[Did this piece for my Telegraph Online column]
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My first thought after watching the wacky and hard-to-classify new film Judgementall Hai Kya, about the psychosis-afflicted Bobby (Kangana Ranaut) and her obsession with Keshav (Rajkummar Rao), whom she suspects of murder: is this a turbocharged, hyper-feminist 2019 version of Gaslight? Where, even if the woman really IS stark raving mad (as opposed to being manipulated into thinking she is), they have to find a way to make the man even worse?
(And yes, before you ask: I’m making a small effort here to compensate for the idiotic political correctness that led to this film’s title being changed from the original Mental Hai Kya.)
Or is this a Crouching Sita, Hidden Ravana story where we end up rooting for Sita even though we know she is unstable – and where we don’t know for sure until the film’s last ten minutes whether “Ravana” even exists outside her head? That isn’t a random reference, by the way. The film has an important Ramayana connection – Bobby finds herself working in a stage production of the epic – and some striking imagery such as ten reflections of a character seen in a hall of mirrors.
But to rewind a bit: gaslighting – which broadly means exercising power over someone by making them doubt their own sanity – derives from the Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light and its film adaptations (most famously the 1944 one for which Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar), and has often been used in recent times to describe male hegemony over women. The term is now part of an increased sensitisation about how women were historically branded as unstable or irrational or (to use a word that tellingly derives from the Greek for uterus) hysterical, in order to keep them “in their place”.
However, there is one obvious difference between Judgementall Hai Kya and Gaslight, or between Judgementall Hai Kya and the many other stories where vulnerable women are preyed on: Bobby really does have a serious mental ailment, and the film – through its form and through Kangana Ranaut’s performance – leaves this in no doubt. We see the childhood trauma that triggered her condition (or worsened something that was already latent), then we see what she is like as an adult: out of step with reality, functioning normally only for phases, heavily reliant on medication that she doesn’t want to take, seeing roaches that no one else can see – warning signs that her condition is deteriorating. We also see her fixating on Keshav, her new neighbour, which might well give her a motive to kill his wife.
From here on, nearly every incident can be interpreted in different ways, and the film’s impact as a thriller hinges on our knowledge that Bobby is an unreliable protagonist. How far gone is she? How far will she go to get what she wants? Are there moments of clarity, and if so, can her judgement or perception be trusted in certain situations?
Judgementall Hai Kya is a wild, kinetic work that does a fine job of finding visual and aural expression for Bobby’s cluttered inner world: the breaking down of the wall between her own life and the movies she lends her voice to (as a dubbing artiste); the shifts between reality and fantasy. Kanika Dhillon’s writing and Pankaj Kumar’s camerawork complement each other well in delineating this fractured state of mind, as do some of the musical choices (you’ll never hear Mr Natwarlal’s “Tauba Tauba” the same way again). There are surreal touches that feel organic to her condition: for instance, a Hanuman who shows up to counsel her late in the film wields a mace made up of cans and other junk that would be available in London, where all this happens (and where a futuristic version of the Ramayana is being staged).
But what’s most interesting (and here’s where spoilers begin) is this. Even though we are in the company of an unhinged protagonist who cannot be taken at face value; AND Bobby is played by an actor who specialises in off-kilter or eccentric characters and whose real-life behaviour in recent times has been (to put it politely) strange – despite this, in the final stretch, we get confirmation that there is someone else who is even more “mental”. And this someone is a man who, unlike Bobby, isn’t tormented by any self-doubt or uncertainty, and is comfortable in his own skin (or many skins) in a way that she isn’t allowed to be. Someone whose childhood the film also shows us glimpses of – as we saw Bobby’s childhood earlier – but who was never an innocent in the way that she was. Someone born to the manor of psychopathy, not shaped by circumstances.
And so, in comparison, Bobby looks like a harmless flake with a few endearing behavioural quirks at the film’s end. We as viewers are required to reassess the prejudices we formed about her over the course of the story. I think a second viewing of Judgementall Hai Kya might make it easier to see the many little ways in which Bobby (despite her obstinacy about not taking her medicines) is making some sort of effort to get well, to not tip too far over the edge: looking for the pesticides that will weed out the insects in her mind; finding focus in moments of real crisis.
Can the ending be seen as a sly comment on the difference between “male” and “female” manifestations of madness – and how, when these two things come in conflict, it is the former that gets a free pass in a patriarchal society, even when it is more dangerous? Not on the surface, but I think it is a subtext.
To even mention such things is to make this film sound solemn or pedantic, whereas one of the pleasures of watching it is that it doesn’t seem at all bothered with deep themes. Even if there are buried ideas here about how female “hysteria” may be less destructive than male aggression – and how women’s intuition, like the voices Bobby says come from her stomach, is sometimes dismissed as madness – the film doesn’t brandish them: it is happy being a fast-paced thriller-cum-black-comedy. And, rarely for a Hindi film, it sustains its non-didactic tone even over the course of a dramatic, revelatory climax where lives are at stake.
The one idea I wish had been explored a little more is that of shared psychosis, or folie à deux – especially given the nature of the central murder, where one character begins the job (albeit without 
conscious intent to kill) and another character finishes it. This could have led to a more amoral film, a Raman Raghavan 3, a Natural Born Killers 2. A story that explores how men and women, by being gloriously insane together, can reshape the world in unexpected ways.
What we get instead is an ending that restores some order, draws a reasonably clear line between Good and Bad, and celebrates the power of women – and this is fine too, especially since it is done without speech-making. Ultimately, despite the moments of genuine nastiness it delivers in its final act, Judgementall Hai Kya is a surprisingly warm film about the many ways of being (as doctors in movies of an earlier, less politically correct time would say) “paagal”.
While other people binge-watch 21st-century things on Netflix etc, I have been on a mini-marathon of Universal horror films from the 1930s and early 40s, especially the ones that brought Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff together on screen (after their successes as Dracula and the Frankenstein monster respectively): the best of these casting coups include the 1934 The Black Cat and the 1935 The Raven, both titled for Edgar Allan Poe stories but having almost nothing to do with the source material.
