggerated emotions.
Possibly I’m now making assumptions about what Mihir considers good cinema, and putting words in his mouth. But this paragraph is revealing:
I definitely felt, while watching it, that it was very, very different from - and better than - anything else that has come out of Mumbai so far. It was subtle and restrained; it did not flatten its characters; it addressed big ethical issues, but avoided easy clichés...
“Better than anything else that has come out of Mumbai so far”? Really? Off the top of my head I can name dozens of works from Bombay film history (and I’m not talking only about the obviously respectable, “socially conscious” ones made by directors like Benegal) that are every bit as good even as they operate within well-established mainstream tropes.
At which point, I suppose I should say something about my own benchmarks for a good film. Being necessarily “subtle or restrained” is not one of them. This is a vast subject and should be explored at greater length than I can manage just now, but to address a very basic aspect of it: many people reflexively use “melodrama” as a pejorative, the same way they use “realistic” as a blanket endorsement. But melodrama is a mode of artistic expression that is as valid as any other, and fulfills a purpose very different from that served by spare realism. In assessing a film, the far more relevant question is whether it has succeeded in realizing an integrated, internally consistent world – irrespective of whether that world is founded on hyper-drama or kitchen-sink realism or one of the many, many things in between.
Which brings me to my own feelings about Ship of Theseus. I thought very highly of it: my column about the film is here. And I agree with most of the specific points Mihir makes about it (the 4th, 5th and 6th paragraphs of his column are excellent – he is much better at examining the minutiae of a single film than at making macro-statements about cinema), such as how it gives the Marwari stockbroker a credible inner life. (This sort of thing is not “revolutionary” by any means, it has been effectively done in other recent Indian films ranging from Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! to Vicky Donor – but it certainly is one of Ship of Theseus’s biggest strengths.) Thinking about it again, I find that my appreciation for the film was tied mostly to how well it did small things, and accumulated them to the service of the whole. More than once while watching it, I had this odd, difficult-to-articulate sense that here was a really good termite-art film (to use Manny Farber’s famous formulation) that had dressed itself up as an elephant-art film.
It worked for me at the level of worm's-eye storytelling, at the level where a movie can achieve great things through attention to detail, by being a near-perfect synthesis of its many parts. (One might say the planks that made up this film were of a uniformly high quality.) But then again, in my view a superbly put together popular/fantasist film like Amar Akbar Anthony (to take one example) meets that criterion just as well. (Better, actually, if I stick with this particular example. But now we’re steering too close to the realm of subjective response, where discussion becomes pointless after a while.)
By the way,
“This movie has such faith in its viewers that the classical paradox that gives the movie its title isn't explained till the very end.”
Nope. The film explicitly spells out the paradox at the very beginning, in the form of a sentence that appears on the screen for a few seconds, then gradually fades away, leaving only the words “Ship of Theseus” (which becomes the opening title) behind. And if we are really discussing whether this film has faith in its viewers, one might point out that the meaning of the title has been carefully explained in every major press release (including the informal one I received inviting me to a preview screening) and on promotional websites. I’m happy to give the filmmakers and publicists the benefit of doubt (perhaps they wanted to ensure that viewers weren’t misled into thinking it was an adventure film set on the high seas, or something such), but I think it’s at least equally probable that they were trying, from the start, to promote Ship of Theseus as a film of Big Ideas (hence presumably more “important” than your “average” movie) and to spoonfeed the central “philosophical enquiry” to viewers.
And if that was the case, it seems to have worked: as I have mentioned elsewhere, before the film’s general release I was puzzled by how many people were gushing about it on Facebook and Twitter feeds, and then disclosing shortly afterwards that they hadn’t yet seen it. (On Twitter, I remember someone congratulating Anand Gandhi for having made such a beautiful, relevant film. Quite reasonably, Gandhi asked where and when the tweeter had seen it, only to be told “Haven’t seen it yet, but saw the trailer”.)
Something that makes me uncomfortable about many of the responses I’ve seen (including the ones by people who “admire” a film without having watched it – much like Hartosh Singh Bal once dismissed a cartload of Indian novels without feeling the need to read any of them) is that those responses are to the elephant-art shell of the movie. It has become increasingly common to hear Ship of Theseus being described in terms like “It is not just a film, it is an experience / it is like reading a great book.” Maybe I’m nitpicking here (it’s an old character flaw) but as someone who has been a movie nut for years – and is constantly making new discoveries about how many different kinds of great films there can be, both “popular” and “arty” – I can’t help wondering what the phrase “just a film” might indicate; it sets off alarm bells in my head. Could it be applied to the many dozens of high-quality Hindi films made over the decades, which operate within a very different artistic idiom than Ship of Theseus? Are we dealing here with a modified version of the snobbery that pronounces non-fiction books to be inherently superior to – or more “real” than – fiction (or fantasy/science-fiction novels to be inherently less relevant than novels set in the real world)?
