Some welcome news to help brighten what has been a tough few months -
my book The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee has been given the Book Award for
Excellence in Writing on Cinema (English) at the Mumbai Film Festival, MAMI.
In the pic below, I am with Arpita Das,
who has been doing a super job of curating this award, and two of the
jury members for the cinema writing prize, Ambarish Satwik and Ravi
Kant.
And here, courtesy Shubhodeep Pal, is a pic from the ceremony, the only one I have currently. (Should get a few others soon.)
As I said during my very brief acceptance speech, I'm very glad this award exists; and not just for the obvious reason, but because books on cinema tend to get short shrift at the more general literary awards, where other categories - such as politics, business, family histories - get taken more seriously.
Also letting myself get vaguely sentimental here: for all the good
things about the prize (including the sense of recognition for a book
that, irrespective of its final merits or flaws, represents a lot of
hard work), the best by far was the look on my mother’s face when she
heard the news. She has been in a lot of pain for months now, has been
bearing it with incredible courage, and this was at least a temporary
boost. Meanwhile, please treat this as yet another plug for the book - pick it up yourself if it seems like something you'd be interested in, or spread the word.
In a recent column, I wrote about how weird it feels – if you grew up with 1980s Hindi-film stereotypes – to see someone like Gulshan Grover playing a good guy. There was almost something comforting about those old-style villains back in the day – you knew their function in the story, you knew that slime and venom were their usual stock in trade. Nowadays, the lines are more blurred.
But there is also the opposite phenomenon: that of being unsettled by a movie villain who, your instincts tell you, shouldn’t be a villain.
This can be a personality-centred matter: it can mean being startled when Ashok Kumar – our beloved Dada Moni, katha-vachak of TV shows like Hum Log – was revealed to be the criminal mastermind at the end of Jewel Thief (1967). Or it can be about the associations one has with a character type. Watching the recent live-action version of The Jungle Book, despite my familiarity with the story and its assumptions, I cringed a little when Sher Khan plummeted to his death at the end. Given everything our self-centered species has done to hasten tiger extinction in the real world, it was troubling to see a tiger – no matter how malevolent – presented as a force to be destroyed (with the audience cheering Mowgli on).
Unexpected villain-predators are often to be found in the horror or suspense genres, which might contain narrative twists or fantastical elements. Monsters in horror cinema have come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the nature of the film: they can be gargoyles with flaming red eyes, but they can just as easily be cherubic children, or the sweet-looking dolls or clowns that cherubic children like to play with (there has been a whole tradition of that narrative, including The Omen, It, and the Child’s Play series). As a longtime horror buff I have encountered a range of such antagonists over the years, but I was still blindsided (so to speak) by the one in Fede Alvarez’s creepy new film Don’t Breathe. This predator-monster is a sightless old man, known only as Blind Man in the script. He is also a former soldier. And at the start, it seems like he will be the victim, since the premise is that three youngsters have broken into his house – where he lives alone, or so we are told – to rob him.
Those kids are in for a surprise, though, and so are we viewers.
I’m spoiling nothing by telling you that Blind Man really is unsighted – the film doesn’t play an underhanded trick on us by revealing that he can see, or part-see. What it does do is to slowly, craftily turn the tables so that the hunters become the hunted, and Blind Man, who is always alert and ramrod-straight, becomes a nightmarish presence. The first time we see him up close, he is sitting up in his vest on his bed, head turned in the direction of one of the kids who has broken into his room. Despite the context of the scene, he already looks like a menacing figure here; the image is disconcerting, and the memory of it becomes more so as the film proceeds.
There are a couple of reasons why it is so disquieting to see a blind person in an aggressor’s role in a film. The first is obvious: the condition seems to demand sympathy, concern or assistance. It is much more common, in thrillers or horror films, to see blind people being persecuted, sometimes to a point where it can become gratuitous or sadistic. A trio of endangered heroines come to mind: Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967), Raakhee in Barsaat ki ek Raat (1981), and Ida Lupino in Nicolas Ray’s under-watched film noir On Dangerous Ground (1951).
