52 films to light up your life

The most fun thing I did during my recent Mumbai trip was an informal little group conversation for Outlook magazine. Satish Padmanabhan got a few of us to participate in a list-making exercise that was utterly whimsical, self-indulgent, even random (I can’t emphasise this enough). Each of us - Anupama Chopra, Sriram Raghavan and Srinivas Bhashyam were the others - picked 20 films we were passionate about (while agreeing that our lists would be very different if we made them an hour or even 10 minutes later), and then got together and came up with “52 Films to Light up Your Life”. Here is a part-transcript of our conversation.

Did I say this was self-indulgent and random? Yes - to give you an idea how random, our choice of the 52nd film came down to Kanti Shah’s Gunda and... a little old movie called Citizen Kane. Also, we were short on time - the Gossip hall, where we had the talk, needed to be made available for a 12.15 show - and had to rush through some of our choices. So please take all this with a vat of salt; enjoy the journey, forget about the destination, etc. READ!

P.S. there are a few small errors in the transcript, and some condensing of things that were said, so we all sound demented at times.

P.P.S. Given that this wasn’t mean to be a canonical list, I felt we ended up with too many obvious/canonical choices among the Indian films - Sholay, Deewaar, Nayakan, Satya etc. Can’t be helped.

Also: when I submitted my initial list of 20, I included a couple of “alternates” for nearly all my choices - e.g. while listing Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne as my Ray choice, I had Devi and Jana Aranya in parentheses. Neat way of expanding a Top 20 list into a Top 50/60...

Angry captive goddesses in Madhureeta Anand's Kajarya

[From my Mint Lounge column]

I haven’t watched Pan Nalin's Angry Indian Goddesses yet, but the other day I caught a remarkable, under-discussed film that also has a wrathful “goddess” at its heart. She isn’t just angry though, she is distraught and foul-mouthed and usually in an afeem-fuelled haze of self-loathing. She is the title character of Madhureeta Anand’s Kajarya, a village woman who is saddled with the task of getting rid of the community’s unwanted girl-babies.

Fifty-five years ago, Satyajit Ray’s Devi gave us an indelible visual representation of how patriarchy can simultaneously put women on a pedestal and enslave them: the story centred on young Dayamoyee (played by the 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore) whose life is altered when her father-in-law dreams that she is the Mother Goddess incarnate. In no time, she goes from being a normal girl, playing with her little nephew, to becoming an object of veneration, a living idol effectively imprisoned in the prayer room and brought out for darshan when people come asking for favours and miracles.

Much like Devi, Kajarya begins with goddess images – a clay statue, a painting – that are made to look sinister both by how they are framed and by the given context. We see that the village is dominated by men: most of the children seem to be boys; women are largely invisible; the local police chief has a lady assistant who banters with him, but she seems the exception that proves the rule. And then we meet the flesh-and-blood goddess, Kajarya (a mesmerizing performance by Meenu Hooda), who is a puppet in the hands of her “devotees”. “Jai Ma Kali” these men shout in a frenzy, even as they perpetuate their dominance over women.

Into this rustic setting trips a privileged young journalist from the city named Meera (Ridhima Sud, who played the wealthy ingénue in a very different sort of film, Dil Dhadakne Do, earlier this year). She looks and behaves like a card-carrying citizen of the modern world, she speaks Hindi with an accent and is a misfit in the village, but as the narrative progresses our view of her changes too; we become aware of her vulnerabilities and compulsions, some of which she doesn’t face up to herself. She is no stranger to enslavement and objectification, and she has her own form of nasha to help her cope.