Conventional wisdom says that Karloff was the better actor of the two — more malleable, elegant, capable of playing “straight” roles — and that Lugosi could only do camp or caricature (partly because he spoke with a thick Hungarian accent, his English was poor, and his features limited him to stereotypical roles). You can see the reasoning behind that argument when watching scenes like the one in The Raven where a bearded Karloff (as a convict on the run) demands that Dr Vollin (Lugosi) give him a new face through plastic surgery: there is something poignant about Karloff’s desperation here, he plays the scene as if he were in a “realistic” dramatic film of the time, and does it very well — while Lugosi is leering and rolling his eyes like he never wants to exit the torture chambers and coffins in the Universal lot.
But I think Lugosi was a personality-actor who could be very powerful and effective within his limited range. He has a surprising sense of humour, for instance, a facility for delivering blackly funny lines, or just for showing exasperation at the naive squares he is surrounded by. (Some of his scenes remind me of another deadpan Central European, Ivan Lendl, telling an umpire, after getting a series of bad calls: “What are you going to tell me next, my house is on fire?”) And he can be unexpectedly moving too, in scenes like the one in The Black Cat where his character learns that his wife and daughter are dead (the former kept preserved in a glass case by a mad architect — but that’s another story).
Anyway, here are some stills from The Black Cat and The Raven featuring these two legends, locked together in posterity. As the Karloff character Poelzig says in one of the finest scenes from that film, an unusual subjective-camera movement through the basement of his Art Deco house, “You say your soul was killed and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmorus fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?”
[My latest “movie moments” column for The Hindu – about ‘lifeless’ objects moving or doing unexpected things – and emphasizing human emotions in the process]
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In a luxury ship’s dining room – grand, opulent, but for the moment, deserted – a strange waltz begins. An unattended serving trolley is moving about on its wheels, going back and forth, sometimes bumping into furniture. With its large hemispherical metallic “head”, this trolley looks like a prototype of the restless little droid R2-D2 from Star Wars. But there are no cute beeping sounds, just an eerie silence.
Because this is happening on the RMS Titanic, and the movie is the 1958 A Night to Remember – generally regarded as the best of the feature films made about the famous tragedy; or at least the one that presents the most authentic depiction of what happened, unfettered by fictionalized narratives.
Through much of its running time, A Night to Remember is a restrained film about British stoicism in crisis – it’s only in the final half-hour that we see people screaming and panicking, throwing themselves into the water, fighting for lifeboat space. But for me, some of the most chilling scenes are the ones involving the lonesome trolley, which makes very brief appearances at various points in the film. Shortly after the iceberg collision, we see it for the first time. It moves only a few inches, but this is still ominous: after all, in an earlier scene, a passenger had placed a pencil upright on his plate and impressed his co-diners with the fact that it stayed still – so serene was the Titanic’s progress through the water.
Later, with the evacuation underway, as a group of steerage passengers encroach on the lavish dining room – and stand transfixed, murmuring “First Class!” – it is the sudden movement of the trolley which shakes them out of their stupor and reminds them that they must hurry. And later still, as the ship starts to tilt and scenes of carnage unfold, our R2-D2 is lurching frenetically all over the room. It looks more human than before.
We think of emotional moments in films as being centred around people, or at least living beings: sentient faces, voices, even animal sounds will do. When a scene focuses on lifeless objects, there is a tendency to think of it as detached, coolly dispassionate. But sometimes, inanimate things can heighten the humanity of a scene.
If A Night to Remember is one example, consider another doomsday film of the late 1950s: On the Beach, set in a future where nuclear fallout is shutting down life on Earth and only a few survivors are left in the Southern Hemisphere (the story unfolds mostly in Australia). Then comes what might be a ray of hope: an indecipherable Morse code is picked up from the Pacific Coast. Naval officers travel to the US to investigate… and find that the signals were created by a vagrant Coca-Cola bottle knocking against the telegraph machine. Mankind’s achievements – our technological advances, our ability to communicate in complex ways – lie neatly exposed; much the same way that the iceberg put an end to the hubris that “God himself could not sink the Titanic”.
But if the scenes mentioned above suggest hopelessness, objects can also be used funnily and reassuringly. I can think of no better example than the final sequence – to be more exact, the last three or four seconds – of the great 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth, an early version of what Stanley Cavell called the Hollywood “comedy of remarriage”.
Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne) have separated, but it is obvious to anyone watching that they are still in love, and made for each other. Misadventures, pratfalls and games of one-upmanship build to a climax where – on the very night that their divorce is to come through – they are staying in adjoining rooms in a cabin, both clearly awkward and yearning to be together. Two moving objects punctuate this sequence: a cheeky door that refuses to shut properly, giving them an excuse to stay up and chat; and a fancy clock with a tiny male and female figurine coming out of adjacent niches each time the quarter-hour is struck.
I won’t reveal what happens to this clock at the end, except to say that the last shot – which allows the film a way round the censorship restrictions of the era – is witty, perfectly executed, and might cause the first-time viewer to gasp in delight. Once again, an inanimate object has provided an achingly human touch.
[Earlier "One Moment Please" columns are here]
[Here’s a short piece I did for Reader’s Digest, about the new Scorsese film on Bob Dylan. Feel a tad sentimental about my first ever byline in Reader's Digest – given how stacks of these magazines always seemed to be around the house when I was growing up, and also given that my mother used to read them quite regularly]
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On the Netflix menu, you’ll find the wrong title for this film. It is missing an important first word: “Conjuring”, which appears just after jerky black-and-white footage of the magician-filmmaker Georges Melies performing a trick onstage. It’s the first pointer to the legerdemain in the “pseudo-documentary” we are about to see, a film so playfully unreliable it may remind some viewers of Orson Welles’s F for Fake.
