With Dibakar Banerjee’s much-awaited Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! releasing this Friday, here is a write-up that came out of my marathon Q&A sessions with the filmmaker two years ago (some of this made it – in a slightly altered form – into this l-o-o-n-n-n-g profile I did for Caravan). This was a few months after the release of Shanghai, and Dibakar was getting ready to work on his short film for Bombay Talkies. He speaks here about the Byomkesh film, which was a gleam in his eye at the time, as well as other projects swimming about in his head. -------------------
“Just today,” Dibakar says, “I passed a typical Bombay street-fashion shop – not high fashion, just Rs 150 for a T-shirt. And they had put the clothes on mannequins that had monster faces. It triggered a thought in my head.”
Such images frequently lead to ideas for him: the genesis of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! lies in two newspaper photos of the “super chor” Bunty, one in which he is sitting on a car in a yellow jacket (an image Dibakar replicated in the film) and another of the large stash of loot he had stolen from various places – a strangely moving pictorial representation of an underprivileged man trying to pull himself into a different world by obsessively accumulating others' things. “This glimpse today of the Frankenstein in the T-shirt hit me in the same way as when I saw those Bunty photos. To me, it was alien – if you use it intelligently, you can use it to talk about any notion of alienation, whether it’s UP-wallahs living in Mumbai, or Muslims in India, or Kashmiri refugees in Delhi.”
Ideology is never the starting point for a film, he says. “Your guiding belief is the sauce in which you cook again and again and again, or it’s a fucking frying pan that you never wash – you cook everything there.” Meaning, the distinct, underlying flavour will remain no matter what he does; the challenge now is to find new dishes, or modes of presentation. “After Shanghai I feel like I’ve said what I had to say about the things that are happening around us – the new liberalised economy and all that – and now I have to start afresh.”
Shanghai was a very personal film in its own way – in bringing us close to the inner compulsions of four or five different people – but it was also of course a Big Issue film, set in an allegorical Bharat Nagar, with a very wide canvas including depictions of chief ministers and other people at various levels on the power hierarchy. I get the impression that Dibakar wants to make his canvases a little more intimate, while still playing out the ideas and themes that interest him – including the oldest of them all, the nature of good and evil. “I’m trying to figure out what conscience is, exactly. What happens when you don’t have it? How do you begin not to have it? What does the environment do to us that we lose the ability to distinguish between taking someone’s pencil and taking someone’s life? I’m trying to get closer to the spaces between people, to figure these things out.”
And he knows well that genre fiction can provide a very effective framework to examine such ideas. His next feature-length project – still at an early stage in script development – will be about Byomkesh Bakshi, the popular Bengali detective created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay in the 1930s. Dibakar’s adaptation, “a melange – not a triptych – of two or three different Byomkesh stories”, will be a period film set in 1940s Calcutta. “I have NO ancestral Bengali component in my life, but I have a deep literary and mythical knowledge of Calcutta – this film is about that mythological space, about that space in my imagination.”
The Byomkesh world of detective thrillers and romantic noir allows him to cut to the essence of human behaviour and its implications. “Neither you nor I have a reference for what happened in 1940s Calcutta beyond surface details, so what will bind us is the core human transactions. I’m trying to move away from social subtext and come to a deeper understanding of human transactions and behaviour.” He wants to provide an experience that is more sensory than reflective. “When you hear about the Pandavas walking up the mountain at the end, you’re aware of a deep sense of pathos – it is visceral. My aim is to make a film where you’re feeling continuously, so you go back feeling purged. Most of my films so far leave you feeling reflective – Shanghai was definitely like that, it was meant to be cool and detached – but I want to try and change that.”
Meanwhile other ideas keep coalescing in his head. When he mentions that he is interested in male chauvinism and in the deep mythological bifurcation between male and female dominance in society – in the suppressed history of a shift from the mother goddess to the patriarchal sky pantheon – I’m reminded of observations he made on his LSD commentary track about how male bravado can give way to over-sentimentality in romantic relationships – and how both things, in different ways, can become pretexts for control over women. But listening to some of his other plans, it’s hard to suppress a chuckle just thinking of the reactions of the woolly-headed viewers who have him slotted as a poster boy for self-consciously “serious” cinema. “I want to do a film about personal combat – martial arts. That would be about craft, choreography, visual rhythm, about the use of the human anatomy and the space around it. Something close to installation.” The horror genre is very close to his heart too – “that is the most moralistic tale you can tell – you can really preach when you’re doing horror!” – and he has developed an interest in T.E.D. Kline’s short story “Nadelman’s God”, about a monster that emerges out of a goth-rock song written by an advertising executive. “I want to do an Indian version of this with a guy in Bombay,” he says, adding – with a straight face – “The title will be Narayan Murthy ka Paaltu Raakshas.”
“That’s the name you came up with?”
“Yes –it’s from Nadelman’s God,” he says a little impatiently, with emphasis, as if this is something very obvious; as if the comical juxtaposition of a banal word like “paaltu” and an imperial one like “raakshas” flows naturally from that English title rather than from the imp inside his own head.
[Much more about Dibakar, the way his mind works, and his future plans in the Caravan story, which is here]
Another update about the wonderful Pratima Devi / Amma, who looks after street dogs near the PVR Saket complex. For their "I am the Change" social filmmaking challenge, the Yes Foundation made this short film about her:
Sudeshna Guha Roy, who made the film, has also started an initiative to collect funds to help Amma. You can contribute online here. Please do spread the word to anyone who might be interested.
P.S. the auto-rickshaw driver whom you see in the film is Ravi, who has been a big help to both Amma and to friends of animals based in Saket. He helps us by taking animals to Friendicoes for sterilisations or treatment. One of the things we hope to do by raising money is to buy a second-hand van, or a smaller but more secure vehicle, so this process becomes easier.
