My mother used to say (always with affection) that the actor Pran strongly resembled one of her aunts, and also that their facial structure and demeanour reminded her of certain varieties of owls:
prominent Punjabi beak, large round eyes (which could quickly become
droopy or sensuous depending on time of day), a general air of
thoughtfulness, and so on.
And now I discover this passage in Saadat Hasan Manto’s essay “Kuldip Kaur: Too Hot to Handle”. Manto has just finished telling us that the young Pran was “like a male mistress” to Kuldip, and that another young actor,
Shyam (whom you will recall if you have seen Manto the film), was
competing for her affections. Now Kuldip, Shyam and Manto are in a train
together when Shyam ardently says:
“Darling, dump that owl’s offspring you call Pran and come to me. He is a friend of mine; I will explain it to him.”
Of course, the “owl’s
offspring” here would be a direct translation of the original “ullu ka
pattha” (this is from the book Stars from Another Sky, English
translation by Khalid Hasan), but I like to think Shyam was being
literal-minded too in making that analogy.
I also like the “He is a friend; I will explain it to him”. Creates mental image of young Pran listening with owlish stoicism as Shyam informs him that Kuldip Kaur will henceforth have a new male mistress.
[Happened to be reading Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man around the same time the trailer for the upcoming Shah Rukh Khan film Zero came out. That led to this Mint Lounge piece]
-----------------------
He became fully conscious of the steps that led up to the windowed door of the trailer, and convulsively he jumped on the first one.
It was just the right height.
On the face of it, Richard Matheson’s 1956 fantasy novel The Shrinking Man – about a man named Scott Carey who begins shrinking at the rate of an inch per week, after an accident with radioactivity – is not much like a sweepingly romantic Indian film. But there is one magical, affecting passage late in the book that I can see fitting into our movies about vertically challenged heroes, such as the upcoming Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Zero, or the Kamal Haasan cult classic Apoorva Sagodharargal (Appu Raja in Hindi).
It occurs when the miserable Scott, now down to barely two feet, dwarfed by both his wife and his little daughter, wanders about a carnival ground and comes across a trailer housing a woman named Clarice – one of the circus’s many performing “freaks”, the same size as himself.
They meet. He explores her custom-made room, sits on the couch, finds his feet touching the floor for the first time in weeks. (It was his world, his very own world – tables he could stand beside and reach across instead of walk under; lamps he could switch on and off, not stand futilely beneath as if they were trees.) They look into each other’s eyes, speak of pity, isolation and fear. And later, during an uncomfortable conversation with his giant of a wife, Scott says he must go back to Clarice for a while. “Even this woman will one day be… beyond me. But now – for now – she’s companionship and affection and love.”
In his influential career as a horror and sci-fi writer, Matheson provided the source material for many heart-pounding film sequences, from a malevolent truck stalking a highway driver in Steven Spielberg’s debut feature Duel to a paranoid man believing he sees a gremlin on his airplane wing in the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet". There are comparable moments in The Shrinking Man, such as the ones where the inch-high Scott battles and outwits a spider in the dusty wasteland that he once knew as his house’s cellar. But the carnival scene has its own special tone, from a tradition of great melodrama: it’s up there with the moment in Appu Raja, for instance, where the diminutive hero bears witness to the wedding of the girl he loves, only a few minutes after he thought she wanted to marry him.
It’s uncertain what the dominant tone of Zero will be – indications from the trailer are that the film will determinedly avoid some of the sentimental clichés surrounding the short-statured hero, and go for irreverent humour instead. But some of those clichés are inevitable in a superstar-driven Hindi film that builds towards an emotional crescendo, as you can tell from lines like “Ek wohi toh thhi jisske aankhon mein aankhein daal kar main baat bol sakta thha” (“She was the only one whose eyes I could look into”), accompanied by the image of the three-foot-tall hero standing next to a woman in a wheelchair, so that they are both perforce the same height.