To sum up (and I know this has been a rambling post): I have limited patience with the way Ship of Theseus is being held up as a shining, single-dose cure for everything that is wrong with Hindi cinema. I can understand being fed up with just one idiom of filmmaking (i.e. the dominant, mainstream one) and looking forward to alternate storytelling modes that get the right backing from influential producers such as Kiran Rao: that trend certainly is to be encouraged (and it HAS been underway for a long time now - even producers like Ekta Kapoor, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar, who are soft targets for snobbery, have been backing such "new" cinema). But it’s another matter altogether to dismiss any film built on commercial tropes such as the song and dance or the theatrical expression of emotions. In themselves, such things certainly don't make a film inferior to Ship of Theseus.
[From an on-off series about little connections between generally unrelated movies that happened to be made around the same time]
The films: Bimal Roy’s Madhumati and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, both released in the summer of 1958
The case: Hitchcock’s film (one of his least successful when it came out, but now among the most celebrated movies ever made) has a detective, Scottie (James Stewart), becoming obsessed with a woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak); they fall in love, but then she dies (or so he thinks) by falling from a great height, and he comes to believe he is responsible. Shortly afterwards, he meets Judy, who bears a strong facial resemblance to Madeleine – he emotionally arm-twists her into dressing up as his lost love so he can immerse himself in a fantasy.
In Madhumati, a tragic love story is similarly followed by an attempt at remaking/play-acting. Anand (Dilip Kumar) falls in love with a village girl named Madhu (Vyjayantimala) but loses her (she falls from a tall building, though this is not immediately revealed) and wallows in grief and guilt until he meets Madhavi, who looks just like Madhu. He persuades her to dress up as the woman he lost.
A strong similarity in plot points then, but there is a big difference in the two men’s personal imperatives and in the nature of the love depicted in the two films. The obsessed Scottie believes that Judy can somehow become the dead Madeleine, and his “love” has an ugly element of control or possession in it. Madhumati takes the more sentimental position. Once Anand realises that Madhavi is someone else altogether, he doesn’t show the slightest romantic interest in her; he asks her to pretend to be Madhu only so he can trap the villainous Ugranarain (Pran) into a confession.
The point is clearly made in an important scene where Madhavi comes to meet Anand in his cottage. Here is a flesh-and-blood woman who strongly resembles the dead Madhu, and who is sympathetic to his plight – yet he leaves her mid-conversation and dashes outside because he has heard the plaintive song of Madhu’s ghost. It might be said that like Scottie he is chasing a shadow, a woman who doesn’t exist – except that in the world of Madhumati the ghost does exist. A defining difference between the two stories is that Roy’s film believes in the supernatural, and this in turn allows it to posit an eternal version of love, built on the idea that Anand and Madhu are soulmates for all time. (Vertigo pretends for a while to believe in the supernatural – and in reincarnation – but this is eventually revealed to be a red herring.)
The twin motifs of climbing towards a height, and then falling from it, feature strongly in both films too (and in different ways suggest the vertiginous feelings that accompany romantic obsession). Both are breathtakingly good-looking films – one in colour, the other in black-and-white – and the cinematography has an ethereal quality: in Vertigo there is a scene 
in a cemetery where Scottie (and the viewer) sees the enigmatic Madeleine from a distance, as if through a mist; when Judy first emerges from the bathroom having “transformed” into Madeleine, she seems ghostly too. In Madhumati the mist is a palpable, living presence almost throughout the film, and Madhu is sometimes presented as an apparition, as someone not quite of this world, even before tragedy strikes.
In both films (I know, I’m stretching now) a tree plays a central part in the lovers’ assignations: Madhu and Anand use a tree’s shadow falling across a rock to mark the time of day they will meet; Madeleine counts the rings on an ancient redwood to reflect on the transience of human life. That might seem a minor detail, but the redwood scene is also a reminder of the big divergence between the films: Madhumati is built on circularity and the idea that nothing ever really “ends” – if Anand and Madhu can’t be together in this life, they will always have another chance in the next one – while Vertigo suggests that there are no such second chances and that an attempt to artificially construct one can only result in tragedy; lives are finite and circumscribed, and too often wasted in pursuing an ideal rather than in appreciating what stands in front of you.
