How “supernatural” is M Night Shyamalan’s new film? And what links it with his best work, Unbreakable?

[I have a weird admission to make about M Night Shyamalan. I avoided seeing his last few films after most of them were savaged by critics, NOT because I had been put off by the bad reviews, but because of a form of anticipatory Writer’s Fatigue: I was worried (given my complicated relationship with Shyamalan’s early work) that I would end up liking those films, or at least being stimulated by them on some level; and then driven to write long pieces standing up for them, nitpicking, pointing out little things that I felt other reviewers had missed. That sort of passionate-defensive-semi-apologetic writing can take up a lot of your time and mental energy, especially when no one is paying you to do it.

And people tell me I over-think things. I wonder why. Anyway, here is a piece about his new film, which I did for Daily O. Minor spoilers in it for both Split and Unbreakable – though nothing that should prevent you from enjoying the films]

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M Night Shyamalan’s Split – about a man with multiple-personality disorder, the three young girls he kidnaps, and a psychiatrist who tries to figure things out – is being seen in many quarters as a part-return to form for a director whose work in the last decade has mostly been savaged by critics. I enjoyed Split a lot too, even though it has some of the weaknesses – plot loopholes, unrealized ideas, ponderous staging of dramatic moments – that one has come to associate with MNS’s cinema over the years. But then, the Good Shyamalan vs Bad Shyamalan game doesn’t much interest me anyway: I peg him as a director who can do provocative things even in a film that doesn’t work overall; someone whose “failures” can be more worthy of movie-nerd discussion than the “successes” of some other filmmakers.

Besides, my feelings about his work tend to change. After first viewing his 2004 The Village – about a community that cuts itself off from the rest of the world by retreating into a forest setting and constructing scary stories that will prevent its youngsters from wanting to explore the unknown – I came out fuming about the film’s inert pace, stodgy dialogue and performances. Re-watching it on TV recently, I found myself more willing to overlook those things, more absorbed by the theme of well-meaning, deeply sensitive people building walls around themselves – and also by how certain attitudes shown by these “old-time” folk contain echoes of the culture Shyamalan’s family hails from. (Watching some scenes, I thought about poor or under-educated people in India who are still afraid of injections, and generally sceptical of modern medicine.)

Returning to Split, this film belongs to a subgenre that includes Brian DePalma’s underappreciated Raising Cain, in which John Lithgow played multiple personalities housed in the same body – the most intriguing of which, a woman (is she a threat or a maternal protector? You might not be able to decide even after watching the film), appears late in the narrative. Or the 2003 Identity, which is an even more complex affair (and I won’t spoil it here).

However, Split is also very much a Shyamalan film, a product of his distinctive mindscape, and this becomes clearer in its final scenes. As the main narrative winds up, a lush, previously unheard soundtrack begins; it took me all of three seconds to recognize it as James Newton Howard’s score for my favourite Shyamalan work, the 2000 Unbreakable. I didn’t read much into this at first, figuring that the director was recycling an old tune for dramatic impact. But then, the very last shot made an explicit connection between the world of Split and the world of Unbreakable. It isn’t a dramatic “twist” of the sort one associates with Shyamalan (the sort that led him to joke on Twitter that he had scripted the crazy ending to this year’s Oscar ceremony), but it opens a tantalizing possibility about ideas he may explore in his future work.

Both Unbreakable and Split are, in different ways, about the birth of a super-villain, yet they almost feel like tongue-in-cheek ripostes to the Marvel and DC movie franchises; their origin myths play out in relatively mundane ways. In Unbreakable, the tormented Elijah (Samuel L Jackson), born with the rare condition of excessively brittle bones, unleashes large-scale destruction in a quest to find his exact opposite: someone who would, by implication, be indestructible. But though Elijah is steeped in a world of comic-book mythologies, he doesn’t have any unearthly powers himself. (You don’t have to be superhuman to do a lot of evil.)

In Split, the protagonist Kevin (marvelously played by James McAvoy in what is easily the best lead performance in a Shyamalan film) has 23 people inside him, who take turns to “come into the light”, or to become the active personality. None of the personalities we meet, not even the one who kidnaps the three girls, seems terribly menacing, and a couple of them – the nine-year-old Hedwig, for instance – are sweet and vulnerable. But as the story progresses, we learn of the possible surfacing of a malevolent 24th personality, The Beast, who is stronger than the others, and feeds on human flesh.

