Doggone! How my ears prick up when a movie depicts an imperilled canine

(Wrote this for the Sunday Economic Times. About recent dog scenes that took me out of a film, leading to a reaction very different from the one the filmmakers would have wanted from their viewers)
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In a recent podcast, discussing such weighty issues as “problematic” art or artists – and the ideological lenses we use when engaging with films or books – I articulated something I hadn’t said before on a public forum: that homosapien-centric issues – including discrimination, exploitation and other such games played by our species throughout its history – aren’t “triggers” for me in the same way that cruelty to animals is. (Or, to be more honest, cruelty to specific animals, the ones I relate with.)

A few dog scenes in films watched over the past few weeks have underlined this. Take the one in Dial 100 – a conceptually promising but inert thriller – where a woman named Seema (played by Neena Gupta) enters a house at night to take another woman hostage. Seema has already got her victim to tie up the family dog Rocky (a friendly-looking Labrador), but then, irritated by his barking, she knocks him out by hitting him on the head with a vase. A little later a neighbour hears Rocky’s cries and sees him lying on the floor (still leashed, of course), blood coming out of his head. And… that’s it. Inspector Sood (Manoj Bajpayee) is thus alerted to the home invasion, but there is no further news about the dog’s fate.

The human part of the story – the “important” part – continues, of course, but for me the scene was a deal-breaker, creating unease and revulsion. While I got that the filmmakers saw Rocky as an expendable pawn for plot movement, it was enough to set me completely against Seema. Subsequent revelations about her tragic back-story and motivations made no difference; after that scene, there was no way I was going to feel sympathy for her.

To channel the always-indignant Wokes (whom I otherwise enjoy mocking): Seema cancelled, movie cancelled.

Then there’s the scene in the short film Summer of ’92, part of the anthology series Nava Rasa, in which a troublesome dog – being chased by village youngsters – briefly falls into a swamp where most of the excreta from the village has been dumped. In the finale, in a moment guaranteed to disgust many viewers at a visceral level (while angering others who see the story’s potential caste commentary being undermined by slapstick), the faeces-covered animal enters a house and, shaking itself vigorously, covers a bunch of people – a potential bride and groom, a pandit, family elders – with human waste.

Even though the dog messes things up for a likable character, this was my predominant reaction when he emerged from the slushy shit-pit: relief that the film hadn’t opted for the sort of slapstick that would involve him drowning in filth (even if the rest of the village is metaphorically swamped by bigotry).

If you think it’s wrong to be more concerned about animal welfare than caste politics, steel yourself for more. A tense sequence in the hard-hitting Polish film Sweat (about a high-profile social-media “influencer” who is desolate in her personal life) has the protagonist Sylvia menaced by a man she invited into her apartment. For me Sweat was a better film than the ones mentioned above, and I definitely felt more invested in the central character – and now here she was facing a possible sexual threat from a violent man. But even so, I was just as worried about Sylvia’s little terrier, asleep on the couch on the edge of the frame. What would the man do to him if he tried to protect his human mom? Should I even continue watching?
(Spoiler alert: it turned out to be okay to continue watching.)

There have been other, less dramatic scenes that have peeved me in smaller ways. In the recent Malayalam film Aarkkariyam, an old man, after finishing his dinner each night, goes to the gate and scrapes leftovers off his plate for the three stray dogs waiting outside. A sweet gesture, you’d think; but even here, speaking as a daily feeder of mongrels with Black-Hole-like appetites, I gaped at how tiny the morsels were, at how the dogs gulped them up in seconds and looked around hungrily for more (by which time the man had headed back, no doubt feeling like he had done a good deed).

In a different category are the “issue” films that use dogs for symbolic reasons, two excellent ones being Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018) and Rohith VS’s Kala (2021). In both, a dog that meets a violent end becomes a catalyst for a character’s awareness of his own oppression – and subsequently a guiding spirit as well. (Think of this as a reversal of the plot arc of the 1980s cult classic Teri Meherbaniyan, in which Jackie Shroff’s death is the pretext for a dog’s discovery of selfhood.)

The lyrics of a song in Pariyerum Perumal go: “In the wilderness without you, how will I find my way? Your paw scrapes are my trail. You are not just a dog. Aren’t you me?” And Kala begins with an animated opening-credits sequence involving a dog, a foreshadowing exercise that makes complete sense – and acquires emotional force – only around halfway through the film. There is metaphor here, but there is also a human-animal bond. I’m not exactly keen to watch a dog being blown up onscreen, or tied to train tracks, but I appreciate that these works – though primarily concerned with a human protagonist’s struggles – engage with and recognise a deep inter-species kinship.