The second reason has to do with the nature of film-watching itself. We are seeing the images on the screen with our eyes, assessing and judging the characters, who are – most of the time – oblivious of our presence. This is why we can feel so exposed when a film unexpectedly breaks the Fourth Wall and has its characters looking straight at us, locking their eyes with ours. Conversely, when a sightless character is on the screen, we feel not just sympathy but also – perhaps on a subconscious level – a bit of relief, and a touch of superiority. They can’t see us. We are safe.
But the old man in Don’t Breathe allows us no such safety nets, as he moves swiftly through the labyrinths of his large house, the nooks and crannies of which he knows more intimately than the intruders. The inside of the house is very dimly lit, with some sections not lit at all, which means that the kids are effectively almost as blind as he is – and more disadvantaged in some ways, since his other senses have been heightened over time. Plus, he has had special forces training as an armyman, and the film makes the most of this. Watching him, I was reminded of Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, another initially sightless being who awakens from slumber and stalks his quarries through hallways and trapdoors. More improbably, I had a sudden memory flash of watching a film called Qatl in a movie hall three decades ago. In that one, Sanjeev Kumar played a blind man who carefully – and without any aid – plots the murder of his unfaithful wife, by rehearsing his movements for weeks beforehand. Qatl, as I realised when I rewatched bits of it on YouTube the other day, is a shoddy movie full of unintentionally funny scenes. But there was a special thrill in experiencing it as a child, and being mesmerised by the sound of the sightless protagonist’s cane tapping on the floor as he measures the distance to where he needs to be to get the perfect shot.
[Sai Paranjpye is receiving a lifetime achievement award at MAMI this year. I did this tribute for Scroll] ------------------------ Having just re-watched the two superb comedies Sai Paranjpye made in the early 1980s – films that count among my generation’s most treasured Doordarshan-era memories – I want to play devil’s advocate for a moment and ask: why do we not think of Katha and Chashme Buddoor as regressive or misogynistic?
That will seem a bizarre question to anyone who knows these films, and yes, this IS a purely speculative exercise – but I’m not being flippant. Such allegations are routinely (and often, carelessly) leveled at movies featuring morally ambiguous subject matter or characters who behave in less-than-exemplary ways. So why should beloved, nostalgia-evoking films be shielded from critical examination?
A memory jig: in Chashme Buddoor (1981), three bachelors-roommates get involved in different ways with the same woman. Neha (Deepti Naval) and the relatively seedha-saadha Sidharth (Farooque Shaikh) fall in love, but the antics of his Roadside-Romeo friends Jai (Ravi Baswani) and Omi (Rakesh Bedi) muddy the waters, and it takes a complicated scheme – combined with a climactic twist – to set things right. By the end, Jai and Omi have helped their friend mend his romance, but they continue to pursue women through south-central Delhi’s tree-lined boulevards, referring to them as “shikaar” (prey), and we are expected to see them as harmless clowns. (It helps that they are played by affable comic actors – one wispy like Stan Laurel, the other portly like Oliver Hardy – whom we can smile indulgently at; whom we don’t think of as “dangerous”.) In Katha the following year, Shaikh – now cast against type, but still recognizably the Farooque Shaikh we all love – plays Bashu, who charms his way through life, duping a population of chawl-dwellers including his upright friend Rajaram (Naseeruddin Shah) and a young woman named Sandhya (Naval again). Eventually he abandons Sandhya at the wedding mandap and flies off to Dubai, presumably to continue his conning and philandering; there is no hint of comeuppance.
Looking closer at the films, one finds that in Chashme Buddoor the ethics question is diluted by the sly meta-references sprinkled throughout the narrative. When Omi and Jai tell fabricated stories about their “conquests”, the three friends look straight at the camera and enter Flashback mode; Neha and Sidharth go from making digs at “unrealistic” song sequences in movies to accepting that maybe when you’re deeply in love you DO hear orchestras in parks and come up with rhyming lyrics for songs. This film isn’t just about its own plot, it is also a comment on tropes of commercial cinema – including the more dubious ones such as a dashing “hero” successfully “wooing” a demure young woman (mainstream stars Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha show up in guest roles to enact such a scene for us) by using methods that in most real-world contexts would be considered sexual harassment, or at least would be experienced as such by the woman. In this light, Omi and Jai can be seen as basically sweet boys who have over-dosed on cinema and need a sensitizing real-world experience.