Despite that plot summary, little in this narrative can be considered outright fantastical. In fact, one thing that Unbreakable and Split have in common – which makes it easier to see them as part of the same fictional universe – is that they are among the Shyamalan films which don’t pivot around explicitly supernatural plot points; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that where paranormal or otherworldly elements do exist, there is some ambiguity involved. In this way, they are different from The Sixth Sense (which is definitely about ghosts), or Signs (which has bulbous green aliens), or Lady in the Water (a water nymph from a mysterious Blue World, plus the even more bizarre notion that a contemporary American president could be goaded into positive action by the work of a mere writer!).

The scenes involving The Beast are the ones where Split seems to take an unavoidable step towards the supernatural: after all, if this new creature requires an actual physical transformation in Kevin’s body, we should be at least in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde territory. But simultaneously, in scenes featuring the psychiatrist, Dr Fletcher, the film has been discussing the many undocumented mysteries of the human brain – including the possibility that the mind can, to a degree, overcome the limitations of the flesh. A woman might have two personalities, one of whom is blind and the other sighted. Another patient might write unrelated things simultaneously with his right and left hand, producing two completely different handwritings.

In these scenes, Split reminded me of the case studies in the writings of such neurologists as Oliver Sacks and VG Ramachandran, about astonishing real-life situations where the human mind and body worked in ways that many of us would find hard to fathom. Cases of phantom pregnancies, for instance, where a psychological condition can lead to crucial changes in the body’s endocrine system, mimicking the symptoms of pregnancy even when there is no baby. (For more on this, read the essay “You Forgot to Deliver the Twin!” in Ramachandran’s book Phantoms in the Brain.)

Notably, when The Beast IS introduced late in Split, the film stays more low-key than we might have expected it to, and chooses to be ambiguous about the extent of his powers. We have already been told that he will be more muscular than Kevin normally is, quicker, more agile – all of which is true. Yet the alteration isn’t anywhere close to being as dramatic as, say, that of Bruce Banner into The Hulk. For nearly every scene where we see the Beast do something extraordinary, it is possible to ask: well, okay, but couldn’t the real Kevin have done that much with just a few hormonal or neurological tweaks?

None of this is to assert that Split would be seen as a plausible film by peer-tested science. Some of the ideas presented in the Dr Fletcher scenes are almost certainly pseudo-scientific hokum, used purely for narrative purposes. But it is also true that there is much yet to be discovered in the fascinating field of neuroscience and human psychology; the surprises that lie ahead might remind us of the Arthur C Clarke observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The point is that by using this framework for his super-villain tale, Shyamalan has made a film that appears mellower, more grounded, than The Sixth Sense or Signs, but still has some very unsettling currents flowing beneath its surface. Split invites a viewer to wonder about the line between what we label “rational” and “mystical”, and Shyamalan is often most effective as a storyteller when examining this divide without coming down heavily on one or the other side.

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[An old post about Unbreakable is here. And here’s a 2004 post about The Village, where I wrote, “I can think of not a single good thing to say about this film”… and then, in the very next sentence, contradicted myself by mentioning a tracking shot I had found very beautiful]

Tales from the crypt: on George Saunders’s brilliant Lincoln in the Bardo

[A review of one of the best novels I have read in a while – did this for Scroll]

In his fine monograph Angels and Ages, Adam Gopnik built a thesis about liberal thought and expression by drawing on the connections between Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, two epoch-defining figures who were born a few hours (and an ocean) apart on February 12, 1809. Among other things that linked them, each man lost a favourite child: Darwin’s daughter Annie died aged 10 of tuberculosis; a decade later, Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie succumbed to a form of typhoid.

It is sometimes thought, Gopnik says, that because child deaths were so much more common in the 19th century, parents of the time “felt them less, or differently, than we might think – or made less of a fetish of them”. However, he makes the opposite proposition. “If anything, the grief was deeper, because their shock was less. There was no surprise to buffer it, no sense of a million-to-one shot to place it in the realm of things that never happen. It was […] the one thing you had always actively dreaded.” And he points to the many reports of Lincoln’s immeasurable sorrow, at a time when one would think the President had enough to distract his mind (the Civil War was underway, he was the target of much nationwide hostility).

