Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Naked gods, fake godmen and a forthright child: on Satyajit Ray's Joi Baba Felunath

(In my First Post column about opening sequences, Ray’s marvelous film Joi Baba Felunath, which is a detective story as well as a critique of pious hypocrites)
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A statue-maker is telling mythological stories to a boy: about the creation of the goddess Durga so that the demon Mahishasura might be vanquished; about the various mounts used by the Gods – a tiger for Durga, a rat for Ganesha, and so on. “Is all this true?” asks little Ruku, the doubtful look on his face emphasized by his gum-chewing (a detail that will work its way into the plot later).

“It must be true, since the old sages say so,” replies the sculptor.

“The buffalo demon is real,” mulls the child, “The monkey god is real. So are Captain Spark and Tarzan.” Comic-book superheroes and “official” Gods belong in the same tier of worship-worthiness.

But the conversation is interrupted, because someone has arrived in a car that has drawn up to the house in the dark, dark night. This isn’t the Mahishasura of legend but a contemporary villain – an unscrupulous businessman named Maganlal Meghraj, who covets a diamond-studded idol belonging to Ruku’s family.

Thus begins Satyajit Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath (English title: The Elephant God), the second of his films about the adventures of the detective Feluda (played by Soumitra Chatterjee). The opening credits have rolled (they appeared over a series of beautiful scrolls depicting religious rituals and stories across a map of Kashi) and now we are in the narrative proper, set in modern-day Benares. The devious Maganlal (Utpal Dutt), this film’s embodiment of the idea that criminals often make ostentatious shows
of piety, shows up and proclaims that he wants the family heirloom – and shortly afterwards, the idol is stolen. Meanwhile Feluda has arrived for a holiday with his cousin Topshe and the mystery-writer Jatayu. Naturally he finds himself on the case, and the film settles into being an engrossing, good-natured detective story.

And as a set-up for all this is that little exchange in the first scene, where a child shows forthrightness about things that adults are often evasive about.

“Kids get crazy ideas from these books,” Ruku’s father complains in a later scene, trying to dissuade the boy from wasting time on superhero fantasies. But that opening scene is a reminder that kids (and the adults that those kids turn into) can get crazy and dangerous ideas from religious stories too – especially if they treat them as the infallible truth.

In fact, one reason why I enjoyed this scene – and identified with Ruku – is that in my own childhood, saturated with Amar Chitra Katha comics, I became besotted with the god Shiva – as a super-cool superhero, not as a divinity. And I would get annoyed with family elders who approvingly referred to my Shiva-love in terms of “bhakti” or religious devotion. Their keenness to have me in the fold as a true believer might have seemed harmless at the time, but years and decades later, in other conversations and proclamations by those same aunts and uncles, I would see the nastier aspects of that religiosity play out.

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In the Joi Baba Felunath opening sequence, we also get our first view of something that will become a running motif in the film: the yet-to-be-painted statue of the goddess Durga, far from finished but already arranged in her characteristic pose, looming over the supine demon. Dare one say it, especially given that this is a film for young viewers, there is something crude and unseemly about these visuals. When you see a Durga statue in full finery, painted, clothed, trident in hand, astride her lion, the impression is one of grandeur and awe. But see the same figure as a blank slate, legs splayed suggestively, and you have something very different. Bereft of paint and accoutrements, she is nothing more than an unclothed Barbie doll or a mannequin. This harks back to the opening-credits sequence of Ray’s 1960 film Devi, which showed a statue’s unadorned face gradually transforming into the goddess through the addition of makeup, jewellery and hair.

Given Ray’s own scepticism about religion – or at least religious rituals – and his concerns about the perils of unquestioning faith, it’s no surprise that over the course of Joi Baba Felunath he gives us these matter-of-fact reminders of what Gods look like naked.

A few years earlier Ray’s first Feluda film, Sonar Kella, had also opened with a nighttime scene involving a little boy – Mukul, whose memories of a past life in a golden fortress somewhere in Rajasthan set the plot’s wheels turning. The tones and assumptions of the two scenes are very different: while Feluda’s detection methods may be logical and precise, Sonar Kella in its denouement is not a “rational” film– it allows for the likelihood that Mukul really does remember details of his previous life. And that opening scene is imbued with a sense of otherworldly mystery created by the child looking through the drawings he has made. In the stories he wrote, Satyajit Ray wasn’t averse to the supernatural or para-normal.

But the opening scene in Joi Baba Felunath is like a counterpoint to the Sonar Kella one: here, the child is questioning, doubtful about the fantastic stories he is hearing. And it sets a different sort of narrative in motion – one that is about debunking religious pretences and hypocrisies. We see this elsewhere in the film’s visual scheme – for instance, in the elaborate religious iconography decorating the walls of Maganlal’s den, a space where underhanded transactions are also carried out.

In superficial terms, Joi Baba Felunath takes the form of a cosy detective tale with warm, familiar characters as well as sinister antagonists: there is a theft, and an investigation around it. But being set as it is in Benares, with its many shots of temples in labyrinthine lanes, there is a more metaphysical quality to this film just
below its surface: it plays out almost like an investigation into the nature of blind faith and idolatry. Consider the probing camera movements in a scene where Feluda moves from the imposing exteriors of the ancient city into a space occupied by a “holy man” who is known as Machli Baba, and sees various items lying around his room – including the wig and the other disguises this unremarkable-looking fellow dons to appear grand and magisterial. Or the vividly shot nighttime scene where a freshly stabbed man stumbles through a narrow lane, with the “holy” city impervious to his plight.

And yet, as this film suggests, there are other forms of (more personal, more individualistic) worship too, and other types of temples. The old man, meticulously painting the statue over many days, is an artist for whom doing his work well is as much an act of devotion as the feelings that will be generated by the finished idol. The bodybuilder with 17-and-a-half-inch biceps who shares a guesthouse room with Feluda and friends thinks of his body as a holy space and as a work of art comparable to Michelangelo’s David.