There have been some notable films recently about female-infanticide and the related theme of how a society treats its women in various contexts. Take Anup Singh’s beautifully shot and performed Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost, in which a girl-child is murdered not literally but symbolically (her father, despairing for a male heir, not only raises her as a boy but tells the world she IS a boy and comes to believe this himself). Or Nila Madhab Panda’s layered Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid, in which a city-bred girl travels with her dad to the village of his childhood, a place where both women and water – two sources of nourishment that are linked by this fable-like story – are now scarce. That film had a shadowy “daayan” who strikes fear in people’s hearts but who turns out to be an unfairly maligned outcaste. In Kajarya, things are a little more complicated: the “witch” really is a murderer, even if she has been victimized and manipulated along the way.

The divide between city and village, modernity and tradition, is central to Anand’s film, as the story moves between the spaces occupied by its two protagonists. But are these spaces really so different? In one scene, a high-society Delhi woman says that the villagers should use technology to pre-determine a foetus’s sex, instead of killing it after it has been born (“so barbaric”). In another, Meera tells her boyfriend in a disgusted tone about how a group of village men had playing-cards with photos of scantily clad women on them – “you could barely make out the faces, it was just bodies” – and as she speaks, we see a shot of her body (with her face outside the frame) from the boyfriend’s perspective. He then comments on her short dress, saying “Are you going to office dressed like that, or a disco?”

Some of these scenes may feel a little pedantic – perhaps this is inevitable in a “message movie” that combines fictional narrative with documentary – but Kajarya’s most powerful moments transcend message-mongering. They include a climactic confrontation where two women sit in a room, facing each other as antagonists. One of them is the interrogator, but soon the equations shift; it is the other woman who starts asking the hard questions, while the person who was initially in a position of power is forced to admit “Mere haath mein kuch nahin tha”. Here they sit, two goddesses in shackles, all too aware of how they are perceived and represented in male-dominated arenas.

[Related posts here: Qissa, Jalpari, Devi]

Updates, photos: discussing Hrishi-da in Kolkata and Mumbai

For anyone interested, here are a couple of updates about recent events involving the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book. (I realised I have been putting a lot of those updates on Facebook, but not here, since the blog is mainly a house for my published work now.)

1) I had a very good time in Kolkata last month, discussing the book and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s work at an Author’s Afternoon session at the Taj Bengal. The audience was small but very warm and engaged, and I got to sign a few dozen books - many of them for libraries associated with the Prabha Khaitan Foundation, which organises these sessions. (Am very grateful to Mita Kapur and Siyahi for the invite.)

The best thing by far was a wonderful bit of serendipity involving my friend Rajorshi Chakraborti, with whom I had first discussed the idea of co-editing an anthology about Hrishi-da many years ago. When I agreed to the dates for the Author’s Afternoon, I didn’t know Raj was going to be visiting Kolkata at the same time; when I found out, I asked if he would do the discussion with me. Not only did he say yes, he did a stunning job: time flew by as we spoke about various aspects of HM’s work, from naatak and leela to his use of actors, reliving some of the things we had first spoken about 6 or 7 years ago, and adding new points.

Very rarely - even at carefully planned sessions at official book launches or big lit-fests - does one get to have such a stimulating conversation with someone who cares about a subject and who has read a book closely enough to ask lots of precise, pertinent questions. This was a special evening. Some photos below:

 

With Shankha Shuvro Bhaduri Chattopadhyay, who did this super sketch while our talk was on

Most of these signings were accompanied by very nice little conversations

2)  And some pics from the Times lit-fest session about “Hrishi-da’s Heroines” at Mehboob Studio, Mumbai, on December 4. With Pragya Tiwari (who moderated the talk) and Jaya Bachchan. As often happens in these situations, there was last-minute suspense about whether Mrs Bachchan would show up, and Pragya and I were a bit concerned - not because we weren’t ready to do a two-person discussion (we have spoken a great deal about HM and his work) but because the large crowd was clearly expecting to see JB. Anyway, it went off well in the end: Jaya-ji didn’t say anything spectacularly interesting (she started warming up towards the end, but we were running out of time), but she was gracious and eloquent. The video of the session is here.