Katha makes for a more intriguing case study. Despite being based on a well-known fable (the hare and the tortoise) and having elements of folk theatre in its staging, it is a more straightforward narrative. And so, even if you love the film, as I do, you might wonder a bit about its final act.
Some would say that Naval’s Sandhya is an educated, liberated young woman who makes her own choice about going to bed with the man she loves, but the scenes in question make it clear that her decision to have sex with Bashu is heavily based on the assurance that they are getting married, that the date is in fact fixed for just a few days away; some coercion is implied. Later, after being left groomless, when she says an initial no to Rajaram’s proposal, it isn’t because she was so much in love that she can’t get over Bashu or trade him for someone else; it is because she feels she is no longer “laayak” or worthy of Rajaram.
One is reminded that in this setting, even educated people have clear notions about women’s honour and chastity – and that in real-world India, the families of women exactly in Sandhya’s position frequently file rape charges against the men who have “cheated” them. This retrospective conversion of a consensual sexual act into rape is of course highly problematic for anyone with a liberal sensibility (among other things, it is closely linked to the notion that a wife is a husband’s sexual property – hence there can be no such thing as marital rape – and to the appalling court directives which prescribe that a woman marry her rapist so that her “honour” can be preserved), but such are the social realities of the chawl-dwellers depicted in the film. And given this, what does it say about Katha that the man who caused them so much emotional damage is simply allowed to get away in the end, a hare turning into a falcon and flying away? Or that he is played by one of Hindi cinema’s warmest, most likable personalities? Doesn’t the very casting of Shaikh amount to a covert indulgence of Bashu’s actions?
******
There are different ways of answering these questions – the least convincing, and most patronizing, of which would be to say that Paranjpye is a woman director (and a sophisticated one), so we should just trust her intentions and place ourselves in her hands. A better way would be to look at the special qualities of her work that come through so well in these two lighthearted films, full of quirky little touches but also emotionally mature, generous and understanding of people. To watch a Paranjpye film is to see – from the very first frames and sounds – a host of cultural influences playing off each other in delightful ways. There are unusual juxtapositions: wall-pictures of Serious Men like Gandhi, Vivekanand and Bertrand Russell get wide-eyed when pin-ups of confident-looking models in bikinis take up residence on the adjacent wall; the use of classical Indian music and credit titles chastely presented in the Devanagari script (a rarity for Hindi films of the time, even the ones that were targeted mainly at non-English-speaking audiences) go hand in hand with an urbane, cosmopolitan sensibility.
There are subdued moments involving deeply felt emotion, but there is humour and fantasy too: see Rajaram’s nightmare about being “Adam-teased” by the apple-bearing Eves from his office, then being rescued by the jhaadu-brandishing Sandhya. (Does this imply that he needs a devi-figure to protect and nurture him, an ayah who can keep his house clean, or a combination of the two? You decide.) Or look at the impish, knowing presence of Paranjpye’s real-life daughter Winnie in Katha and in a small part in Chashme Buddoor (where her act of sprinting off to greet a boyfriend and leaping joyously into his arms – after having accepted a lift from a “shikaar”-hunter– works both as an act of confident self-assertion and as a lovely, non-sequiturish touch of the sort that populates this cinema).
These varying tones – and the resultant difficulties in slotting a Paranjpye film – are also reminders, once the narrative begins, of the many contradictory impulses acting on both women and men in a society that is orthodox in some ways, downright regressive in others, and forward-looking in others. I can’t think of many other Hindi movies that capture the friction of these opposing forces as astutely – and with as much lightness of touch – as these two comedies do.
Repeatedly these films show the many facets of people and how they might behave differently given specific pressures or challenges. The lonely trophy wife played by Mallika Sarabhai in Katha can be seductress, or prisoner, or both at once. During her most vulnerable moments in that climactic scene, Sandhya may be close to the stereotype of the “abla” woman, but she is also capable of taking her future in her hands and switching the power equations around by being upfront with Rajaram (when she didn’t really have to be) – the staging and the performances ensure that our final takeaway from the scene is not that she is a helpless victim but that she is strong enough to deal with what has happened.