And lastly, one of those pleasing coincidences that often occur when one is watching many (varied) films over a short period. Last month I saw two films – on consecutive days – that were dramatized stories about real-life directors. One was Hitchcock, which I wrote about here (and which made a reference to Vertigo’s plot as a variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s real-life treatment of blonde actresses). The other film, Meghe Dhaka Tara, was about Ritwik Ghatak, who was the story-writer of… Madhumati. (If this blog had a soundtrack, this would be the cue for an ululating ghostly wail.) Which brings me to an irony in the Vertigo-Madhumati association: Hitchcock – the “commercial” director, usually associated with escapism – made the more hardheaded film, a cynical work with many scenes that make a viewer feel like he has bitten into a sour lemon; while Roy and Ghatak – both archetypes of the "socially conscious" artist – created a lush melodrama (I don’t use the word pejoratively) about stormy nights, wandering spirits and immortal romance. It’s a pleasing reminder of cinema's limitless possibilities, and of the limits of classification.
Early in Nikhil Advani’s D-Day, people in high positions in national security and intelligence discuss the difficult matter of infiltrating another country, and someone points out that Pakistan isn’t a municipality garden where you go in, pluck a flower (meaning Iqbal, the Dawood Ibrahim-like character played by Rishi Kapoor) and sashay out. By the second half of this film though, I had my doubts. Here are four “undercover” Indian spies, at least two of whom have been involved in very public acts of violence in Karachi before carrying out their high-stakes mission – Operation Goldman, which involves bombing a hotel where a wedding ceremony for Iqbal’s son is being held. The hotel attack itself goes wrong for reasons they couldn’t have anticipated, but they elude top-level, city-wide security and "wanted" posters to return to the guesthouse they have rented rooms in (and this after participating in more gratuitous nighttime violence on the streets). Later they set off again in two explosive-laden cars to try and blow another big house to kingdom come. At this point I was thinking that if espionage/terrorism/revenge-terrorism were so casually planned and executed in real-world India and Pakistan, the two countries might get bored with each other and decide to become friends.
Which is not to say that D-Day is a poor film. It is entertaining and even gripping from one scene to the next, if you don’t think too much about credibility (or, in the second half, comprehensibility). It begins with a tense, solidly crafted 15-minute action sequence – at this point we don’t know exactly what is going on and what is at stake – and then gives us a prolonged flashback to the weeks leading up to Operation Goldman. We meet the Indian agents, beginning with Wali Khan who has been installed in Pakistan for a decade and is leading a double life with a wife and son whom he deeply loves but who know nothing 
of his background. From the start, we see that the divide between love and duty is strongest with this man (a voiceover thickly underlines the point) and that if someone is going to complicate the mission it is likely to be him – and so, what better actor than Irrfan Khan to play the role? Wali is well-integrated into Pakistani life and has perhaps even developed a certain affection for and understanding of the country: this is not really explored in the script, but Khan has enough interiority as an actor to make it seem likely and relevant.
The inner conflicts of the other members of the group are not as fleshed out as they might have been though. There is the token woman in the group, Zoya (Huma Qureshi in a disappointingly small part – though it’s considerably larger than that of Rajkumar Yadav, who plays her husband back in India and appears only as a sulky voice in two phone conversations and as the wallpaper on her laptop) and there is Aslam (Aakash Dahiya), about whom we know almost nothing. Much more screen time is given to Rudra (Arjun Rampal). He is presented as a single-minded, individualistic killing machine, but shortly after making his base in Karachi’s “jism-faroshi ka bazaar” – one of the few places where no questions are asked of strangers – he falls in love, or something resembling love, with a prostitute (Shruti Hassan) whose name he barely registers through all their time together (though her quiet reference to the song “Kajrare” indicates that she has guessed where he is from and that it doesn’t affect her feelings for him).
On paper, this is a touching romance; in actual practice, it amounts to little more than a series of nicely shot still-picture moments set to good music, and there is something alarmingly random about a scene where Rudra uses some of his free time in the countdown to Operation Goldman to kill the man who scarred her face. (Perhaps he sees this as part-practice for his big mission, but he might at least have done it in a way that drew less attention.)
Anyway, having perfunctorily established the characters and their relationships, and returned to the scene of the busted operation, the second half follows a familiar action-movie template: the unraveling of a carefully laid plan, its immediate aftermath, the dynamics of group paranoia, the hurried counter-strategising and second-guessing. There is the broad tone here of a heist-gone-wrong film, but it seems out of place in a situation where the stakes are so much higher, involving the destinies of two combative countries that also happen to be nuclear powers.
More generally too, I thought the film became uneven in its tone and pacing around this point. On the one hand, it has delicate touches and is attentive to the small gesture, from the use of a phrase like “vilaayati badmaashi” (which occurs in a romantic conversation between husband and wife but has added edge in this story) to the comical sight of a liquid-soap spray being pressed into service during a fight in a restroom. But there are just as many detours into heavy-handedness and superfluity: take the scene where Wali catches a segment of TV news in a marketplace and comes to a realization that has strong emotional and practical implications. Narrative tautness is of the essence at this point in the film, and the scene needed nothing more than a couple of seconds of Irrfan’s expressive face; instead there is an unnecessary montage of brief flashbacks to things we have already seen a short while ago.