My dad was Darth Vader: a Star Wars confession

[Here's a piece I did for Mint Lounge's special on Star Wars]

If you’re a ten-year-old encountering a sword-and-sorcery epic, it is natural enough to root for the young hero whose journey from innocence to peril to self-realization lies at the story’s heart. But the only time I really identified with Luke Skywalker was when the poor thing discovered that his daddy was a monster in a black mask.

And that moment, as any Star Wars buff knows, came nearly two-thirds of the way through the original trilogy, in the famous, frisson-producing climax of The Empire Strikes Back.

“You killed my father!”

“No. I AM your father.”

Followed by Luke’s scream of anguish (a part of him knew the truth already, he just wasn’t letting himself believe it) and his refusal to clasp Pater Vader’s outstretched hand, choosing a bottomless abyss instead.

(He survives, of course. He has to save himself and win redemption for his dad. And he will do this, since he is the hero and this is a fantasy.)

Before that scene, I hadn’t been particularly interested in Luke, who was played by the likable but bland Mark Hamill. The other male lead, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, was more personable; besides, by the mid-1980s when I first saw the trilogy (at one go), Ford was a big star and this affected one’s perceptions of the characters. But then, it didn’t take Indiana Jones to make Hamill look dull. Chewbacca and Jabba the Hutt had more personality than Luke too. So did C-3PO. Even the light sabres, arguably. Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan had personality AND gravitas. And there was Master Yoda – cute was he, and funny spoke he.

(Of course, all these ideas about gravitas and heroism came before one was exposed to the frat-boy jokes about the characters’ names. “Hand solo? Snigger.” “Obi-Wan Kenobi has ‘I wank’ in the middle of it. Hehhehheh.”)

So, young Skywalker was a cipher amidst many colourful characters. But those words – “I am your father” – and Luke’s response to them: how completely they turned things around, how much they resonated. They still swim in my head alongside other lines that belong to the same galactic system: “Mera baap chor hai”, “Mere paas ma hai”, all part of a childhood mythology where real life always seemed to be mashed up with popular cinema.

Because by age 10, I had some experience of what it was like to have a black-helmeted monster as a dad. My mother and I had recently left my father’s house, escaped a life of alcohol-fuelled violence. I knew she was a lot cooler than Nirupa Roy, but I didn’t think my dad was as cool as Darth Vader – he was a little scarier though.

You’re thinking – sure, it’s okay to feel that sort of connect with a cheesy fantasy film as a child, but people grow up and find echoes in more grown-up things: “serious” films, “serious” books. And yes, I did gravitate towards that kind of art as I got older. But the Star Wars influence remained, in a little box in a corner of my head that also contained the dramatic tropes of mainstream Hindi films and the visceral immediacy of low-budget Hollywood horror. These things may have lain dormant for a while, especially during the years when I was immersed in world cinema and high literature, but they were there all right, and I would return to them for emotional nourishment as well as meaning.

So it was that when watching the original trilogy again, sometime in my twenties, and on the big screen (this was a rerelease to celebrate the onset of the new, “prequel trilogy” in 1999), I was just as deeply sucked into the Luke-Darth Vader narrative as I had been before. And this time I found myself stirred by the eerie nightmare scene that takes place midway through The Empire Strikes Back, before the big reveal: Luke decapitates Vader during a duel… only to find his own face beneath the cold black mask.

Hamill was still an average actor, but by this point I was projecting my own feelings on him, and I felt I understood the great fear in Luke’s mind. I had recently begun to note aspects of my personality that were dangerously close to my father’s: a short temper, a continual sense of persecution, a tendency towards crippling melancholia and self-righteousness. And I was realising how important it was to not let those qualities become too dominant, how important it was not to turn into my dad.

Years later, reading Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, I would identify with Pinto’s fear of being laid low by his genetic heritage and becoming like his schizophrenic mother one day. But long before I read that fine book, a lightsabre duel had awakened similar thoughts; I had been acquainted – through life and through Star Wars – with the cynical possibility that parents can be most useful as cautionary models for what not to be.