One of the more affecting details in those reports – the fact that Lincoln would visit the cemetery alone at night to hold his son’s embalmed body – is the foundation of George Saunders’s fabulous, and fabulously hard to classify, new novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

A brief plot summary: young Willie Lincoln dies, and is interred in a Georgetown crypt. As the narrative begins, he finds himself in a bardo (the word never occurs in the book itself, only in the title), an intermediate place populated by ghosts – or souls, or spirits, pick your word. Its occupants, who are active only during the nighttime, don’t know they are dead (some of them may have dimly suspected this, but they have suppressed the thought) – as far as they are concerned, they are temporarily in “sick-boxes”, waiting to get well and be returned to their former existence, where their loved ones patiently wait.

But when the new arrival’s father, the President himself, penetrates this darkness, it shakes up their sepulchral after-lives (this is something new – the people from “that previous place” don’t open vaults and touch “sick-forms”). Some of the ghosts now attempt to help the confused and lonely Willie, and to communicate – in whatever way possible – with the strange, comically lanky but very magnetic man who is visiting their terrain. In the process they understand new things about their own situation, and deal with it (or don’t deal with it) in different ways.

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Critics tend to over-use the word “extraordinary” while describing a book of the moment. I’m happy to fall back on it for Lincoln in the Bardo, not just to indicate its quality and emotional impact but also the apparent ease with which it breaks away from regular storytelling forms. The novel has undergone so much experimentation, in so many directions, over the past few decades (to cite some high-profile contemporary writers, look at the work of David Mitchell or Zadie Smith), that it’s risky to call a new book the “first” in any sort of narrative – but Saunders’s work has as good a claim as any other. A label like “historical fantasy”, while broadly accurate, doesn’t begin to scratch its surface; at the very least, you’d have to add a few further descriptors. (“Absurdist-philosophical, pseudo-journalistic, interior-monologue narrative poem”?)

Reading it, images and passages from other stories kept running through my mind: the great Michael Powell film A Matter of Life or Death, in which a brain surgery being conducted on earth runs alongside a grand celestial trial (real or imagined?) where nothing less than the meaning of civilization is debated; or Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (recently adapted into a multi-illustrator graphic novel), in which a living infant is nurtured by supernatural creatures. But ultimately, Lincoln in the Bardo is a one-of-its-kind.

For one thing, it moves fluidly from the profound to the flippant, and in ways that remind us that the two things aren’t mutually exclusive: when a cemetery watchman offers an amusing description of Lincoln on his mount (“…his legs are quite long and his horse quite short so it appeared some sort of man-sized insect had attached itself to that poor unfortunate nag who freed of his burden stood there tired and hangdog and panting as if thinking I will have quite the story to tell the other horsies upon my return …”), it doesn’t detract from the pathos of the situation.

For another, it merges fantasy – often grotesque, profane, scatological fantasy – with straight-faced reportage. Saunders alternates between his invented otherworldly tale – much of which comes to us in the fascinating voices of two bardo-dwellers, Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, who are longtime companions – and fragments from actual news reports, letters and the vast literature about Abraham Lincoln: his presidency, the war, his bereavement, the many perceptions of him during his lifetime.

Some short chapters entirely consist of such fragments, and yet the book never seems derivative, because it carefully uses those sources to build its own distinctive structure and mood, or to create a sense of urgency. There are also contradictions in some of the historical literature quoted, which is fitting given that this story is partly about the vastness of human experience and the unreliability of our perspectives. In one chapter, made up of real, effusive accounts of the state dinner hosted by the Lincolns on the night that Willie fell very ill, one report says that a bright golden full moon shone in the sky; another describes “a fat green crescent”; yet another says it was “a silver wedge”; we are also told that there was no moon at all. Similar anomalies occur in a brilliant chapter containing descriptions of Lincoln’s face and eyes.