Which is all very romantic, but one can also read into it a mild subtext: about a man needing to cut the woman down to (his) size. This is a common theme in many works about small-sized men. Just beneath the surface of The Shrinking Man is social commentary about male insecurities, about feeling diminished in a world where women are gradually becoming more independent. Carey’s physical decline is linked to emasculation: he becomes smaller and smaller; he can no longer do the work he always did, running the house, bringing home the bacon; eventually he is tiny to the point of being irrelevant to his family.
Within the horror genre, this theme was taken to its logical conclusion in Tod Robbins’s exhilaratingly nasty "Spurs". This 1923 short story begins on a note of pathos, with a midget smitten by a beautiful bareback rider (“Jacques Courbé was a romanticist… he felt himself a doughty knight of old about to do battle for his lady”), but ultimately leaves us with no one to root for; the main 
characters take turns being savage to each other, playing antagonist and victim. No wonder that when it was adapted into a film, the masterful Freaks, even with major plot changes the tone remained nihilistic, leading up to a scene where physically deformed sideshow performers assault and disfigure those who had mocked them.
All this is very far from the tone of a Zero or an Appu Raja, but it offers another, less placid and dewy-eyed way of looking at those who must walk under tables – and at the capacity of the disadvantaged to be not just recipients of sympathy or scorn but to be just as malicious as “normal” people.
[Did this piece about the violent new web series Mirzapur – uneven, but full of terrific performances by a very talented cast – for The Telegraph Online]
--------------------------
Near the end of episode five of the new Amazon Prime show Mirzapur, two very drunk friends have a conversation about the romance and poetry of killing with a razor blade as opposed to a gun. “Iss se maarna kala hai” (“Killing with this is an art”) one of them says, caressing his weapon of choice as he dreamily describes splatters and patterns of blood.
Just a few moments after this, such a murder is depicted in grisly detail (though the scene is shot in dim light). And though the men who slit their victim’s face and throat certainly do find poetry and pleasure in the act, we also see the brutality, the ugliness and the suffering up close.
Both these views of violence – its seductive allure and its repulsiveness – run through this nine-part series, created by Karan Anshuman and Puneet Krishna, about the Uttar Pradesh underworld: more specifically, about the life and crimes of Mirzapur don Akhand Tripathi (Pankaj Tripathi), known as Kaleen bhaiya because he runs a carpet business (as a front for the gun and opium trade). The other important characters include Tripathi’s restless second wife Beena (Rasika Duggal), his psychotic heir Munna (Divyendu Sharma), and two outsiders, the brawny Guddu (Ali Fazal) and his contemplative brother Bablu (Vikrant Massey), who become closely involved with this “business” despite their fact that their own father is the one upright lawyer in town. These and many others lives intersect in a story about the difference between being “family” and being “wafaadaar” (loyal), how the need for izzat (respect) can lead people into very dark corners, and the murkiness of student and adult politics (“Agar neta banna hai, toh goonday paalo – goonday banno nahin”).
****
I didn’t have high expectations of Mirzapur after watching the first 30 or so minutes. Everything seemed a little too on-the-nose, too underlined. Shortly after Munna beats someone up in a classroom, we see him making a vote-canvassing speech about how violence in classrooms won’t be tolerated (and two students exchange smiles). When an obsequious cop who is in the pay of a high-profile don arrives with bad news, we are promptly told he is just a “postman”. After a man tells his son “You are my family” and leaves the room, the son mutters to himself “Family hai issiliye toh virasat milne ka intezaar kar rahe hain” (“That’s why I am waiting for my inheritance”). The effect is that of over-expository conversations being held purely for our benefit, so we can quickly define characters and relationships.