 (And now the internet is awash with rumours that the big twist in the new film is that Luke Skywalker – now an old man – has finally crossed over to the Dark Side himself. Please, for Yoda’s sake, no.)

This connection with the Star Wars narrative is one of many times, in my career as a pop-culture consumer, when something massy, even pulpy, became a route to self-understanding. Which is one reason why I dislike the kneejerk snobbery often directed at mainstream Hindi cinema. And why, despite being a big fan of Pauline Kael’s writing, I have always been less than impressed by her famous distinction between Art and Great Trash, with its implication that films belonging to the latter category can be enormous fun, terrific entertainment, but you must never – no! no! no!, said in a headmistress’s voice – make the mistake of taking them too seriously. Those of us who “get” popular cinema, understand how it can provide a catalyst for our deepest and most primal feelings, wouldn’t ever patronize it in such terms.

Anyway, the years rolled by, I continued growing up (or not) and then came 2005 and the release of Revenge of the Sith – billed as the darkest film in the prequel-trilogy, the one that would show the transformation of Luke’s dad Anakin from Jedi hero to Sith Lord. Watching it, I was riveted again by the elements of Shakespearean tragedy, the operatic final scenes, the striking intercutting shots where we see the birth of the twins who will grow up to be Luke and Leia (the “new hopes”, creating a bridge to the first film, which we had already watched decades earlier), but where we also see a ghastly rebirth, the wounded Anakin being locked into the black suit that will become his new identity.

Most of all, there was the scene where Darth Vader, learning that his wife Padme is dead, bursts out of his shackles, lurches about like the Frankenstein monster, and growls “Nooooo!!!!” in the best style of the “Nahhiiinnn!” in old Hindi movies.

Watching that scene, a part of me may have wished that my own father had had something of a similar reaction when my mom and I moved out; that in a rare moment of clarity and self-awareness, he may have understood what he had lost, and grieved for it.

But probably not. Real life isn’t like cheesy films. At least, not all of the time.

Just be yourself: Dharmendra in Guddi, and other reflections

[Did this for Mint Lounge]

Dharmendra turns 80 on December 8. This can be hard to believe if the image in your head is of the pranksters he played in two very different types of films released forty years ago: the charade-orchestrating Professor Parimal Tripathi, confounding people in his “vaahan-chaalak” guise in Chupke Chupke, and the high-spirited rogue Veeru in Sholay – still, for my money, one of Hindi cinema’s most underappreciated lead performances (weird though it is to suggest that anything about Sholay might be underappreciated!). Or even if you’re thinking of the quiet leading man in black-and-white classics made by Bimal Roy and Asit Sen in the 1960s.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I helped organise a public screening of the 1971 Guddi, in which Dharmendra played himself. And around the time this column is published, I will be speaking with Jaya Bachchan at a panel discussion about women in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema. One of those women – in this case, girl – was the character Bachchan (née Bhaduri) played in Guddi: the star-struck Kusum, who must be “cured” of her Dharmendra obsession, and who gets to meet her hero during a visit to Bombay’s film studios. Gamely, at the request of Kusum’s family, Dharmendra then participates in his own demythologizing, undercutting the glamour of the movie world, acquainting her with behind-the-scenes realities.

But even so, the film ends with the words “Jai Dharmendra!” – an exclamation by Kusum’s relieved uncle. The star does turn out to be the hero and saviour after all.

“Can an actor playing herself on screen escape the charge of narcissism inherent to the situation?” Maithili Rao asks in her new book Smita Patil: A Brief Incandescence. The question arises in the context of Patil’s role in Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane (1980), but it made me think about two producer-directors who played themselves onscreen: the legendary Cecil B DeMille in Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Wes Craven – best known for helming the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise – in the 1994 metafilm Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Watch those performances: even though the scripts don’t require either DeMille or Craven to be unqualifiedly nice (for instance, DeMille has to be firm, even harsh, with the film’s delusional protagonist Norma Desmond), they never lose their beatific expressions; they play Themselves with the reverence another actor might have brought to the part of Mother Teresa.