(Conjuring the) Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese unfolds like a concert film about Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, which aimed at making the singer and his troupe (plus celebrity guests like Joni Mitchell) accessible to small-town America as the nation celebrated its bicentenary. But this is also a sleight-of-hand exercise where fiction and fact merge in unsettling ways. “Being with Bob was like looking into a mirror – you saw what you wanted to see or you hated what you saw,” we hear early on, from someone named Stefan van Dorp, who was supposedly on the tour. But here’s the rub: Stefan is a fictional character, played by an actor just for this documentary. And the story that actress Sharon Stone tells about her meeting with Dylan as a 17-year-old… that’s made up too. These are things you probably won’t realise unless you are steeped in Dylanology, or unless you have read up on this film. That’s what a viewer is dealing with here.
What is the purpose of this? One answer is that Scorsese is addressing the unknowability of Bob, the unknowability of artists, the way ideas and people change over time, how we build and destroy idols. And what better subject for such an exegesis than Dylan, who has always been so elusive, so frustrating to fans and followers who thought they had him slotted? Scorsese himself went into that terrain with the 2005 documentary No Direction Home, and it’s also worth remembering that the best feature film about the legendary singer-songwriter was the 2007 I’m Not There, in which six actors (including a woman, Cate Blanchett) played different versions of Dylan.
But one is left with a mild suspicion that this material didn’t need such a convoluted, nudge-wink framing story. We have already had so many ironical perspectives on Bob Dylan over the past few years that one yearns for a straight documentary with authentic behind-the-scenes footage. Happily, there is a lot of that here too. Dylan sitting with Allen Ginsberg at Jack Kerouac’s grave, playing a harmonium. Ginsberg dancing lithely. Patti Smith telling a goofy 
story about an incestuous archer. Joni Mitchell asserting that she deserves to be taken as seriously as male songwriters. Joan Baez dressing up like Dylan. Views of the political climate of the time, including a Nixon speech (poignant from the vantage point of today’s anti-immigrant hysteria) about bringing a certain standard of living to those who are “fortunate enough to come to this country”.
And there are the performances. The most electric scenes – assuming, of course, that you’re a bona-fide Dylan fan – include the one where we see almost a complete performance of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, with no cutaways, no sudden excursions involving talking heads. Or the hypnotic images of Dylan performing a snarling version of “Isis” in white-face, wearing a hat with flowers in it, or doing “Simple twist of fate” with considerably amended lyrics. That’s where the real magic of this film lies.
P.S. One of my favourite little moments in the film: just as Dylan is talking about watching a Kiss concert and being intrigued by their use of white face-paint, we get a few seconds from Marcel Carne’s great 1945 film Children of Paradise (with the mime artist Baptiste dramatically drawing a cross on the mirror). A classic demonstration of Scorsese as movie nerd. I wrote about Children of Paradise, and Baptiste, in my Hindu “moments” column last year – here’s the piece.
(Wrote this piece for Telegraph Online)
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Early in the new film Super 30 – a dramatized biography of Anand Kumar, mathematician and mentor to underprivileged students in Patna – the young Anand (played by Hrithik Roshan) aspires to get a paper published in a UK-based journal. But what theorem can he prove, what new formulae can he come up with? As he sits in front of a blackboard, a Eureka moment arrives: he jumps up and begins writing equations furiously. The background music builds.
This scene, along with a few others, is a reminder that any film whose plot hinges on advanced Math or Physics has an innately tricky task: given that these are highly specialized, “difficult” subjects, how to convey what is going on?
With a more accessible problem – a linguistic brain-teaser, a riddle – a film can create a pleasing “Aha!” moment for any viewer who has basic knowledge of the language in question. Consider the TV show Sherlock where, each time Sherlock Holmes deduces a dozen things about someone with a glance, the camera homes in on parts of the person’s body or clothes and we get textual information about what the sleuth noticed. Along with beeping sounds that make it seem like we are watching a supercomputer processing system. (Which we are. But we can at least follow the workings of this human computer’s mind.)
Complex Math, on the other hand, doesn’t easily fit into a general-audience, narrative film.
If you have watched films like A Beautiful Mind or The Theory of Everything (about John Nash and Stephen Hawking respectively), you know the tropes: the genius scribbling away, digital effects and superimpositions creating an impression of order emerging from chaos, a solution coming out of a jumble of quadratic equations. There isn’t a hope in hell that the average viewer will understand what the figures and numbers mean, but a vague sense of something profound and earth-shattering has to be created. Similarly, in the Super 30 scene mentioned above, the film must rely on Hrithik Roshan’s concentrated intensity and the swell of the music. But what Anand has actually done lies beyond our ken.
And to a degree, this is okay. When Anand writes a letter to his girlfriend, expressing his feelings, and it turns out to be in binary code, we don’t understand what it says, but it’s enough to proclaim Crazy Brilliant Nerd – which is all that the scene requires. (This, incidentally, is also the point where I started to feel grateful that Roshan plays this role straight – not in the register of the wild-eyed idiot-savant of Koi Mil Gaya, or the wild-eyed idiot of Main Prem ki Deewani Hoon. That would have been overkill for this film.)
But when Super 30 moves into a classroom environment with prolonged scenes between teacher and students, the stakes rise. Things must be made viewer-friendly through relatable problems (how hard will Tendulkar have to swing the bat to hit a six on a ground of a certain size, against a Shoaib Akhtar delivery of a certain speed?) and cutesy touches such as metallic question marks appearing atop the students’ heads.
Obvious comparisons can be made with other recent films about teachers or coaches who work magic in seemingly hopeless situations – films like Hichki, in which Rani Mukherji manages both a neurological disorder and a bunch of unruly quota students, and Taare Zameen Par, in which Aamir Khan sings “Bum Bum Bole” and defeats dyslexia. But another, lower-key film I was reminded of was the Swara Bhaskar-starrer Nil Battey Sannata, in which a single mother, working as an ayah, joins the same class as her adolescent daughter.