In this world, both rogues and simpletons can have hidden depths: Rajaram may be the most adarsh-vaadi of Gandhian heroes, but watch him smiling indulgently when Bashu plays a phone-trick in the restaurant to squirm out of paying the bill. In this and in other early scenes, he is implicated in Bashu’s smaller misdeeds, and he must consequently bear some responsibility for the larger ones that follow. But equally, the rogue’s actions can open a doorway to self-discovery for the simpleton. Rajaram is clearly a more mature, less rigid person at the end of Katha; the ending as a whole becomes a little easier to digest when you think of Bashu as a Krishna-like figure, using unsavoury means to reach a desired end (decades before Akshay Kumar in OMG – Oh My God!, here is a smug interloper who twirls his key-ring like a sudarshan chakra).
When we speak of the Middle Cinema of the 70s and 80s, we tend to lapse into language about “simpler”, more “innocent” times. Nowhere is this dewy-eyed naiveté about the past more shown up than while watching something like Chashme Buddoor, which IS such a charming, innocent-seeming film, but is also full of references to girls in an unsafe city being picked up by hoodlums like crows picking up paapad – or Katha, with its laments about how the sachaai ka zamaana is long gone and crooked people always stay ahead of truth-tellers. One of Paranjpye’s achievements is that she manages to be warm and affirmative at the level of individual stories even while keeping this larger picture, and the many dangers of the world, in the frame. In one emblematic image in Chashme Buddoor, the heroine walks along the road, humming to herself, swinging her bag unselfconsciously, barely aware of what is going on around her – it is a bracing sight, since this is not how young women of her background are conditioned to be like in public – but we also see the men walking or cycling past stop to look at her, and wonder what might be going on in their minds. Paranjpye doesn’t underline the moment, she lets us register it and moves on.
Among the many wonderful touches in these films that feel like they were thought up on the set rather than carefully scripted beforehand, there is one where Jojo, played by Paranjpye’s real-life daughter, shows Bashu a photo of her dead mother – “Yeh thi meri asli maa” – and the garlanded picture is that of Sai Paranpye, looking stern. “She was a terror!” Winnie says with some feeling. That’s hard to believe if you were to imagine the person by the films she made, so sharp and clear-sighted, but so gentle and funny too.
Readers gravitate to certain types of books depending on what they are experiencing in their lives at a given point, what the old mood is like, and what they need to prioritize – escapism, profundity or some unknowable mix of both. But at times it can feel like certain books are seeking you out, pressing for your attention. In the past three years I have spent a lot of time as a caregiver in hospitals and at home, handling medical situations for family members. Two months ago, even as things escalated dramatically, the online catalogues I received from publishers seemed suddenly full of books involving either healthcare at a macro-level or intimate narratives about living with illness. The connections got spooky at times. Just a week after my mother was diagnosed with metastatic cancer that had spread from the breast to the bones and other places, I received a copy of the Jerry Pinto-edited anthology A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind, opened the contents page and found my eye alighting on the title of the third story, “My Mother’s Breast”, by Amandeep Sandhu. Then, a day after my mother had a surgical procedure to repair a crack in the spine – the source of the crippling back pain that had belatedly alerted us to the cancer – I waded through a stack of books at home and found my hand on a dust-covered copy of Aarathi Prasad’s In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine.
One could call this coincidence, or say that my antennae were tuned to seek out this kind of literature. However, it is also true that the Medicine and Healthcare category has seen a lot of publishing activity in recent times. Among the most popular of these books – capacious, informative but geared to the general reader – are the works of the surgeon-cum-writer Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and The Checklist Manifesto being the most recent) and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-winning history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. And there are other, lower-profile publications, not as ambitious in terms of prose or narrative structure, but still worthy and important.
Among these is Dissenting Diagnosis: Voices of Conscience from the Medical Profession, co-authored by the doctors Arun Gadre and Abhay Shukla as an expose of malpractices in private healthcare. Unsurprisingly, I learnt of its existence around the time I was making umpteen visits to a corporate hospital, grappling with the spirit-sapping demons of apathy, inefficiency and profit-mindedness, as well as the demands of having to be in many different places at once. The book became a companion during subsequent hospital stints, and I was tempted to wave it about each time a senior doctor passed by.