At the other extreme is self-parody. John Malkovich ostensibly plays himself in Being John Malkovich (1999), but such is the wacky nature of this film (the plot centres on an office-building portal that sucks you straight into the actor’s mind!) that a viewer can’t take anything at face value. Instead, if you’re familiar with the Malkovich persona – the effete preciosity one saw in earlier films like Dangerous Liaisons – you’re likely to recognize the little inside jokes in scenes like the one where he stays polite when confronted by an intolerable fan who goes on about the “retarded” character he had once played.

Eventually, Malkovich enters the portal himself: even John Malkovich wants to know what it feels like to be inside John Malkovich’s head! How close is this to the possibility that the Dharmendra of Guddi indulges Kusum’s family because he wants to understand the nature of his fandom – to look at himself through someone else’s eyes?

Even when narcissism or irony are not involved, the nature of cinema is such that any actor playing “himself” is always – to some degree or the other – playing a part or a construct. This doesn’t necessarily mean being dishonest or misleading the viewer, it can simply mean emphasizing or exaggerating an aspect of your personality, to suit the film’s purpose. When Aamir Khan, who has been much in the news lately for his plain-speaking, appeared in a cameo as himself in Zoya Akhtar’s marvelous Luck by Chance (2009), the scene threw in a wink at Aamir’s real-life reputation for perfectionism (which sometimes goes hand in hand with a reputation for being a control-freak): after he has shot a scene with the aspiring actress Sona (Konkona Sen Sharma), we see Aamir looking at the rushes with the director and muttering, “See, I almost got her name wrong in that line – you can see me hesitating for a fraction of a second.”

Like I said, though, the line between reality and projection isn’t always clear. When I first watched Guddi and saw Dharmendra going “aw-shucks, I’m just a sweet little Jat boy who happened to stumble into the big bad filmi world”, I was cynical: this had to be an exercise in image-building. But I felt a little differently early one morning last summer when I got my own tiny Guddi moment. The phone rang, and it was the man himself, sounding hesitant and avuncular; the call was a courtesy response to an email I had sent him about a possible interview. Our conversation was short, but he was every bit as sweet to me as he had been to Kusum in a fictional narrative 45 years earlier. I can’t get over how bashful the voice got when I said I loved his work in Satyakam, how close it was to the movie-studio scene in Guddi where Dharmendra, embarrassed by the intensity of Kusum’s fandom, sidles away from her like a coy heroine.

[A related piece here: the Amitabh cameos. And an earlier post about Dharmendra is here]

Identity crisis: on Michel Bussi's After the Crash

[Did this short review for Mint Lounge]

The French thriller Un Avion sans Elle, now translated into English as After the Crash, comes with a blaze of publicity reminiscent of that attending Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and the work of the Japanese author Keigo Higashino (The Devotion of Suspect X, Salvation of a Saint) – the promise of a stirring, twist-in-the-tail story combined with sociological or psychological commentary. And to a degree, this is the case. You feel a pleasing chill when, in the opening pages of Michel Bussi’s novel, a detective, about to commit suicide because he has been unable to solve a confounding mystery for 18 years, realizes that the solution has been staring at him from the front page of an old newspaper.

The book then adopts a cross-cutting narrative. We are made privy to the detective’s journal account of the case that preoccupied him for so long, as well as the present-day trials of a young man named Marc and the girl he loves, Lylie, whose identity is at the heart of the mystery. Lylie, now 18 (the story is set in 1998), was the sole survivor of a plane crash as a three-month-old baby, and was subsequently claimed by two different families – one very wealthy, the other eking out a livelihood by selling sausages from a van. A court judgement – based mainly on circumstantial evidence – was reached, but both families knew in their hearts that there was no foolproof way of verifying the baby’s origin, and this uncertainty affected many lives over the years.