“Maths ko apni zindagi se jod do,” says a prodigy in this classroom as he helps his friends with their lessons. “Maths se dosti karo.” And the film complies, even offering a catchy song titled “Maths mein dabba gul”, the lyrics of which include lines like “Bhayankar hai situation / with quadratic equation”. Everyday things are related to mathematical concepts: “tyre, tube” can be rhymed with “square, cube”.
This sort of thing, even when done well, can raise questions about dumbing down. Is some over-simplification inevitable in films dealing with such topics? There’s a scene in The Theory of Everything where Stephen Hawking has a grand epiphany while staring at the coal in a fireplace – this is convenient shorthand for a general audience, but it also has the effect of making Hawking’s science seem like a magic trick, or a divinely obtained moment of inspiration. As Professor Leonard Norkin put it in an article shortly after the film released: “Representing Hawking’s discovery in this way is a disservice to the science because it disregards the intense effort that lay behind it.”
But popular cinema hasn’t single-handedly created such ideas – there have often been mystical associations around prodigious talent in these fields. Even the legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan believed that the formulae that came to him had been placed on his tongue by a goddess while he was asleep; that he was just a vessel for a mysterious higher power (pun unintended).
This idea – that some people have been granted an inexplicable gift for subjects which most other people find hopelessly difficult – lies at the heart of Super 30’s thesis that the world no longer belongs to the children of kings; that when it comes to some things, there is no “natural talent” waiting to be passed down from one generation of Rajas to the next.
Among the better scenes in this uneven film are the (much-too-brief) ones where we meet some of the youngsters who will make up Anand’s first batch of students. These are poor children expected to live in servitude, not have any ambitions above their pre-designated stations – much less think of joining NASA, finding life on other planets, or working on the relativity theory! There is something otherworldly about their passion and aptitude for things so removed from their daily lives; they will have to work hard to succeed, of course, but that initial fire in their belly comes from an unknowable source. And this is also where the parallels with the story of Ekalavya – the tribal boy, cheated of his dreams by the royal teacher Drona – come in.
The climactic sequence of Super 30 has the students putting their classroom knowledge of parabolas and trajectories into practice and becoming Ekalavyas – almost literally so in one scene involving a form of archery. The sequence isn’t particularly well-executed (in general the film’s last hour is rushed and confusing), but there is some neat symbolism here: underprivileged youngsters responding to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with slings of their own; holding the fort against the henchmen of the world’s princely Arjunas and obsequious Dronacharyas. Most intriguingly, they do it with Maths as their ally and “dost” – a seemingly elitist subject has been pressed into the service of a more egalitarian world.
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(An earlier post about Nil Battey Sannata is here)
[50th anniversary of Apollo 11's Moon landing this week. Did this piece for a special Moon-themed issue of The Indian Express]
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Astronaut Anand is all set to go to the Moon. In a thick Punjabi accent – for he is played by that most genial of beefcakes, Dara Singh – he tells his widowed mother, quietly weeping at her little puja-corner: “Dur kahaan hai, Ma? Main to aise samajh raha hoon jaise ghar se college jaa raha hoon.” (“The Moon isn’t far – it’s like I am traveling from home to college.”) Waving goodbye, he then makes the unscientific promise that if he finds some devi-devta up there in space, he will ask them to restore his mute sister’s voice.
Thus begins the hero’s journey in the 1967 movie Trip to Moon, a.k.a. Chaand Par Chadhaai. This very low-budget film (an intergalactic spaceship battle resembles a mushroom being chased around a dimly lit kitchen by a cucumber) features pseudoscience, slapstick comedy, fistfights, song-and-dance, and, two years before Neil Armstrong, some moonwalking too: Anand and his sidekick Bhagu float about until the Moon’s residents give them shoes that enable them to walk normally (and Bhagu drones, “Agar deviyan yeh nahin lagaatay, toh hum udte udte chandralok se suryalok tak pahunch jaate!”).
Chaand par Chadhaai may not be a “good” film according to our conservative definitions of such things, but it has a sense of wonder (and, pun intended, lunacy) that fits its subject. This may seem a giant leap, but I think the poet John Keats would have approved of it.
If, as Keats once remarked, scientists were diluting the poetry and magic of the rainbow by explaining it in rational terms and “reducing it to the prismatic colours”, an even more pronounced case can be made for the Moon – more visible, more central to human life. For thousands of years there was the dreamy moon of poets, lovers and fabulists; in more recent centuries there has been the moon of science, the cold, crater-ridden natural satellite. Can the twain meet?
Films have given us the answer: yes. Since cinema itself combines art and technology, it’s appropriate that this medium has supplied both these moon depictions, and others in between. In one of the first major films ever made – by a man who was artist, magician and technician at once – scientific endeavor is married to the whimsical, imaginative impulse. Georges Méliès’s 1902 Le Voyage dans la Lune has the unforgettable image of a rocket embedding itself in the eye of an animated Moon-Face (who looks none too pleased; would you be?). So what if the shot is in defiance of the basic laws of physics or space or dimension: the film, like early sci-fi literature, is driven by honest curiosity about the then-unknown.
If you believe, as I do, that different types of films talk to each other across space and time, one can imagine the alarmed Moon Man in the Méliès film looking 65 years into the future and seeing Dara Singh coming at it. But the rocket-in-eye scene (which Martin Scorsese affectionately paid tribute to in the 2011 Hugo) also had a more gruesome echo in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou – a surreal masterwork that begins with a shot of a cloud passing across the moon, juxtaposed with a razor slicing through an eyeball.
It’s more common to see the moon represented in gentle, soft terms. A famous shot in the classic silent film Sunrise shows the male lead walking through a marsh that is lit by the full moon. It’s a beautiful long take (and must have been even more so when seen in a dark hall by its first audiences), but here’s the rub: the whole setting – the marsh, the moon – was constructed. It’s fake. It turns out that films didn’t need the real moon to create a vivid impression of “moon-ness”. (Thinking about it, perhaps this realization was behind the many conspiracy theories which held that the 1969 Moon landing didn’t really happen; that the footage was created in a studio by canny filmmakers.)