In the fictional sections, I particularly liked how the bardo’s inhabitants adopt forms and shapes that reflect their personalities, attachments, or states of mind at the time of death. Bevins III, a suicide who had in his dying moments regretted his act and become aware of the world’s many sensory wonders, now has numerous sets of eyes, noses and hands (with bloody slashes on all the wrists), and can’t keep extravagant descriptions out of his speech. Vollman, who was felled by a ceiling beam as he was anticipating the consummation of his marriage later that night, has a dent in his head but is also naked with a huge swollen penis. A woman who died during a surgery and is worried about her three daughters is surrounded by three gelatinous orbs that alternate between painfully crushing her and abandoning her (which causes even more torment). A landowner fretting about his many properties floats about horizontally, his head facing in the direction of this or that estate.

While this is a fantasy-adventure populated by shape-shifting creatures, it is also a story about the many things we take for granted, our disregard for our own worth and how our lives intersect with those of others. A reader might at first feel pity or revulsion for the restless spirits “trapped” in the bardo, but to experience this book fully is to be reminded that regular existence too – the cycle of birth and death, being confined to our physical bodies, vulnerable to ailments, emotions and self-deceptions – can feel like a trap. The bardo-dwellers are very much like us in many ways: like them, we defensively construct stories for ourselves, repeat the same things endlessly in conversations, play out our essential natures over and over, have no real sense of the passage of time.

Saunders has done a strange and wonderful thing: apart from blurring the line between the (in any case misleading) categories “literary” and “genre” – or “realistic” and “outlandish” – he has created a novel of ideas where the ideas are often spelled right out but the effect isn’t heavy-handed, because this premise and framework seem to require it. Multiple narrators speak to each other and to us, probing, reflecting, trying to make sense of things (picture M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense told through the accounts of the many bemused ghosts who don’t know they are dead). Gradually, these Greek chorus-like voices come to seem like components of a single shared consciousness. And amidst all this, we get Abe Lincoln’s agonized musings filtered through the spirits who enter him in turn and relay his words to us. Here is someone responsible for so many lives (and so many deaths), now petrified by his own grief; but ultimately the grief also serves as a catalyst, enabling him to see more clearly.

In these passages, the book cleverly literalizes the idea that a conscientious state leader must contain multitudes, must accommodate the perspectives and whims of a variety of people, cutting through the cacophony of voices in his head, streamlining confused thoughts into a series of decisions that may, possibly, bring about the greatest possible good in the long run.

But perhaps part of the point is that you don’t have to be an American president to face such conundrums; we are all leaders in our own lives. As Lincoln in the Bardo draws to a close, there is a powerful scene where the over-descriptive Bevins narrates a list of experiences, from the mundane to the very special, from “milk-sip at end of day” to “the way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars” to “someone noticing that you are not at all at ease”, all of which add up in countless ways to make us what we are; and then ends his monologue by saying:

None of it was real; nothing was real.

Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.

These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and in this way, brought them forth.

And now must lose them.

Taken as a whole, the passage is as pure a summing up of life’s wonders and prisons (and prisons-disguised-as-wonders, as well as wonders-disguised-as-prisons) as you’ll find in fiction. And it comes in a book that is funny, fresh and imaginative, a story about a president in a moment of private and public crisis (if “bardo” means a nowhere-land where one is uncertain of the way forward, the book’s title has an obvious double meaning), but also about all of us, perched on the junction between flesh and spirit, trying to balance the limitations of one with the possibilities of the other.

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[An older post about Angels and Ages - with the emphasis on Charles Darwin - is here]

“All that remains are images, and a reminder to preserve them” – notes from the BD Garga cinema exhibition

[Did this for Mint Lounge]

During a 1957 trip to Moscow, the film critic and historian Bhagwan Das Garga experienced something very special: a clandestine screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part II, made more than a decade earlier but banned by Stalin. In an essay about the film for Sight and Sound magazine months later, Garga wrote of the exigencies of scribbling notes with an interpreter’s help:

“Eyes glued to the screen and hand scratching away frantically in the dark – possibly it was not the best way to watch a film for which I had waited all these years. But I was anxious to conserve as much of the experience as I could.”