And of course there is little Ruku with his firm belief that the superhero Captain Spark can protect even kidnapped Gods. He turns out to be right, too. 

[Earlier First Post columns here. And here is an essay I wrote about Satyajit Ray as rationalist and fabulist]

Monday, July 26, 2021

Terribly tiny reviews: The Disciple, Cinema Bandi, Malik

(I have been doing some very small – barely 300 words or so – reviews for Reader’s Digest in recent months. Not my preferred writing format, but it does sometimes feel like a nice throwback to my first journalistic stint 20 years ago. Am putting some of these reviews here in this combined post)

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Cinema Bandi (Telugu)
Directed by Praveen Kandregula

Netflix

In a small town, an autorickshaw driver named Veera finds a big video camera that someone accidentally left in his vehicle. With the help of his friend Gana, he sets about trying to make a film himself. Who knows, it might become a pan-India hit and fetch lakhs of rupees?

The charming new film Cinema Bandi probably derives its inspiration from the fact that in recent years, thanks to mobile-phone technology and apps like Tik Tok, it has become possible for underprivileged people to become “filmmakers” themselves – often displaying commendable levels of creativity as they work within constraints and learn on the job. In this case, the plot begins with unexpected access to an expensive device, and the endeavour becomes more complicated with the hunt for a suitable crew (including a girl who sneaks away on college time because her father won’t let her act). But slowly they figure out the vagaries of shot-taking, continuity and costume. Everyone is infected by the project – in one scene Veera and his wife even behave a little “filmi” when they quarrel. One is reminded that much of human behaviour and self-perception over the past century has been influenced by the tropes that we have been exposed to as movie-goers.

Fittingly, this tribute to small filmmaking is itself a small, low-budget film – one where the actors are first-timers (only a little more polished than the hired-on-the-fly “actors” within the narrative). This means that you have to be a little patient with Cinema Bandi, tolerant of its rawer moments, a couple of cliches, and the over-earnestness of some of the storytelling. Ultimately, though, its sincerity and gentle humour carry the day.

And in one of the wittier touches, the “writer” of the amateur movie is an old man who is always around for the shoot, but quiet, passive and summarily overshadowed by what is going on around him. He does get to speak the film’s hilarious last line, though.

The Disciple (Marathi)

Netflix

Chaitanya Tamhane’s lovely tribute to the world of Indian classical music – and its many forgotten practitioners – could just as well have been titled “Discipline”. This is the quality that Sharad (Aditya Modak) has to organise his life around, and we witness both his patience and his frustrations as he comes to term with the possibility that he might never find a proper foothold in the world he loves. Is he even good enough, as a singer or as a student?

Slow-paced as The Disciple might seem, it becomes a hypnotic experience as you get invested in the central character and his journey. The narrative moves around in time, giving us glimpses of Sharad’s childhood as well as the present day, where he tries to draw succour from audio recordings of talks by a long-deceased teacher named Maai (voiced by the late Sumitra Bhave). Tamhane’s long takes and almost-static shots – also a characteristic of his earlier feature Court – work wonderfully for this subject matter: in the musical performances, the camera sometimes moves only very slightly forward, as if mindful of intruding on the performers’ space. Throughout, one is aware of the contrast between this deliberate, measured pace of life – and the patience required for it – and how the world moves elsewhere.

The Disciple is driven by its attention to detail and its many little vignettes – such as the mildly chastened look on Sharad’s face when his guru tells him, mid-performance and in front of a seated audience, “No, you aren’t listening … sing with an open throat.” Or the plaintive scene where he goes to donate recordings of Maai’s voice to an archive that doesn’t seem to care much. Or the very slow escalating to hostilities when the mother of one of his students comes to him asking that her boy be allowed to take time off to perform with a “fusion” band. It is a story about the relationship between art and artists, as well as a lament for things that have come to be seen as elitist, outdated or both.

Malik (Malayalam)

Prime Video

To understand the breadth of the current Malayalam cinema – responsible for perhaps the most vibrant filmmaking in the country today – consider the last two collaborations between writer-director Mahesh Narayanan and actor Fahadh Faasil. In 2020, with pandemic-generated restrictions on conventional filmmaking, they made the low-budget, experimental “computer screen film” C U Soon, a story told through video calls and online chats, and needing only very basic real-world sets (Faasil offered the use of his own flat).

Their latest, Malik, on the other hand, is a big-canvas gangster film spanning five decades, with a large cast of characters. It begins with a very long, single-take sequence that introduces us to the household of the aging Sulaiman or “Ali Ikka” (Faasil) as he prepares to leave for a Hajj pilgrimage. He is arrested, though, and plans are made to get him killed in prison. This provides the framework for flashbacks – narrated by different characters – that detail the rise to power of a man who becomes a hero in the Ramadapally region. Though Sulaiman, a Muslim, falls in love with and marries a Christian girl Roslyn (Nimisha Sajayan), he also finds himself caught in communal tensions exploited by politicians and police – leading to a parting of ways with his brother-in-law David (Vinay Fortt).

While being about the politics of a specific area, Malik draws on some templates and character types that have been genre staples since The Godfather (some scenes also feel like a homage to Mani Ratnam’s Nayagan). Accordingly, crime-movie aficionados might find it over-familiar at times. But watched on its own terms – and without comparing it to the very best that Malayalam cinema has recently given us – this is a solid, well-acted film with a sense of the broad sweep of history and of the small, intimate moments which forge that history.

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Et tu...

First picture below: my mother with a little Great Dane pup in November 2014. Other pics further down: what that pup grew into.

Brutus was the canine baby of Susmita aunty, my mother’s dearest friend: they got him together seven years ago. He died yesterday after weeks of being very unwell; the last diagnosis was lung cancer. Aunty and I got him cremated at Sai Ashram.