Though there are more varieties of “moon films” than there are moon phases, these are the key genres: Science-fiction/Fantasy; Romance; Horror. The first of these is obvious, but even here there are subcategories: from stately, realistic sci-fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey to animated classics like the 1954 Boo Moon (Casper the Ghost goes into outer space) and the Tom and Jerry O-Solar Meow (Jerry the mouse finds heaps of delicious cheese on the Moon) to inventive B-movies such as Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964).
The Moon in romantic films is a cliché we know well in India, given the “chaudhvin ka chand” motif in our films: the comparison of the heroine’s beauty with the full moon, or even, on occasion, as something that eclipses the moon. “Chaand aahein bharega,” croons Raaj Kumar in the 1963 Phool Bane Angaaray – “even the moon will sigh at your beauty” – and Mala Sinha, made rapt by this compliment, sways about in self-love. But this seemingly hackneyed comparison can be made in subtler ways too 
– for every exuberant “Yeh chaand sa roshan chehra” (Kashmir ki Kali), there is something like the languid sequence in Jhoothi (1985) where Raj Babbar sings “Chanda dekhe chanda / toh chanda sharmaaye” to Rekha. This isn’t an intimate, two-person moment -- the lovers are part of a small group of people, which includes her protective elder brother, and the song isn’t so much an ode to individual beauty as to love and companionship in a general sense
Subversions of the romantic-moon trope include the “Dum bhar jo udhar munh phere” song from Raj Kapoor’s Awaara, where the moon is treated as a rude interloper, not giving the lovers privacy. Or look at the scene in the 1960 Anuradha where the heroine looks yearningly at the full moon while her doctor husband – always preoccupied with his work – studies a drop of liquid through his microscope; the scene visually links the two white spheres, representing two different sorts of passions. And it’s hers that has to make way.
Once heady romance is over and domesticity sets in, the moon serves another purpose in tradition-fetishizing films, via Karva Chauth scenes wherein the man and his long life become the focus of all attention. If such scenes can be viewed as a form of horror, the more conventional variety involves the association of the supernatural – mainly werewolves and zombies – with the full moon, in movies going back to at least the 1943 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. But personally speaking, one of the scariest superhero-film scenes I know had a moon connect too: in Superman 2, when the sadistic General Zod and his associates kill a helpless astronaut, it’s a reminder of how bleak and lonesome the lunar setting can be, how far from home if you run into trouble.
Of the many broad observations one can make about the moon in cinema, an obvious one is the tonal difference between films that treat the moon as a faraway object – a symbol – and the ones that see it up close, even visit it. But, to return to Keats, it isn’t necessarily true that the latter type of film lacks in poetry. In the climax of Damien Chazelle’s First Man, Neil Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling), having touched down on the lunar landscape, channels his grief – at the loss of his little daughter years earlier – in a way that he couldn’t back on earth. Alone, away from prying eyes, he bequeaths her bracelet to a crater. The place he is standing on – lifeless, greyscale – may be a far cry from the romantic moon of myth, but the emotions are just as real as those felt by two new lovers looking up at the full moon from the home planet.
[my latest “Bookshelves” column for First Post]
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I have always felt the term “comfort reading” is a little over-used, but I unequivocally relate to the phrase when it comes to Gerald Durrell’s trilogy of books – My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts and Relatives; and The Garden of the Gods – about his blissful childhood on the Greek island Corfu in the 1930s. As is the case with much comfort reading, revisiting these books also brings a tinge of melancholia, as one reflects on the small ways in which one’s own life paralleled (or might have paralleled) the author’s – and the very big ways in which it diverged.
Rewinding to my own resolutely non-Corfu-ish childhood: if a schoolteacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer was “a vet”. This came out of a hazily defined interest – encouraged by my mother – in cats, dogs and baby birds. Never mind that the house I lived in till age nine was on south Delhi’s busy Ring Road, an urban space that was not welcoming to non-human creatures. (A kitten we had adopted was run over in the service lane and had to be taken, throbbing, not fully dead, to be anesthetized.) It was also around this time that I discovered the adventures of little Gerry Durrell, as told – probably with some embellishment – by the adult Gerald Durrell. By the time I was done with the first of the books, my answer to the teacher’s question might have been “a naturalist”.
All readers know the joy of discovering magical new settings through literature. Mine included the little village Peterswood, where Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers solved mysteries and infuriated their policeman nemesis Mr Goon; the moors that Heathcliff and Cathy roamed in Wuthering Heights; Tolkien’s many vistas, expanding outwards from the cosy Shire to the daunting mythological landscapes of The Silmarillion. But few of these compared with the sunlit paradise that Gerry lived in with his colourful family (his mother and elder siblings), exploring the wildlife-rich countryside with his dog Roger at his side. “I stared down the hill at the beckoning sea and planned my day. Should I take my donkey Sally and make a trip to the high olive groves to try to catch the agamas that lived on the glittering gypsum cliffs, where they basked in the sun, tantalizing me by wagging their yellow heads and puffing out their orange throats? Or should I go down to the small lake in the valley, where the dragonfly larvae should be hatching?”
I marveled at Gerry’s attention to detail as he discovered and analyzed countless insects and birds. The sense of drama he brought to a bloody battle between a gecko named Geronimo and a praying mantis named Cicely. And his clear-eyed understanding of the innate violence in nature – the knowledge that there would always be random suffering and cruelty, that creatures would not live in perfect harmony with each other, as if on a giant ark. There was the anger and pain of the moment when a beloved hoopoe was slain by a cat, but there was also a wisdom about the unsentimental workings of the natural world.