In fairness, this could be because many people have to be introduced and established within the first few scenes. And things do get better: while the series never fully ditches the “tell, tell, tell” mode, it becomes more assured as it continues – and the starting point for this is a tense confrontation scene in the episode-one climax, which moves from ominous silences to an explosion of violence that somehow works despite a few cartoonish elements. With most of the central characters involved in the fight, it’s here that the narrative threads coalesce, all that exposition finally giving us a payoff.
And the scene ends with another of those poetically gruesome shots – drops of blood on the dining-table cutlery. Which brings us to an inevitable talking point: Mirzapur probably has more gore than any other Indian film or show you've seen recently.
Nor does it waste any time in telling the squeamish viewer to stay clear. Within the show’s first 10 minutes, a rowdy wedding celebration has ended with the groom (still on horseback) with a hole in his eye; another man has had his hand blown off; and a car tyre has squished a severed thumb lying on the road. In later episodes, brains are blown out with loving attention to detail; a man proves agonizingly hard to kill even when shot in the chest at point-blank range. Without giving away any details, the final act of the last episode provides a catalogue of murder, mutilation and psychological torture that will test even the most hardened nerves. And an old question rears its head: is this glut of violence "necessary" to the film's purpose, or is it gratuitous – perhaps an enthusiastic overreaction to the greater freedoms that are (for the time being) available to web content in India?
The answer is probably somewhere in between. Watching Mirzapur, there were times where I thought "Well, did that face-exploding or innards-spilling shot have to be SO explicit for the point to be made?" (And I say this as someone who enjoys both gore and gratuitously amoral cinema if I feel it's well done.) This question is bolstered by the fact that the show sometimes marries brutality with slapstick, or has the soundtrack doing comedy while violence unfolds. In one cringe-making scene, while a boy is being kicked hard in the balls, his Accounts teacher, looking into a textbook, mutters to himself: “Iss deal mein toh Sharma ki donon FD toot gayi.” (“Both of Sharma’s fixed deposits were broken.”)
The counter-argument might be that it's essential for this series to show us the thrill of violence, given its subject matter (Tripathi grows his business by encouraging people to use guns for both attack and defence) – and also given the trajectory of one of its most compelling characters, Guddu, a startling performance by Ali Fazal.
That Mirzapur is full of fine actors doing fine work should be no surprise to anyone who has watched these performers in indie or low-key films in recent years. Pankaj Tripathi has a well-earned reputation now (though he might soon be in danger of being over-used in a certain type of laconic, wry role), but there is also Vikrant Massey (who was outstanding as the gentle Shutu in A Death in the Gunj), Shweta Tripathi (who does bookish indifference very well here, as a girl named Golu who runs for the college elections) and Rasika Duggal, delicious as the frustrated wife who calls her stepson “Munna bhaiya” but perks up on hearing stories about his sexual stamina.
Given these riches (and I haven’t even mentioned the supporting cast), it feels like a child's game to pick a performance as the "best", but Fazal was the pleasantest surprise for me. He is a revelation as the droopy-eyed, Big Moose-like oaf whose brain, we are told in an early scene, is as thick as the rest of his body. Whether he is drinking “ma ka doodh” from a baby’s bottle (while also taking supplements to buff up his body) or telling a girl – when she flirtatiously says she looks forward to seeing more of him than just his biceps – that he’ll invite her to the Mr Purvanchal contest in which he is participating, or simply cocking his head and hunching his shoulders, he is funny and endearing. Yet this is also what 
makes his transformation into someone who gets drunk on crime and power (“Shuru majboori mein kiye thay, ab majaa aa raha hai”) so troubling. Mirzapur’s most engaging narrative tracks by far are the ones involving Guddu and Bablu as they negotiate their new world and eventually face the consequences. Even as they transport blood-soaked carpets past the eyes of suspicious policemen, their story threatens to sweep the kaaleen out from under the viewer’s feet.