Though I walked him once in a while during the lockdowns, I didn’t spend as much time with him in the past few years as I might have (he was a very big, awkward-to-handle dog, and one couldn’t really play with him or make him run around in our park). But each time I saw him I was reminded of how close he and my mother had been. After mum’s cancer diagnosis and her inability to move around much, she was confined to our first-floor flat apart for the hospital visits, and Brutus was much too big for us to risk him being around her in her delicate
state – so they didn’t really get to meet in her last year or so. And he was very sad and puzzled by this turn of events: even after she was gone, he would sometimes break free while passing our building during his evening walk and try to gallop up the stairs to look for mum.

It isn’t ideal for such a large-sized dog to stay in a small flat (even a ground-floor one with a garden, as aunty’s is), but he was lucky in one sense: in the past year and a half, thanks to the pandemic, he had aunty with him round the clock. And of course, she was there at the very end.

I have lots of pictures of him, too many to share, but the lovely illustration here was done by fellow dog-parent Moutushi Sarkar from a photo of Brutus and Lara together. I have had this drawing as my laptop wallpaper for a couple of years, and it will definitely stay there for a while now.

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Yeh dil maange gore: on marriage and homicide in Haseen Dillruba (and elsewhere)

(The first in an occasional series I am writing for the Economic Times’s Sunday Chatter page)
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The climactic scene of the new film Haseen Dillruba involves inadvertent murder with a mutton leg – wielded, ironically, by a vegetarian – as the weapon. That detail probably comes from the famous Roald Dahl story “Lamb to the Slaughter”, which ends with policemen feasting on a heavy roast served to them in the house where they are investigating a murder. They wonder what and where the weapon is. “It’s probably right here under our nose somewhere,” one of them grunts as he digs into the meat.


“Lamb to the Slaughter” is one of a few blackly funny tales Dahl wrote about spouses who slay or torment each other – others include “The Way up to Heaven” and “William and Mary” – to go with his wicked stories about a by-product of marriage, children: read “Royal Jelly” or “Genesis and Catastrophe” to feel the shudder of revulsion that is exactly the opposite experience of looking at a cute baby and going “awley”.

But the Haseena Dillruba scene also involves something grislier – an act of self-mutilation, a chopping off of a human limb. And what’s more interesting: even as blood decorates the walls, this is a stirringly romantic scene. It is the moment when a marital pact is sealed, when two people know for certain that they belong together.

I was reminded of a similar moment in the climax of the 2001 Hannibal, adapted from Thomas Harris’s novel, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter, having decided not to eat his long-time nemesis Clarice Starling, briefly transforms from psychopath to valentine, making a heart-warming sacrifice so he can escape while keeping Clarice intact in body and soul. This was a notable change from the denouement of Harris’s novel, which many purists had found unacceptable: Hannibal the book had ended, in the ornate prose that Harris had adopted by this time, with Lecter and Clarice together in a diabolical romantic relationship. (You could even think of it as a sort of marriage.) The film version reworked the ending to retain Clarice’s moral integrity. And yet, in its own way, the movie’s resolution is sexier than the book’s was. When Lecter brings his chopping knife down to a swell of lush music, it’s more poignant (if you’re a certain sort of viewer) than Jack letting Rose hog the wooden panel in Titanic.

In other words, true romance often goes surprisingly well with gore. There is a long line of literary and cinematic explorations of this idea, in different contexts: from couples trying to kill each other to those who bond by committing crimes or exploring the possibilities of folie à deux (a madness shared by two). A notable recent instance in Indian cinema was in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis, which employs soft lilting music and a dreamy, Vaseline-on-lens aesthetic even as it tells the story of a man and woman who fall in love over her enjoyment of meat-eating (which leads to unsettlingly varied types of meat-eating). 

In Haseen Dillruba, the protagonist Rani quotes her favourite pulp writer as saying that eternal love should be stained with a few drops of blood. The narrative isn’t unconditionally respectful of this insight – it serves as the build-up for a funny moment where a frustrated police officer explodes in anger – but it does suggest one way of looking at this film: Rani and her husband Rishu, divided by personality differences and social circumstances, find common ground as they become more amoral.

An earlier film also scripted by Kanika Dhillon, the wacky Judgementall Hai Kya, hinted that games of romantic one-upmanship can be a form of psychosis (as well as cathartic). Haseen Dillruba doesn’t live up to its promise – it is dull and plodding, which is especially disappointing for a film with so many references to lurid small-town detective novels. But there are flashes of something subversive in its depiction of two people in a regimented arranged marriage. You haven’t had any time to get to know each other, nosy in-laws are keeping an eye on your every move (so that a susheel ladki can’t even drop her pallu to excite her husband without her saas snapping at her) – in these circumstances, one way of creating adrenaline is by trying to kill each other (or fantasise about killing each other) in inventive ways. Put slippery paper soap on the stairs, or engineer a gas explosion – do this often enough and maybe she’ll find you irresistible (if she survives).

Its flaws notwithstanding, this film knows that marriage can be a cannibalistic endeavour in which two people gnaw at each other over the years, with results that can vary: you might leave each other depleted and hollow, or you may feel replenished and hungry for new adventures. I don’t know what Dinesh Pandit, the fictional pulp writer created for this narrative, may have thought of Rani and Rishu’s antics. But Roald Dahl, Patricia Highsmith (who once opened a story with the line “A young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand, and received it in a box — her left hand”) and other chroniclers of gruesome love would probably approve. 

(Earlier post: Judgementall Hai Kya: mental disorders in men and women)

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Online film discussion: The Conversation and Blow Out

It’s been a while, but I’m planning my next film -club discussion now. It will centre on two celebrated thrillers by two of the major American directors of the 1970s, the “kids with beards” generation: Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma. Both these films are about different kinds of audio surveillance: about listening to sounds and trying to piece together a narrative, or solve a mystery.

The Conversation (1974) – with Gene Hackman as a very reclusive and paranoid surveillance expert trying to figure out if some of his recordings reveal the planning of a murder.