For a young reader, there were many other vicarious pleasures. I remember yearning for someone in my life who would be like Theodore Stephanides, the shy, taciturn genius who played a huge part in Durrell’s development – and who, despite being a brilliant scientist, treated the little boy as an equal. (Later, I was thrilled to discover that Stephanides had, like Gerry himself, been born in India.)
For years after my first reading of the Corfu trilogy, I thought of them as children’s books. But on revisiting them, I realise this was misleading, and that I must have sped-read a few passages as a child, impatiently fast-forwarding to the funny conversations between the Durrell family and the adventures that really fascinated me. Despite the impression of effortlessness, a lot of care went into the writing. The prose in the descriptive passages and establishing scenes is polished and elegant, while sacrificing none of the sense of wonder. “Watermelons,” Gerry tells us, “their flesh as crisp and cool as pink snow, were formidable botanical cannonballs, each one big enough and heavy enough to obliterate a city. The green and black figs burst with the pressure of their sap, and in the pink splits the gold-green rose beetles sat dazed by the rich, never-ending largesse. Trees had been groaning with the weight of cherries, so that the orchards looked as though some great dragon had been slain among the trees, bespattering the leaves with scarlet and wine-red drops of blood.”
A function of literature is to show you worlds removed from anything you have personally experienced – and yet, to allow you to find small echoes in your own environment. Having lived the last three decades in another concrete jungle in south Delhi, it would be ludicrous for me to claim any similarities with Gerry’s childhood. Yet, as the writer-naturalist Ranjit Lal reminds us in such books as Wild City, all we have to do is open our eyes, briefly step out of our anthropocentric selves, and we will be awakened to the many treasures around us: the insects that nest in the nooks of an old house; the cry of birds like the shikra heard above the deafening roar of traffic.
Despite my professed childhood ambitions, I was for many years inattentive to the other species in my vicinity. But in more recent times this has changed. The little park where I walk my dog Lara every day has squirrels, peacocks, ladybirds, butterflies, occasionally visiting monkeys, four parrots that spend most of their 
time flying about a single specific tree. There are a few outliers like a purple pigeon that looks normal in every sense except that its head is fully white. I once saw four large peahens, presumably searching for a place to lay their eggs, circling wildly, one behind the other, atop a corrugated green roof near our house; if I were to write a Durrell-like book, I would probably describe them as doing a version of the “ghoomar” dance.
At other times, my mind plays tricks on me. Once, looking closely at a patch of mud (to ensure that Lara didn’t swallow something harmful), I saw what looked tantalizingly like a little sandy door. It reminded me of a passage in My Family and Other Animals where Theodore tells Gerry about the unusual dens made by “trapdoor spiders”. But this one turned out to be a tiny bit of dusty cardboard, embedded in the mud in a way that resembled an insect’s burrow with an attached door. You can only go so far when you try to merge your comfort reads with your own world.
[My earlier First Post columns are here]
[Did this essay about Anubhav Sinha’s powerful new film for The Telegraph Online]
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“I have no Homeland,” BR Ambedkar said to Mahatma Gandhi at their first meeting in 1931, “No self-respecting Untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land. The injustice and sufferings inflicted upon us are so enormous that if knowingly or unknowingly we fall prey to disloyalty to this country, the responsibility for that act would be solely hers.”
Images of Ambedkar and Gandhi feature in Anubhav Sinha’s powerful film Article 15 – as in a scene where portraits of the two icons flank the desk of IPS officer Ayan (Ayushmann Khurrana), who is investigating caste murders in a small town. But Ambedkar’s no-punches-pulled declaration finds its strongest echo when a low-caste man named Nishad (the always wonderful Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub) responds to the idea that he is being too rigid in his activism. People like us are patronisingly called Harijans, he replies, but we never get to be true “Jans” of the country, the ones included in “Jana Gana Mana”.
To watch this scene in a multiplex (and in an ongoing climate of nationalistic fervour, where both Bhimrao Ambedkar and Nishad would doubtless be marked “anti-national”) is to be reminded that just before the film began, everyone in the hall was obediently standing for “Jana Gana Mana”. This includes viewers who feel the warm glow of patriotism and belonging – of “jana-ness” – in their hearts, while staying blind to the savagery of caste oppression, how deeply it is woven into this country’s fabric, and to the many small ways in which all of us are complicit: from keeping separate glasses for domestic staff to thinking of caste as an aberration that exists only in isolated, backward pockets and has nothing to do with the religion that sanctified it.
For the privileged viewer capable of a small degree of empathy, the impact of a film like this – about brutal crimes visited on low-caste people because they asked for a three-rupee increase in wages – is also closely tied to the knowledge that one has bought tickets at Rs 400 or more, and is consuming overpriced beverages and snacks.
More than once, while watching Article 15, I thought of Arundhati Roy’s long essay “The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate”, originally published as an introduction to a 2014 edition of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. The Project of Unseeing, Roy writes, “is sometimes a conscious political act, and sometimes comes from a place of such rarefied privilege that caste has not been stumbled upon, not even in the dark, and therefore is presumed to have been eradicated, like smallpox.”
A key to understanding this film, and how well it does what it does, is to recognise that its point of entry is that of a privileged person whose world – at least as far as caste is concerned – is secure. Ewan Mulligan’s stygian cinematography and Mangesh Dhakde’s creepy, insistent background score combine to give Article 15 the texture of a tightly knit psychological horror film – and this is an apt creative choice, given its protagonist and his journey. Posted in Laalgaon, deeply naïve in some ways, shaking his head in disbelief and exchanging astonished messages with his more aware girlfriend, the foreign-educated Ayan may be a policeman in charge, conscientious, ready to shake up the status quo – but he’s also a bit like an innocent in a horror film stumbling on a witches’ coven (or a dark swamp) and not realising at first what is going on.