*****
On the whole, though, Mirzapur blows hot and cold. It has slack moments and detours where we spend too much time away from the really interesting characters (and actors). I couldn’t work up much interest in the distant flashbacks which reveal that even the frail old “bauji” – played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda, sitting in a wheelchair, watching macabre nature documentaries on TV – was very much part of this cycle of violence. Most problematically, Munna, who is such a central character with so much screen time (the series both begins and ends with a close-up of his face), rarely moves beyond the gangster-film stereotype of the insecure, entitled, beast-like “prince” of a kingdom he has done nothing to make himself worthy of. Too many of his scenes felt tediously caricatured.
Thankfully, his nonstop seething is somewhat offset by the presence of a few good women – strong, aspirational, desirous. This is something we are increasingly seeing in socially conscientious films that are on the face of it set in very macho, male-dominated spaces. In such stories and settings, there is a special thrill attached to the idea of the outwardly demure, tradition-bound woman reducing a powerful man to jelly with a sharp word or gesture, or through sexual aggression. And while this can sometimes feel like tokenism (you might wonder if a film is erring on the side of being slyer and more progressive than the society it depicts), it also works very well when the actresses involved are of the quality of Duggal, Shweta Tripathi or Shriya Pilgaonkar.
Amid all the hurly-burly, their quieter scenes stand out – such as the one where Golu tersely asks her school principal to get to the point during a rambling conversation; or the one where Kaleen bhaiya’s dinner-table sermon to his son – “Yaad rakhna, aurat ki khushi hamesha aadmi se upar hoti hai” (“A woman’s pleasure should be above the man’s”) – is undercut by a barely audible snort from his wife who has never has an orgasm because he comes too soon.
These are the deflating little moments that Mirzapur could have had even more of, moments that free it from its burden of testosterone and masculine self-importance – much like the gun that explodes (prematurely) in the hands of its excited owner in one of those many gory scenes.
[Did this very short review – for India Today – of the new series Homecoming]
-----------------------
Fans of Brian De Palma’s kinetic thrillers of the 1970s and 1980s will sit up during the opening sequence of the new, 10-episode Amazon Prime show Homecoming. Accompanying a long tracking shot – so characteristic of De Palma’s work – is Pino Donaggio’s sumptuous music score from 1980’s Dressed to Kill. Like the opening scene of that film, the camera looks around a room before moving in towards the lined face of the heroine – in this case, Heidi Bergman (Julia Roberts), who works as a counsellor for a company that helps disoriented soldiers acclimatize to the “normal” world.
There will be other De Palma references in Homecoming’s subsequent episodes: music from Body Double and Carrie (plus a role for Sissy Spacek, who played the lead in the latter), slow zooms, split screens and other sorts of playfulness with framing. Plus a very deadpan, worker-bee-like investigator delightfully played by Shea Whigham – so poker-faced that in some of his scenes, you might be unsure if he is acting at all.
But Homecoming also has its own distinctive way of building a sense of claustrophobia and dread, as it moves between the past (2018) and a present day (2022) where Heidi, having long left her job, is trying to figure out exactly what had happened at the Homecoming centre and why there are so many gaps in her memory. The show does a fine job of capturing the unease of the soldiers – notably Walter (Stephan James), who seems warmly self-aware on the surface, but may have buried memories that need to be plumbed – as well as Heidi’s increasing bewilderment in past and present. Aerial shots are used effectively, showing us room interiors and other spaces with the geometric arrangement of furniture, adding to our sense of the characters as dolls trapped inside a labyrinthine jigsaw puzzle. There are many unsettling scenes involving Heidi’s boss Colin (Bobby Cannavale), who always seems to be on the phone, schmoozing and networking as he runs the facility from behind the scenes.