By its very nature, this story is about the grand and the banal, the personal and the political, brushing against each other. This is effectively done in places, and there are signs that the script intended to puncture the balloon of lofty, sloganeering ideas about patriotism, nationalism and duty, rather than set up a good-vs-evil dichotomy. The unsentimental, no-nonsense performances of the veteran actors Nasser – as the R&AW head – and KK Raina – as a Pakistani general – are reminders that national defence and intelligence agencies necessarily inhabit a moral twilight zone. And this is also why Iqbal’s big, mocking speech at the end, though a very amusing bit of business on its own terms (and one gets to hear Rishi baba say chutiya on screen! Twice!), strikes a jarring note. It makes Iqbal an all-too-easy focal point for an Indian audience's pent-up rage, and catharsis is too conveniently achieved.
One of the most striking visuals in D-Day comes shortly after this: a shot of Iqbal’s red-tinted glasses sitting in the desert, the sand blowing past them. The image reminded me of Ozymandias’s crumbling statue, a symbol of hubris laid to waste, but perhaps the glasses can also be likened to the billboard eyes in The Great Gatsby, gazing dispassionately at (while also being a symptom of) an increasingly amoral landscape. After all, Iqbals and Dawoods come out of a long and complex history of violence and corruption – they aren’t the single-point sources from which all evil things emanate. But at the very end, a film that has otherwise shown a head for nuance seems to cop out and plumb for an easy solution. If this is what D-Day was headed for all along, perhaps it should have stuck to being an explicitly jingoistic, adrenaline-fueled thriller from the beginning.
[Did a shorter version of this for my DNA column]
A south Delhi multiplex is not the sort of place where you expect to linger after a film screening, listening to a discussion about (among other things) neuroscience, microbiology, extended phenotypes, and the nature of consciousness, morality and individual responsibility. Yet this is what happened after a recent PVR Saket preview of Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus, which releases in selected cities next week. Even the young writer-director seemed a little sheepish, as if aware that such conversations should ideally unfold at leisure, without the distraction of the hall management pointing at their watches to indicate that the (paying) viewers for another movie were waiting outside, rustling their popcorn sacks. But then, Ship of Theseus does lend itself to being discussed in terms of its big themes – which may be an injustice because it is also a splendidly constructed, visually fluid work, very assured for a debut feature, with some of the best ensemble acting I have seen in a while.
Personally I was in two minds about the post-screening talk. As a movie buff and journalist seeking background information, it was nice to hear from Gandhi and members of his unit, including Sohum Shah, who played one of the three main roles and took on the responsibility of producing the film when funds were scarce. Besides, the interaction itself was pleasant, with members of Delhi’s culturati – the painter Jatin Das, photographer Raghu Rai and veteran producer Suresh Jindal among them – warmly expressing their appreciation for the film (Rai couldn’t resist making a technical point about “apertures hanging” in certain shots) and relating personal anecdotes. Speaking as a viewer though, I would have preferred some time to let the experience sink in fully, to collect my feelings about the unusual images and sounds of the previous two-and-a-half hours.
The very title of this dream-like, occasionally slow-moving film comes from a well-known philosophical query (does an object that has had all its components replaced one by one remain the same object?), which means there was a measure of intellectual self-consciousness built into the project from the start. In the breadth of its ambition and in its desire to tackle big ideas about our physical and inner worlds, Ship of Theseus reminded me of Terrence Malick’s bloated, often spellbinding, sometimes incomprehensible Tree of Life. Unlike that film though, this one has a linear, easy-to-follow narrative. Or three: this is a triptych of stories about individuals struggling with bodily changes or emotional epiphany, or both.
In the first story a young, vision-impaired woman named Aliya (wonderfully played by the Egyptian filmmaker-activist Aida El-Kashef) takes photographs by listening to sounds and aiming her camera at them, using colour-identification devices and computer technology, and the aid of her boyfriend. An exhibition of the photos is enthusiastically received (is the acclaim for their actual quality or for the novelty of the venture?), but Aliya has a life-changing and art-changing moment when her sight is restored after a surgery, and the question arises: having gained something so vital, what might she have lost along the way? We see that she has become more conscious about what she is doing, and the film has a story about a frog and a centipede that suggests her predicament. (“How do you manage to walk on a hundred legs without ever stumbling?” the frog asks the centipede. The centipede, having never dwelled on such details of technique, now starts thinking about them – and promptly trips over himself.)
The second story begins with a long take of another centipede – this one isn’t stumbling, but it is in peril of being squashed by human feet until it is lifted on a piece of paper and set out of harm’s way. The monk who does this, Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi), is the story’s protagonist. “What if the insect’s karma was to get crushed?” a cocky young lawyer asks him, and their good-natured banter continues intermittently, even as they file a petition to improve the treatment of animals used for chemical testing by big corporations. But Maitreya’s ideals are put to a painfully severe test when he is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and finds that those same heartless corporations make the medicines that can ease his suffering.