Khurana’s trademark qualities – likable boyishness verging on callowness but making way for sensitivity and introspection – have been well suited to certain roles (films like Vicky Donor, Dum Lagaa ke Haisha and Shubh Mangal Savdhaan pivot on his character’s initial immaturity and gradual coming of age), and Article 15 continues that tradition. Casting him as an Anglicised (and a Brahmin) protector who will help make things better in the hinterland raises questions similar to the ones about “white saviours” in Western literature and film. But while there should always be (unresolvable) discussions about representation and prisms in any social-issue film, one should also note how Ayan repeatedly moves outside his comfort zones, and does it not with “heroic” swagger but as a regular person who slowly grows in understanding.
From his first appearance, where he drinks water bought from an “untouchable” Pasi community, the film is full of scenes where he ruptures the existing order by entering spaces that are not meant for an upper-caste man: from a dirty marsh to an outhouse used for skinning animals, all the way to locating a hiding place in the jungle that someone on the run might use as shelter. He forces himself to see, to confront discomfiting things – and to also look into the mirror by association.
At the same time, Article 15 is aware that someone like Ayan will never have to face the consequences that those who “transgress” from the opposite end of the social pyramid do. When a lower-caste man tries to rupture spaces that are not meant for him – by entering a temple, for instance – he is savagely beaten up, or murdered, or made to watch the women in his family being gang-raped, or all of the above.
One scene has Ayan asking junior cops about their caste and his own, and doing double-takes as he learns how many different ways there are of being low-caste, or untouchable, or Brahmin. On one level, this scene is low comedy, encouraging us to chuckle with Ayan (or choke on our 300-rupee popcorn) at all this complicated madness. But there is also an important subtext: Ayan – and we – have the luxury of laughing patronisingly, or feeling superior through our ignorance of these subcategories; but most of the other people in the scene don’t have that luxury. This is part of their existence and has always been, and their lives depend on whether they follow age-old rules and proscriptions.
Incidentally there is an equivalent for this scene in Roy’s essay. “Brahminism is practised not just by the Brahmin against the Kshatriya or the Vaishya against the Shudra, or the Shudra against the Untouchable,” she writes, “but also by the Untouchable against the Unapproachable, the Unapproachable against the Unseeable. It means there is a quotient of Brahminism in everyone, regardless of which caste they belong to […] It’s like an elaborate enforcement network in which everybody polices everybody else. The Unapproachable polices the Unseeable, the Malas resent the Madigas, the Madigas turn upon the Dakkalis, who sit on the Rellis; the Vanniyars quarrel with the Paraiyars, who in turn could beat up the Arundhatiyars.”
And this raises a question that Article 15 touches on in a wry yet pointed exchange. “Sab baraabar ho jaayega toh raja kaun banega?” someone quietly asks when a point is raised about equality. The obvious answer to this – voiced in the film – is “why do we need a king at all?” But as the many subdivisions within the caste system – the many forms of “Brahminism” – suggest, the need to pronounce oneself “above” someone else (even if one also knows what it is like to be oppressed) may be a very human impulse, and one that is not easy to siphon out through new-fangled ideas about democracy and justice. A story told early in the film – about a village voluntarily in darkness because that makes Lord Rama’s palace look even more well-lit in comparison – suggests that people are often complicit in their own servitude, partly because they can’t imagine what the world would look like or how it would function if they didn’t have a king (or a God) to rule over them. Even if oppressed people break their shackles and overthrow a despotic ruler, won’t a new sort of despotic ruler rise from amidst their own ranks?
In other words, Article 15 deals with subject matter that is bleak and hopeless; it is also unflinching in its depictions (or descriptions) of the violence that may be visited on the powerless; and yet, remarkably, this is in essence a hopeful film, one that believes that things can be meaningfully improved – while also saying that the first big steps may have to be taken by those who already have a measure of power.
In this, it is unlike many of the other major films we have had about caste: films like Ketan Mehta’s superb allegory Bhavni Bhavai (which, like Article 15, raised the question of what happens to human excreta if manual scavengers go on strike), or Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh. (Think about the fate of Lahanya Bhiku’s sister in the last scene of that film – and then think about the tenderness with which Ayan and his girlfriend Anita speak with another young girl, Amali, who is a victim in comparable circumstances.) Or more recent films like Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry and Sairat. That sort of cinema – built on a cry of despair, on the fear that there is no light at the end of the tunnel – is perfectly valid, but Article 15 is trying to do something trickier: to be at least somewhat accessible to a multiplex-going audience, complete with a charismatic lead, some facile humour (e.g. the misunderstanding around Ayan’s use of the word “fuck”) and an ending that – while not exactly “happy” – at least provides a sense of justice on a minor scale; a sense that there will be more opportunities in the future.
Is that enough? Not for the millions in the real world who are facing tyranny every day. But if a mainstream film manages to sensitise a few viewers to the plight of “yeh log” (as lower-caste people are dismissively referred to early in the story), and to perhaps see them as “jan” like us, that’s no small achievement.
[Related posts: Sairat; Bhavni Bhavai; Fandry]
[On his 15th death anniversary, here’s remembering the legendary actor in one of his strangest roles – as an Indian guru. Did this light piece for The Telegraph Online]
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1968 was an important year for pop-cultural interactions between India and the West. It was the year of the Beatles’ celebrated White Album, which came out of a Rishikesh visit during which they were enthralled by and then disillusioned by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The George Harrison-Ravi Shankar musical association would be more long-lasting, and was alluded to in the Merchant-Ivory film The Guru, released early in 1969. Meanwhile the Hindi film industry had been throwing money into glossy international productions like Around the World, An Evening in Paris and Aman, almost as if to preview the Beatles’s visit and present the Indian as Global Citizen.
This was also the year in which Peter Sellers played Hrundi V Bakshi, intoning “Birdie Num Num”, in the slapstick comedy The Party. Watching The Party, Satyajit Ray – who had recently been in talks with Sellers about a science-fiction script – noted the scene where Bakshi refers to “my pet monkey Apu”, and wondered if it was a dig at Ray’s famous trilogy.