All this is a way of saying that I probably won't be queuing up to watch Cruella (which, being the Cruella de Vil origin story, is possibly a part-sympathetic look at a famous puppy-slayer). But I will keep a cautious look out for more news about the Vishal Bhardwaj production Kuttey, the trailer of which strongly implies that Naseeruddin Shah, Tabu and other thespians play dogs – or is it the other way round?

[Another old post about cinematic dogs is here. And a piece about Pariyerum Perumal is here]

Politicians and actors: notes on Thalaivii

(Did this piece about Thalaivii for India Today. Note: I watched the Tamil version with subtitles, not the Hindi version. Think that’s important to clarify since I suspect the effect would vary quite a bit for non-Tamil speakers. Watching the film in Hindi would make suspension of disbelief more difficult, you’d tend to see Kangana playing Kangana, and become a little more conscious of the politics of casting a well-known north Indian star as a south Indian icon)
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Two dramatic sequences – set 24 years apart – open the new Jayalalitha biopic Thalaivii. One of these shows the young Jaya (Kangana Ranaut) performing in the florid mode of 1960s Tamil cinema – writhing under a waterfall, jiggling her hips – and a glimpse of her soon-to-be leading man, superstar MJR (Arvind Swamy). But just before this comes a scene that is as theatrical in its own way. It is set in the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly in 1989 and depicts Jaya – new to politics – being manhandled during a scuffle between opposing parties. Whereupon she compares herself to Draupadi, with a fiery denouncement of men who don’t know how to respect women – and the implied promise of revenge.

This could be seen as a case of showboating by a former actress (who also worked in mythological films), but another way of looking at it is that all successful politicians – even the relatively restrained or “dignified” ones – are to some degree performers: putting on a show, presenting a version of themselves for public consumption. Films about politicians or lawyers, set in parliaments or in courtrooms, have always known this well. To watch Thalaivii is to be reminded (and this is independent of the film’s quality) that political arenas are theatres, and what happens in them – especially if you have followed Indian parliamentary proceedings over the years – can be more melodramatic, more outlandish than anything in an over-the-top film.

Those opening scenes suggest Thalaivii might go on to be a film about politicians as actors, and actors as politicians – a clever, insightful look at the workings of realpolitik. Instead it settles conservatively into a depiction of Jayalalitha as pure-hearted saint, wanting to acquire power only so she can use it for a good cause. One of the film’s conceits – a pleasing but over-idealistic one – is that a woman can help clean up politics through empathy and a willingness to go to the grass roots. (“I will never like or understand politics,” Jaya says at one point, but later an epiphany hits her when she realises how cut off MJR is from the people his party is supposed to be serving – and how a caring touch is required.) This results in a manipulative, one-dimensional film, full of shots of Jaya being talked down to or pushed around – the main agenda being to create sympathy for someone who is trying to bring compassion to a callous or apathetic space.

We don’t exactly have a tradition of robust cinema built around real-life political figures. One can’t help compare Thalaivii with Mani Ratnam’s 1997 Iruvar, a fictionalised account of the friendship between MG Ramachandran and M Karunanidhi (with Aishwarya Rai as a character who marginally resembled the young Jayalalitha). A confession: I spent the more tedious bits of Thalaivii day-dreaming about Iruvar. Part of the reason why that earlier film was so effective was that by shrugging off the need for saphead verisimilitude, it could reach for more poetic truths about friendship and politics, ideology and lived experience – while also revealing something important about 20th century Tamil history and the celebrity cult. Thalaivii, on the other hand, is supposedly a straight Jayalalitha biopic, and yet, in the interests of prudence, given the statures of the real figures involved, it slightly alters character names (MGR becomes MJR) and offers sanitised depictions of events along with a highlights reel of Jayalalitha’s life, built around this basic thesis: she is underestimated and patronised – but then she hits back and Shows Them All.

