More from the Pune film-library archives. Here is a letter to the editor in Filmfare magazine, shortly after they introduced the column "Readers Don't Digest" (in 1964 or 65, I think), which encouraged readers to point out plot loopholes, continuity errors and lack of logic in films.
Says the lady, optimistic of heart and teacherly of soul: producers and movie-goers will learn a much-needed lesson, films will get better, and so will the world in general.
Yet the column is still going strong 50 years later, and is arguably the most entertaining thing in the magazine. Long live Unrealism.
And while on things that may be more easily digested, here is a mid-50s ad from Screen magazine - Yusuf saab ki "apni zubaani".
[Also from the archives - Nirupa Roy and Baburao Patel]
“Haan, main mendak hoon,” says Bauji (Sanjay Mishra), the aging protagonist of Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi, “apne kuay ko samajhne ki koshish kar raha hoon.” (“Yes, I’m a frog in the well, but at least I’m trying to understand my well.”) Bauji’s “kuaan” is a marvelously realised Old Delhi setting with crumbling houses in which joint-family members squabble and talk past each other for much of the day, but have relaxed rooftop soirees once in a while. Young people try to find a measure of independence, middle-aged men take out their frustrations on their families and feel bad about it soon afterwards, hospitality and goodwill are measured in glasses of “rooh-abja”. Working in a small travel agency, Bauji is surrounded by clocks that tell the time in far-off countries, but he appears to have rarely ever left this neighborhood.
Though his world is a small one, there is a lot he still has to comprehend about it, even at his age. His daughter Rita has grown up and is in a romance with a boy who may or may not be a rogue. His
younger brother Rishi (played by Rajat Kapoor himself) is becoming
distant and wants to move out with his family after decades of living
together. The basic affection between Bauji and his wife (Seema Pahwa, brilliantly channeling the many facets of a loud-mouthed but soft-hearted woman harried by events) is usually overridden by the little trials of everyday life, and casual chat is rare. “Kya hua?” she demands when he asks her to come and sit with him. “Jab kuch hoga, tab hee aaogi?” he replies.
Something does happen though: Bauji has a personal epiphany when his relatives turn out to be wrong about his daughter’s boyfriend. This gets him thinking about the need to look closely at the world and make up one’s own mind about what is real – it is as if he has been reborn, or at least grown a new pair of eyes. Soon he is sharing his insight with other people, trying to convince them that they too must rely on their own observations and discover their personal sach. But what might the cost of such a project be? Could it mean letting go of unquantifiable things, such as one’s complicated relationships with family and friends? As he will learn, being untethered could mean soaring above the world like a bird (or like a frog that has escaped its well), but it could just as easily mean crashing down to earth.
Or perhaps he will find that everything is an illusion anyway. The studio behind Ankhon Dekhi is Mithya Talkies, and Kapoor’s Mithya, one of the best Hindi films of the last decade, was about an actor who is hired to masquerade as someone else and ends up fitting all too well into his new role; in the tradition of other fine films about stolen or borrowed identity – The Passenger, Plein Soleil and Kagemusha among them – notions of selfhood become confused and perhaps even irrelevant. Bauji’s story isn’t as dramatic, but he is often in danger of losing touch with reality in the very process of defining it. Trust only what you can see, he tells a group of apostles, even as one is constantly reminded of the impracticality of such advice. (Some of the followers react by blindly accepting what he is saying, which may be a wry comment on how organised religions come into existence.) He speaks about the importance of truth – going to the extent of leaving his job because how can he sell the virtues of cities he has never been to himself? – but ends up concealing things from his family and gets involved with an underhanded gambling operation.
There have been a few films with Old Delhi settings in recent years, and like most of them Ankhon Dekhi emphasises authenticity in character, dialogue and production design. It has many nice touches, from Bauji’s wife’s weary exclamations of “Arre bhaiya!” (even when she is addressing a prospective son-in-law who has shown up unannounced) to the improvised wedding vows that a bride and groom are made to recite, to the pleasing but unexpected candour of a scene where Rita shows up at her boyfriend’s house and makes herself comfortable. There is overlapping dialogue and a ear for conversation, and it is all wonderfully performed by Mishra, Pahwa and a cast of fine supporting actors including Brijendra Kala and Manu Rishi.