What does it all add up to, though? No spoilers here except to say that if you’re a seasoned viewer or reader of sci-fi/dystopia, this is familiar territory plot-wise. While you’re watching Homecoming, episode by episode, there’s nothing to fault in the performances 
(Roberts has outstanding chemistry with both James and Cannavale), the creation of mood, the touches of unusual black humour (an extended shot of a large pelican strutting about on a desk in a sterile office cabin) and the affectionate harking back to the paranoia-drama-thriller aesthetic of the 1970s. (De Palma apart, there was also an acclaimed 1978 film called Coming Home, about returning soldiers.) But if you were hoping for an earth-shattering twist or revelation in the final episodes, you’ll probably feel that this thriller is a little less than the sum of its parts.
---------------------------
[Other recent TV show mini-reviews: The Terror; The End of the F***ing World]
[did this review for Scroll]
--------------------
Time travel is the cornerstone of Trisha Das’s sharp and entertaining novels in which historical or mythological figures brush against our modern (in some ways) world, and vice versa. Das’s Ms Draupadi Kuru: After the Pandavas, published in 2016, wasn’t a time-travel story in the conventional sense, but that is for all practical purposes what happens when four of the Mahabharata’s women – residing, somewhat restlessly, in heaven – visit present-day Delhi for a month.
Now, in Das’s new book, the awkwardly titled Kama’s Last Sutra, the theme works in the other direction: a 21st century person negotiates, gawps at, interprets, learns from, and doles out lessons to a culture of a thousand years earlier. While working near the Khajuraho ruins, a young archeologist named Tara is mysteriously sent back to the 11th century, landing in the Chandela kingdom, saving a little girl from being raped by a priest, meeting King Vidyadhar himself, and eventually finding herself in a tricky situation: she knows how Chandela history turned out, and when it looks like events aren’t headed in the right direction, she must decide whether to interfere and make herself a part of the story.
Given that these are both fast-paced works of popular fiction hinging on a similar concept – old world meets new world – it’s worth reflecting on the differences between them. Having written a Mahabharata novel (something many writers do these days, with varying degrees of success), Das has now made it tougher for herself on two counts. First, most readers will not be as familiar with – or as dramatically invested in – the history of King Vidyadhar and the Chandelas as they are in the Mahabharata (even if what one essentially needs to know is that Vidyadhar managed to stave off the efforts of Mahmud of Ghazni to conquer his fort). There aren’t as many reference points, comforting allusions, or familiar characters to root for.
Second, Ms Draupadi Kuru, despite its title, had four protagonists: Draupadi, Gandhari, Amba and the eternally maternal, guilt-ridden Kunti, trying to help a young orphan named Karan, a reincarnation of the first-born son she had abandoned in the ancient days; the book cut back and forth between their adventures or personal missions, allowing for a dynamic, multi-dimensional narrative. Whereas in the new novel we have a single first-person narrator whom we have to stick with from beginning to end – which means that if either Tara or one of her specific encounters becomes a little boring, the reading experience is dragged down.
It’s a commendable risk, and it mostly works well. Kama’s Last Sutra starts with a few clunky sentences and some redundant information (“I continued to remove the mud around it, using all my training from my four years as an undergrad student of archaeology at Columbia University in New York…”) but even in these initial passages, Das’s knack for the short, sharp observation and the sardonic aside is evident – and these qualities soon begin to define the book.
Much of the fun of Ms Draupadi Kuru was watching the characters deal with things that are strange to them, but so familiar to us that we take them for granted: we see traffic signals, chandeliers, television sets and the Rashtrapati Bhawan (the “palace” for 21st century Indraprastha) through their perspective. With Kama’s Last Sutra, it’s different – we accompany Tara as she moves out of her own space and slowly processes the sights and sounds of her new environment. There are some nice details: Tara first knows for sure that she is in the distant past when she observes that the sky above her head really is blue, and that the foliage around her “smelled strongly of…foliage. Fresh, damp and heavy – like when you blended a bunch of spinach leaves and opened the blender lid to realise that spinach had a smell after all.” (This reminded me of the protagonist of Stephen King’s 11.22.63 going back to Eisenhower-era America and finding that the foam on his beer was full and creamy.) Now she must go about the business of wearing the appropriate clothes, calculating dates and figuring out geography based on her knowledge of the Khajuraho temples that had survived into her own time.