But another major Hollywood star – whom Ray had also met in connection with his sci-fi story – played an Indian that year too, in a film so strange that it can make The Party look like a kitchen-sink drama. In the final act of the sex satire Candy, Marlon Brando appears as a lustful “gooroo” who explains to the titular heroine that the Y in her name stands for Yoni. It’s an impressive monologue, but he has trouble managing his yogic sitting posture; like the mad scientist in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, wrestling with his own arm as it tries to give a Nazi salute, this guru grunts and writhes as he tries to lock his knees in position. His white dhoti rides up to reveal his powerful thighs. This is nothing like the sensuous, vulnerable young Brando of A Streetcar Named Desire and Julius Caesar, but it’s pretty sexy in its own way.
Based on a novel co-written by Terry Southern (whose most famous film contribution, as it happens, was the screenplay for Dr Strangelove), Candy is about a young girl drawing the lustful attention of a line of (mostly middle-aged) men from different walks of life: gurus, yes, but also doctors, a military man, a highbrow writer, a mountebank, and her own uncle (John Astin, in what may be the film’s most unselfconsciously funny performance).
And that’s really all there is to the “plot”. This film is a series of skits built around a one-note situation – “respectable” men turn into satyrs at the sight of Candy – which it uses to satirise everything from xenophobia to jingoism to democracy to the hypocrisies inherent in human nature. A Welsh poet (played by Richard Burton) speaks in the anguished tones of a tormented creative person even when he is doing nothing more profound than reciting the address where the money order for a copy of his book is to be sent. A famous doctor performs a ticketed surgery to which his audience comes dressed as if for the opera; while slipping his gloves on, he casually gropes the nurse holding them out for him. A Mexican gardener (played by Ringo Starr, as if one Beatles reference weren’t enough for this post) is held back from Candy-worship by his three domineering, Fury-like sisters.
All this lunacy leads unerringly to the Brando sequence, which begins when poor Candy clambers onto the back of a huge trailer truck and discovers a mystical, watery chamber (with little kettles dangling from the ceiling, and oyster shells on the walls) wherein the holy man sits meditating. When he gets an eyeful of her in her flimsy dress, it’s enough to have him spouting gobbledygook about the many stages of becoming one with the universe. In addition to words that are familiar in the India of today: “You must leave science behind,” he says, “It is corrupt.” Because all truths, and technological advances, are to be found in the ancient wisdom of the East, and the West simply hasn’t caught up yet. (Never mind that this truck is heading determinedly westward, across the American heartland.)
In some obvious ways, Candy is a dated work. It’s a film of the hippie moment, with psychedelic music and images that belongs firmly to a period that saw the release of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets. It may have appealed to the same viewers who lay, drug-addled and mumbling phrases like “transcendental consciousness”, on the floor below a movie screen while 2001’s Star Gate sequence swept over them.
Candy is also a little vulgar and exploitative in places, begging the question: can a film that satirizes pornography and male sexual aggression avoid becoming sleazy itself? (Consider that the Lolita-like Ewa Aulin, constantly leered at by the camera, had just turned 18 when she played the title role.) And of course, it is offensive (if you relish being offended) to various groups. Doctors. Patriots. Poets. Hunchbacks. Mexicans. Sadhus. Families. Women. Men. Take your pick.
The biggest problem with the film is that it isn’t funny enough on a sustained basis – too often, it feels tired and stretched out. But if you can work your way through the duller or forced bits, there is a savagely matter-of-fact satire about the worst impulses of people; about how powerful men, across milieus, can be predators. And in the process, it allows for some respected male stars to be undignified in front of the camera, even to send up their own personas.
Of course, no actor worth his salt should be permitted an ego about what he will or will not do onscreen – but even so, it seems to me that some of the thespians in Candy go beyond the call of duty. It’s 
particularly impressive to watch Burton (a dashing, golden-voiced, classical British actor) play a transparently hypocritical poet who starts off behaving like a cool, modern-day Lord Byron but turns into a double-entendre-bellowing drunk when he has Candy alone with him in his car. (“Can you withstand my huge… NEED?”) Or to see the always-elegant, catlike John Huston as a hospital administrator who loses control.
As for Brando’s performance, it blows hot and cold (he appears to make a stab at a sing-song Indian accent early on, but soon discards the idea) and it is all too easy to mock him for this role, to set it unfavourably against his major work. But there are times when he is genuinely funny, showing a knack for physical comedy (don’t miss his last appearance, where he catches a glimpse of Candy while being suspended in the air from ropes) as well as a piercing, rugged faux-intensity. It’s almost enough to make one wish Hollywood had made a DeMille-style epic around Indian mythology and cast him as Lord Shiva, holding out his gaanja to asuras and apsaras, making them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
My first thought after watching the wacky and hard-to-classify new film Judgementall Hai Kya, about the psychosis-afflicted Bobby (Kangana Ranaut) and her obsession with Keshav (Rajkummar Rao), whom she suspects of murder: is this a turbocharged, hyper-feminist 2019 version of Gaslight? Where, even if the woman really IS stark raving mad (as opposed to being manipulated into thinking she is), they have to find a way to make the man even worse?
However, there is one obvious difference between Judgementall Hai Kya and Gaslight, or between Judgementall Hai Kya and the many other stories where vulnerable women are preyed on: Bobby really does have a serious mental ailment, and the film – through its form and through Kangana Ranaut’s performance – leaves this in no doubt. We see the childhood trauma that triggered her condition (or worsened something that was already latent), then we see what she is like as an adult: out of step with reality, functioning normally only for phases, heavily reliant on medication that she doesn’t want to take, seeing roaches that no one else can see – warning signs that her condition is deteriorating. We also see her fixating on Keshav, her new neighbour, which might well give her a motive to kill his wife. 
conscious intent to kill) and another character finishes it. This could have led to a more amoral film, a Raman Raghavan 3, a Natural Born Killers 2. A story that explores how men and women, by being gloriously insane together, can reshape the world in unexpected ways. 