But plot-oriented though this film appears to be, it is - again like Mithya - formally deceptive, with a few detours into strangeness (a young boy suddenly turns into an idiot savant, spouting high-sounding gibberish for hours on end, and is then “miraculously” cured) that may reflect the main character's state of mind and his inability to pin down what is real or verifiable. Kapoor dedicates Ankhon Dekhi to his “masters” Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, and that should tell you something about his often-abstract filmmaking sensibility. It is a sensibility with traces of nihilism - a cold, detached view of the absurdities of our condition - but it also gently observes and acknowledges the little things that can make life bearable. Watching this film made me want to return to his earlier work, and in particular roused my curiosity about his unreleased 1990s film Private Detective, which Naseeruddin Shah half-seriously described as “a very bad combination of James Hadley Chase and Mani Kaul, who go together like rum and whiskey”.
In any case, the point of this rambling post is to say: do try to see Ankhon Dekhi. You could do a lot worse with your time this week.
[Did this for Forbes Life magazine – some thoughts on time travel in literature]
Chris Marker’s great short film La Jetee – made almost entirely of still pictures – ends with a man, a time-traveller, choosing not to seek refuge in a sterile, “pacified” future but to return instead to the war-torn world of his childhood, where he may once again see a face that has long obsessed him. Of course, the whole thing ends in tragedy, and the narrative closes with the frisson-creating line “He knew at last that there was no escape from time…”
That scene touches on the Temporal Paradox – a logical conundrum built into any such narrative – but it is also about the haunting power of memory and the need to relive. These are key components of the best time-travel stories, and they are both present in Stephen King’s sprawling novel 11.22.63. The date in that title is seared into the consciousness of any American above a certain age, and a short blurb would say the book is about a man traveling to the past to try and prevent the Kennedy assassination – but that would be reductive. This tense thriller plays with such ideas as the Butterfly Effect (what if saving the president alters the future in many other ways that can’t yet be imagined?), but I think it came equally from King’s desire to simply revisit the world of his own childhood and to imagine what it might look like to someone who never experienced it firsthand. The protagonist’s first tangible sensation of 1958 is the wholesome taste of beer, and other details build up, with references to advertisements, TV shows, popular culture and the social mores and language of the time. But alongside nostalgia, there is caution against idealising an old way of life.
King’s novel is a recent entry in one of science fiction’s most popular sub-genres, one that went mainstream more than a century ago with H G Wells’s The Time Machine, about an inventor going nearly a million years into the future and discovering (rather like someone watching Karan Johar’s coffee show alongside a Bigg Boss episode) that humanity has branched off into two sub-species, one effete, the other vicious. The social commentary here is occasionally simplistic, but as so often with Wells’s work (The 
Country of the Blind and The War of the Worlds being other examples), one must remember that he was a pioneering fiction writer operating in a field that had scarcely been touched at the time. Even so, predating The Time Machine by 50 years was another classic that involved a different form of time travel: Charles Dickens’ s A Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Scrooge is shown visions of his past and future – “shadows of what may be” – in the hope that he changes his miserly ways. Like Wells’s story, this is a cautionary tale, but a more intimate, interior one.
A real-life figure who has often been the subject of time travel in fiction is Jack the Ripper, and it is easy enough to see why. The Ripper’s killings were not – by serial-killer standards – unusually savage or numerous, but he was never caught or identified despite operating in a heavily policed area, and so the story lends itself to supernatural renderings, premised around such ideas as invisibility or immortality attained through blood sacrifice; there was even a Star Trek episode, “Wolf in the Fold”, where the Starship Enterprise crew encounters the Ripper as a woman-loathing spirit that has persisted for hundreds of years!
That episode was written by Robert Bloch, whose contribution to Harlan Ellison’s famous anthology Dangerous Visions toys – literally – with the serial killer as an unwilling time traveller. “A Toy for Juliette” presents a delightfully morbid scenario: in a dystopian future, a sadistic young lady awaits as her grandfather brings her humans from the distant past, scared and disoriented people whom she can torture for fun. But what happens when one of these living “dolls” turns out to be more than she bargained for, an anonymous Victorian gent from 1888 carrying a small black bag?