And she must look hard into the mirror as well. It would be easy for a book like this to present a modern-day character smugly preaching to her predecessors, enlightening them about things like equality and secularism. But it isn’t so simple: Tara isn’t a self-congratulatory young person convinced that her era represents the apotheosis of human civilization. She is aware of her own privileges, aware as a feminist that she stands on the shoulders of women who fought and won many tiny battles in the past. And she recognizes, more than once, that some problems and prejudices don’t go away, no matter how “evolved” people become.
She does come across as omniscient at times – noticing every little thing, such as the expressions on the faces of different people with different agendas during a court gathering – which can feel improbable given her own disoriented situation. But that’s a hard-to-avoid pitfall of this sort of narrative, where the protagonist is required to be a sutradhaar and guide – showing us around – while also being a full-fledged participant.
Of course, this is as much a ghagra-choli-ripper-meets-modern-chick-lit as it is anything else – and so, even amid philosophizing or facing a political crisis, Tara finds the time to ogle the hot king and feel conflicted about her own feelings. It leads to a sort of sex scene where Vidyadhar takes her “orgasm virginity” without touching her; the passage is vivid and intense, but I think it would have been sexier if Tara (who is hardly coy about her language earlier in the story) hadn’t mystifyingly started using “manhood” for “penis” and “sheath” for “vagina”.
The only problem I had with this book is that the mid-section sags and gets repetitive in its detailing of court politics and the many sorts of intrigues involving ministers, queens and concubines. Some of the wry, irreverent humour of the early chapters yields to earnest exposition. Tara is understandably a little subdued and wary about not getting into serious trouble (even if it means toning down her 21st century feminism) but in the process the book itself becomes a little too somber. It does pick up, though, as the plot becomes more focused and more oriented toward the encounter with the marauding Ghazni and Tara’s own role in it.
Like many books in this sub-genre – going back to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Kama’s Last Sutra combines wide-eyed humour with a poignant sense of history, the awareness that the land one stands on has been the setting for countless dramas over the centuries involving countless types of people. It is about being, at one and the same time, a progressive who is proud of the freedoms available in the present day, and a nostalgist who feels a restless curiosity, even a yearning for, a bygone time. The tension between these two things flow through and enrich this novel, even when it is essentially concerned with telling an engrossing, fast-paced story.
------------------------
[An earlier piece about time travel in literature is here. Lots and lots (and lots) of Mahabharata-related pieces are here. And here is my archive of reviews/interviews for Scroll]
[my latest Mint Lounge column, about the latest in a series of films where Adil Hussain plays a father trying to control his daughter’s life]
-----------------------
During a conversation once, the actor Adil Hussain told me he tried to stay away from comfort zones when picking roles. Speaking about what was then his best-known Hindi-film part – the condescending husband in Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish – Hussain said he tried to find something to relate with even in deeply unsympathetic characters. “It is important to recognise yourself in uncomfortable things.”
Perhaps because Hussain himself was so genial and accessible, I often think about those words when watching him onscreen, particularly when he is cast as an unlikable, domineering character – most recently in Iram Haq’s Hva vil folk si (English title What Will People Say), the Norwegian submission for the 2018 foreign-language-film Oscar.
Here, Hussain plays a Pakistani man named Mirza who has been living in Norway for decades, and is so aghast when he finds his daughter Nisha (Maria Mozhdah) alone with a young man in her room that he beats them both up, and packs her off to the homeland he himself had long ago left.