Coppola made this film in between the first two Godfather films, and while it is nowhere near as widely seen as those movies, it got a fair deal of critical attention when it came out, along with a best picture Oscar nomination. (It lost to The Godfather Part II!)

Blow Out (1981) – with John Travolta as a sound man for cheap C-grade films, who gets caught up in a political conspiracy when he inadvertently records the sound of a car accident that kills a governor.

(As some of you might know, De Palma is one of my favourite directors. This film has his trademark cheekiness, technical virtuosity and even his unapologetic appetite for sleaze – don’t miss the opening sequence which is a parody-tribute to the teen-slasher film involving horny youngsters – though it’s also a political thriller and a coming-of-age story.)

Anyone who'd like to drop in for the discussion (it will be sometime next week) or would like to just watch the films, mail me (jaiarjun@gmail.com) and I'll send across the G Drive links. And if anyone has suggestions for other similar films to watch for this chat, let me know. (Antonioni’s Blow-Up is one obvious name. There is also Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes. And more tangentially, the Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others. And there are lots of political/journalistic thrillers from the 1970s, including The Parallax View and All the President’s Men.)

Sunday, July 11, 2021

The current Malayalam cinema – some thoughts by an outsider

(As anyone who has talked cinema with me in recent times knows, I have watched more Malayalam films in the last three years than films in any other language. [Well, among *new* films anyway.] The latest issue of Outlook magazine has a special package on Malayalam cinema, and I have contributed a “new entrant to this world” essay. Here it is.)
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In a key scene in the 2019 Malayalam film Driving Licence, a popular movie star named Hareendran is in a televised face-off against a motor vehicle inspector. The MVI has long been a big fan of the actor, but things have turned ugly between them over the issuing of a new driving licence. Now Hareendran has to pass a learner’s test that involves a quiz-style Q and A session. Ten questions, and he must answer six correctly.

The scene builds and pulses with tension until, with two questions left, Hareendran needs one correct answer. In almost any such dramatic movie scene, the moment would be milked for all it was worth, taken down to the wire. But it doesn’t happen that way here – the star simply gets the ninth answer right, meaning he has won this bout. Only for now, though. Because this is just one of many unpredictable little moments in the film’s screenplay (by the late KR Sachidanandan, or Sachy) – the narrative, about two people divided by misunderstandings, might be broadly familiar, but the journey is sinuous and clever.

A few days before Driving Licence, I watched the intense action film Kala, co-produced by and starring the hunky Tovino Thomas, one of the industry’s more popular leading men. Without giving away spoilers, around forty-five minutes through this film something happens that shifts the focus away from the Tovino character Shaji (who, to all intents and purposes, was the story’s protagonist) and to another, unnamed person. With this change in perspective, the film roars into a new gear: just as we thought we knew where the narrative was going, our ideas about the characters, their circumstances and what is at stake, are upended. Kala is easily described as a “home-invasion thriller”, but whose home has been invaded? This question hangs over the film.

I mention these two moments because they represent something I have enjoyed about the high-quality Malayalam cinema of the past few years: the willingness of a screenplay to take playful detours, to do unexpected things organically, without making a fuss about it. And also because, on the surface both these films are glossy and relatively commercial – they have pace, masala, visual flourishes (Kala’s second half has some marvellously staged fight scenes), and charismatic leads (Prithviraj Sukumaran, a big star himself, plays the much-worshipped Hareendran in Driving Licence). They are different in tone and texture from the more grounded Malayalam films that get fetishized in some quarters. Yet they have a knack for the counterintuitive moment and for the rupturing of a narrative.
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As is the case for many others who don’t know the language, my acquaintance with Malayalam films has been facilitated by greater accessibility on OTT platforms, good subtitling, and occasional context-providing by south Indian friends (though this last factor can be a double-edged one, in the same way that one must be careful not to get bullied by Bengalis who have unshakeable views on Ray or Ghatak!). The journey has been both exhilarating, as a viewer, and a little nerve-wracking as a professional critic. Because encountering a completely new cinematic landscape – and through it, a less familiar culture – when you’re in your forties is very different from doing so as an energetic teenager (which is what I was when I first dived into “world” cinemas). You tend to be more set in your ways, lower on patience; it takes more time to make sense of something new, to work your way into it by identifying recurring themes, tropes, personalities and behaviours, and connecting dots across a variety of films.

But after the initial barriers, it has been smooth going. It helps that the canvas is large and no genre or tone seems to be off-limits; the main requirement seems to be conviction in a project and the ability to execute it whole-heartedly. Thus, on one hand there is the slice-of-life tale that makes for the most unobtrusive type of great film: driven by small incidents and whimsies of character, with the true depth of the storytelling slowly sneaking up on you. The films of Dileesh Pothan – including Maheshinte Prathikaaram (Mahesh’s Revenge), about a photographer determined to regain his dignity after being knocked down during a brawl, and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (The Mainour and the Witness), about a small-time thief crossing paths with a married couple during a bus ride – are good examples, as is the acclaimed Kumbalangi Nights (directed by Madhu C Narayanan), about the intersecting lives of a dysfunctional all-male family and a seemingly “normal” family unit in a fishing village.

Elsewhere in the spectrum are the Big Issue films such as Virus (about the Nipah virus outbreak and those who investigated and contained it) and The Great Indian Kitchen (about a progressive young woman in a patriarchal environment after marriage), as well as the much more formally adventurous, stylised works such as those of Lijo Jose Pellissery (Angamaly Diaries and Jallikattu being among the most feted, though my personal favourite is Ee.Ma.Yau.) – full of showy camerawork, long takes, fast-paced editing, and the use of elaborate animated sequences, even as they retain a storytelling directness.

