Two video discussions — with Baradwaj Rangan and Devashish Makhija

Sharing a couple of Zoom discussions I recently participated in.

A conversation with Baradwaj Rangan: two blog-era critics reflect on their journeys through social media, then and now — how have writing, reviewing and online discussion changed during this time?



This is something Baradwaj and I had wanted to do for a while. The result was some rambling, some navel-gazing and some tripping over oneself - that tends to happen with these things - but it was nice to do this, and hopefully it will be of interest to those who have followed our work (and culture criticism more generally) over the past two decades. I also hope we can do a sequel sometime, where we can discuss a few things we left out here.

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And from a few weeks earlier, here is the full video of the “Cinema and Migrant Crises” fundraising conversation I had with author-filmmaker Devashish Makhija, about the migrant issue as depicted in his latest feature film Bhonsle, as well as other aspects of his work.



(Speaking of which: Bhonsle, an excellent and demanding film with Manoj Bajpayee as a tired old policeman, has only just been released for a general public — it is on Sony Liv.)

Online film-club discussions: In a Lonely Place (1950)

About the second of the film-noir discussions I am hosting. The film: the 1950 In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray, with Humphrey Bogart as a cynical, caustic screenwriter who comes to be suspected of murder. This is one of a number of films made around this period that cast a dark gaze on the inner workings of the entertainment business (other major examples include Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve from the same year, as well as The Bad and the Beautiful and the light-hearted but equally sardonic Singin’ in the Rain).
 

As before, this is how it goes:

– Those who are interested, mail me at jaiarjun@gmail.com so I can share the link to the film through Google Drive.

– Watch the film. Make notes if you feel like it.

– We get together on Zoom for an hour or two to talk about the film, as well as historical context, recommendations for other related works and so on.
 

Please mail me so we can set this up. Last week’s Gun Crazy discussion had more than 30 participants and went reasonably well; ideally that should be the maximum number, but it is flexible. I can also share the link with anyone who wants to just watch the film.

P.S. This discussion will only be next week, since I have committed to a Jaane bhi do Yaaro talk this Sunday.

P.P.S. the second still here is from an incidental little scene, but look at that Indian tourism poster.

Found while rummaging through old cupboards...

... an appointment booklet from one of my mother’s Bombay trips, when she was pregnant with me. 

The main obstetrician mentioned here, Dr Rustom Soonawala, is very well-known in his field (checking online, I learn that not only were Ranbir, Karisma and Kareena Kapoor delivered by him, but that “Vijay Mallya flew RP to Los Angeles to deliver his son Sidhartha”. All in a day’s work for a kingfisher, I suppose). But I was more amused to see one of the other names, Dr MC Watsa. 


That’s Mahinder Watsa, who has been writing the “Ask the Sexpert” column for Mumbai Mirror for a couple of decades. He’s 96 now, and still replying to sex questions. Penguin published his book It’s Normal! a few years ago and it has some enjoyably silly humour in it. I wonder if my mother met him back then, and if he said anything outrageous to her.

Film noir discussions: Gun Crazy (1950)

An update about the online film discussions I mentioned in the last post. While I am putting together a module for classes, I wanted to kick things off with a couple of informal sessions centred on 1940s-50s film noir. This is how it will go:

– I upload a film and make it available through Google Drive.

– Those who are interested, mail me at jaiarjun@gmail.com so I can share the link.

– Watch the film. Make notes if you feel like it. Preferably, don’t read detailed analyses of the film before our discussion. (When I share the link, I will provide a basic synopsis along with points of interest and what to look out for.)

– We get together on Zoom for an hour or two on a specific date to talk about the film; I will try to provide some historical context, recommendations for other related works and so on, but in my experience some of the sharpest observations during such classes come from people who have watched the film for the first time without preconceptions/too much contextual information.

 

For the film-noir discussions, I will include some of the more famous works in the genre, such as Double Indemnity, The Third Man, The Big Heat, The Asphalt Jungle, and In a Lonely Place. But I want to start with a “B-noir” that doesn’t have major stars or a major director but is a personal favourite: the 1950 ˆ, which was one of the first “couple on the run” films, made nearly two decades before Bonnie and Clyde, and a big influence on the French critics-turned-filmmakers of the decade to come. (There are visual similarities between Gun Crazy and Godard’s Breathless, for example.)

 

Please mail me at jaiarjun@gmail.com so we can set this up. I would rather start small, which means no more than 20-25 participants for the discussion. But I’m happy to share the link with anyone who wants to just watch the film.