[This is the last of my fortnightly columns for Business Standard Weekend. Have written that column for over 10 years and I will miss it, but it was time to move on. Will continue to do the occasional standalone piece for BSW though] ---------------------------------------
I am not easily star-struck, or daunted by the physical proximity of a great achiever, even when it’s someone I admire – yet there I was at the India Habitat Centre last week, moderating an event for the Penguin Spring Fever festival, when a part of me froze. Like a beam of light shooting through mist, this thought had leapt into my head: “The man sitting next to me has worked closely with Bimal Roy…and with Anurag Kashyap. He composed a gentle, meditative song for a classic like Bandini more than 50 years ago, but also won an Oscar for an exuberant number in a 2009 film.” For an amateur film historian, it’s a staggering thought. The period mentioned above covers close to 75 percent of the history of sound cinema in this country, and Gulzar saab has not just been there through it, he has shaped a great deal of it with his own sensibility. As songwriter and occasionally dialogue-writer, he has made vital contributions to the work of Roy and Kashyap and dozens of directors in between, informing the mood of so many key films…and this in addition to helming many fine movies of his own.
Most remarkably, he has reinvented himself along the way. If Gulzar had retired from films at the end of the 1980s – the decade that marked the twilight of the beloved “middle cinema” epitomised by him, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji – his legacy would still have been a solid, secure one. Instead, as Hindi cinema began to shift towards the edgier, more globalised forms of expression that would mark the multiplex era, he found fresh inspiration through his collaborations with Vishal Bhardwaj (who went from composing for Gulzar’s film Maachis to becoming a celebrated director in his own right) and AR Rahman. Despite having himself been weaned on relatively straightforward narrative-driven cinema, he has relished the chance to work on formally unusual movies such as No Smoking, Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, inspiring a new generation of fans along the way.
The IHC amphitheatre last week seemed overrun by these young fans (the average age of the large audience couldn’t have been more than 30-35 years), but the man in the spotlight may have been the most young-at-heart person in attendance. It’s worth remembering that Gulzar has always had a naughty streak that belies the image of the venerable poet unvaryingly dressed in white kurta-pyjama. One of his notable qualities – a rare one for a man who, by his own admission, came to cinema from the world of serious literature – has been his ability to switch, seamlessly and often within the same stanza, between the soulful and the flippant. When he was a young man, his use of unusual metaphors often confounded purists: what is this aankhon ki mahekti khushboo, Rahi Masoom Raza once asked him, referring to a lyric from the film Khamoshi. “How can an eye have fragrance?”
As early as the mid-1960s, he was using apparently discordant English words to fine effect in Hindi songs: in a musical scene in the lovely 1965 comedy Biwi aur Makaan, Keshto Mukherjee and Biswajit – pretending to be women and slowly becoming sensitive to the travails of their adopted sex – lament while washing clothes, “Roz yeh naatak, roz yeh makeup […] Pehle pant-coatdhota tha, ab petticoat dhoti hoon.” Forty years later, as my friend Uday Bhatia writes in this excellent piece, young fans were still finding it counter-intuitive that a poet of Gulzar’s pedigree would use the line “personal se sawaal karte hain” in “Kajara Re”. But then the legend himself is not conservative in the way that some of his fans are. Unlike them, he has little time for the rose-tinted notion that the past was always a better place than the present, that the films and music of today represent a degradation. Kashyap’s very abstract No Smoking, which he worked on in 2007, was the high watermark of his achievement as a poet-lyricist, he told me before his session – even though he originally had a hard time understanding the concept of the film. And he spoke approvingly of the high standards of professionalism in today’s film industry – it being a time of bound scripts (usually unheard of in the 1970s) and more attention to detail in areas such as production design and research.
With the nature of the musical sequence in Hindi cinema having undergone changes, lyric-writing has become more challenging – and invigorating – for him. In a 70s film like Aandhi, Gulzar could use exalted language for the songs, having the characters sing “Tum aa gaye ho, noor aa gaya hai / Nahin toh chiraagon se lau jaa rahi thi” – lines that the same characters would certainly not have used in the “prose” segments of the film, where their dialogue would be more casual and everyday. It was understood at the time that a song marked a break in narrative space and logic.
In contemporary cinema though, there is more self-consciousness about the need to “realistically” integrate songs with narrative: they are either used as an accompaniment to the soundtrack, with the actors not lip-synching to the words, or when they are sung on screen, the idea is to be authentic. So when a gangster sings in Satya, the words – “Goli maar bheje mein” – should match his speech elsewhere in the film. The item song “Beedi Jalayele” (Omkara) is raunchy and suggestive, but that’s because the priority is to be truthful to the rustic setting. How would these people express themselves in this situation? What Gulzar saab has been doing in his recent work is to catch such truths and still make lasting poetry out of them. I hope he continues for many more years.
“I am no longer so hung up on the idea that a film should be consistently excellent from beginning to end; I have more time now for brilliant scenes or 'moments' within a generally uneven or even mediocre film. And I am unashamed to admit that quite often, instead of watching a favourite old film from start to finish, I watch just a few favourite scenes that I find stimulating. (Perhaps this is natural as one grows older and becomes more conscious of how short life is.)”
The online journal Projectorhead asked me to participate in a survey that “tries to construct a cohesive response to global cinema and cinephilia during the year”. With the disclaimer that I don’t watch as much of contemporary international cinema as I should, here are my responses to their questions. (Note: the films listed in answer b include some I had watched years ago but only had a dim memory of.)