This is a neatly organized primer to issues that are seriously undermining the Hippocratic Oath and the view of medicine as an innately noble profession. These include the nexus between pharmaceutical companies and corporate hospitals (or senior doctors), the lack of transparency and accountability in the private sector, and the self-perpetuating system of commissions or “cuts” by which doctors and companies often profit at a patient’s expense. The book draws on the testimonies of nearly eighty doctors (around half of them agreed to have their names published) who were troubled about the flaws in the system. If you have spent a lot of time in hospitals, chances are you will identify with some of the anecdotes included here; if you haven’t, you might be aghast but you’ll also be better prepared to deal with a medical emergency when it does crop up. Given that most of us in such situations are under pressure to act in haste – and not always in a position to think calmly – it is useful to have read something like this beforehand. While Dissenting Diagnosis deals mainly with modern practices – rooted in the germ theory of medicine and endorsed by internationally approved scientific benchmarks – Prasad’s In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room takes a more wide-ranging look at the many avatars of healthcare in India. This includes a clear-eyed, occasionally sceptical but mostly open-minded examination of alternate therapies that fall under the collective term AYUSH (an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy): treatments that most corporate hospitals would have little truck with, but which people disillusioned by exorbitant medical practices often turn to, if only to supplement Western medicine.
Prasad’s travels (this book is also a journey of discovery for someone who is of Indian ancestry but doesn’t live in the country) took her, among other places, to the Bathini Goud family in Secunderabad – practitioners of a mystical but hugely popular form of therapy that involves the ingesting of live fish whose mouths have been stuffed with herbal medicine. Here and elsewhere, the author – a biologist by profession – brings a good journalist’s seriousness to her material, even as she speculates about the usefulness of esoteric treatments: do these methods work in the same way that placebos do, with good faith and optimism as driving factors, or are there real, measurable benefits that have eluded the grasp of Western medicine?
Throughout these essays, Prasad provides a sense of her own dual value systems, as someone who has been trained in modern medicine but has also – through the influence of family and friends – stayed open to other forms of healing. This commingling of the personal with the general gives a special texture to many such books, even a work as mammoth as Siddhartha Mukherjee’s latest, The Gene: An Intimate History. Though this is nothing less than a history-cum-biography of the gene, which has so advanced our understanding of the building blocks of life, Mukherjee begins his narrative with a very personal story about mental illness in his family and his resultant obsession with genetic legacies and perils.
Which brings me back to the anthology A Book of Light. Amandeep Sandhu’s piece about his mother’s breast cancer was a reminder that even when the specifics of a case vary, many things about the daily business of caregiving are despairingly familiar. Sandhu was more intimately involved with his mother’s care on an hour-by-hour basis than I (so far) have been, but I could relate to some of the mundane details, such as the business of coping with bathroom flushes that don’t work on full pressure, or a patient’s embarrassment that can soon yield to stoicism.
Other moving pieces in this book include Nirupama Dutt’s “Mothers and Daughters” (the full scope of which is only just about captured by that simple title) and Sharmila Joshi’s poignant “The Man Under the Staircase” about a dimly remembered uncle who, because of mental illness, was confined to a secluded spot under the house’s stairway. The story’s end is heartbreaking: no photo remains of her unfortunate uncle, Joshi tells us, only her own fragmented memories and a drawing he did for her long ago – a sole indicator that he existed and had an inner life, even if it is one that most of us wouldn’t be able to identify with. If there is a single thread running through all these books, it would be empathy – both for the ailing and for the “normal” or “healthy” people who care for them. [Some other ForbesLife columns are here. And here's a detailed review of Dissenting Diagnosis]
Ever since I watched Clint Eastwood’s Sully – about the aftermath of the successful landing of a damaged commercial aircraft on the Hudson river in January 2009 – I have been thinking about the film’s last shot, or, to be more exact, its closing seconds. Captain Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and First Officer Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) have just been cleared of allegations of pilot error at a public hearing; the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has acknowledged that “Sully” did the only pragmatic thing he could have done under the circumstances. The air in a crowded, once-adversarial room is starting to clear, hard talk is replaced by banter. Is there anything you would have done differently that day, someone conversationally asks the First Officer, and the square-jawed Skiles replies, “I would’ve done it in July.” The little joke lightens the tension and makes everyone smile. And just like that, the screen fades to black.