As it turned out, Ellison was so stimulated by Bloch’s story that he himself wrote a sequel to it, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”, which continues Jack’s adventures in the futuristic City, and eventually suggests that even the worst evils of our time may pale compared to what the future brings. But time travel doesn’t have to belong in the realm of futuristic fiction: sometimes, it can be built into the very form of a novel otherwise set in a recognizable world. For instance, F Scott Fitzgerald's novella The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about a man who lives his life backward from old age to infancy, while Martin Amis’s much more complex Time’s Arrow tells the life-story of a concentration-camp doctor in reverse chronology, so that this man – in his own reinterpretation of events – becomes not a murderer but 
a life-giver, who brings dead Jews to life and eventually creates a new race. Here, time travel becomes a form of expiation or possibly a comment on how people can rationalise their actions. (Incidentally Amis’s book makes an intriguing double bill with Philip Roth’s alternative-history The Plot Against America, in which the Jewish-American Roth revisits the world of his childhood - much like Stephen King did in 11.22.63 - with one crucial difference: the pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh has become US president during WWII.)
Of course, temporal paradoxes can strike even when authors are not consciously setting out to write about them. As I mentioned in this piece, Kavita Kane’s The Outcast’s Queen has the “then vs now” feel of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with the author going to ancient Hastinapura and confronting various characters with her modern wisdom and moral sense. Many such stories are essentially about wish-fulfillment, but then that is the allure of so much fiction anyway. As Salman Rushdie once put it, writing is a way of keeping a hold on the many things that keep slipping, like sand, through our fingers. Perhaps this is another way of saying that nearly all writing is on some level a form of time-travelling.
[Some earlier thematic columns for Forbes Life: popular science, satire and black comedy, true crime]
Returning to an infrequent series about old song sequences (some earlier entries here, here and here) with thoughts on “Tere Mere Sapne” from Guide. Hindi cinema has a long history of the song sequence as a declaration of love or commitment, but rarely has it been done as well as it is here.
First, here is the scene (which you should grab this opportunity to watch anyway, whether or not you intend to read the rest of this post):
While the song in itself is one of the loveliest we have ever had, the visualisation shows Vijay Anand’s talent for using the long, unbroken take to add dramatic intensity and continuity to a given situation. This sequence lasts more than four minutes, but it is made up of only three shots, which increase progressively in length – in other words, there are only two cuts in the whole scene. And this isn’t an arbitrary stylistic decision, it is central to what is happening in the film at this point.
Waheeda Rehman’s Rosie has just confronted her unpleasant, domineering husband and announced that she is leaving him. She has lately developed a bond with Dev Anand’s Raju – the “guide” of the film’s title – but this is the first time that the possibility of a future together will be properly broached. So we have two people who are very vulnerable in different ways: Rosie, having shown fire and resolve in the scene just before this one, is now uncertain about the road ahead, and Raju, a hitherto carefree man, is taking on responsibility and baring his own heart. As if mindful of the significance of the moment, the camera moves slowly, respectfully around the duo, observing them but not being intrusive.
The “language” of the sequence, with its long takes and tracking shots, is easier to understand if you consider that in filmic terms, a cut can represent disruption or a shift in tone. The two cuts in this scene (the first around the 39-second mark, the second around 1.44 minutes) both occur after a movement of the song has been completed, and both have Rosie drawing away from Raju after initially reaching for him. In the first scene, she strokes his shoulder; in the second she hugs him briefly, but then bunches up her fist and moves away. She is still conflicted at the end of both these movements, and in each case the cut serves as punctuation, indicating that the process of reassuring her must begin anew. And this is done at a dual level, by the lyrics of the song as well as by the sympathetic, probing movement of the camera.
All this leads up to the final, pivotal shot, which lasts for well over two minutes. Raju follows Rosie again, but his approach has changed now: instead of leading her by her hand, or drawing her close, he moves back, stands at a distance and holds his hand out – inviting her to come to him when she is ready. And it is here that the unbroken camera movement finds its strongest, most purposeful expression. The camera follows Raju, then moves back to Rosie, bridging the (largish) gap that has opened up between them; it watches her as she makes up her mind, and then accompanies her as she moves toward him.
Think of how different, and less intense, this scene would have been if it had simply cut back and forth between the two people. Instead it is done in one fluid take, with a near-perfect melding of performance and technology – every time I see it I have the spooky feeling that the camera, by not allowing Rosie the option of “escaping” to another shot (via a third cut), is coaxing her and then gently leading her to Raju. That unbroken take, tracking from left to right and then left again, appears to facilitate the final “milan” - an effect that could not have been achieved if the scene had been shot in a more conventional way, with multiple cuts and the shot/reverse-shot process.