“So close to civilization is the cave,” Roger Ebert wrote in his passionate review of Luis Bunuel’s film The Exterminating Angel. (He was describing the scene where three sheep – having strayed into a room full of agitated socialites – are cooked on a fire made from expensive furniture.) I loved that piece when I first read it nearly 20 years ago, and I remembered the line again while watching Navdeep Singh’s tense thriller NH10, in which two sheltered Delhi yuppies – Meera (Anushka Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam) – find themselves in the Haryana hinterland a few miles beyond the National Capital Region, witnesses to a brutal “honour killing”, and then stalked by a gang of rough-spoken, homicidal men. The short walk (or drive) between civilisation and the jungle, and how easy it is to cross over in either direction, is a clear subject of this film. Yet I also felt that on some level NH10 invites us to consider what words like “civilized” and “savage”, “sophisticated” and “crude”, really mean, and how they can bleed into each other.
Singh’s long-overdue second film – which lived up to the expectations I had after his wonderful debut Manorama Six Feet Under nearly eight years ago – is, first and foremost, a tightly constructed genre movie, an exercise in suspense. The immediacy of the experience – being glued to the screen, holding your breath, forgetting to pick up your cold coffee, wondering if it was a good or a bad idea for this film to have an Intermission (the break provides a needed breather, but it also has the effect of toning down the intensity) – precedes everything else. And only then, after exiting the hall and collecting one’s thoughts, does one reflect on the deeper issues being dealt with here: about the many faces and inner contradictions of a society heaving between old and new ways of life. Where a woman may have a high-paying job in a posh, gated office complex, but may still be encouraged to carry a weapon for her safety, and to anticipate and be “responsible” for other people’s criminal impulses (“Gurgaon badhta bachcha hai, toh gun mujhe hee lena hoga,” Meera says drily) – because the police can do only so much to help, and they would rather she didn’t travel alone anyway, it makes their job more difficult. (Besides, the idea of a woman driving by herself late at night discomfits them at a more primal level. Cops don’t emerge from thin air, as someone points out, they come from society and are very much part of it.) It's a world where elegantly dressed, well-spoken male colleagues may listen attentively to her presentation, but later rib her about the boss making special concessions for a woman.
This film is about other divides too, such as the big difference between a defiant but safe gesture (wiping off a sexist pejorative that has been scribbled on a bathroom door) and taking real action in the face of terrifying aggression. And it is, in a notable way, about the difference between being rooted, versus being adrift or cut off. NH10 bears a slight structural resemblance to Tobe Hooper’s cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – which also had innocents being stalked through a forest-like setting by unspeakable evil – but there is a subtler link between the two films. In the 1974 movie, a group of teenagers, having moved far outside their comfort zone, fall afoul of what is eventually revealed to be a family of cannibals. A key word in that description may be “family” – these are the primitive monsters, sure (just as the “honour-killers” are the clear bad guys in NH10), but they are also quaintly tradition-bound and rule-abiding; they live in a big house in the fashion of a joint family (with the repulsive Leatherface putting on an apron and playing the “woman’s” role at dinnertime). And one reason why they are so successful at the hunt is that they are united and organised, while their terrified prey is scattered to the winds. The family that slays together stays together.
In NH10, Meera and Arjun, after they get off the main highway, are alone in the wilderness, then gradually stripped of things they have taken for granted – cellphone, wallet, car. And this is especially scary because we already know that they are used to being in their private bubbles. The film’s opening-credit sequence has views of nighttime Delhi and Gurgaon, seen through the windows of their car, and we hear the murmurs of the lovebirds drifting in and out of the background music. When the credits end and we see them for the first time, it is in tight close-ups and they are now in an elevator leading to a friend’s apartment party. (The scene is a romantic one, centred on flirting and dirty talk, but there is something sinister and stifling about how it is composed.) Their inter-caste relationship is, of course, presented as a progressive contrast to the insular lives of the Haryanvi villagers – but Meera and Arjun are insular in their own ways, and seem cut off from a larger sense of family and community. (We don’t hear anything about their parents, apart from a very brief phone chat Meera has with her mother, which she hurriedly ends because the battery is low, or because she wants to have a quick smoke in the toilet).
In contrast, the bad guys of NH10 have a more sharply defined sense of family values than the heroes do – even if those “values” allow a man to murder his sister for breaking the “code”. The rustic setting that Meera and Arjun stumble into is a big, monstrous joint family in a way; a world where there can be no secrets, no privacy, where everyone knows what everyone else is up to, and is more than willing to hold the fort against outsiders. And here are our hero and heroine, unaware even of their family caste, accustomed to booking a private villa for themselves whenever they want a getaway, and thoroughly ill-equipped to deal with such a place. The film is about what might happen when these two very different worlds collide for any length of time in a situation of extreme stress and emotion. What happens when the bubble bursts, so to speak? (A very early scene, when the window of Meera’s car – or cocoon – is smashed, comes as a shock to the system. It also prepares the ground for bigger horrors to follow.)
Just to repeat, NH10 doesn’t pedantically underline any of these things. I can already imagine ideology-driven critiques that come down on it for making a woman “win” by resorting to vicious male violence, or perhaps for encouraging a multiplex viewer to sweepingly judge “those savage Haryana types”. But the specific situation shown here involves a game of survival where anything goes, and where moralizing or philosophizing is a luxury the characters can’t afford. At the very end, where another film might have engaged in some gyaan-dispensing about the sickness in our society, this one leaves us with a single desolate line, spoken first by one person and then echoed by another. “Jo karna tha, kar liya.” No quarter is given. This has been a clash of civilizations, but the victory won at the end is a shallow, Pyrrhic one. At a time when so many movies are about affirmation – providing views of the world as it should be rather than as it is – this one uses genre tropes (from horror, suspense, even the road movie) to mask the fact that it is one of the bleakest, most nihilistic depictions of our social framework.