Looking at all these films through an outsider’s gaze, I get a sense of an ecosystem that is constantly replenishing itself. Producer-directors such as Aashiq Abu, writers like Syam Pushkaran, cinematographers like Shyju Khalid (also a producer), and a number of talented performers have cast a strong influence and multi-tasked across a range of films, and the acknowledgements lists in the opening credits can be very telling. One should be cautious while comparing cinematic cultures, but I am sometimes reminded of the French film industry of the late 50s and 60s, made up of artists who were expressing very distinct visions and sensibilities but also riffing off each other’s work: on the one hand there was an avant-garde Godard, on the other a deliberately verbose Rohmer, and so much in between. Or the American directors – the “kids with beards” – of the early 70s, watching each other’s rough cuts and offering support and suggestions even as they made varied films (from Coppola’s gangster epics to George Lucas’s “space opera” Star Wars).

The creative energies in Malayalam cinema can also be seen in the willingness to do something on the fly, or to seize a moment. Consider the “computer-screen thriller” CU Soon – about a man taking his cousin’s help to digitally track a woman who has gone missing – which was made in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and turned the period’s shooting limitations into a virtue; Fahadh Faasil, one of the industry’s biggest names, not only starred in this experimental work but also made his apartment available for the shoot. Another Faasil starrer, the Dileesh Pothan-directed Joji, is actually set during the pandemic, with the plot even affected by it; in the opening scene, a youngster takes delivery of an important package meant for his grandfather by telling the courier boy that the old man is in quarantine.

While there are many things to cherish in these films, for me personally one of the warmest aspects of Malayalam cinema is its depiction of the natural world and the interconnectedness between its different elements. This is explicitly done in films like Jayraj’s Ottaal (about a boy destined to be cruelly separated from his environment, the Kuttanad backwaters), Jallikattu (about a village trying to hunt down a vagrant bull) and Kala, which will turn out to centre on the fate of a dog, and includes many shots of animals and insects in their natural setting, appearing to watch impassively while self-important humans go about their work. But the awareness of our ecology – and our attitude to our ecology – as being inseparable from our existence is a refrain in many other films. Even a story like Virus – which cross-cuts urgently between subplots in portraying a human crisis – manages to end with a lovely, tender, morally complex scene involving an encounter between a man and a baby bat that has fallen off its tree.

In a way, perhaps, this attentiveness to other life forms ties in with the broader theme of otherness – the many ways of being different, and of assimilating different-seeming things. And this theme can extend beyond the natural world, even to the use of a non-living thing as a metaphor. I am thinking of the 2019 comedy-drama-fantasy Android Kunjappan Version 5.25, in which the wonderful actor Suraj Venjaramoodu plays a man nearly twice his age – the crabby Bhaskaran, who finds himself saddled with a robot as nurse and house help.

The idea of a sentient humanoid waddling around making tea, chattering away, and even having a mundu draped around it, can be jarring if you love Malayalam films for their grounded, naturalistic treatment. But Android Kunjappan Ver 5.25 has some wonderfully observed moments enroute to becoming a story about insularity and outsider-ness. While other recent films like the excellent Nayattu or Unda (both about cops in peril) or Sudani from Nigeria (about an African footballer adrift in Kerala when his passport goes missing) deal in direct and “realistic” ways with caste or class prejudice, this one does so tangentially, starting with facile humour – including a joke about the android being an “upper-caste Japanese” – but building up to something more thoughtful. This machine will bring disgrace to the temple, a haughty priest says, barring the robot’s way, much as religious leaders do to lower-caste people or to menstruating women.

In a sort of counterpoint, the android later asks the old man if he would like to live in the future. “There will be no caste or religion in the future,” it says, “So if you stop believing in these things now, you will already be living in the future.” No time machines required. Moments like these are a reminder – among many others – of the possibilities in this dynamic filmmaking world, and how the best of it manages to be simple yet insightful, inclusive, quirky and thought-provoking all at once.

(Also did this long piece on a few favourite Malayalam films for the Cinemaazi website last year. Other related posts: Kumbalangi Nights/men in barbershops; thoughts on Joji; nostalgia and imagination in Ottaal)

Wednesday, July 07, 2021

The Serious Actor and the Matinee Idol - a tribute to Dilip Kumar

(Wrote this piece about Dilip Kumar for Mint. The coming Saturday’s issue of Mint Lounge will carry a slightly extended version)

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One of my memories of reading Hindi-film magazines in the 1980s was that when young actors were asked about their idols or inspirations, the answers seemed to follow a template. Among American favourites, the names “Brando” and “De Niro” were reverentially intoned. Among Indian legends, it was almost always “Dilip Kumar” or “Yusuf saab”.

At the time, I had seen and loved films like Karma and Shakti – and yes, even Kranti, with that “Chana Jor Garam” song where Dilip Kumar and Manoj Kumar were strung up by the comically evil Brits – but I had no firsthand experience of the much-idolized Yusuf saab of yore. This is what one gathered from those magazine pages and from parents’ conversations: he was so understated. The opposite of what Hindi cinema usually stood for. Gravitas, soulfulness, thehraav were his stock in trade. His performances were “realistic”.

This eulogizing of subtlety – and the blanket equating of quietness with realism – was a little puzzling to someone who was from a Punjabi clan and knew many boisterous or demonstrative people in real life. An obvious question was: what if Dilip Kumar were required to play a flamboyant character?

The answer would come over the years, as I discovered older cinema, and accordingly I’d like to emphasize an aspect of Kumar’s screen persona that sometimes gets overlooked: apart from anything else, he was a great matinee idol who knew how to work the camera to his advantage.

This is not to undermine his emblematic roles, or to deny that he was marvelous at what one might call studied understatement. Clichéd though it sounds, he is excellent as the sulky, limp-wristed non-lover in Bimal Roy’s Devdas (though for my money, he was out-understated, so to speak, by Suchitra Sen’s Paro in their scenes together). The quiet intensity is there in so many seminal films, from the 1949 Andaz to the 1951 Deedar to the 1957 Musafir, in which he sang in his own voice for the first time onscreen – in a beautiful, plaintive scene where the characters played by him and Usha Kiran, former lovers, recall their young and carefree days together.