Much more hard-edged and worldly than the gentle monk is a young stockbroker named Navin (Sohum Shah), whose story rounds off the film. “Zindagi mein khushi chahiye, aur shaayad thodi si maanavta” (“All you need in life is happiness, and perhaps a bit of humanity”) is Navin's personal philosophy, but his conscience is strangely awakened when he hears about a poor man whose kidney was stolen, around the same time that Navin himself had a kidney transplant. Even after establishing that he wasn’t the recipient of the pilfered organ, he feels personal responsibility - the poor, voiceless man may have become for him what the centipede was for the monk - and traces the stolen kidney to Stockholm, leading to a blackly funny sequence where a harried middle-aged Swede tries to understand what this Indian man wants of him (and later weeps and crouches in prayer like a Bergman character trying to fathom the mysteries of existence).
Taken together, these stories ask how much an individual’s actions can affect the world, and what is the real measure of a human being anyway: are we agglomerations of body parts, autonomous entities or “colonies” made up of trillions of bacteria, separate from our environment or indistinguishable from it? And either way, where does consciousness and self-awareness fit in? Ship of Theseus has many such balls in the air. During the preview discussion, Gandhi admitted that he was eager to put all his enquiries and influences into this one film (perhaps a natural impulse for a creative person who doesn’t know what the future may hold beyond his first big project). But he was also aware that a film conceived in such lofty terms can become turgid. One of his challenges as a writer, he said, was to make the dialogue sound as natural and organic as possible, “as if it really was flowing from the characters”, rather than the characters being mouthpieces for an ideology. “As an author, I was tempted to intrude on the characters’ space. I had to guard against that.” No wonder then that the auditioning process for the film had to be spread out over many weeks, and became an exercise in bonding and forming relationships. “I had to feel a strong connection with the actors who played even the smaller roles.”
It certainly produced results: perhaps the most admirable thing about this film is how well it works at the level of intimate, worm’s-eye storytelling. There are a couple of static, over-expository passages – such as a courtroom scene with lawyers and judges speaking like philosophers – where I felt my attention wandering. But lightness of touch is the more dominant mode, and there isn’t a false note in any of the main performances. I particularly liked the splashes of unexpected humour in the third story, including a surreal but plausible scene where Navin walks around decrepit buildings in a poor neighbourhood, trudging up seemingly endless stairs and squeezing through narrow alleys, to find the house of the man whose kidney was stolen (it is almost as if the stockbroker were being forced to leave the material world behind, to negotiate a mountain and discover his inner hermit). Another long, unbroken tracking shot has Maitreya and his friend walking together along a road, passing walls with graffiti on them, exchanging corny jokes such as the one about Buddhists being allowed to send emails with no attachments – but even as the conversation becomes more intense as it goes along, and the pace of their walking appears to quicken, the smiles never leave the two men’s faces. The real, human tone of this film can be found in scenes like the one where we see the ravages of physical illness corroding even the most evolved mind (“Pata nahin,” says the illness-wracked monk to a supplicant who asks him if the soul exists) and where a plaintive request like “Please take care of yourself” then becomes more direct and pertinent than all the self-conscious soul-searching in the world.
At the same time, many diverse things are happening here at a formal level; this isn’t one of those “arty” movies that are content to let the dialogue do all the work. The images and the cutting (or lack of cutting) constantly reveal something of the inner lives of these characters. One scary scene on a busy road – with sound design and quick cuts used very effectively – gives us an immediate sense of Aliya’s disoriented state, her inability to deal with a complex sensory world where sounds and sights operate together (or in opposition). In another extended scene, she argues with her boyfriend and the
handheld camera moves back and forth between them, the movement,
dialogue and acting combining artfully to let us appreciate both sides
of the argument. There are long takes that follow the norms of Cinema Verite (as in a lengthy shot in a hospital room where Navin washes his grandmother’s bedpan, then helps her pee) but there are also visually showy sequences like the one in which a group of monks walk through a landscape dotted with windmills. “Ideas and enquiries” may have been the starting point for this film, but there is palpable cinematic ambition too, and much of it is achieved through Pankaj Kumar’s outstanding photography.
Ultimately (no spoiler here) the three stories – which have no visual breaks or markers to separate one from the next – smoothly converge in a scene where the main characters find themselves in the same room. But such is the context of this meeting that we are also led to wonder about the stories of the other people in that room, the ones we haven’t been shown. That open-endedness – the sense that what we have seen in these two hours is just a fragment of an immeasurably large and interconnected picture – is one of the things that make Ship of Theseus such a rewarding film despite its occasional verbosity. It is well worth watching on the big screen, so do look out for it.