What an extraordinary decision it was to close the film like this. If the term in medias res describes a beginning that doesn’t quite feel like a beginning – an opening paragraph or scene where the reader or viewer has the unsettling impression of being parachute-dropped right in the middle of the story, not having been allowed to settle in – here is an example of an ending that has a comparable effect. At first, when the closing credits began, I was taken aback. Conditioned by years of film-watching, I had been expecting at least a musical cue of some sort.
But then I realized what an apt, unfussy finish this was to a film about a self-effacing professional who had simply done his job – never losing sight of the fact that he had to “fly the plane” – in an extraordinary situation, and is now dazed by all the attention coming his way. It is as if the film is adopting Sullenberger’s own work ethic, telling its viewer: okay, that’s it, we have nothing more to show you, so let’s just sign off with this little quip – much the same way a pilot, after executing a routine landing, might say a quick parting line to the air-traffic-controller he has been communicating with.
In the light of recent revelations about Sully, though, I have been thinking again about that closing scene, and about the film’s determinedly low-key tone.
In debates about cinematic licence in the depiction of real-world events, it is usually accepted that a commercial feature film dramatizes reality, to some degree or another. But this can mean many things. In some cases (and this may sound counterintuitive), “dramatize” is a synonym for “simplify”: streamlining the messy randomness of real life – the many intersecting mini-dramas that are so hard to keep track of – into a more predictable and easy-to-digest narrative. (What was that again about some truths being stranger than fiction?)
Some films stray so far from their source events that they are, for all intents and purposes, fictional – and this is usually not a problem if they carry a “loosely based on” disclaimer. Others are attentive to the main facts but condense timelines or expand the big moments, greatly varying their tone in the process: Argo, about the rescue of American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, was a subdued film for the most part, but the climax played almost like a breathless video game, the plane carrying the evacuees taking off with seconds to spare (after the ground authorities realized what was going on and deployed ground vehicles to pursue the big bird as it taxied down the runway). Sometimes, real-life figures are glamorized (or two characters are reshaped into one) so that they dovetail with the screen persona, or the acting strengths, of the star playing the part: see Rani Mukherji as the spirited reporter investigating the Jessica Lall murder case in No One Killed Jessica, or Akshay Kumar as the self-centred businessman who, almost in spite of himself, becomes a saviour in Airlift. And in mainstream Hindi cinema, we are used to biopics that, even when filmed with integrity and seriousness, make concessions to popular taste. When Priyanka Chopra is cast as the Manipuri boxer Mary Kom in a high-profile film, or when Farhan Akhtar plays Milkha Singh, looking buffer than the original, the informed viewer understands that a certain compromise is involved (even if the performances in themselves are fine, and even if we agree that an alien freshly arrived on earth with no background information on Kom or Milkha, and no preconceptions about Priyanka or Farhan, would find the acting persuasive).
In most such cases the embellishment is obvious. If confronted with errors or factual inaccuracies, a fan of the film might say “Arre, film thi, documentary nahin – thoda toh drama daalna hee tha.” But what when dramatization (or simplification) occurs in a place where you don’t expect it to occur, and somehow goes hand in hand with extreme austerity of form? What when a film from another cinematic culture – a culture more associated with understatement – is very restrained in tone, but still has a hidden, narrative-fixing agenda?
Back to Sully, which is, after all, a story about a very unassuming real-life hero. In the film, Sullenberger seems as taciturn and undemonstrative as some of the cowboy-loners Eastwood played half a century ago. (With some minor differences, of course: it’s hard to picture the Man with No Name from the Dollars Trilogy smiling bashfully on the David Letterman Show!) “Yes, I know it’s a strange thing to land a plane in a river, but do we have to fuss so much about it?” you can imagine him thinking. “Can I get back to my life now?” You watch on, marveling at how it’s possible to make such a quiet film about such a high-octane real-life event. If such a story were to be dramatized to get an audience’s adrenaline flowing, you’d reason it would be during the flight scenes. And when those turn out to be muted, it becomes easy to feel that here is a genuinely “realistic” film about a real-life incident.