But beneath the hurt lover withdrawing into himself, there was also one of the most dazzling smiles in our cinema. (After a Mumbai Film Festival screening of the Partition-Era film Qissa, Tillotama Shome – who played a girl raised as a boy – mentioned that the director had asked her to watch early Dilip Kumar performances in films like Tarana, because he wanted her to look at the way he smiled, even in tense situations.) And there was a showman too, a man with style, panache, star quality.

Some Dilip Kumar fans – those who prefer to restrict him – would treat those descriptors as slurs. But I mean them as a tribute to a star-actor’s ability to shift registers.

Consider Kumar in Mehboob Khan’s 1952 epic Aan, a film that can be somewhat hard on the eyes today because of the overdone Technicolor (it was India’s first such production, meant to impress international viewers, and it may have blinded some of them instead). He is required to swagger and preen and swashbuckle and get the better of a spoilt princess, and he does all this with conviction – but without relinquishing any of the softer qualities that most people associate with him. Watch the handsome young poseur bandaging his horse’s wounded foot while singing “Maan Mera Ehsaan” to a sullen Nadira, balancing genuine concern for the animal with the demands of being a dashing romantic lead – and treating the scene not just as a stand-alone musical interlude but as an important part of the film’s universe. It’s as if – to evoke the qualities of the Hollywood actors Kumar would have watched as a young man – the brash cockiness of Errol Flynn had somehow been mixed with the bashfulness, the poetic realism of Henry Fonda. If you can imagine such a thing.

Many years later, here is Dilip Kumar bounding about at a podium in that bloated but often very intriguing satire Leader, showing a fine sense of the absurd and even a knack for slapstick. Or watch him throw himself into the part of the gregarious, emotional Gungaram in Gunga Jumna, even performing “Nain Lad Jaiyen” – one of his first full-throated musical sequences – as if he had been singing and dancing throughout his childhood. Among the Hindi-film actors who were celebrated for their naturalism, only a select few could bring conviction to song performances (which involve a very different set of performative skills). Nutan was one, Kumar was another (and how good they were together in the first rendering of “Dil Diya Hai, Jaan bhi Denge” in Karma).

Like almost every male star in Hindi cinema, Kumar could – when allowed to get out of control or over-indulged by a script – seem like a self-congratulatory ham at times. But more than most other star-actors, he managed to strike a balance between internalizing a character while also being a popular star, aware of his following and reputation and how a specific gesture – even a “subtle” one – would make him look on screen. There are many instances across his body of work where you see both facets in the space of a few minutes of film. In the opening scene of Madhumati, the car moving through the stormy night, he tosses off his lines with Brando-like carelessness: chatting with his friend, peremptorily telling the driver to go faster. But then, just a short while later, in the “Suhana Safar” song, he stands on a rock and waves his arms like an orchestra conductor, as if he were really hearing the tune in his head – and as if he knew that the attention of every last member of the audience should be on him.

In the best work of this actor, the two poles of Realism and Stylization blended into one, and you could see how they might work together. It’s a lesson that most major performers working in mainstream Hindi cinema have had to learn, but one that very few could master.

(Related posts: Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala in Paigham; in praise of Gunga Jumna)

Tuesday, July 06, 2021

Evil under the sun, in Ari Aster’s Midsommar

(First Post is doing a series about films discussed through the lens of their setting. I contributed this piece on an unsettling horror film that unfolds mainly in bright spaces)
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In October 2019, during a writing residency in the Swedish town Stromstad, I took a bus to a farmland six miles away to see a stone ship, a prehistoric grave made up of dozens of large standing stones. My flatmate, the writer Girish Shahane, and I soon realised that this wasn’t anything like a normal tourist destination: despite its historical value, the stone ship was just there, majestic and poignant, in a deserted space. Signs of habitation were around us – houses, a herd of sheep walking past indolently, hay bales piled up in the distance – but as far as I can recall now we didn’t see another human being during the hour or so that we were there.

Briefly, thoughts of similar settings in horror films – the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example – came to my mind, but this was mainly academic (and I tend to think about horror-film tropes in mundane everyday situations anyway). It’s probably just as well that I hadn’t yet watched Ari Aster’s Midsommar, which had come out a month or two earlier – if I had, I would have felt a much deeper chill on that Swedish afternoon. Because the bulk of this strange, moody, unnerving film unfolds in an open Scandinavian setting where the sun rarely naps.

Midsommar begins on a different note, though, one that might come from a more conventional horror film. A choral music score, a glimpse of a medieval painting, followed by a snowy, tree-filled landscape seen in crepuscular light. Mysterious chants flood the soundtrack – it’s as if nature herself were calling out plaintively – and then there is an abrupt visual and aural cut: another sort of night-time setting, more urban, many houses packed together, and the sound of a phone ringing. We hear a young woman’s urgent-sounding voice message for her parents.


All this is a prelude to the tragedy about to strike the film’s protagonist Dani (a superb performance by Florence Pugh), who will lose her family to a suicide-homicide perpetrated by her mentally disturbed sister. However, this opening scene is also tonal misdirection: Midsommar will achieve its principal effects not in darkness but in blinding light. If those first few minutes create a sense of claustrophobia (this is not just because of what happens to Dani but also because we learn that her boyfriend Christian is feeling stifled by their relationship), the rest of the film will operate more in the opposite mode of agoraphobia, or the fear that can come from being in wide open spaces.

We tend to have preconceptions about genres such as noir, suspense thrillers or horror. When we picture films in these categories, we think of stygian or shadowy settings: night-time chases, shot in black and white, through a city’s deserted streets; something waiting in a closet, or under a bed, in a dark room. Yet some important works in these genres – or some very effective scenes within films – have been brightly lit, as I was reminded while hosting online discussions about film noir last year. The bank robberies conducted by a runaway couple in the terrific B-movie Gun Crazy (which was a precursor to Bonnie and Clyde), for instance. Or a great neo-noir, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown – and closer home, a film that paid tribute to it, Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under, which is set in sun-baked Rajasthan.