Worse, it does this lifelessly. What’s most surprising about Thalaivii is not that it is hagiographical, but that it is so dull. Kangana Ranaut has been such a controversial figure herself in recent times, using social media as a personal kingdom for shrill, gratuitous and self-aggrandising pronouncements, even being banished from it before making a dramatic return – the way Jayalalitha did at various points during her political career – you’d think the casting alone could make for an entertaining movie that moves through multiple layers of artifice, reality and meta-references. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen. For every playful touch (e.g. the teenage Jaya reading Caesar and Cleopatra as she prepares for a tempestuous relationship with a much older, deified man), there are ten other moments where the dialogue is tiresomely on the nose. (“Now respect has come from my heart,” Jaya says out loud when she finally deigns to stands up as MJR passes her – after he has made a dubious gesture of compassion towards an injured junior artiste.)

Tell, don’t show is mostly the motto here – and the showing, when it happens, happens in slow motion. During the duller stretches, it feels like the entire film was shot in that mode, each moment milked dry for emotional effect. Ironically, by presenting her only as someone who is constantly condescended to (“This is not a cinema shoot, why are you here?” Karunanidhi asks her when she comes to see MJR in hospital), and must goad herself to new heights in response, the film itself diminishes and makes her one-note.

P.S. I thought there were a couple of subtle Iruvar tributes – as in the staging of a scene where Karunanidhi feels slighted when an audience listening to his speech turns its attentions to MGR. And in the casting of Nassar as Karuna (he played the Annadurai figure in Iruvar).

On Don Palathara’s Joyful Mystery: an arguing couple, a fixed camera and an 82-minute take

(One of my most pleasing recent discoveries is the cinema of Don Palathara [whose work can be found on Mubi India, for anyone interested]. I have watched three of his five films so far, most recently Everything is Cinema, which I loved for its cold, self-absorbed misanthropy and for the texture of Palathara's voiceover, which dominates much of the film. For now, though, here’s a piece I did for Money Control about Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam)
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A tiny moment – lasting barely a couple of seconds – in the new Malayalam film Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam (English title: Joyful Mystery) drew a surprised chuckle out of me. Maria and Jithin – an unmarried couple, not too secure financially, trying to get their careers on track – are on their way back from a clinic. They are facing the possibility that Maria is pregnant (the test result will come later in the day) and are trying to process what this might mean for their future, and what their options are – abortion included. For much of the drive to the clinic they have been arguing, exchanging recriminations or being passive-aggressive in the way couples often are in these situations. The air is thick with tension.

Then something shifts, if only momentarily. Maria – a tabloid journalist – is on a phone interview with a movie director who is pontificating on about his work. Even as he claims to be making “the first feminist Malayalam film by a man”, he decrees that there are some things only women should do since they excel at them. Such as making sambhar. What if my grandmother had become a revenue officer, he asks rhetorically. The whole family would have missed out on her amazing sambhar! As the director says these words (we can hear his voice on Maria’s speaker-phone), there is a split-second exchange of bemused glances between Maria and Jithin. It’s deadpan, not underlined, but very effective and funny.

Another amusing interlude: shortly before this scene, they gave a ride to an elderly woman who revealed that she was at a wedding attended by a hundred people – much to the consternation of Jithin, already displeased about sharing an enclosed space with a stranger in Covid-19 time. After the woman gets off at her destination, he exclaims, “She had primary contact with 100 people.” Maria looks pensively at the departing woman.

In the lead-up to both these moments, Maria and Jithin had been in sullen-silence mode – but now we see them bonding, however briefly. They get to step back from their fraught situation for a moment and become one “unit” again – a couple who is sufficiently attuned to each other (and have enough in common as broadly liberal young people) that they can share a wordless glance at the idiosyncrasies, irresponsible behaviour or posturing of others.

Both these scenes are in the second half of the film, and after all the angry, accusatory talk in the first half this represents the beginning of a return to some order, the calm after the storm. Which is not to say that the film is headed for a conventionally happy ending, or that the couple’s struggles are going to be over soon. But something vital about the relationship has been captured, adding warmth and plausibility to the narrative.

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Much of the talk around this film, written and directed by Don Palathara, will understandably focus on the formal device at its centre: it is filmed in a single take that runs more than 80 minutes, with one fixed camera at the front of the car in which Maria (played by Rima Kallingal) and Jithin (Jithin Punthenchery) are travelling.

This means that almost throughout, we watch them up close as they talk or negotiate uncomfortable silences. With a couple of breathers here and there: Jithin stopping the car and getting out to bring Maria a lemon for her nausea, or to smoke for a while after an argument; Maria leaving the car for a few minutes when they reach the clinic.