The mental picture this conjures fits the man well. Garga was only in his thirties then, but by the time he passed away in 2011, aged 86, he had dedicated a lifetime to the delicate art of recording and conserving that which is in danger of being lost; keeping cultural artefacts from slipping out of our hands and memories. To this end, he made dozens of documentaries – Amrita Sher-Gil and Satyajit Ray were among his more notable subjects – and he continued publishing books about cinema and gathering memorabilia into his eighties.

To experience his writing is to find oneself wading in history, surrounded by ghostly voices, and to be reminded that film is so fragile and ephemeral – the word “film” here applying not just to neglected old movies, but to the stock on which they were recorded. One of Garga’s most poignant experiences as a young man, mentioned in his book The Art of Cinema, was a meeting in the 1940s with the son of the filmmaking pioneer Dadasaheb Phalke, and learning that a trunkful of Phalke’s films needed to be salvaged since the material was inflammable nitrate stock. No one they contacted was willing to help; on the contrary, some distributors suggested they melt the reels down to retrieve a few rupees’ worth of silver.

I thought of that story and others when I attended the exhibition “A Story Called Cinema: The BD Garga Archives”, held earlier this month in Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. In one of the exhibits, a tent made up to resemble the travelling shows of the past, scenes from Phalke’s 1919 film Kaliya Mardan were being shown. The child-God Krishna – wearing what looked like a striped pajama top! – was in underwater battle against the giant snake Kaliya; it was thrilling to watch, but also a reminder, as the same few minutes of film played over and over, that this is one of very few Phalke works still extant.

Though some of Garga’s own documentaries were being screened too, and lobby cards and posters from his personal collection were on display (as was a letter written to him by an ailing Satyajit Ray), the exhibition wasn’t so much about him as about Indian cinema’s bygone years – which is exactly as he would have wanted it. Here, in one room, was a brightly coloured bioscope, its many viewing portals offering austere black-and-white images – and here, in a neat reversal, was a DVD player, itself a dull-grey but showing scenes from newer films, complete with sound and colour. There were photos from the 1920s and 30s, of actors and directors who are barely known today as well as more familiar personalities in unrecognizable avatars (the very young and lean Prithviraj Kapoor in a 1934 film; a vampish Lalita Pawar in a slit dress) – but there were also life-sized cardboard cutouts of contemporary actors: Amitabh Bachchan in Mard, Dimple Kapadia in Saagar. And, from the early years of sound cinema, there were elegies for the orchestra pits of silent movies, lost in the age of the “all-talking, all-singing picture”.

Looking at exact replicas of the clothes worn by Raj Kapoor as the tramp in Shree 420, or Balraj Sahni as the farmer in Do Bigha Zamin, I experienced the mixed emotions I had felt in Paris’s Cinémathèque Française on seeing gowns from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast or Louise Brooks’s dress from Pandora’s Box (1929). For the film buff, it can be spooky and melancholia-inducing to encounter such iconic costumes now made banal: in faded colours, hung up for display, even posed to mimic a gesture or action.

These exhibits might seem misty and distant to our modern eyes, but there were also reminders that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Garga’s own writing often demonstrates this. Here he is on censorship, in a 1968 essay: “Our censors eulogize the Middle Ages and Victorian virtues, ignoring the mainstream of modern thought […] Little do they realise that traditions cannot be dug up and revived. They can no more be willed or argued into existence than the drainage system of Mohenjodaro be made to work […] These are the zealots who held up a film, Temples of Tomorrow, on the plea that its title, which referred to our new projects, dams etc, violated Hindu sentiments.”

Similarly, the old films he wrote about may look and sound creaky, but the content is often still fresh, easy to relate to… and in some cases, more wicked and hard-hitting than what we have today, as I discovered when I recently watched Mehboob Khan’s 1942 Roti. My appetite for the film had been whetted by clips shown at one of the talks at the exhibition, but I was scarcely prepared for the off-kilter force of its opening sequence, a caustic exercise in social propaganda. A sutradhaar (storyteller)-like figure mocks the hungry poor. “Bhookh lagi hai? Bhookh lagi hai?” he leers – and then, when an old man is hit by a car as he struggles to retrieve a piece of bread, come the words: “Mar ja mar ja mar ja! Bojh zameen ka halka kar ja.” (“Die! Die! Die! Make the earth’s burden lighter.”)