The horror genre has many intersecting modes, and Midsommar operates mainly in the psychological-cum-atmospheric mode, with a dose of gore. Its main setting is a commune in rural Sweden, where Dani ends up traveling with Christian and his friends, to celebrate a festival that takes place every ninety years. They are greeted by beaming locals dressed in white, flowers in their hair. Everyone is enthusiastic and friendly, but we are also aware of Dani’s vulnerable state of mind, her panic attacks, her awareness that the others are keeping a wary eye on her.

The young tourists lie on a hillside in the countryside, under a gentle sun – it’s 9 pm but the sky is still blue and reassuring. Dani falls asleep for a few hours; woken, disoriented, she asks if it got dark at all. Only for a couple of hours, and not completely, she is told. Is it tomorrow, she asks. From yesterday’s perspective, yes, is the reply. It’s a funny exchange, but it carries an undercurrent. We need our lives to be divided into days and nights, light and dark, to feel organised, to make sense of where we are and what to do. But what when it is daytime round the clock? How do you know when you’re awake and when you’re dreaming, when you should be active or lethargic?

Soon after this, a barren, rocky landscape provides the setting for the first big setpiece, the point where Dani and her friends realise they have walked into a pagan nightmare that they were unprepared for. And it is one of the brightest scenes in the film – you might argue that the brightness is essential from the cinematic point of view so that we can experience the fullness of the horrific sights that turn the youngsters’ stomachs. A face exploding open when a body hits a rock after a long fall, as part of a ritual suicide; another face being coolly demolished with a mallet, folding in on itself like papier-mâché.

The rituals build; here is a story where two of the most private acts, suicide and procreation, are performed in a communal setting, with people not just watching and encouraging but also making empathetic sounds and gestures – there is something simultaneously horrifying, hilarious and tender about these scenes. And as the story progresses, Dani – soon to be crowned May Queen – finds herself with more agency and control than she had earlier when she was essentially a tag-along for a reluctant boyfriend and his pals.

One of the initial scenes in Midsommar is a night-time view of a house of horrors – Dani’s family home after rescue workers in gas masks discover the bodies of her parents and sister. The film’s final scene is a sort of distorted complement to this sequence – another building, with people in it, is being set ablaze, and Dani is watching, smiling beatifically as it collapses. There is something very liberating about her journey from fretting about her family, repeatedly calling her boyfriend for support, to the final sequence where she gets to make a judgement and watches its consequences play out – again, under the Scandinavian sun.

Midsommar is packed with reminders that external trappings of place and time are secondary in the horror genre; what matters is the darkness within. And if a film succeeds in depicting that darkness vividly, then a sunshiney environment can make the experience even more unnerving, because viewers have nowhere to hide. Watching such a film in a hall, when a scene is dimly lit, we feel reflexively safer, more protected in our seat (even if something scary is happening on the screen) – we feel like we are sheltered, and that the person in the next chair won’t be able to tell if our hands are half-covering our eyes. But when the screen is dazzlingly bright, and that brightness spills over to our viewing space, we are exposed too. A very special sort of terror resides in that experience.

(Earlier First Post pieces here. And here is my long essay about horror-movie love, Monsters I Have Known)

Monday, July 05, 2021

Five years ago

It is generally held that the day of a beloved parent’s death will be seared forever in your mind's private calendar. And this probably is true for most people, depending on (among other factors) the circumstances of the passing. It wasn’t that way for me though. Feb 27, 2018, when my mother went, feels like just another date to me. Mum had been deteriorating for weeks, the writing was on the wall, and in the final 48 or so hours she was barely there; my dominant emotion after switching off the oxygen machine that morning was relief, and the next-dominant emotion for that day was growing annoyance at the number of people who dropped in over the next few hours and bustled about the house, before we left for the crematorium.

The next morning, when I went to collect the ashes and met a couple of well-meaning relatives, they spoke in soft tones and seemed to assume that I wouldn’t have got any sleep the previous night. I was surprised by the assumption; it was the calmest and fullest night’s sleep I had had in weeks. 
 
For me the truly devastating date when it comes to my mother was July 4, 2016 – five years ago yesterday. The afternoon I sat down to talk with mum about needing to get her treated for an old kidney ailment – which is what I thought had been causing the extreme discomfort and weakness she had been suffering from – and she told me in a deadpan, matter-of-fact way that it was something more serious; that it was almost certain to be a very advanced case of breast cancer. 
 
I wrote about that conversation in this essay about my relationship with my mother, but no words will ever be enough to convey everything that was going on in that moment: the surreal casualness of it, the TV playing in the background, Lara watching us both from her spot on the bed (and my mother and I looking at her after the big revelation had been made, both of us thinking about how this very nervous and dependent child would be looked after if mum was admitted to hospital for a long time). 
 
The next day in the oncologist’s room, after he had taken a quick look at her and then, face all solemn, looked at me and shook his head… followed a few minutes later by the estimate that she had maybe a year and a half left – normally you’d think that THAT would be the defining moment when blackness shrouds you. But again, it wasn’t – it was something I was fully prepared for. My mother had, in her unflinchingly direct way, already made the diagnosis a day earlier, and knowing her, I had no reason to think she was being over-dramatic or exaggerating; if anything, it turned out to be just the opposite as scan after scan revealed the extent of the disease, the havoc it had already wreaked, and the high pain threshold that had made it possible for her to continue to seem relatively “normal” when she was anything but.
 