It remains to be said (and unfortunately this is a defensive caveat that often follows any such analysis of a popular film) that none of this is intended to take away the beauty and emotional immediacy of the sequence by “intellectualising” or “over-analysing” it, or by turning camera movements into mathematical equations. But there is already a much-too-common tendency to undervalue the thought and effort that can go into such scenes from popular films, which are viewed mainly as “entertainment” or as diversions. (And as I have written elsewhere – here, for instance – the questions “Did the director really mean this?” or “Why analyse so much?” often signal laziness, or an unwillingness to engage with the nuts and bolts of narrative cinema.) In his book Cinema Modern, Sidharth Bhatia quotes the cinematographer Fali Mistry’s son as saying of this sequence, “It was shot over two evenings and a morning, at dusk and dawn, which means they must have had a very small window of about 10 minutes each time, so they had to ensure nothing went wrong in the acting, camera placement, lighting etc … It required great coordination.” There is similar fluidity in other song sequences in the film, including the much more exuberant “Aaj Phir Jeene ki Tamanna hai”.
Incidentally, another insight about the “Tere Mere Sapne” sequence comes from my friend Karthika, who points to the scene’s unusual use of light, or the time of day, “in signifying both solitude and the comfort and safety of love”. The scene begins in dusk, and as it continues the darkness grows – this is a notable departure from the kind of symbolism where a declaration of love coincides with dawn breaking (or is shot in bright daylight throughout). “Instead, what Rosie finds as darkness descends and envelops them is companionship, arms to hold her, a homecoming,” Karthika says – it underlines the fact that the scene is not about casual, youthful infatuation but about long-term responsibility.
P.S. and there is that lovely hug around the 3.10 mark. I showed this sequence during a talk at Ramjas College recently, and one observation made was that it was a little startling to see a hero and a heroine hugging so candidly in a 1965 film. Of course, the Navketan school was always a little more “forward” in such things, and the subject and back-story of Guide (an English-language version of the film made by an international crew was shot too) probably encouraged such candour. There is also the matter of the Dev Anand persona, and what he could get away with, both on-screen and off-screen. In the new book Conversations with Waheeda Rehman, the actress tells Nasreen Munni Kabir:
[Dev] was the only star who could put his arms around any actress and she would not object or push him away. Today the stars are physically affectionate with each other – there’s a lot of hugging – but we were reserved in our time. Yet none of us minded when Dev put his arms around us. He would say ‘Hi, Waheeda! Hi, Nandu’ – that’s what he used to call Nanda. The other actors were jealous and complained that whenever they tried to give us a hug, we girls would push them away. Dev was a decent flirt [laughs].
[An old post about R K Narayan's droll account of the shooting of Guide is here]
If you grew up watching 1980s films, you may remember a time when Juhi Chawla and Supriya Pathak – one working in mainstream cinema, the other largely in the “parallel” circuit – were different versions of the fresh-faced girl next door. They didn’t always play virginal stereotypes (Pathak has a few casually sexy moments as a modern-day Subhadra on honeymoon with her Arjuna in Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug) but generally speaking they were comforting presences; one felt that nothing too bad would happen if they were around. It has come as a jolt to the senses then – in a pleasing way – to see these actors tear up those images with relish in recent films.
In the past two years, Pathak has played a self-serving chief minister in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai and then a domineering matriarch in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram Leela. The form of those two films is very different – Shanghai has an austerely gloomy tone and many handheld camera shots, while Ram Leela is baroque and over the top – but in both there are scenes where lighting and shot composition make her look like a black widow spider feeding on everyone around her (or a black hole sucking in whatever light there is in the rest of the frame). The performances are terrifying too: whether she is assessing a potential son-in-law, or emerging from the shadows to quietly menace a conscientious bureaucrat, she is a revelation.
The thing with Pathak though is that one knows she came from a theatre background – her mother was the veteran actor and director Dina Pathak – and worked with directors such as Benegal and Nihalani, whose films were more character-oriented than personality-driven; so once you’ve got over the initial surprise, it isn’t so unusual to see her experimenting at this stage of her career. Juhi Chawla, on the other hand, was very much from the commercial-cinema star system, which is founded on the comfort of watching people play similar roles over and over again, and the bubbly-sweetheart image is one that is particularly hard to break away from. I wasn’t a Qayamat se Qayamat Tak fan – I was 11 when the film came out in 1988, and had better things to do with my time (or so I thought) than watch a teen romance – but I did register Chawla’s chocolatey presence and may have vaguely felt that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have an elder sister of such pedigree to play Scrabble with on a lazy afternoon. I wonder how I would have reacted to a time traveler’s revelation that 25 years hence this Rashmi (the cutie, so to speak, in QSQT) would play a politician who sets a “generous” pay-off to cover up a rape and then says – in a room filled with male lackeys – that the victim should consider herself lucky this happened just before an election.