It is all heavily stylized, with echoes of German Expressionism, theatre and Russian montage, but the premise – that the world isn’t for the poor, that they will be redundant no matter who is in power – is as topical as ever. It struck me that if such a scene were to be attempted in a current-day satire – with a character singing a tuneful but sadistic song telling poor people to “Die!” – it’s unlikely that our censors would recognize the narrative context; they would probably cut the scene because it “offends sentiments”. And I can picture the ever-vigilant Garga rolling his eyes at that, and opening a new page of his notepad.
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[More soon on Roti, and other related films of the period]

“His lines are laced with libido” – on Tanveer Bookwala’s erotic collection Wet

[Did this review for Scroll]

The explicit sex scene is one of literature’s great levelers – the place where the inexperienced hack who can barely string together a grammatical sentence might stand on an equal footing with the acclaimed, much-awarded author. Looking for unintentionally funny porn? You can browse the scores of “bestsellers” written by randy teens to impress their friends, and published by low-investment-no-editing houses such as Srishti; but you can just as easily look at the entries that get shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, many of them by heavyweights such as Haruki Murakami, Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth (to say nothing of Tony Blair).

In the first type of book, you’ll find delirious, trying-too-hard sentences like “The friction between a virgin vagina and virile vigor (sic) produced such fire on bed (sic) that it could easily put two flint stones to shame” (from Novoneel Chakraborty’s That Kiss in the Rain… Love is the Weather of Life) or displays of juvenile wonderment (“He pulled off her bra to discover that her lofty [sic] boobs did indeed meet the idea he had of them” – Tuhin Sinha’s That Thing Called Love). In the other type, equally ludicrous things might be done in a more literary-seeming way: consider “He kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world” (Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Or “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg” (from Jonathan Littell’s epic The Kindly Ones). Or, for spiritually inclined readers, “She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. 'Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal' ” (Paul Theroux’s A Dead Hand).

Which is to say that any writer, regardless of pedigree and experience, whether fumbling and self-conscious or smug and overconfident, can easily go wrong with the sex scene. (It is also possible on occasion that a well-written sex scene provokes discomfort leading the reader to perceive the writing itself as poor, but I won’t get into that discussion here.) Writing erotica is never easy, it always comes with the risk that you’ll become a laughing stock. And this is why I was willing to overlook some of the more cringe-inducing passages in Tanveer Bookwala’s collection Wet.

It does take some overlooking, though.

The first of the seven stories, “The Clinic”, begins with the narrator watching his wife moan in ecstasy as another man performs oral sex on her. The scene builds in intensity, there is much slithering and throbbing and bucking and dribbling and twitching and plunging, things seem to be going well generally, and the woman, we are assured, is having a grand old time. But then comes this odd little description: “Rocky sucked hungrily on her lips, nipping them, refusing to let go, much like a stubborn dog refusing to part with his meat. The sexual tug-of the dog and the very wet bone, the thrill of fresh meat, Sheila’s legs open, splayed…”

At the end of the passage, Sheila duly “shuddered and came like a deluge”. Later in the book, when another woman being thus serviced “gushes like a waterfall”, I had visions of the author carrying along a snorkeling mask on his own carnal adventures – but sticking with Sheila for now, all I could think was: did she have an orgasm because someone was chewing, dog-like, on her “wet bone”? Sounds like the perfect woman for a lazy, unimaginative man… or for a threesome involving Hannibal Lecter and Rin Tin Tin.

At this point, only two pages into the book, the epigraph “To every woman I have ever known and those I am yet to meet” felt less like an enticing promise and more like a threat. In the fashion of the over-smart reviewer who gets off on trashing everything, I had this sentence scribbled out in my notepad: “If this is what the author thinks will rock the world of women he is yet to meet, female readers may consider filing a restraining order.”