[Did a version of this piece – about Kiran Nagarkar's new book, which collects his play Bedtime Story and the screenplay “Black Tulip” – for Open magazine] ---------------------
In the opening scene of Kiran Nagarkar’s trenchant play Bedtime Story – written in Marathi in the mid-1970s, heavily censored, attacked by fundamentalist Hindu organisations, staged by small, experimental theatre groups in the 90s, and now in print for the first time in the author’s English translation – the Chorus talks about “distance” being important in theatre. “Nobody claims that the audience is either responsible for or conniving at what happens on the stage,” says this sutradhaar, apparently pleading the case for convention, and insisting that nothing “unexpected, shocking or exceptional” will happen. “We on the stage are the actors. Our business is to perform a play. You are the audience.” Yet we can guess that all this is tongue in cheek. Stage directions have already informed us that as the Chorus speaks these anodyne words, he is sitting on a swing at the very edge of the stage; midway through his monologue, he starts swinging above the heads of the viewers in the front rows, while a group of Hell’s Angels-like interlopers stalk the aisles carrying chains and machine guns, to ensure that the play won’t be shut down by protestors. So much for distance. So much for the supposedly hallowed line between performer and audience – the line that allows viewers to temporarily bristle with indignation while watching a narrative about injustice but to feel at a safe remove from what is being shown. In this play, which subverts episodes from the great epic Mahabharata to make its angry points about discrimination, everyone will be implicated.
Apathy is a subject of Bedtime Story – written shortly after Nagarkar found his own political conscience awakened by global events in the 1960s and 70s – and as he points out in his introduction in this new book (which also includes a screenplay titled “Black Tulip”), it would become a recurring theme in his writing. “What’s the use of keeping a tongue in your head if it doesn’t do its work when required?” asks the Chorus in Bedtime Story. The play will later imply that it is possible to feel sympathy and outrage on behalf of an Anne Frank – to make her the poster girl for a cause – while still in the long run siding with the Nazis. And that those who look away from wrongs which don’t directly affect them may end up in a gas chamber of their own making.
****
With all the anecdotes about the stir created by Bedtime Story in the late 70s and early 80s, about private readings held in cultural circles, the play has acquired near-mythical status. None of its visceral power has faded, though it appears in print at a time when epic retellings of all stripes – banal, hard-hitting, predictable, revisionist – have become a subgenre of Indian English publishing. Nagarkar intersperses his retellings of Mahabharata stories – such as Dronacharya’s attempt to ensure that the tribal archer Ekalavya doesn’t surpass his prize student, the pampered prince Arjuna, or the comical misunderstanding that results in Draupadi marrying all five Pandavas – with vignettes set in contemporary times. So a modern-day Arjun, a medical student, is hunted by the incensed male members of his girlfriend’s family, but when they see a lower-caste man with him they forget all about their original quarry (much as one suspects that the Pandavas and Kauravas would temporarily have set their differences aside if confronted by Ekalavya’s tribe). A young widow in East Pakistan is raped, first by Pakistani and then by Indian soldiers. Another young widow tries to spearhead a corporate power struggle. And the Mahabharata narrative itself ends with God begging for release from the world – but not before He has been cuttingly rebuked by Draupadi, the woman he smugly attempts to “save”.
Nagarkar writes that he intended “no overt messages and no preaching. If there was anything worthwhile in what I had to say, it would come through far more potently like a slow-release drug over weeks and months”. As a reader in 2015, with no immediate experience of the climate in which the play was first written and performed, I’m not so sure about this. Bedtime Story is not heavy-handed, but I saw it as a clearly political work that wears its concerns on its sleeve, and makes sharp use of irony and sarcasm. (“We are princes,” Arjuna tells Ekalavya, “This kingdom is ours. Its people are ours. Geography is ours. History is ours. The air is ours. You are ours.”) In this, and in its repeated shattering of the Fourth Wall to discomfit the viewer, it belongs to a tradition of radical theatre and cinema movements of protest in the 1970s and 80s, which includes the work of Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Saeed Mirza, Mrinal Sen and Govind Nihalani among others.
Nihalani’s film version of Elkunchwar’s play Party closes with a murdered activist, his tongue cut out, appearing in the nightmare of a complacent poet – the ghost staggers towards the camera as blood flows from his mouth. Mirza’s Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan, about a poor little rich boy, sensitive but too passive to take a stand against his own class, ends with exploited carpet-makers staring at us accusingly. And it’s just possible that Bedtime Story may have provided some inspiration to a cult black comedy that was, in its own way, a cry against the hegemony of the powerful. Fans of Kundan Shah’s 1983 Jaane bhi do Yaaro (which, like Party and Arvind Desai, had a final shot that broke the wall between character and viewer) will recall one of the most guffaw-inducing lines from that film’s climactic scene, a Mahabharata stage performance gone madly wrong: a villain dressed up as the Pandava Bheema says “Draupadi tere akele ki nahin hai. Hum sab shareholder hain.” (“Draupadi isn’t yours alone. We are all shareholders.”) Now look at this line from one of the sharpest scenes in Bedtime Story: “We are all partners,” say the Pandavas when the possibility of all of them wedding the beautiful princess arises, “and Draupadi is our capital.”