P.S. (Cough cough) Highly amused to see the "genre" classification for Ship of Theseus on this Wikipedia page. Take a look.
My Barun Chanda fandom has been well-chronicled on this blog, but even a more “objective” viewer would probably agree that his dignified, sympathetic presence as the aging zamindar of Manikpur brings both gravitas and credibility to the early scenes in Lootera. That apart, there is much to love in Vikramaditya Motwane’s film, the first half of which contains a delicate romance and a tender parent-child relationship as well as an elegy for the passing of an old world. Here is a genuine Big Screen movie, lush and stately and beautifully shot by Mahendra Shetty (who also did Motwane’s debut feature Udaan) – I couldn’t imagine being as drawn into it if I had first experienced it on a TV screen.
Here is also a film with enough courage of conviction to let things unfold at a slow pace. It gives us close-ups of interesting faces, lets the camera linger over details of period décor, and allows its characters to occasionally speak in such hushed tones that the audience must strain to hear, and a new kind of sensory experience comes into play; you can see people on the seats around you turn their attention away from the wondrous things happening on their cellphone screens and paying heed instead to the other kind of screen in front of them. (It felt like a throwback to an earlier, idealised time in movie-watching.)
The film's look is very much at the service of story and mood-creation. The lambent interior scenes reflect the warmth of the relationship between Roychoudhury the zamindar and his daughter Pakhi (Sonakshi Sinha), but there is also an oppressiveness, a sense of a place in a time warp, waiting to be invaded by a harsher, more modern world. This is the post-Independence moment (the story is set in 1953-54), the zamindar’s estate is like a treasure-filled catacomb, and then a young archaeologist named Varun (Ranveer Singh) arrives on a motorbike of all things. He might just as well have come in a time machine (when his bike is knocked off the road by the quaint maroon car being driven by Pakhi, it is like a collision between two eras), for he is an anomaly in this setting; though well-mannered on the outside, he is as much a symbol of the rude future as James Dean’s Jett Rink, striding about the oil fields of Texas, his very presence unnerving the Old Rich, was in Giant. And he is as rootless as the landlords are tied to their way of life. (Ranveer Singh seemed a little miscast to me, not quite of this time and place, but I kept wondering if that wasn’t deliberate.)
Varun and his friend are here supposedly to unearth the ruins of an ancient civilization beneath the zameen, but from their cryptic conversations we can tell that something is off, and the film’s title is a giveaway too; and so it doesn’t come as a shock to learn that the “old civilization” they intend to dig up and plunder is the world of the zamindars. These are unprivileged young men who are trying to forge their destiny by operating outside the law, by reaching out and taking what they may have convinced themselves is theirs by right. (The East India Company stole riches from the country and distributed them to the zamindars once. Now, 200 years later, with the white overseers gone, it is time for the common man to even the scales.)
The narrative builds subtly in these early scenes, so that even when we think we know what is going on there are small, frisson-creating moments, such as the scene where Varun’s genial friend reflexively draws a gun when he is awoken. Or the aptness – with hindsight – of the use of the song “Tadbeer se bigdi hui takdeer bana le” from the 1951 Baazi, a film about a young pauper being led into a posh, unfamiliar world and told “All this can be yours if you play the right hand.” The film leads up to its halfway point with an adept, largely wordless cross-cutting sequence where the zamindar and his daughter discover Varun’s betrayal, and there is a shot of the disconsolate Roychoudhury framed at the entrance of a tunnel dug by the “archaeologists” – visual shorthand for the landlord sent to an early grave.
But the lootera has also stolen Pakhi’s heart and betrayed her trust, and their atypical love story provides the fuel for the film’s second hour, while making Lootera – for me at least – a little less gripping after the intermission. It is still wonderfully shot, the setting having shifted to snowy Dalhousie where a tuberculosis-afflicted Pakhi lives alone. The change in colour tones is so palpable, we see that the warmth and security has gone out of her life, and partly because of the move to a more plebeian setting the film itself now looks notably more contemporary (even though this section is set just a year later). But having offered so many interesting possibilities and diverse narrative strands early on, Lootera now becomes a chamber drama centred on two damaged people and their conflicting feelings about each other. And this change in narrative focus (or narrowing down of narrative focus) didn’t quite work for me.
Sonakshi and Ranveer both have undoubted screen presence, but the film places much too heavy a burden on their shoulders. They do a good job of smouldering or snarling at each other, but I just couldn’t believe in the deep, all-consuming passion. Too often, I felt I was being simply told by the script to accept that these two people are intensely in love, without much actual evidence – it became a version of “tell, don’t show”, and the long, languid takes and leisurely cross-cutting that I had enjoyed so much in the first half began to seem excessive and self-conscious after a point.