Reading on, though, I found myself willing to give Wet a chance. This is not to say that the banalities, clichés and ill-conceived metaphors disappear, they don’t. Many sentences are overcooked, clumsy (“The steam from the tea made the dust of their love dance”) or plain wrong (“the desire to see Ria’s breasts were clearly worth the big bucks”), and some of the writing is like a parody of those annual Bad Sex Award excerpts. “Sharma’s cock was flicking like a firefly trapped in a jar,” we learn, “His mouth was dry. His erection, erect. (Sic) He looked at his mother-in-law in a bid to kill it.” You’ll find similarly amusing things on pretty much any page. “The Scandinavian, made-to-order shower gel made love to her loofah.” “It was a blasphemous cauldron of smell and taste.” “Abdul tore through her expensive silk shirt, shredding it; the sounds of the seams coming apart echoing around the kitchen like the original sin.”

*****

So, here’s the obligatory warning: while this book (obviously) isn’t for a squeamish or prim reader, it isn’t for fans of sharp or economical prose either. However, there are interesting things going on here at the idea level. Bookwala’s writing may seem forced in places, but there is nothing inauthentic about the dark sensibility of the stories. A sense of danger runs through them: they are about the many effects of sexual desire, how it can cross over into game-playing and fetishism, how the yearning to submit fully to an impulse can coexist with a deep fear of submission. And there is plenty of matter-of-factly subversive content, as in a passage where a young boy masturbates near the temple where his father is a priest; as he experiences his first orgasm, an ethereal white light flashes before his eyes and he imagines the woman whose photo he is looking at screaming God’s name.

Apart from being attentive to the desirous woman seeking out new sexual identities (in itself a risky thing for a writer to do in our current cultural climate), Bookwala probes the morally ambiguous aspects of sex. In one story, a horny sexologist can’t believe his luck when a voluptuous young woman walks into his office out of the rain, wet but shyly willing to get “wetter”. In another, a man becomes so addicted to porn, and to virtual sex with the images on his computer screen, that he barely registers his flesh-and-blood wife. In a tale that involves S&M and an uneasy bridging of the class divide, a wealthy writer(!!) bullies her meek husband around but finds a new life of the flesh with her servant. A phone-sex encounter turns into something with incestuous overtones.

Interestingly, the one story that involves a more-or-less conventional sexual relationship – “The 3 a.m. Show”, about two young lovers setting out to lose their virginity on Valentine’s Day – may be the strangest of the lot, since it takes a surreal turn midway: I won’t give away details, but suffice it to say that the lovers become the stars of a baroque, decadent nighttime performance. At its best – again, not so much in the actual writing but in the concept and structure – this piece about voyeurism suggests what Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” could look like if written in an age of projection rooms and hidden cameras. It gets my vote for one of the two most intriguing stories in the collection.

The other one is “Tipping the Velvet”, in which a bereaved woman named Gita finds herself gliding, unexpectedly but very enjoyably, into a first lesbian encounter… but that isn’t the most mysterious thing that will happen to her over the course of the night. In both these stories, there is some formal experimentation, including crosscutting (in one passage, Gita, while in the throes of passion, has visions of cemeteries and coffins) – they move back and forth across the line that separates reality from fantasy, private lives from public ones, “normalcy” from “deviant” behaviour.

If this reads like a schizophrenic review, I plead guilty. But that’s the nature of the book: even if you overlook the flaws in the writing, Wet can annoy and intrigue you at the same time. The author profile in the beginning says that Bookwala’s lines “are delicately laced with libido”. Not really: there is little that’s delicate or subtle about this collection. It is bold, brash, in your face, tiresomely florid at times … yet a case can be made that this approach is well-suited to the telling of stories about obsession verging on insanity. 

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[An earlier post on Urmilla Deshpande's "carnal prose" collection Slither is here]

In praise of “commercial” acting

[my latest Mint Lounge column]

“I am a hardcore commercial actor and I hate it when people remark that what we do is not art,” Rishi Kapoor says in his recently published memoir Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored. “How many actors can enact singing a qawwali like me? Or dance like Mithun Chakraborty? Or do a ‘Khaike paan Banaraswala’ like Amitabh Bachchan? It’s very easy to sneer at us and say that ‘serious’ cinema is superior to what we do.”

This passage reminded me of an old magazine piece from the early 1990s – I think the interviewee was Subhash Ghai, who, when asked why Hindi cinema couldn’t produce an actress of the quality of Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon, shot back, “Can they dance as convincingly as Madhuri Dixit does?”