That is just one of many wicked things Chawla – as the predatory Sumitra Devi – does in Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang. It isn’t exactly a multi-dimensional performance, but it has many well-conceived, well-timed moments where the eyes suddenly flash, a lip curls and one sees psychotic currents moving below a calm surface. And there is no sentimentalising. In a tale about women’s empowerment, it would have been easy to give Sumitra a weepy back-story, where she is seen as a victim of patriarchal expectations herself, someone who is “bad” mainly because she has entered a male domain and is doing things that are traditionally done by men. But Gulaab Gang isn’t that sort of film – it is from the old Bollywood commercial school, built on archetypes, where villains could be just villains – and you don’t get the impression that Sumitra has been corrupted by power; it is more as if she sought power because it would allow her to play out her innate dark impulses.
The casting of actors like Pathak and Chawla in these roles (and other names can be added to the list – Rishi Kapoor, for instance, is enjoying a fine second innings as an actor that is worlds away from his cheerful romantic-hero parts of yore) suggests that today’s filmmakers are creating fresh opportunities for middle-aged performers, and having some fun in the process. But it is also a reminder of the self-reflexivity (or as the academics might say, the post-modernist deconstruction) of mainstream cinema: writers and directors who were once passionate movie-buffs are tempted to overturn elements from the films they grew up watching. When I interviewed Banerjee, it was clear that the very thought of casting Pathak and the equally genial Farooque Shaikh in negative roles in Shanghai had been invigorating for him. Similarly, Gulaab Gang’s writer-director Sen (who, in full disclosure, is a former colleague) must have had strong ideas about how to use Chawla in a contemporary masala film that is in some ways a homage to the less self-conscious Bollywood that she began her career in.
Of course, an added benefit is that this sort of self-referencing allows the dedicated viewer to form his own associations. Given that Chawla’s Qayamat se Qayamat Tak co-star Aamir Khan played a scowling bank robber in Dhoom 3 just a few months ago, what fun it would be to have a postmod QSQT sequel in which it turns out that Rashmi and Raj survived to discover that love was not a bed of roses after all, then eventually went their separate ways and set about wreaking vengeance on the world. I know I’d queue up early to watch that film.
-----------
P.S. On the somewhat related subject of casting an actor in a particular role with one eye on his screen history: I felt a little chill recently while watching the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and seeing F Murray Abraham in a small part as a talent manager. Abraham’s most famous role was as the composer Salieri, forever envious of Mozart’s “God-dictated” talent, in Amadeus. And Inside Llewyn Davis is about a musician – a young folk singer in the early 1960s – who may not be good enough or driven enough, and who, in one of the film’s last scenes, walks out of a club gloomily as another young, clearly more talented musician named Robert Zimmerman takes the stage. I'm fairly sure the casting of Abraham was a deliberate nod to Salieris past and present.
[Did a version of this for Business Standard Weekend]
The subjectivity of our responses to a film usually runs deeper than “I liked this, you didn’t”. Viewer A and viewer B may agree on what a movie’s strong and weak points were, but their overall assessment will be completely different if A felt that the weaknesses outweighed the strengths while B felt that the best thing in the film was so good that it made up for the blemishes. I mention this because I tried imagining Vikas Bahl’s Queen without Kangana Ranaut’s splendid performance as Rani, and felt like it would have been a radically diminished experience for me – without Ranaut holding it all together, I would have spent much more time rolling my eyes at the implausibilities and strained attempts to be cute.