Thinking about online film discussions (+ a recommendation for He Walked by Night)

I have been thinking about hosting a few online discussions around cinema —I hesitate at this point to call them “film-appreciation classes”, though that is what the eventual goal is — and I wondered in particular if there might be takers for conversations around American/British films of the 1930s and 1940s. Across genres: from noir and psychological horror (e.g. Val Lewton) to screwball comedy (Preston Sturges) and films that are hard to classify (the works of Powell-Pressburger). The idea being 1) to examine ways of “reading” a film by looking closely at specific works, 2) to acquire a deeper sense of film history - something that I know many young movie enthusiasts struggle with today, given all the demands on their time — and how the past has influenced the present. 

Anyway, I will provide updates about such a project here (and hopefully some of this blog's readers will be interested). But for now, a quick B-noir recommendation. A couple of such films are playing on Mubi India, among them the 1948 He Walked by Night. 

This is a lean and gripping low-budget movie, structurally unusual for its time, and it has some historical importance too: it was while playing a supporting role in this film that the actor Jack Webb came up with the idea for the police-procedural series Dragnet — a show with a long and very influential run on both TV and radio. (Dragnet might not mean very much to Indian viewers — even those of us who know old Hollywood quite well — but it helped prepare the ground for much later police shows that we do know, such as Hill Street Blues.)

Much like another 1948 film The Naked City (which also led to a TV series much later, and which I wrote about here), He Walked by Night is made in a semi-documentary style. Though it has a narrative and a dramatic arc, it also focuses on the painstaking nuts and bolts of police-work: forensics, the creation of a suspect profile based on the testimonies of several witnesses, and of course sheer luck. 
 
One more point of note: a year before a much more famous (and respectable) film noir, The Third Man, this film features a climax where the antagonist runs through a complex network of storm drains, with the police in pursuit. These sequences may not be as poetically constructed and shot as the corresponding scenes in The Third Man (and there are no canted angles!), but they are gritty and suspenseful in their own right. A very fine film if you have a taste for this sub-genre. 

P.S. like Paatal Lok, He Walked by Night also has a “villain” who seems to care for dogs. This is turning into a motif…

Chekhov in the Kerala backwaters: Ottaal

See below for a few images from Ottaal (2015), one of the most haunting films I have watched in a while. (It is playing on Mubi India now. Give it a try.) Directed by Jayaraj, this is an adaptation of the Chekhov short story “Vanka”, about a sad little boy writing a letter. You can read the English translation of that story online, but really, in my view the source text is incidental. Because this film’s beating heart is the very particular terrain in which it unfolds: the Kuttanad backwaters where the child spends much of his time minding ducks with his grandfather. 

The many beautiful images – of the place, the people in it, a boat rowing across a breath-taking network of canals, a friendly “nameless dog” running alongside the shore – are markers of a childhood that is about to come to an end. They help you see how much this boy is part of his setting, and what he is going to be separated from; they are pictures he desperately needs to preserve in his mind, and fittingly the film does everything it can to make these images unforgettable. 

(The setting also reminded me of S Hareesh’s sprawling novel Moustache, which I reviewed earlier this year. Ottaal is a much sparer work, though, and might be my favourite of the many splendid Malayalam films I have watched in the past year – certainly up there with Ee. Ma. Yau and Kumbalangi Nights. Here is an earlier piece about current Malayalam cinema.)

Short review – Sridevi: The Eternal Screen Goddess

[Wrote this short piece about Satyarth Nayak’s Sridevi book for India Today; it was done many months ago, but since their feature pages were constantly being shortened or dropped in favour of Covid-related coverage, the piece only appeared in print last week]
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There is good reason to approach an authorised biography with wariness, especially when the subject is a beloved movie star and the book is published not long after her untimely, much-lamented death. Such were my initial feelings about Sridevi: The Eternal Screen Goddess, which was written with the cooperation of the actress’s husband Boney Kapoor, described by the author as “the invisible force behind this book”.

But what makes this book feel personal (and discourages the notion that it was a hurried ego project) is that Nayak makes his own Sridevi obsession immediate and persuasive. While much of the journalistic information here comes from magazines, or first-hand interviews, there is also enough evidence that the author has closely watched and engaged with her large filmography. For those of us who know Sridevi mainly through her work in Hindi cinema, some of the most interesting sections are the ones about her work in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam cinema, starting with her child roles playing mythological characters like Lord Murugan.

Growing up in the mid-1980s, I must have been among a tiny minority of Hindi-film-loving boys who wasn’t utterly besotted by Sridevi – even though she was central to some of my favourite films such as Mr India and Chandni (and a little less central to other favourites such as Karma, Aakhree Raasta and Watan ke Rakhwale). One reason for this may have been that Sridevi was that rarity among beautiful actresses, someone who was willing to look silly, even buffoonish, on screen, and could pull off slapstick comedy very well – these qualities can be discomfiting if, at a certain age, you want your screen crushes to be aloof and goddess-like (which is something she could also be when required).