There are other ways in which this play keeps the audience constantly aware that they are watching a performance, not allowing them the comfort of full absorption. Like Peter Brook’s and Jean-Claude Carriere’s Mahabharata – a relatively straightforward stage adaptation that was written around the same time – Bedtime Story uses the technique of having actors playing multiple roles, even slipping from one character into another before the audience’s eyes. (In Brook/Carriere, shortly after saying “Krishna is in all of us”, the elephant-headed Ganesha slips off his mask to reveal the actor who will play Krishna; in Bedtime Story, an old grandmother removes her wig while on the stage, puts on a little makeup and becomes a young woman.) Nagarkar also makes deliberate, cheeky use of anachronisms – the scenes set in ancient times have references to airplanes, chocolate cakes, film festivals, again with the effect of blurring the line between these faraway characters and their modern viewers. (It is intriguing to speculate that what was intended as a non-realist, polemical device may now, in certain circles, be taken at face value. So what if Suyodhan mentions his daddy’s Boeing 747 or Drona talks about the fission-bomb formula, our jingoistic pseudo-scientists might say: we had all that in Vedic times!)
Unsurprisingly, given our thin skin when it comes to holy cows, Bedtime Story was shredded by a panel of literal-minded, wide-eyed censor-board scissorhands who had little understanding of artistic methods or licences, and asked Nagarkar questions like “Why are you distorting the myths?” That was then, but as the author himself observes, the play may be even more pressing and relevant today. Intolerance and fundamentalism grow apace; developed nations blithely plunder the earth’s limited resources; the powerful – politicians, corporate, religious leaders – are accountable to no one. And self-interrogation is always at a premium. The latest of many controversial bans in India, at the time of writing this review, involves the BBC documentary India’s Daughter, about the high-profile gang-rape case of 2012; the government’s response, typically, has been to tuck the film out of sight rather than face the mirror it holds up to social attitudes. When Nagarkar writes “There is something worse than callousness – an outburst of righteous rage which subsides just as easily as it had risen”, one thinks of how, in our own age, mass media and the internet have made superficial, responsibility-free displays of solidarity very easy.
**** After the intensity of Bedtime Story, the screenplay “Black Tulip” can be seen as light relief, though it takes up two-thirds of this book. (In fact, the book was originally meant to be just the screenplay; the publishers leapt at the opportunity to publish Bedtime Story alongside it when Nagarkar mentioned he had the translation ready.) This is a script for a taut, fast-paced film about two smart, savvy heroines, a con-woman named Rani Agarkar and an efficient cop named Regina Fielding, whom Rani hero-worships. (I couldn’t help seeing Rani Mukherjee and Kangana Ranaut in the roles.) Though natural antagonists, they unite for a common cause, in a story that features cutting-edge technology involving hackers and firewalls, a pungent romance with plenty of smart-alecky-bordering-on-cheesy dialogue, and a terrifically scary idea for a terror attack that could affect millions of people. Nagarkar, who has been a film buff for decades, shows a keen visual sense, not restricting himself to dialogue and story but often detailing camera movements too – one description, for instance, has “a red streak of flamingoes” flying past the sun followed by a camera pan over the bloody pool around a murdered woman’s slit throat.
“Black Tulip” may be Nagarkar Lite for most of its duration (the case can be made that this screenplay better fits his stated intention of not underlining points for readers and instead letting a well-told story do its work subtly), but at its end he engages in formal experimentation, offering us two possible endings. The first is tense and dramatic but eventually upbeat, and more in keeping with the general tone of this type of movie: the future of a metropolis is at stake, a bomb is defused just in time, the protagonists come away unscathed. The other ending isn’t exactly negative but it is more low-key, less “filmi”, and a little more disturbing – with a suggestion that heroes don’t win unconditionally, that both Rani and Regina are small fry in a world where strings are pulled by powerful people in high places, that the privileged get away with much bigger crimes than a small-time thief could ever dream of.
In this light, what Nagarkar says in his afterword is a sardonic return to the concerns that were addressed in Bedtime Story. “Let us common folk be grateful for heist movies which allow us to lead proxy lives through Rani and others who outsmart cops and the system […] but, unlike the shameless CEO-cum-stupendous con artists, are ultimately corralled by the law.” Are these words (a coda to a screenplay for a breezy mainstream movie) just as dark and cynical as the relentless verbal barbs of the Chorus in Bedtime Story (a subversive non-mainstream play)? Read this double bill – which represents two faces of the same writer – and decide for yourselves.
-----------------------------
P.S. There is an amusing sidenote in Nagarkar’s account of the censoring of Bedtime Story in the late 70s. He mentions that, during the arguments that ensued, the censor members slowly began to relent, only because most of them had come for the fees and free lunch and didn’t want to spend much time thrashing over the subject. Here, then, is another form of apathy, indicating that even these “guardians of culture” weren’t all that invested in their roles, or passionate about their stated values – and a suggestion that the default human position could be to not care too much, to want to quickly move on.
[An old interview with Nagarkar is here. A post about another wonderful Mahabharata retelling here. And here is the text of Nagarkar's introduction to the published Bedtime Story]
(A history lesson for all you little teenagers and 21-year-olds. You’re welcome)
For people of my generation, it can be unsettling to find that new movies set in the 1980s or even the 1990s are now officially “period films”. Take Sharat Katariya’s charming (and surprisingly low-profile, given its many fine qualities) Dum Lagaa ke Haisha. Set in the mid-90s in Haridwar, with a callow young protagonist who idolises Kumar Sanu(!) and manages an audio-cassette store for his father (the CD era is about to knock forcefully on their door), this film has obvious nostalgia value for anyone above a certain age – and obvious knock-their-eyes-out-of-their-sockets value for anyone below that age. All the usual signifiers are here. Rotary phones, red Ambassadors, rickety grey scooters, a reference to Vinod Khanna as the epitome of male hotness. The tiny moment that left me nearly moist-eyed though was when Prem (Ayushmann Khurana) struggles to remove a videocassette from its tight cover – he has to yank the thing out – and then does something that people of my generation so unconsciously did hundreds of times in the old days. He flips open the little lid at the rear of the cassette and blows at the visible strip of film to clear away dust particles and other lethal, real-or-imaginary microscopic things. (This keeps the player’s “head” safe, we would tell ourselves.) Then he puts the cassette in. If he is anything like I was, he is holding his breath for the few seconds until the TV screen lights up. (Please, please let it not be covered by “snow”, which could mean the VCR has packed up again and needs to be serviced.)