The opening scenes in Queen set a high bar for storytelling economy, with Rani’s excitable interior monologue during her wedding preparations followed by a Café Coffee Day meeting where her status-conscious fiancé Vijay (Rajkumar Yadav, now using the name Rajkummar Rao) says he is calling off the wedding. The narrative here is crisp and direct (I thought of these scenes later as the film became slacker) and one gets a sense of the equation between these two youngsters from old-business families – a sense that will be deepened through flashbacks over the course of the film. Vijay says “anyways” and “hey bro” but also pronounces “often” in the propah British way, with the T; we learn later that he has spent time in London and is more worldly-wise than Rani is, but we can also tell – from his attitude to “hippies” and to women working after marriage or drinking – that he is narrow-minded in many ways that matter. Rani, on the other hand, seems the picture of naïveté at first, speaks as if her life were a Hindi film (my father will die of a heart attack when he hears this, she says tearfully, as if she has just come from watching Rab ne Bana di Jodi) and has modest ambitions: get married to good boy, settle into cosy domesticity. But there is more to her than meets the eye, and perhaps she will be as surprised to discover this as we are.
Queen’s basic premise is that Paris and Amsterdam (where Rani travels by herself, determined to have her honeymoon even without a groom) can be rejuvenating forests of Arden for a young woman who has never gone overseas before, speaks poor English and is so provincial that when asked where she is from replies “Rajouri” instead of “India” or “Delhi” – but who has a pluckiness and intuitive wisdom that enables her (with the aid of a few conveniently placed guardian angels) to make her way through the jungle and come out with a tiara on her head. In some obvious ways, this film is similar to Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish, complete with a Mind Your Language-like situation where a group of people from different backgrounds stumble into cheesy camaraderie. Like Shashi in that film, Rani is overwhelmed by all the "new-new-new" early on, then gradually finds her bearings; if Shashi’s big test was the delivering of a speech in English, Rani’s involves selling the virtues of the gol-gappa to spice-wary Dutch people, brushing lips with an Italian hunk and most importantly facing up to her boyfriend.
It’s the sort of premise that lends itself to simplifications and contrivances, and it would have been easy for Rani to come across as an idiot who jumps into unfamiliar waters with little thought or preparation – but Ranaut ensures the character is worth a viewer’s time and engagement. She is often placed in the position – unenviable for an actor – of having to say something first in Hindi, then repeat it in English, the practical reason for this (independent of story logic) being that the film doesn’t want to alienate its Hindi-speaking audience. But she makes it seem credible within the terms of the narrative too: you feel like Rani has to first enunciate her thoughts in the language she thinks in, before she can translate it for the firangs around her. It also fits the sense one gets that for much of the time, even when she is ostensibly speaking with other people, Rani is really in a long conversation with herself – figuring herself out, learning what she is capable of when not in the controlling presence of her boyfriend, and the possibilities of the world outside of the things she has taken for granted all her life. (In a way, the whole film is an expansion of the inner monologue we hear in that very first scene.)
Queen is not a tourism promo for Paris and Amsterdam in the way that Zindagi na Milegi Dobara was for Spain – the cities are not excessively romanticised or turned into picture postcards, there is even a witty scene where the Eiffel Tower becomes a monster looming over Rani, mocking, inescapable, a sour reminder that she wasn’t supposed to be alone in this romantic setting. Yet the film is crammed with feel-good scenes, perhaps more than it needed. On one hand the Paris trip is presented as a huge new adventure in Rani’s life; on the other, she conveniently runs into the friendly, street-smart Vijaylakshmi (Lisa Haydon) [Bechdel test alert: not only is there a scene where two women talk about things other than men, they talk about things – such as the pleasures of burping – that are off-limits for “decent” middle-class girls in India] and is always in touch with her family on Skype. Later, arriving in Amsterdam, she finds herself in a backpackers’ hostel where she must share a room with three men (each from a different ethnic background, wouldn’t you know it). By now the story’s allegorical side will have become evident even if you missed the shot of Rani in an Alice in Wonderland T-shirt. But there are no vicious Red Queens in this rabbit hole, and the only character who might lose his head is the ironically named Vijay.