Which is not to say that the film ever stops being interesting, or good to look at. At one point it wittily uses a passage from Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie”, a tune that was also used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. But there is another echo from that film: Varun, his past having caught up with him, arrives for shelter at the door of the woman he has wronged, much like Alex staggering through the snow and knocking at a former victim’s doorstep: “It was home I was wanting and it was Home I came to, brothers, not realizing where I was and had been before.” The context is different, of course. Here are two people who want to be together at some level, but know they will never be able to build a “home”. And perhaps that is because, like Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, they aren’t really of the same world or the same dimension to begin with? In one of the film’s loveliest shots, as Pakhi teaches Varun how to draw, we see a canvas with a painted landscape on it set against a real landscape. The juxtaposition of reality and artifice might lead one to ask: is the world of the zamindars a pretty picture that has nothing to do with real life? Or is it the other way around – is the modern world a gaudy simulacra, an imposition? And either way, can they exist in the same space?
Speaking of reality and artifice, Lootera has an ending borrowed from the famous O Henry story “The Last Leaf” (which is credited by the film). It seemed a bit random to me, but it’s easy to see the appeal: “The Last Leaf” is the sort of tale that is almost guaranteed to have a powerful, irrationally emotional impact on someone who encounters it for the first time, and its use here gives Lootera the seal of being a mythic love story for the ages, irrespective of how convincing the actual romantic arc of the film is. For reasons I mentioned earlier in this post, this is still one of the two most absorbing movie experiences I have had in a hall in months (I’ll write about the other one next week) - but by the end it felt like a case of diminishing returns.
[A post on Motwane's fine first film Udaan is here]
I finally watched the 2012 Hitchcock, and it became a test case in the truism that you have to see a film for yourself to decide how you feel about it. That might sound blindingly obvious, but how often we read a movie synopsis (or even a measured review) and casually say, “Oh I’m sure I won’t like that one.” Even professional film writers – weighed down by deadlines or the tedium of watching mediocre movies week after week – sometimes make these assumptions, and regret them afterward.
As I wrote in this post last year, given my intense relationship with Psycho, I was always going to approach Hitchcock with a certain amount of dread, anticipating its many simplifications and inaccuracies. I expected to feel the same way about it as many Iliad-purists felt about Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (a film I thought highly of) – wanting to elbow the stranger in the next seat every couple of minutes and hiss “That ISN’T how it really happened!” The project seemed to pivot around the casting coup of Sir Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock and Dame Helen Mirren as his wife Alma, and given that relatively little is known about the inner workings of the Hitchcocks' 53-year marriage – or the precise nature of the contributions made by the publicity-shy Alma to her husband’s later work – it felt like this was going to be a neatly dramatized, easy-to-digest serving of Hitchcock Lite, for a modern audience that would probably have little time for his own films.
And to an extent, Hitchcock is all of these things. It includes Cliff's Notes-like summaries for viewers who have a basic acquaintance with the director’s work but who aren’t engaged enough to read books filled with analysis or biographical detail. (At one point, Vera Miles glibly tells Janet Leigh that Hitchcock is just like the James Stewart character in Vertigo, constantly needing to control and reshape women. QED.) It tinkers with the facts, placing a lot of dramatic weight on a subplot about the Hitchcocks’ writer friend Whitfield Cook that almost certainly has no basis in reality. But on the whole this is a better, more layered film than I’d expected. It is a considerate (by which 
I don’t mean hagiographic) pen portrait of a man who was all huff and bluster on the outside, and especially in public, but who may also have been insecure enough inside never to fully realize what a major artist he was. It is a largely engrossing account of a marriage going through a brief period of crisis, of a wife who was mostly content to stay in the background and of a husband who didn’t always acknowledge how vital her presence was to him. (The Lady Who Nearly Vanished vs The Man Who Knew Too Little?) And importantly, it is a droll, self-aware tribute that draws motifs from Hitchcock’s own work and understands something of his sensibilities.
Consider the very first scene, where we see the mass murderer Ed Gein (whose macabre adventures inspired Robert Bloch’s book Psycho) clunking his brother on the head with a spade near their Wisconsin farm, upon which the mood abruptly changes from the gruesome to the comical: as the famous funeral-march tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents plays on the soundtrack, Hopkins’s Hitchcock enters the frame to introduce this story and to seal a blood pact with the murderer. Ed Gein committed horrible crimes, Hitchcock tells us in his patented faux-outraged tone, looking into the camera; but then, if he had never existed – or if he had been arrested earlier than he was – we wouldn’t have “our film”, would we?