The scene lasts barely a few seconds but I felt sentimental because I wondered if any of the young people in the hall would even know what it meant. Or would they dismiss Prem’s gesture as a character quirk? (“Hey, there’s a guy who likes to whisper randomly at rectangular plastic objects. It’s probably a religious thing.”)
However, there’s another reason why Dum Lagaa ke Haisha took me disappearing down the foggy ruins of time. Its story about a self-absorbed man who is pushed into an arranged marriage and is then indifferent to his wife because she is an overweight “saand” (at least, that is what the plot seems to be about at first – it takes a right turn in the second half and becomes much more about the insecurities of Prem, intimidated by a woman who is smarter and more poised than him) reminded me of another film that haunted my younger self.
I have spoken, oh gawping teen readers, about the character-building ritual of blowing into a videotape’s rear end. Let me now introduce you to a thing called Chitrahaar that we used to watch on Wednesday and Friday nights. It provided the soundtrack of my childhood, pre-dating the Kumar Sanu-Sadhna Sargam one you hear so much of in Dum Lagaa ke Haisha. In the mid-80s this soundtrack included the yowling number “Teri Meherbaniyan”, sung by a dog to Jackie Shroff (or vice versa), which I wrote about here, as well as Anil Kapoor screeching “Zindagi Har Kadam Ek Nayi Jung Hai” to himself. And it included a hypnotic, droning song called “Bhala Hai Bura Hai”, which was telecast so often that its lyrics nestled into the minds of every little Indian boy and girl and gave us moral conditioning and good value system for decades to come. They began:
“Bhala Hai, Bura Hai, Jaisa bhi Hai Mera Pati Mera Devtaa Hai (Good, Bad, Whatever, My husband is my flying spaghetti monster and I will worship It and feed It samosas and beer)”
It wasn’t just the song, but the power of the accompanying visuals. Displaying acres of wifely stoicism was a dark-complexioned woman who didn’t fit the Hindi-cinema ideal of beauty (not even the one established by south Indian heroines like Rekha and Sridevi). The film did everything it could to make her look ludicrous anyway. She sticks her tongue out (when she isn’t singing) and makes other strange expressions for no clear reason. Most important of all, trailing her head at a distance of several metres is an astonishing upright chhoti that ends in a ribbon; the sort of accessory that would have made Hanuman very envious as he set about using his tail as a wick to set Lanka afire.
Also visible in the scene (though he tries his best to stay out of sight) is Rishi Kapoor, doing his famous double-takes and managing somehow to look mortified, cocky, sheepish, contented, despairing, self-important, despicable and helpless all at the same time, all in the same frame.
In fact, Kapoor tweeted a few days ago that Dum Lagaa ke Haisha was like an updated version of his 1980s film. (You only have my word for it, but I made the connection before he did.) He would have good reason to remember Naseeb Apna Apna – it was possibly the hardest thing he ever had to do, a role that would have any actor yearning for a more lightweight assignment, such as playing Hamlet and Falstaff on the same night. Because apart from anything else, this film is highly confused about its own characters: it feels for them while simultaneously making fun of them (or passing judgement on them). And Kapoor’s Kishen is often on the receiving end of this double-headed treatment.
Take the early scenes where he is being bullied by his authoritarian father. Kishen should be the sympathetic underdog here, since he is saying nothing more unreasonable than: what, you want me to marry a girl I haven’t even seen? And yet, and yet... look at the shirt they made poor Rishi wear:
(Talk about subliminal messages. Beware, India's sons and daughters, the film is saying here. If you argue with your Mogambo-like dad or wag your finger at your poor long-suffering mother over something as trivial as your choice of life-partner, even your clothes will publicly denounce you.)
Ten years before Amrish Puri played the patriarch whose permission must be sought in DDLJ, here he is as a fiercer, more rustic version of that patriarch, the boy’s father this time, who threatens to break his son’s legs if he tries to leave home. “I’ll staple you to that horse’s back if I have to,” he growls (or words to that effect), so the next scene has Kishen in bridegroom’s garb riding along sulkily on his way to wed the “plain-looking” Chandu (Radhika). At this point you think Naseeb Apna Apna has set itself up so that one of two things will happen: 1) The parents eventually see the error of their ways, recognise that times are changing, or 2) Tradition is upheld and glorified; young man finds love with papa-certified girl, starts wearing placid white shirts with "सुन्दर सुशील बेटा" printed on them.
But no, the film mixes and mashes both these ideas while sticking to its larger agenda: to gratuitously make fun of Chandu and her Hanuman-ji chotti. At the same time it introduces another, fairer-skinned heroine – Farha – who gets to be not just Kishen’s wife of choice, but the film’s Christ figure too. Summary of what follows: Wife 1 is happy to abase herself by playing maid to Wife 2 if this means she can get to live in the same house as her (their) husband. And Wife 2 is happy to sacrifice her very life if it means that husband and Wife 1 may find happiness with each other. (Meanwhile Kishen continues to look miserable – look at the rough hand fate has dealt him!) This also means that the similarities between Naseeb Apna Apna and Dum Lagaa ke Haisha are only skin-deep. In the new film everyone is likable, and the big message of the present day – that Indian men need the right sort of education – is in plain sight. Prem’s father meekly accepts his culpability when his daughter-in-law Sandhya gives him a lecture about not having taught his son to respect women. (Her wisdom, and the father’s sensitivity, are tellingly set against the values of the khaki-shorts-wearing brigade Prem is involved with, bent on producing a species of men who have no need for a female presence in their lives.) Back at Sandhya’s home, when her mother tries to feed her the usual line about a woman’s place being with her husband, aurat ki destiny etc, the educated girl coolly shuts the door in the mother’s face and that’s that. Not much room here for real social conflict.