Nayak discusses the many Sridevis, including the child-woman who never had a proper transition from childhood to adulthood. (“It was almost as if she was playing out a double role in real life as well – a kid who had grown too much, an adult who had grown too little.”) He covers her intuitive approach to acting, her extraordinary comedic talent, and her deployment of the many rasas in classical Indian expression. The successful pairings with Kamal Haasan, the epochal performances in films like Mondram Pirai (remade in Hindi as Sadma), the rivalry with Jaya Prada, the rise to a stature where she could play an eye-catching double role in even an Amitabh Bachchan film (Khuda Gawah). The ways in which she maintained a measure of control over the male gaze (even while working in a male-dominated industry where heroines were often treated as eye candy) and how her persona in films like Nagina resonated with closet homosexuals, or with other marginalised people.

He often begins his analysis of a Sridevi performance in a scene with the words “Watch how…” This can get repetitive and sometimes ornate (“So harrowing is this act that one wonders if it gutted the very insides of the actress” […] “Her face created its own grammar, her charisma overrode every technical rule, creating a physicality that was simply impossible to replicate”) – and it’s possible to wonder how, discussing dozens of films across decades and languages, he doesn’t find anything seriously negative to say about a performance. (Dissing some of her choices is another matter; that’s easily done with any prolific Indian movie star.) But there is also something direct and pleasing about this nerdy attention to detail, this willingness to focus on the little moments, and that’s what raises this book above the assembly-line biography. Even if this is a hagiography, it feels rooted in an honest love for its subject.

Animal chronicles contd: rescuing Coffee

This is a dog named Coffee, and if you think he is not looking in good health here, you do NOT want to see photos of him from two weeks ago (I won’t post any of those because I’d rather not use this space for grisly images, I see enough of those every day on WhatsApp animal groups). 

It’s hard to describe what bad shape Coffee was in back then, you had to see for yourself: he had large purple boils all over his back, some of which had burst and were fetid and oozing pus; he was unable to see properly, and kept bumping into parked cars and walls each time he tried to stagger about. Vasundhara, his regular feeder in D-block, Saket had been trying to catch or medicate him, with little success, and things were reaching a point of no return — so I asked our paravet heroes Ravi and Manoj to come across and give it a try. What began as a disorganised catching attempt by four or five of us quickly turned into an extended nighttime adventure. 

Confronted by a couple of confused-looking humans who were holding out a large sheet between them and idly hoping he would run into it, Coffee found a sudden burst of energy, darted past us and crawled under the (locked) gate of one of the largest parks in the vicinity. It was late, we were tempted to give up for the night (and Manoj had to go to the hospital because his sister-in-law was very unwell), but somehow we extracted the park key from a senior resident, and there followed a chase scene as stirring as anything out of The French Connection or Black Friday. In a huge, dark, jungle-like space where all of us had to keep our phone torches on and get into pairs to cut the terrified dog’s escape routes off. Finally we cornered him, Ravi managed to get a chain around his neck (very difficult to do without causing him harm), and then one of our kindliest residents, Chhavi, drove him to a vet + boarding facility in Chhatarpur. He has been there for the past two weeks, and will probably stay another few days. 

The good news: the biopsy report has indicated nothing very threatening so far. The not-so-good news: the skin ruptures will need to be monitored closely after he is back in his lane, and that’s always tricky with a street dog, with rainy weather ahead. Still, at this point it looks like we should be able to call this a success story — if so, it’s a rare one for a dog who was in the condition that Coffee was in two weeks ago. Given how things were then, it’s good just to see him calm, eating biscuits and looking at the camera. This might seem an unattractive photo at first glance, but for me it's a very satisfying one.

[Earlier posts about Ravi and Manoj: 1, 2]

'Cinema and Migrant Crises', an online conversation

For this fundraising event, writer-filmmaker Devashish Makhija and I will discuss Cinema and Migrant Crises, as well as related subjects, on June 6. The starting point for the talk will be Devashish’s stunning film Bhonsle — with Manoj Bajpayee as an elderly Bombay cop who gets caught up in a conflict between locals and migrants in his chawl — but we will also talk more generally about Devashish’s work and its concerns (in addition to making feature-length and short films, he has authored short stories, tiny tales and children’s books).

The link for registration is here. Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested.

P.S. here is a piece I wrote about Makhija's short film Taandav, which also featured Manoj Bajpayee as a policeman.