Such quotes, especially when taken out of context, might sound arrogant or amusing to someone who looks down on our traditional forms of cinematic expression, or on the Music + Drama formulation that produced the much-maligned word “melodrama”. You might dismiss them as coming from an overly defensive actor and director trying to mount a case for the formulaic films they specialised in.

But lazy and formulaic work can just as easily be produced in what we call “meaningful” – as opposed to “commercial” – cinema. Without getting into a broader debate about these categories, here’s a personal peeve: assessments of a film’s artistic merit are too often based on the idea that if something looks easy, is pleasing to the eye or gets your adrenaline flowing, then much effort or rigour can’t have gone into its creation. It’s all fun and games onscreen – ergo, the putting together must have been all fun and games too.

This snobbery manifests itself in many forms. For instance, well-informed movie buffs have long known that the Oscars seem incapable of honouring great work in comedy: some of the genre’s most timeless films and performances haven’t even been nominated. And here too, there are hierarchies. If a comedy has a clearly detectible “serious” function – say, dark social satire along the lines of Dr Strangelove or Jaane bhi do Yaaro – critics elevate it above comedy that is perceived as “only” providing belly-laughs. As if successfully providing belly-laughs – or skillfully doing physical slapstick like Harold Lloyd or Jerry Lewis, or engaging in verbal calisthenics like Groucho Marx – were a walk in the park.

On a related note, an actor’s work is frequently measured by the nature of the role and the film rather than by the actual performance. Much as I liked Deepika Padukone in Piku, I was surprised by the many reactions suggesting she had come of age as a performer by playing an understated part; I thought Padukone’s chomps as an actor (and as a star-actor, which is a marginally different but no less worthy thing) were already evident – for anyone who was willing to look – in her more mainstream roles in films like Ram-Leela and Chennai Express. Incidentally, those two films are very different in tone, aesthetics and quality, but they would likely be clubbed together by the sort of viewer who celebrates Piku as being superior only because it isn’t glossy and doesn’t have songs. This, unfortunately, is what happens when people deal in categories rather than looking closely at individual entries in those categories.

On the subject of songs, Rishi Kapoor’s quote is a reminder not just of his own vibrant performances in qawwali scenes like Amar Akbar Anthony’s “Parda hai Parda” but also the general undervaluation of song-and-dance sequences. There are tiers of respectability here too. Some musical scenes announce their value immediately: take Waheeda Rahman’s brilliant snake dance in Guide, a scene that is driven not just by her remarkable dancing-acting but by the narrative subtext – Rosie, a caged bird, is throwing off her shackles, this is her first shout of rebellion. As the sequence builds in intensity and rhythm, almost anyone watching it will recognise that something profound and life-altering is going on.

In contrast, there is the song sequence that, at first glance, can seem nothing more than a rowdy bunch of people having a good old time – but which reveals layers as you re-watch it. I receive odd looks when I say that the ensemble sequence “Gallan Goodiyan” in Dil Dhadakne Do (2015) is a lesson in good filmmaking. I stick to this position, though, and not just because of the scene’s technical achievement – it is a single unbroken take, with Carlos Catalan’s camera whirling around the ship’s ballroom and focusing in turn on several different characters as they enter and exit the frame – but also because of how the lyrics, framing and gestures sum up things about the story and the characters.

Some characters participate wholeheartedly in the song, others linger on the fringes or appear briefly, and the size and nature of these appearances mirror the characters’ role in the narrative: for instance, the brother-sister duo Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) and Kabir (Ranveer Singh) are the leads in the song, much the same way the film pivots around their conflicts and personal growth. Or note the throwaway moments like the one where Ayesha sings the line “Pyaar karne se bhi mushkil hai nibhaana” directly to her ex-boyfriend Sunny (Farhan Akhtar) and how it subtly comments on their relationship while also being an organic and credible part of a larger, playful interaction involving many other people.

In short: this is an excellently crafted scene, built around a catchy tune and robust singing, and extremely well performed. It is part of the film’s overall narrative movement and makes for good, economical storytelling in its own right.

And yes, it’s massive fun to watch too. Should we hold that against it?

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[A related piece - about good acting in action sequences - is here. And here's a review of a recent book about Amar Akbar Anthony, which closely examines Akbar's function in the film]