In terms of plot and narrative arc, all this is very basic; the “young person shackled by oppressive culture” theme is well-worn for those of us in the subcontinent. But there is a quiet sincerity in the film’s performances and in the little observations about how human behaviour changes in different contexts. For instance, Mirza and his wife Najma (Ekavali Khanna) are callous parents, but an early scene gives us a hint of their struggles over the years, while also showing us Mirza’s efforts to be transgressive or “cool” in his own small way: at a gathering, he gets up to dance to a favourite song, and asks Najma to join him; she reluctantly does so, but later privately complains about how inappropriate it is for someone from her culture to dance in front of “gair mard” (strange men). It’s a small moment, but one that creates a tiny bit of empathy for the film’s antagonists.
Given that Hussain is not a glamorous star-actor or personality-actor – he ranks among performers who have a reputation for being versatile and chameleon-like, disappearing into the foliage of their roles – it’s notable how often he has played a patriarchal father, controlling or obsessing over a daughter’s life. But within that character type, there are subtle differences and similarities, shades and degrees of humanity.
In the 2012 film Lessons in Forgetting, based on Anita Nair’s novel, Hussain plays Jak, trying to understand the events that led his teenage daughter into a comatose state after an assault, and in the process realising that she might not have fit his narrow definition of a “good girl”. This character is a milder, more melancholy father than Mirza, but perhaps that is because Jak is never required to directly confront his daughter. And there are moments in the two films that echo each other. A scene in What Will People Say where Mirza shouts, over and over, “Tumne usske saath sex kiya” (“You had sex with him”), as if he can’t get the image out of his head, reminded me of a wonderful sand-animation 
sequence in Lessons in Forgetting, where a visual of an orgy segues into one of a throbbing brain – a depiction of a father’s fevered imaginings about a daughter who has, without his knowledge and permission, become a sexual being.
Another father from a very different milieu is the vulnerable farmer in Love Sonia, who takes out his frustrations on the two daughters who can’t much help him with physical labour – and then, being neck-deep in debt, sells one of them into the sex trade. This is a ghastly act, but by the end of the film, when Sonia’s experiences have made her worldly-wise and canny, it is possible to see this man (whom we glimpse in just one later scene) as a victim in his own way, an underprivileged and voiceless denizen of an insular, feudal world.
At the other extreme in Hussain’s corpus of such character types is the despicable police chief in the heavy-handed Unfreedom. I was puzzled by this film’s tone: it loudly expresses outrage about social injustice and discrimination, but there is something gratuitous about its use of nudity, including a cringe-inducing but also voyeuristic scene in a police station where two lesbian lovers are raped at the behest of the father of one of the girls. This is the Hussain role where one most wonders how it was possible for him to generate any empathy for his role – Unfreedom is populated by characters who serve as symbols rather than as fleshed out, multi-layered people. But of course, an actor must be ready to play such allegorical parts too.
As Hussain told me, he doesn’t find it useful to think of characters as good or bad. “I don’t even use the word ‘character’ or charitra, because I feel that is a diminishing. I prefer the Sanskrit paatra, which recognises the many dimensions of people.” An actor, he said, must become like water – transparent, fluid – to fit the paatra. And perhaps, in the process, confront the disturbing possibilities in his own personality.
----------------
[A longer piece about Lessons in Forgetting is here. A short review of Unfreedom is here, and here is a piece about Love Sonia]
[In my latest “cinematic moments” column for The Hindu, thoughts on an animation sequence in the vibrant film Kaala]
--------------------------------
Around 30 minutes into Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala, the protagonist Karikaalan (Rajinikanth), who is in his sixties, re-encounters his long-ago girlfriend and fiancée Zareena (Huma Qureshi). Meaningful silences follow; Karikaalan’s wife, sons and other members of his large extended Dharavi family watch in wonder as their larger-than-life hero behaves like a flustered young lover.
And then comes a scene where snippets of expository conversation are intercut with animation and painted stills depicting events of four decades ago: the young Kaala coming to Dharavi with his father; his romance with Zareena; the tragic attack by a rival group on their wedding day, which leads to the lovers’ separation.