This can be viewed as an artist’s admission to feeding off – and profiting from – the ugly aspects of the real world, and the suffering of others; but the words “our film” are also a reminder that Hitchcock implicated his audience in nearly everything he did, putting us through a gamut of disturbing, contradictory, morally ambiguous emotions. (An aside: as someone whose life as a movie-watcher and writer was hugely informed by Psycho, would it be callous of me to feel vaguely grateful for Ed Gein’s existence?) That opening scene catches so much of what the real Hitchcock was about: reflections on the relationship between life and art, between the artist and his patrons, between the watcher and the watched; the alternating of black, even tasteless humour with moments of human truth and insight. (At his very best, as in Psycho’s great parlour scene, Hitchcock used one to enhance the other.)
At times it is hard to figure out exactly what sort of audience Hitchcock was made for. It presumes that the viewer cares about Psycho, or at least has a good memory of the film (an intense scene where Hitch is shown directing Janet Leigh during the car-drive shoot, for instance, would lose much of its impact for someone who didn’t know Psycho well). But at the same time, the narrative emphasis is on something more universal: the relationship between two people as they approach the twilight of their long life together. One can 
tell the film is more interested in the Hitch-Alma relationship than in behind-the-scenes trivia, because it leaves out some of the most entertaining and filmable anecdotes about the making of Psycho, such as the one about Hitch taking Janet Leigh aside and asking her to “warm up” her cold-fish co-star John Gavin during their love scene, or the painstaking, half-successful experiments with moleskin to cover the “naughty bits” when Leigh had to be topless for the shower scene. The inclusion of such scenes would unquestionably have made Hitchcock a more accessible and exciting film for a mainstream audience; instead, it chooses to spend much of its running time on the bond between two people who have been married for 35 years.
Mirren and Hopkins play a big part in making this work. But equally notably, the growing tension and paranoia in the marriage (as Hitch wonders if his wife is having an affair) is presented not in the terms of a conventional realist drama but as Hitchcock himself might have opted to do it: there is a terrific scene where he crunches violently on celery in the kitchen and the camera moves in on Alma hunching over the sink, with the movement and the sound design suggesting that her husband momentarily feels like snapping her neck. (This may also be a reference to a darkly funny domestic scene in Hitchcock’s Frenzy.) Elsewhere too, the spirit – and some of the energy – of Psycho infects this film, from the deadpan one-liners (“You know where to plunge the dagger, don’t you?” is said during domestic banter in a scene that takes place, where else, in a bathroom) to the use of quiet, minatory passages from Bernard Herrmann’s superb score.
And there may even be a few hat-tips to the intense visual design of Psycho: the echoing gestures and movements, the use of similar-looking objects (windshield wipers in the rain, a knife swinging back and forth in a shower). Take two scenes – very different in mood – that have our portly director making flamboyant use of his arms. In one, deeply distressed, he insinuates himself into the shooting of the shower sequence, moving the knife savagely back and forth to show the crew how it is done (and indulging in self-therapy in the process). In the other scene late in the film, he stands outside the preview hall, so thrilled by the audience’s reception to the shower scene that he waltzes about and moves his hands like an orchestra conductor slashing a baton through the air. Neither scene plays like an accurate representation of what the undemonstrative Hitchcock might actually have done in those situations, but they achieve a poetic credibility in showing what may have been going on in his head (the latter scene is presumably a literalisation of his remark that he liked to “play the audience like an organ”). They make a good, playful stab at summoning the master's ghost, and for that I was happy to overlook this film's little inconsistencies.
P.S. I like Scarlett Johansson, but I was a little underwhelmed by her performance as Janet Leigh; though that is probably because the real Leigh in the first 45 minutes of Psycho – so skillfully holding the best section of the movie together – is so thoroughly embedded in my movie consciousness (it is a great performance, one of the best in a Hitchcock film). I might have felt the same way about James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins, but the difference is that D’arcy has a smaller, less important part, and in the two or three scenes we do see him he bears a strong enough physical resemblance to Perkins and does a decent job of imitating the actor’s real-life earnestness – whereas Johansson has the harder task of playing Janet Leigh in recognizable scenes from Psycho (in the car, and in the shower).
Which brings me to my own feelings about Ship of Theseus. I thought very highly of it: my column about the film is here. And I agree with most of the specific points Mihir makes about it (the 4th, 5th and 6th paragraphs of his column are excellent – he is much better at examining the minutiae of a single film than at making macro-statements about cinema), such as how it gives the Marwari stockbroker a credible inner life. (This sort of thing is not “revolutionary” by any means, it has been effectively done in other recent Indian films ranging from Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! to Vicky Donor – but it certainly is one of Ship of Theseus’s biggest strengths.) Thinking about it again, I find that my appreciation for the film was tied mostly to how well it did small things, and accumulated them to the service of the whole. More than once while watching it, I had this odd, difficult-to-articulate sense that here was a really good termite-art film (to use Manny Farber’s famous formulation) that had dressed itself up as an elephant-art film.