Prem himself – before he makes a serious effort to improve his attitude – comes close to being a worm in some scenes, but never in the way that the forever-entitled Kishen is. Basically:Dum Lagaa ke Haisha is steeped in political correctness and social progressiveness and general feel-goodness; Naseeb Apna Apna wouldn’t know what any of those things were if they were brought to it on a large silver tray carried by a gharelu, pallu-covered bahu with eyes cast downward.
Well, apart from the very special, tearful sort of feel-goodness that comes from watching a Noble Soul make the Ultimate Sacrifice in the Last Scene – we loved that sort of thing in the 80s. And with that observation, this post comes to...
As longtime readers will know, I often make shrieky noises about the tendency to watch films in conditions that are not optimal for film-watching: on small laptops or cellphone screens – and worse, in lighted settings with distractions all around. Of course, some types of viewing experiences are more easily ruined than others. As the long, hypnotic final sequence of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (a concert performance that begins with deep-rooted antagonism between two men but then turns into a manic collaboration, even a jugalbandi) unfolded, I was thinking: the ONLY way to watch this scene is in a darkened hall, with eyes and ears fixed on the screen from start to finish. Okay, I’ll amend that a bit: it doesn’t have to be in a theatre, on a very large screen; it can be on a good-sized TV at home. But the room should be dark, cellphone off, no idiot whispering into your ear or tossing popcorn at your head from the seat behind, etc. Failing this, you lose most of the scene’s power, and all of the film’s point. **
“Keep quiet and pay attention,” this movie seems to be telling its viewers anyway, from the very opening scene where a young jazz student practicing on drums alone at night has his first encounter with an overbearing conductor-teacher. Whiplash’s most intense scenes – set in music rooms where training sessions turn into a battle for the soul, with the abusive Fletcher as a version of Mephistopheles, offering 19-year-old Andrew a glimpse of immortality (defined here as the opportunity to be an all-time great like Charlie Parker) – are claustrophobia-inducing in ways that make even Birdman seem like it was shot in a sunny lawn.
But this is what I thought most intriguing about Chazelle’s film: though its story and narrative arc resembles that of the inspirational, will-to-win, triumph-of-the-underdog tale (a category that is crowded with sports movies as well as other subgenres, such as stories about people overcoming physical disabilities – even the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything could fit here), I don’t think Whiplash is essentially any of those things. I didn’t see this as a film that offers generalised lessons about life or art or talent or hard work. I saw it as a razor-focused story about two very specific people in a very specific situation, one of whom serves as a sort of distorting mirror for the other (and eventually pulls him across to the mirror’s other side); a one-point study of obsession, with no larger “message” about whether such obsession is Good or Bad.
So I was surprised to hear that there has been criticism based on the idea that the film endorses violent, cruel teaching as a way of getting students to realise their potential. I didn’t see it that way (and I think I’m in a fair position to judge: I wouldn’t myself have lasted more than an hour in any sort of class with a Fletcher-like teacher, and I would be hyper-sensitive to any film that appeared to be celebrating his methods. My fingers ached so much just from watching Andrew’s labours that I thought I wouldn’t be able to type for a week. Ringo Starr’s “Ah gaat blisters ahn mah fingers!” sounds like a toddler’s wail compared to some of the stuff this young man goes through).
Yes, there is some seemingly inspirational-philosophical dialogue about Charlie Parker’s transformation into “Bird” – with Parker being used as a symbol of someone who was pushed into legend terrain by a teacher who could smell the real potential in him. But the person telling that story is a man with a ferocious need to be a legend-maker himself. And the argument that the film approves of Fletcher’s methods falls through pretty quickly if you consider the key plot point that one of his earlier students (someone whom he himself tearfully describes as a real achiever) killed himself because of the strain, and that Fletcher – quite reasonably – ends up losing his job because of the physical and emotional violence he directs at students. (When the film was over, I joked that this might well hasten the demise of classical jazz – how many youngsters would voluntarily pursue it as a career after watching this?) So what is this film really? Maybe it's just a love-hate-love story between two people who are surprisingly alike in many ways, despite the power equations that encourage us to see one as the bully and the other as the victim. The camera, often standing in for Andrew and the other students, regards Fletcher with dread from the start. Physically distinctive to begin with, and photographed to seem even more imposing, he is so often its centre of awed attention, easily picked out even when he is doing nothing more than gently playing the piano in a corner of a dimly lit nightclub. The comparisons with Svengali are obvious, and more than once I was reminded of the Powell-Pressburger classic The Red Shoes (the scene where Fletcher apparently shows a vulnerable side while talking about his recently deceased student reminded me of the barely controlled hysteria of Lermontov while making his announcement at the end of The Red Shoes). That Fletcher is the one in control, a puppetmaster, is also emphasised by his conducting gestures; you can almost see the strings reaching from his hands to the arms and fingers of his students.