Then, a while later, you learn about the facts of the case. About how the actual NTSB hearing was pure procedure – appropriate procedure, given the stakes involved – and not a case of a pilot being hounded by crafty prosecutors (there seems little argument about this: the real-life Sullenberger has been on record about the matter in interviews). And now, with hindsight, you realize that there was something pat and simplistic about those scenes, a subtle attempt to create antagonists for us to root against, so that the hero in turn becomes even more sympathetic; to manipulate the natural human tendency to plumb for individual heroes over large, rule-enforcing organisations.
I should stress that this has only slightly dampened my appreciation of Sully – I still hold the film in high regard (and as discussed in an earlier column, I don’t easily forego my first-time viewing impressions). But it did create pause for thought, and a reassessment of what “dramatic” means. Now, even that closing scene – which I admired so much – has begun to feel a tiny bit manipulative, as if a director with something to hide was trying hard to create the impression that his film was pure slice of life with no flourishes, no extra toppings. [Another post with related thoughts: Manjhi the Mountain Man]
[Did a shorter version of this review for Cricinfo]
To begin with an admission that will seem astounding to regular readers of this site: I was more stirred by the opening scene of M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, set at the Wankhede Stadium during the 2011 World Cup final, than I had been by the actual match five years earlier.
The main reason for this is that my love affair with cricket ended a decade ago, occasioned partly by Tendulkar’s decline, partly by the ugly, fair-weather displays of nationalism-jingoism associated with the sport (one example being the crowd assault on Dhoni’s Ranchi house after the 2007 World Cup failure). Besides, even when I was a compulsive cricket fan, I was more into individual players than teams, and not patriotically invested in India’s victories. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I was one of the very few people in the country who didn’t much care when Dhoni, the real Dhoni, hit that winning six on April 2, 2011. And so, I was unprepared for my reaction – the adrenaline rush, the growing anticipation – when I saw Sushant Singh Rajput as Dhoni in the dressing room, deciding he will go in at number five, then padding up and heading out into the deafening arena. Call it the power of a tense, tightly constructed scene that uses camerawork, space and sound effectively or a sudden burst of nostalgia for a once-adored sport.
In other words, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story begins on a rabble-rousing note. But after this World Cup scene (which Neeraj Pandey’s film will of course return to at the end), the narrative back-tracks to a quiet afternoon in July 1981 and MSD’s birth in a Ranchi hospital ward as his father Paan Singh Dhoni (Anupam Kher), a hardworking lower-middle-class man, waits nervously outside. A series of well-constructed vignettes follow: the child Mahi being coerced by a coach to leave football for cricket and take up wicket-keeping (though he prefers batting); the support of his friends as it becomes evident that he has special talent and drive; the misgivings of his father, who has sensibly conservative ideas about what constitutes a secure future; repeated frustrations followed by a job in the Railways and the possibility of Mahendra becoming a “bada aadmi” in this profession (“Ticket-collector se badi cheez kya ho sakti hai?” as Paan Singh puts it).
Rajput starts playing Dhoni from age 16 onwards, and these early scenes have a slightly off-kilter quality – like the actor’s head has been digitally superimposed on a slim teen body – but that doesn’t matter after a while, because this is a fine performance. He captures not just Dhoni’s boyish exuberance and the enigmatic smile that stops just short of being cocky, but also something of the placid, Buddha-like inscrutability that emerges in moments of stress; a sense that he is calling on inner reserves only he knows about. This is a convincing portrait of a young man who can be impetuous but is also grounded enough to buy snacks for his friends as a sort of “celebration” after not being selected for a team – because he never wants to forget this day of failure (and, by implication, because such a day is what will bring him nearer to his eventual goal).
The film’s first half, with its depiction of the rhythms of small-town life, is a reminder that director Pandey has a feel for place and period (see his recreation of 1980s Delhi in the con-job film Special 26). There are many engaging little moments such as an early encounter, in a Bihar-Punjab match, between Dhoni and his future teammate Yuvraj Singh (played here by Herri Tangri as a regal kid whose very presence leaves most people awestruck). The cricket scenes are shot with panache and wit, even when they centre on a deadpan hero. Meanwhile, the stage also gradually shifts to show us officials in the sport’s higher echelons in Mumbai and Delhi, pulling strings and deciding the fate of thousands of struggling youngsters around the country.