Many, many stressful things – including things that one couldn’t have any way of being prepared for – would of course happen over the next year and a half, all the way to the end. I have written elsewhere about a few of those too, such as the demoralizing scan report that told us there weren’t many slivers of hope left and that a second round of chemotherapy would be required, even if it only delayed the inevitable. (This period also saw the deaths of my dadi, in December 2016, and my father, in May 2017. Those are other, linked stories) But despite all those ghastly milestones, July 4, 2016 remains far and away the most shiver-inducing date for me, the date that separates the “before” and the “after”, the moment when I knew everything had changed once and for all.

Sunday, July 04, 2021

On Mahanati, Maya Bazar and a “replica scene”

Anyone who has spoken with me at any length about cinema recently will know about my deep love for the 1957 Telugu classic Maya Bazar (it’s a film that made more than one appearance in the Mahabharata course last year; if we had had enough time, Karthika Nair and I would happily have shown multiple scenes from it just because we wanted to re-watch them). I have also crushed on Savitri’s performance as Sasirekha (Vatsala in the Tamil version which was shot simultaneously) – both she and Maya Bazar were icons of Telugu/Tamil cinema for decades, but they weren’t part of my cultural education while I was growing up, and I discovered them relatively late.
 
A couple of days ago I got around to watching the 2018 Mahanati, a dramatisation of Savitri’s life, with Keerthy Suresh in the lead and Dulquer Salmaan as Gemini Ganesan. I liked the film a lot – though there must be many nuances that I missed, and I’m not really in a position to say how “authentic” the narrative is. ***

There was one thing I felt ambivalent about: the recreation of a couple of iconic moments from Maya Bazar, especially the brilliant “Aha Naa Pellanta” song sequence. This is an author-backed scene that Savitri had really sunk her teeth into, as she shifted between Sasirekha’s dainty gestures and Ghatotkacha’s manspreading (rakshasaspreading?) ones. (Context: Ghatotkacha, disguised as Sasirekha, is trying to maintain the appearance of a young woman singing about her upcoming nuptials.)
 
This being among my favourite scenes in Maya Bazar, I enjoyed that Mahanati had paid a full-fledged tribute to it. But I couldn’t help wondering if it was the right decision from an actor’s point of view. For most of Mahanati, Keerthy Suresh is very good as Savitri (or rather, as the Savitri constructed by the film) – but in a studiously recreated scene like this, she is required to be more mimic than actor. In the original Maya Bazar scene, Savitri had the freedom to build her mannerisms and gestures from the inside-out, and it came across as joyful and spontaneous; the Mahanati version feels more schematic; one is uncomfortably aware that Keerthy has the onus of faithfully copying Savitri’s legendary act. And game though she is, if you have the original scene at hand and you know that the new scene is meant to be a facsimile, a few little things won’t seem right: in a movement here, or an expression there, Keerthy comes across as more cerebral, more controlled than Savitri did in the original. (It was just a teeny bit like watching Sridevi dance to “Jumma Chumma” at that 1990 Wembley concert and thinking how different it was from the uninhibited energy of Kimi Katkar’s performance in the original.)
 
It also struck me while watching this Mahanati scene that though so many films have been made about the making of earlier films (especially in the past two or three decades when cinema has been mining its own history with relish), it is still rare to see a recreation of this sort. The wiser move seems to be to try to capture the spirit or general tone of a character/scene rather than to do a straight imitation with the exact same camera angles and set design.
 
There are a couple of other such recreations in Mahanati itself – such as the wonderfully goofy moment in the “Vaarayo Vennilave” song from the 1955 film Missiamma where Gemini Ganesan is about to start singing the next stanza but clutches his throat, bemused, when a woman’s voice seems to emerge from it. (Savitri, standing behind him, has taken over the singing.) Mahanati’s recreation of that scene worked a little better for me, even though (or perhaps because) Dulquer Salmaan doesn’t look very much like Gemini Ganesan. Or maybe it worked because there are fewer layers involved here. In “Aha Naa Pellanta”, Savitri wasn’t just playing a singing princess, she was playing Ghatotkacha pretending to be Sasirekha and slipping in and out of character: this is a performance within a performance; an actor who does brilliantly in such a role tends to get canonised for all time, and no imitation can ever match it.
 
In the event that anyone is still reading this post: any thoughts about other cinematic recreations of this sort (in Indian or non-Indian films) and whether or not they have worked? I’m finding it surprisingly difficult – offhand the only one I can think of just now is from the 2012 film Hitchcock, with Scarlet Johansson as Janet Leigh as Marion Crane driving the car early in Psycho. But as I recall it, that was a fleeting moment.
 
*** P.S. About authenticity in the Mahanati narrative. One thing I realised was off: the film’s implication that Gemini Ganesan was so wholeheartedly in love with Savitri that at least for the first few years of their marriage his attention was focused completely on her. In reality, Gemini’s extra-marital relationship with Pushpavalli was very much in high tide around the same time that he married Savitri in 1952: Gemini and Pushpavalli’s daughter, later famous as the actress Rekha, was born in October 1954.
 
P.P.S. here is another fun little moment in Mahanati, where the dialogue (which you can see in the subtitle) feels like an inside joke. Because this is Naga Chaitanya playing his own grandfather, the legendary Akkineni Nageswara Rao (ANR).
(ANR was one of the superstars of Telugu cinema, but until a few years ago I knew nothing about him. Back then, the only way the inside reference in this scene would have made sense to me was if someone had told me that Nagarjuna’s son is playing Nagarjuna’s father.)
 
Amusingly, Mahanati has at least one other moment that would have allowed a popular current actor to appear in a cameo as his own *great-grandfather*. The film depicts Prithviraj Kapoor in a brief scene where he gives the young Savitri a citation after watching a dance performance. Weirdly, the actor they picked looks nothing at all like the Prithviraj Kapoor of the late 40s/early 50s when the scene is set. If resemblance wasn’t going to be a factor, they may as well have bunged Ranbir Kapoor into the part. It could lead to a few dissertations with subheads like “The dialectics of intercultural nepotism in Mahanati”.

[A post about Maya Bazar is here]