The film does throw in an obligatory scene set in Amsterdam’s red-light district and another one in a sex-toy shop, and to me the latter scene was a little discomfiting – specifically when Rani’s three new men-friends get together to laugh at her as she examines the store’s wares without realising what they are. (The framing of a couple of shots almost makes it seem like they are leering.) The scene is facile and unconvincing to begin with, clearly aimed at getting some easy laughs, and the moment passes quickly, the men go back to being good-natured and unthreatening, but it did make me wonder: for perhaps the only time in the film, there is a sense here of real danger for Rani. But perhaps part of the point – a point running through the story – is that appearances are deceptive and that everyone contains multitudes. A trio of men sniggering together at a girl who is unknowingly examining a dildo can simply be having harmless fun. (Okay, if you say so.) The sweet-looking boy who shows up on a scooter with dozens of red balloons for his girlfriend could become a domineering, iron-fisted husband. A jovial grandmother might casually, after decades, recall an old boyfriend from whom she was separated by Partition. A hooker who displays herself in a window in red-light Amsterdam might speak in refined Urdu outside her working hours. And a “simple” West Delhi girl who was in love with the idea of being married might return from a foreign trip and happily flaunt her “single” status on Facebook. Despite my minor reservations about Queen, I’d be happy to watch the further travels of Rani if Ranaut were to play the part again.
[Never been too happy writing for “special” issues on short notice. It can be taxing to be told a day in advance that the paper is doing a “Billionaire’s Club” special this weekend, so could your column be on films about rich people – especially when I had already done this piece for the last such issue less than a year ago. But well, I complied. As long as one can complain a little afterwards]
The dominant image of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard – set during the Italian Risorgimento, when aristocrats began to be supplanted by the rising middle classes – is that of the old prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster in a super performance) wandering about his palace, contemplating the end of a world he once bestrode like a colossus. Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar, about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in a mansion, has even bleaker views of fading grandeur – a spider scuttling across a large portrait of royalty, a disused chandelier collecting cobwebs and dust. More recently, in Vikramaditya Motwane’s lush Lootera, set in the post-Independence years, another old zamindar tries to maintain his composure and dignity as the government reclaims treasures bequeathed to his ancestors by the East India Company 200 years earlier.
These are all gorgeous-looking films about once-rich people in the process of losing their privileges, being swept away in the face of a more egalitarian, less genteel world. In principle, the change depicted in these movies is a welcome one for anyone with liberal sensibilities – it symbolises the coming of equal opportunity, democracy, even soft socialism. One might ask then: how do these films succeed in evoking a quiet, melancholic sympathy for the fall of billionaires?
One answer is that human responses to such things are complex; regardless of one’s ideological position, it is possible to feel a small aesthetic pang about the withering away of grand havelis and the dispersing of valuables that seemed to belong together in a special treasure room. More important, these films are ultimately about people whom it is possible to relate to as individuals. The landlords and royals shown here may have benefitted from excessive privilege throughout their lives, but they also have admirable human qualities, such as a genuine love for music and the other arts, and we are privy to their finer emotions. And they were, 
after all, to the manor born. Having only ever known one way of life, they are now – at an advanced, vulnerable age – seeing that way of life slipping away. Even with the most meritocratic worldview, one can still feel for their private tragedies. Underlying this is the bitter pill of the knowledge that the beneficiaries of the new order – the people who deserve their place in the sun – can become just as corrupt and exploitative down the line; that change doesn’t mean a final victory of good over evil, and obscenely affluent people will always be around anyway.
Some films about the old rich and the nouveau riche uneasily circling each other are also doomed love stories, which adds to their human appeal – while reminding us that denizens of an old world can become like ghosts when the new world arrives. Lootera has a great shot of the disconsolate zamindar, shortly after he learns he has been “framed”, at the entrance of a tunnel dug by crooks who were posing as archaeologists – it is shorthand for a man in his grave, and it is the last time we see him in the film. Simultaneously his daughter is betrayed by a young man who is a symbol of modern times, and though the film does everything it can to convince us that they really do love each other, one constantly gets the sense that these two people don’t even exist in the same dimension – they come from such vastly different backgrounds, their destinies are so unlinked.
There is an even subtler relationship in Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. The tragic protagonist Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari) – daughter-in-law of a zamindar family falling on bad times – forges an emotional bond with a lower-class man named Bhoothnath (Guru Dutt), but there is never any pretence that this relationship has a future, or that they can even acknowledge romantic feelings for each other. Chhoti Bahu eventually comes to a tragic end, but even when she and her haveli are “alive”, there is something distant and otherworldly about them – much like the prince of Salina in The Leopard watching the young people dance around him, or like the zamindar in Jalsaghar looking into an unpolished mirror with a puzzled expression, perhaps wondering if he had imagined the great days of his past.
["March 4th" does seem an inappropriate date for a post about people trapped in time. Anyway, here are two old posts on films about relics of the past trying to stay relevant: Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. And an extended piece on Lootera here]