Given the overwhelming personality of this man, it’s easy to miss that Andrew himself is much more than just a victim or a foil. Sure, he’s a likably awkward and vulnerable young man in some obvious ways (at age 19 he still watches films with his dad, he finds it hard to sustain eye contact with people, he has chosen an artistic calling), but he also has a hard edge that we see glimpses of quite early in the film; in the smug little smiles that briefly spread across his face when someone else’s misfortune allows things to go his way, or the swiftness with which he converts defence into offence during a dinnertime altercation with acquaintances who are doing well in more glamorous, “macho” fields like football. As the story progresses, his almost frightening competitive streak comes into clearer relief. And maybe this is being presented as something to admire; but the context also makes it clear that there are very, very few people like that – which in turn means that this film can hardly serve as an inspiration-manual for most people. Inspirational movies aren’t usually this dark and soaked in despair anyway; they don’t make triumph seem SO hard and ugly that you can’t be sure whether it counts as any sort of triumph at all. And even when they unflinchingly chronicle a very tough struggle, they tend to finish on a clear-cut note of affirmation, with cheering audiences and friends, and a sense that having negotiated the worst of Mordor, the story can now return to where it began, to the warmth of the Shire. They don’t close with a shot where a man who has been a sadistic villain through most of the film smiles approvingly at the hero, and the hero smiles back, and we see that he has found self-worth and affirmation in that moment, and that the two men are now of one mind and one heart, united by a shared obsession. (A Frodo does temporarily become a Sauron, but the moment passes and he is saved. Not here.)
In other words, that last sequence is one of the most exhilarating things I have seen in a movie hall in a long time – but it is not exhilarating in the particular way that a cheerier movie in this genre would be. Instead it is spellbinding because we see a world and everything in it being reduced to an echo chamber; everything else has been stripped away, and in the end there are only these two people performing this madman’s duet for themselves. (We don’t even get any reaction shots of the audience applauding – a standard trope of this kind of scene – or the other musicians giving so much as an approving nod. There is a passage near the end where the camera swish-pans back and forth between Andrew and Fletcher with such speed that what lies between them – the rest of the orchestra – is completely blurred out.) Basically, this is a magnificent Folie à deux. At the end Andrew finally matches Fletcher’s “tempo”, but the effect is a little similar to that of the Grim Reaper’s followers falling in line behind him for the Dance of Death in the last shot of The Seventh Seal. I wouldn’t be surprised if both Fletcher and Andrew, having reached this grand culmination, went and stuck sharpened drumsticks through their throats in their respective homes later that night. Where else is there to go?
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** Speaking of distractions: DT Cinemas in Saket really must do something about their acoustics. For a while – a short while, mercifully – during the early scenes in Whiplash, we could hear a song sequence from Badlapur, playing in a nearby hall. This sort of thing has happened before at the same venue
An alarming thing happened at the World Book Fair in Pragati Maidan last week. Outside the HarperCollins stall I met someone who was halfway through my Jaane bhi do Yaaro book and had apparently been enjoying it. (I haven't got to the alarming bit yet.) He said a few nice things, I mumbled self-effacingly, the afternoon sun beamed down at us, having ended the Delhi winter a month before schedule, but it wasn’t too hot and all was well. Then he made an observation about Jaane bhi do Yaaro (the film) and I said “Yes I mentioned that in the book’s Intro”, and he replied “Oh I didn’t know that. I haven’t read the Intro yet. I will read it after I finish the book.” *Dramatic double-take followed by a series of heavy blinks in slow motion. Visions of concentric circles and iris wipes leap into my head. I hear those ululating sounds which indicate, in slapstick comedies of yore, that a character is day-dreaming, followed by Alfred Hitchcock’s recorded message at the initial screenings of Psycho, meant to dissuade viewers from walking in after the film had begun: “Psycho is most enjoyable when viewed beginning at the beginning and proceeding to the end. I realize this is a revolutionary concept, but we have discovered that Psycho is unlike most motion pictures and does not improve when run backwards.”*
I spluttered, remonstrated. My reader looked sheepish, admitted that he was in the habit of tackling Introductions last, having been advised to do so by an English Literature teacher or some such animal. To fortify his case he mentioned a classic he had read recently, where he went straight to the main body of the book and only later read the Intro for context. The name Virginia Woolf came up. At which point I saw the lighthouse, so to speak, and realised he was talking about the sort of Intro where someone other than the author writes an analysis or tribute, usually for a new edition of a book that was first published decades or centuries ago.
“But I’m alive! I wrote this Intro myself! It was part of the narrative!”
In a calmer mood later, and flipping through my poor misunderstood book, it struck me that the word “Introduction” on the contents page – seemingly demarcated from the other chapters by a visual break and Roman-numeral pagination – can indeed be misleading. But it is still worrying to think this may have happened to a large number of readers. People tend not to be very rigorous when reading film literature anyway, and I’m sure it’s possible to treat the JBDY book as an anecdote-trove – to open it at a random page to read about something of specific interest. But when I wrote the thing I intended it to be a flowing narrative that would ideally be experienced in sequence; not a patchwork. And that opening section was important to the continuity. It provided background information for what was to come: what the film had meant to me over the years, what the Hindi cinema of its time was like. Skip it and you’re just as adrift – for a while at least – as the people who made the film in 1982 were, fumbling about, not quite sure what they were doing.
One lives and learns, though. My next book has an intro too, a long one, but I’ll keep all bases covered this time by using that ever-reliable tool, the subhead. The title will say –
himself into a different world by obsessively accumulating others' things. “This glimpse today of the Frankenstein in the T-shirt hit me in the same way as when I saw those Bunty photos. To me, it was alien – if you use it intelligently, you can use it to talk about any notion of alienation, whether it’s UP-wallahs living in Mumbai, or Muslims in India, or Kashmiri refugees in Delhi.”
The horror genre is very close to his heart too – “that is the most moralistic tale you can tell – you can really preach when you’re doing horror!” – and he has developed an interest in T.E.D. Kline’s short story “Nadelman’s God”, about a monster that emerges out of a goth-rock song written by an advertising executive. “I want to do an Indian version of this with a guy in Bombay,” he says, adding – with a straight face – “The title will be Narayan Murthy ka Paaltu Raakshas.”