In the context of Indian cinema, this is an unusual flashback. There is something both poignant and stirring about seeing faithfully rendered cartoon images of 1970s-era Rajinikanth. But I was also reminded, weirdly, of background-establishing sequences from superhero or fantasy films. Like the great scene in Wonder Woman where vistas from classical paintings and sculptures are given a 3D effect, providing a bridge between the present day and a distant, Godly past. Or one of the finest sequences in the 2013 Man of Steel: as Kal-El, soon to become Superman, gets a history lesson from his father Jor-El, the story of their doomed planet Krypton is shown to 
us through “liquid geometry” technology – shape-shifting arrangements of people and events expanding around the two men as they speak, so that history is experienced as virtual reality.
Or consider the wonderful opening-credits scene of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times they are a Changin” – even those who feel the film doesn’t match Alan Moore’s great graphic novel usually admit that this sequence is a fine, economical summary of a long back-story that might not have been easily shown in a feature-length film.
Compared to all these scenes, it must be said, the Kaala animation sequence is very basic, like a version of an Amar Chitra Katha comic: it is intended to be rustic, humorous, old-world in its effect. Like the others, though, it conveys the sense of a deep history, placing the present-day story in context. Besides, as we know, Rajinikanth is another sort of superhero, no less than the Amazonian Diana or the Kryptonian Kal-El.
But if the Kaala scene performs a myth-building (or world-creating) function on one level, there is another level at which it deconstructs – or comments on – an enduring myth of our mainstream cinema: the legend of the Ageless Leading Man. It saves us from the tedious and embarrassing experience of watching a 66-year-old Rajinikanth play a 20-something version of himself in a live-action flashback, aided by makeup and Vaseline on the lens.
Anyone who knows Indian film history knows the countless instances of 50-plus or 60-plus male stars playing college students, wooing heroines less than half their age (or playing brother to actresses nearly 30 years younger, as Dev Anand did with Zeenat Aman in Hara Rama Hare Krishna). Remember that scene in The Dirty Picture, where a jowly superstar does a role that requires him to burst into his house with a “ma, main pass ho gaya!” and plonk his head into the lap of a white-sari-clad widow who is clearly – to any sane eye – younger than him? It may seem like exaggerated satire, but it was plain realism.
With Superstar Rajini himself, you don’t have to look much further than his pairing opposite Aishwarya Rai in Robot – or the flashback scene in the previous Ranjith-Rajinikanth film Kabaali, where the hero does play a much younger version of himself.
In Kaala, on the other hand, the animation device gives us a version of Rajinikanth as he was in the early days of his stardom – long sideburns, flared pants, youthfully rakish – without the sullying of that image. The sequence manages to be a drolly affectionate tribute to the earlier screen persona, and the mental picture of the flesh-and-blood Rajinikanth one comes away with when the film ends is the pleasing one of a white-bearded granddaddy playing his age, being sleek and stylish in his own senior-citizen way, even when he is getting clean-bowled by a child.
Much has been written about how PA Ranjith’s sharply political sensibility found a way to employ the Rajinikanth persona – and to cater to the superstar’s fan-base – without letting that persona overwhelm the film; one of those rare occasions where a film with a powerful star-personality at its centre ALSO had an auteur-director 
keeping an eye on things (not too dissimilar with Mani Ratnam’s use of Rajinikanth and Mammotty in the 1991 Thalapathi). The animation sequence plays with the tropes of melodrama while preserving the film’s own very distinct tone.
My only reservation about the sequence is that the real-life Huma Qureshi looks practically the same age as the cartoon version. Imagine if they had cast one of Rajini’s old-time heroines – maybe even Sridevi! – in the Zareena part. That would have allowed us to see the contemporary versions of two gracefully aging actors with a history of onscreen work together, while also showing us their artistically rendered younger versions – reviving old memories and providing even more sappy, starry-eyed nostalgia.
---------------------
[Earlier Hindu columns here]