In the second half, a tonal unevenness sets in, and to a degree this is understandable given the arc of MSD’s life. It seemed natural that the early scenes would have the texture of a gritty, understated small-town story about aspiration, the sort that Hindi cinema often does so well now (in another such film, the 2013 Kai Po Che!, Rajput played a character whose cricketing dreams don’t pan out). But once Dhoni gets his chance in the Indian team, he rises to stardom fairly quickly, and as more glamorous locations take over – plush hotel rooms, advertising studios where he says cheesy lines while endorsing a range of products – the film’s look and pace alters as well; it becomes glossier, more languid. In one scene a gaping old-time acquaintance visits him in one of those swanky hotel rooms and hesitantly tells him while leaving that the woman who showed him in should have been more decently dressed – here is a view of two Indias in opposition, and of a young man who crossed the wobbling bridge.
The real problem is that around this time, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story also becomes slacker, more random, and whimsical in its decisions about what to show and what to leave out (there isn’t even a scene that shows the circumstances that led to MSD becoming captain) – and when this happens, one recalls that this is largely an “authorized” project, with the real-life Dhoni and his associates having been consulted and kept abreast of the script. There are also two romantic interludes – first with a girl named Priyanka (Disha Patani), who dies in a car accident, then with the cricket-indifferent Sakshi (Kiara Advani) who becomes Dhoni’s wife – that feel much too generic given how this film has so far unfolded. This section includes an exotic-location song sequence, superfluous flashback inserts, and embarrassingly forced attempts to generate pathos (wondering about their future together, Priyanka dolefully repeats the line “Bahut time hai naa hamaaray paas?” as if she were aware of her impending fate). Briefly glimpsed in these scenes is the suggestion that a man who is so assertive as batsman and captain might be defensive-passive when it comes to relationships, but the film doesn’t take this idea anywhere. The two-woman trope is handled better than the one in the recent, utterly lackluster Mohammed Azharuddin biopic Azhar, but that isn’t saying much. (The goofy climactic scene of that movie had the “wronged” Azhar being vindicated when his two wives walk into the courtroom side by side to support him and provide the ultimate character certificate!)
These sequences notwithstanding, the film builds unerringly towards that World Cup win, which is presented here as the culmination of a remarkable career (never mind that real-life sport doesn’t usually provide such tidy or definitive endings – MSD did, after all, also captain India in its 2015 loss, but there isn’t space here for such troughs). Ending with real footage of the post-match celebrations is a guaranteed way of having the audience out of their seats and applauding; as mentioned above, I was one of those viewers. And yet, in the final analysis, I thought the film worked best when it did the small moment well. In one notable scene, a subdued MSD explains why he is so frustrated by his railway job – not because he considers it below him (“Kaam chhota nahin lagta,” he says), but because it doesn’t allow him to give cricket enough time and attention. This nuanced scene comes as a refreshing counterpoint to a shoe-polish ad that the real Dhoni did a long time ago, where he turned to the camera and said, “I decided not to be ordinary. I chose to shine.” A good, smooth line for the product, but also one that condescendingly implied that people in some professions can be dismissed as “ordinary” and that real winners can simply choose to reach the very top through hard work and perseverance.
M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story is a bumpy film, very stimulating in its good parts, oddly inert at other times, but in its better moments – like that “Kaam chhota nahin lagta” scene – it ducks the grand, overarching narratives and gives us a ground-level story about a young man following a calling with the knowledge that things might not work out perfectly, but that he has to at least give it a shot, he can’t die wondering. That’s a compelling tale in itself, and a more inspirational one in some ways than the one hinted at in the film’s more triumphal scenes – the ones about a blazing star who was so good and so determined that he was destined to reach the top no matter what, and who might well have had that World Cup-winning six inscribed on his horoscope chart.
-------------------------------- [Some old cricket-related posts are here, including this one about my obsession with the sport between 1996 and 2006]