If the only question on your mind is “Is this a gripping thriller?”, stop reading this review now and just order the book. I was swept along for the most part, and had to stop myself from jumping ahead a few dozen pages to see how it would end. But as a nitpicking critic, I also want to list my areas of dissatisfaction. The first was simply that midway through, I had guessed part of the solution: not all the details, but the broad set-up. (Without giving much away, it has a touch of old-world melodrama, which makes me wonder if it came easily to me because I grew up with mainstream Hindi cinema.) And while it can be good for the ego to feel like you’re a step or two ahead of the characters, it can also hinder your enjoyment of a breakneck thriller, especially when the author stretches things out and provides two or three cliffhangers where one would have sufficed; the revelations involving DNA test results made me especially impatient and felt more Dan Brownish than was necessary.

The other problem was that I wished we had learnt a little more about the inner conflicts of Lylie and her two sets of “grandparents”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Bussi should have compromised on his principal task – keeping the reader’s hair on edge – by getting self-consciously solemn or introspective. I just felt that once he had this particular premise in place – with its potential for examining the nature-nurture question, the class divide and the workings of guilt and regret, among other things – he could have done a little more with it. “We all hang on desperately to life even when there’s no hope left,” one character says to another near the end. I wish the relevance of this thought – and a few others – to this story had been addressed more directly.

Otherwise, Bussi does a fine job of throwing in red herrings – in making us think, for instance, that the secret of Lylie’s identity is so important that people might be murdered for it. Or at creating the impression that there might be more to the whole thing than meets the eye: could the plane crash have been part of a terrorist plot directed at a big business family? Might the Lylie story be further complicated by infidelities within her biological family? There are wry – sometimes overdone – touches of meta-commentary in the narrative (Marc wonders exasperatedly why the detective couldn’t simply have set down the facts of the case instead of writing his journal in the style of a potboiler). And, in what I thought was a hat-tip to Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular creation Lisbeth Salander, there is also a petulant, foul-mouthed woman-child named Malvina who starts off as Marc’s adversary, then becomes a reluctant travel companion. She is only a supporting character here, but don’t be too surprised if she returns in a future Bussi novel.

Darkness in pictures

[My latest Forbes Life column. Earlier columns are here]

When I think of the graphic novels I have read – especially the ones with dark subject matter – it sometimes happens that a single image, just one panel among hundreds, stands out and seems to represent the tone of the whole. For instance, in Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde’s Mumbai Confidential, a noir thriller set in Mumbai’s underworld, this image would probably be the wordless “aerial shot” of two people – one of them a sweet little girl selling flowers – sprawled on the sidewalk on a gloomy night, after having been hit by a car. In Gautam Bhatia’s angry satire Lies: A Traditional Tale of Modern India, it might be the deliberately exaggerated drawing of a luxury plane that contains a swimming pool, a golf course and a shopping arcade, among other diversions. (The plane is being used by a minister who is flying over a drought-stricken area and making obligatory sympathetic noises. Poor man. Imagine having to make do with a six-hole mini-course.)

It would be hard to perform a similar exercise for Art Spiegelman’s magnificent memoir Maus, which was written as an attempt to record his parents’ experiences in the Nazi concentration camps – this is too multilayered a work to be reduced to one emblematic image. But there is a panel I noticed on a recent rereading, which reminded me of how closely sadness and humour, despair and affirmation run together in this story about human endurance in extreme situations.

The drawing shows Art’s father Vladek, having been incarcerated in a ghetto with his family and waiting to be taken to Auschwitz, coming across the dead body of the Jew who had turned informer and betrayed the Spiegelmans to the Nazis a few weeks earlier. “Hey!” Vladek tells a passerby, “This is the rat that turned my family over to the Gestapo.” It turns out that the informer had been shot after he was no longer of use to the Germans, and now Vladek is the one who ironically has the job of giving him a decent burial.