There are bursts of conversation, explosions of anger, mood swings. And a few long pauses that are always risky in a film like this since all the viewer can do during these periods is to look at the two people on the screen, conjecture what they might be feeling or thinking. Watch Jithin keeping his emotions (mostly) under control and his eyes on the road, making a determined effort to be the Sensitive Male but with his mind probably ticking away under that composed exterior; look at Maria, more agitated and demonstrative, dealing with her current nausea as well as the possible bodily changes to come, worrying about career and societal judgement, frustrated that the man next to her can afford to be so unruffled since he isn’t as directly affected.

With most of the famous lengthy takes in film history (in classics like Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Under Capricorn, or in modern films like Birdman or Russian Ark or 1917), the camera moves with the characters. A twelve-minute-long establishing shot in another recent Malayalam film, Malik, takes us through a large house, up and down stairs, into different rooms, as we meet some of the film’s protagonists.

The single take in Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam is very different from these. On the face of it, the unblinking and unmoving camera makes this film less “cinematic”, more stationary and theatre-like. But the technique works very well visually for the situation. During the driving scenes, Maria and Jithin are in fixed positions in the car, literally strapped in, while the scenery behind them changes subtly: the buildings, the greenery, the shifts in light as they pass under a canopy. They are in a private space – with each of them leaving it occasionally but soon returning – while other things orbit around them. People enter and exit (mostly as voices on a phone), there are conversations – with family, friends – that in subtle ways touch on the subject of what is conventional or unconventional, socially approved or frowned upon, and on aspects of the parent-child relationship; things that are relevant to Maria and Jithin’s current circumstances.

It’s one thing to say that a particular film is for a “patient viewer” – that’s a given in a case like this – but so much here hinges on the performances of the two leads; with the camera scrutinising them so closely, the slightest inadequacy or implausibility would make the whole film lose its moorings. Jithin Punthenchery and Rima Kallingal – who are constantly required to walk a tightrope between the mundane and the dramatic, between improvisation and a scripted narrative – are excellent throughout. Even when there is nothing particularly exciting or novel happening in the conversation, when the whole point of it is its banality, they kept me gripped.

Looked at in one way, this film’s structure is very simple: take a potentially dramatic development and use it to examine the quotidian workings of a relationship over the course of a long car drive. End with a measure of calm having been reached, even a little smile here and there, an affectionate touch. Some might even call it simplistic. But if you accept its slice-of-life approach on its own terms, and also see it as a work that is self-aware about the limitations of this kind of “experimental” cinema (there is a nod to this in the conversation with the pretentious director, who is voiced by Palathara himself), the staging and the performances add up to a lot. This is an absorbing view of how close relationships work; how two people, caught in a particular moment, interact with each other and with the world.

Screenplays and petticoats: a book about Hindi cinema's women screenwriters

(Along with the Green Knight review [in the previous post], this is the other short piece I have in this week’s India Today – a review of Anubha Yadav’s very engrossing Scripting Bollywood: Candid Conversations with Women Who Write Hindi Cinema)

Juhi Chaturvedi says she reads dialogues out loud while writing them: “My staff sometimes comes to my room to check if everything is fine.” Shama Zaidi reads big novels non-linearly – “I decide how much I want to read and I read in stages” – and believes a web-series can be experienced the same way. Sooni Taraporevala decided to direct the film of her script Little Zizou because she wanted to maintain its quirkiness. Screenplay structure is like a petticoat, says Shibani Bathija – without it, “you will not get the form you need. The sari will fall right off”. The late Kalpana Lajmi says she finds depictions of romance in the films of Gulzar and Shyam Benegal dry, and that “there is more ras in a woman’s gaze”.

Little details like these – observations, back-stories, personal whimsies – provide the beating heart of this collection of interviews with 14 woman screenwriters. They give Scripting Bollywood the same free-flowing, unpredictable quality that Taraporevala wanted her film to have.

This book is a response to two levels of “invisibilising”: the neglect of, or glossing over of, a writer’s contribution to filmmaking; and the more specific neglect of female writers over the decades. The subjects include veterans like Zaidi and Sai Paranjpye as well as younger writers like Chaturvedi and Devika Bhagat who work in the exciting new worlds of the indie film and the web-series. This means that all sorts of cinematic idioms are contained here: from “parallel” to “commercial”, from overtly progressive films to the ones that get labelled “problematic” because of their politics. And the stories, personalities and viewpoints are equally varied.