This situation in itself is a testament to shared suffering and how easily oppressors can become victims and vice versa, but the image might also make you laugh out loud, because it includes a little wink at the book’s chief stylistic device. Throughout Maus, Art Spiegelman depicts the Jews as wide-eyed mice and their German persecutors as smug, predatory cats. And so, in this panel, we have the use of the word “rat” to describe the dead man even as the drawing itself portrays both Vladek and the corpse as rodents. When people extol the virtues of the written word (text-only literature) over visual forms such as cinema or the illustrated book, it is often pointed out that great writing enables you to use your imagination, while visual depictions make it too easy. There is some truth in this, but I’m not sure how text alone – even when created by a very skilled writer – would be able to replicate the effect of this one drawing (which, as mentioned earlier, is among dozens of searing images in Maus).

The really dark graphic novels can be unflinchingly gruesome in what they do show, but they might equally achieve their effects through the power of suggestion – as the Japanese master Osamu Tezuka repeatedly does in his medical thriller Ode to Kirihito. One of the most devastating scenes here concerns the fate of a young woman named Reika, who plays the part of a “human tempura” in a crowd-drawing show involving a large vat of oil, but there is so much else to shudder at and sympathise with in this manga epic. Ode to Kirihito, is about a disease that is transforming people into dog-like beasts in 1970s Japan – the protagonist Dr Kirihito, who has been afflicted, lives in the countryside, trying to cure himself and others; meanwhile, in sophisticated city hospitals, doctors take part in corporate power struggles. In Tezuka’s hands, this premise becomes a way of exploring exactly what words like “humanity” and “morality” mean (something he achieved in a different way in what is perhaps his best known work, an eight-volume rendition of the Buddha’s life).

Some people find it hard to come to terms with sexual explicitness in illustrated books – not least because “comics” often get dumped in the children’s sections of bookstores – but there have been works, ranging from Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries to Chester Brown’s Paying for It, which do this exceedingly well, concealing subversive content beneath minimalist, placid-looking drawings. Satrapi’s story centres on teatime conversations between a group of Iranian women, who use this private time to air their troubles and use humour as therapy, and the talk progresses from relatively innocuous matters to the need to fake virginity for one’s husband if necessary. Brown’s book, set in a very different society and from a male perspective, is about his years of experience as a “john” – someone who regularly pays for sex with prostitutes – and the glimpse he got into the inner lives of these women, as well as the less savoury side of his own personality. It veers between personal epiphany and philosophical musings about love, commitment, power and control, and includes a series of endnotes where he discusses the ethics of prostitution.

It would be hard to imagine a non-pornographic film being made out of Paying for It, but one of the most gripping graphic novel-inspired films is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, about a man named Joey who escapes a life of violence to live a quiet existence as a Regular Family Guy in a small town – and then finds his past pursuing him to the degree that his own wife and children no longer know who he really is. John Wagner and Vince Locke’s book, which the film is adapted from, can be viewed as pure pulp – it lacks the finesse of works by Spiegelman or Satrapi – but in its scratchy, black-and-white drawings there is a raw, menacing quality that fits the subject matter perfectly – not least in the hard-to-look-at scenes near the end where Joey, having returned to confront his enemies after 20 years, finds that his childhood friend Ricky had been kept imprisoned and savagely tortured for all that time, while Joey had been peacefully leading his new life hundreds of miles away.

When he stares at the battered, maimed body of his friend, Joey is in a sense looking at a distorting mirror that shows what he might have easily been if things had turned out just a bit differently. In my mind, there is an odd but resonant link between this image and the Maus one of Vladek Spiegelman gazing down at the body of the comrade who had betrayed him.

[For thoughts on another dark vision from a great graphic novel, see this post. And a long post about Chester Brown's Paying for It is here]