Yadav invisibilises herself in a sense by presenting the conversations in the “as told to” format – we get only the voices of the subjects, which creates a hushed, intimate, stream-of-consciousness effect. Some writers speak a little more about craft or routines, others focus on formative experiences or influences. Rapports with directors – Urmi Juvekar’s work with Dibakar Banerjee, for instance, or Honey Irani’s with Yash Chopra or Bathija’s with Karan Johar – are discussed in terms of conflict or cooperation. Some see being a woman as central to their experience, others appear not to give it much importance. There are different perspectives on the female gaze in scriptwriting, and insights into the challenges of various periods in film history: here is Kamna Chandra relating how she wrote Prem Rog for Raj Kapoor, who made some changes “to suit a more mainstream film”; and here is Chandra’s daughter Tanuja, decades later, writing in the multiplex era or for independent American producers.

Importantly, before moving on to the main interviews, Yadav provides context about some of the women who played key roles – as producers, directors, writers, or sometimes all at the same time – in the early years of the talking Hindi film: figures like Fatma Begum, Ratan Bai and Jaddan Bai, whose contribution to screenwriting has barely been noted in the historical record. This is also a reminder of the value of the present book – and, hopefully, others that will follow it – as a chronicle of cinema’s undervalued creators.

The Green Knight – a short review of a lovely-looking film (watched in a movie hall!)

(I have a couple of short pieces in this week’s India Today. The first is this brief review of the new film The Green Knight. At the bottom of the post you can see a few images from a rare visit to a movie hall – the revamped PVR Priya, where the preview screening was held. I was there with Uday Bhatia, and apart from the film we got to experience a burger described as “an icon of layered circles that has made french fries famous”)

In one important sense, David Lowery’s The Green Knight is an easy film to watch: it is a beautiful sensory experience, especially if you’re brave enough to go to the theatre for it. The stately compositions and art design, the beautiful Irish settings (complemented by some computer-generated imagery that one might feel ambivalent about), the mesmerizingly dark, hushed tone – all this adds up to a sweeping canvas that never loses its intimacy.

But in narrative terms, this medieval fantasy is determined not to make it easy for a viewer, even one who is broadly familiar with the Arthurian legends. For instance: early on, you’ll see King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, the Round Table, the sword Excalibur and even Merlin the wizard, but the film doesn’t underline who they are or try to give the viewer an “Aha!” moment. Also, if you have been mollycoddled by OTT films and series during the pandemic, consider yourself warned: here be no subtitles. You might feel the need for those, given some of the dense accents and even the rune-like chapter heads that appear on the screen.

Adapted from the 14th century Chivalric poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (which you might want to quickly look up beforehand), this is the story of Arthur’s nephew Gawain (Dev Patel) and his fateful encounter with the mysterious, magical Green Knight. A game of “exchanges” requires that after Gawain has beheaded this tree-like being, the latter will return the favour a year hence. Thus begins a version of the Hero’s Journey, with Gawain setting out to meet his nemesis and having a string of strange encounters along the way – including one with the ghost of Saint Winifred, and another with a red fox that might appear sweet until you realise it is CGI.

Without giving away spoilers, The Green Knight builds to a very moving climax that might remind some viewers of The Last Temptation of Christ (the book and the film), or some of the stories about “maya” (illusion) in Hindu mythology. By the time Gawain asks someone “Are you certain the Green Chapel is that close?” late in the narrative, we can tell that the Green Knight waiting in his “chapel” is a symbol for the protagonist’s personal arc. Does he choose a dramatic destiny or a safe one, and is it really possible to make such a choice? Or as another character puts it, “Why greatness? Is goodness not enough?”

But looked at from another perspective, those are very limited, human-centric themes. Given the altered Covid-19 world we live in, The Green Knight also feels like it is about something much bigger: our relationship with nature and our destruction of the ecological balance; about the “greenness” that we try to bend to our own puny wills. If you hack away at a green knight’s limbs, will it pay you back manifold? We are all learning the answer to that question now.

Regardless of how you interpret its meaning, this is a haunting film that rewards more than one viewing – as long as you don’t go into it expected a fast-paced, action-filled adventure.

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Pics from a PVR Priya expedition with Uday Bhatia: