Secret gardens and opulent Gurgaon complexes: on the new show Hush Hush

(Wrote this review of a new series for Money Control. P.S. a Juhi Chawla-starrer called Hush Hush and a Sunny Deol-starrer called Chup released on the same day?! This gave me a major nostalgic flashback to watching Sultanat in a hall in 1986)
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During episode two of the new thriller series Hush Hush, there was a point where I felt like the show was starting to come together. Near the end of the first episode, we had seen Ishi (Juhi Chawla), a powerful and controversial lobbyist, in an altercation with an unknown man – and the chain of events that led to her three closest friends Saiba (Soha Ali Khan), Zaira (Shahana Goswami) and Dolly (Kritika Kamra) becoming caught up in this situation. Now, just a few minutes of screen time later, Ishi is found dead in her apartment – suicide or murder? – and the friends, grief-stricken, are trying to process the events of the previous night, how they have been implicated, and what options lie ahead for them.

As the confusion and guilt mount, Saiba and Zaira are snapping at each other, while Dolly – the most traumatised of the group at this stage – is staring vacantly at her friends, feeling like a caged bird (a running theme for this character), unable to articulate her own thoughts. Meanwhile, in a separate thread, the cops led by Geeta (Karishma Tanna) arrive at the death scene for the investigation. All the principal characters – the five women who get star billing in the show’s opening credits – have now been introduced. There is a focused intensity in these scenes, in the anxiety of the interactions of Dolly, Saiba and Zaira, which comes together marvellously and is aided by sharp performances.

And it is such a pity that Hush Hush never finds this focus and rigour again. As the show progresses it continues to be engaging in a way that almost any moderately well-put-together crime series can be if you have enough time as a viewer (or if you *have* to see it for reviewing purposes): you keep watching, since there are minor cliff-hangers here and there, you have become invested in a couple of the characters, you like the actors… and most of all you’re hoping, even as your gut instinct tells you no, that the narrative and the pace will somehow get better. But Hush Hush lets itself become diffused and loosely structured. And this despite having done a reasonable job of setting up its premise and giving us basic information about the lives and challenges of its high-society protagonists (for instance, Zaira is managing the many stresses and deadlines that come with running a fashion label that has gone international; Dolly learns that her ovulation cycle is being tracked by her persistent mother-in-law who wants a grandchild to carry on the family legacy; Saiba is ostensibly in a more settled family unit, but there seem to be dormant tensions in her marriage, and a question mark about why she left her career as a journalist).

The other side of the class line is represented too, in the form of Geeta, and through some amusing asides in the screenplay. “Sir-ji, siyaappa ho gaya,” we are told a building security guard said after Ishi’s body was discovered in her plush apartment – it’s a direct, rustic, wide-eyed exclamation that seems worlds removed from the rarefied lives of the La Opulenza complex and its air-kissing residents. There is also some on-the-nose dialogue: a cop saying “Inn ameeron ke life ka ‘behind the scenes’ kuch aur hee hota hai”, another remarking “Inn ameer logon ke alag hee chochlay hote hain.” And a little lecture from Geeta’s mother, along the lines that rich and poor people may not be innately different from each other, but money changes everything.

An earlier, better series, Made in Heaven – which also started by seeming to be exclusively about the lives of rich socialites before turning into a more nuanced examination of class conflict – got much of its frisson from what we gradually learn about the protagonist Tara and her journey into wealth. One isn’t, of course, demanding that every show employs a similar structure or method, but given how much Hush Hush seems to invest in its principal characters (and how sincerely the main actors approach the material given to them) there are too many holes, and not enough providing of back-story. It would certainly have been useful to know a little more about how Ishi, Zaira, Saiba and Dolly came to become such a close-knit group of confidantes in the first place. (This is especially relevant because there are notable age differences between them; the show’s first scene, a flashback set in 1978, makes it clear that Ishi is now in her early fifties, while Zaira and Dolly must be at least a couple of decades younger.)

Conceptually and thematically, there is much of interest in Hush Hush, which begins with an allusion to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden – about an orphaned girl undergoing a process of healing – and goes on to suggest that life-affirming secret gardens for lost children may be much harder to come by in the real world (or at least in the farmhouses of Gurugram). But the series becomes a slog in its execution, the kinetic energy of that second episode giving way to long ponderous encounters between characters where too much is said too slowly, with dialogue that doesn’t feel like it could have come from Juhi Chaturvedi (who has written some fine films in the past decade). In one embarrassingly poor family scene, Benjamin Gilani as a patriarch harps on about tradition while his son stands up to him with a “You keep your fucking money and you keep your fucking legacy”. Some seemingly important side-stories – such as Geeta’s romantic relationship with another young woman who is being pressured to get married – aren’t fleshed out or given the weight they need.

As the boy who had crushed on Juhi Chawla for a short while in the 1980s, it pains me to say this, but her droning dialogue delivery made me thankful that she had such a small part during the show’s midsection: though Ishi is central to the plot – the enigmatic figure whose past life is the key to the psychological mystery – she appears mainly in short flashbacks, setting up (inadequately realised) suspense about what led to her fate. She does get more substantial screen-time in the end-section, though, and a few scenes with Ayesha Jhulka (who plays Ishi’s childhood friend Meera) that can be mildly nostalgia-evoking if you’re in the right mood. For an 80s or 90s kid, there is some honest enjoyment to be had in watching Chawla and Jhulka, actresses from a very different era in Hindi cinema, speaking unselfconsciously melodramatic dialogue to each other. (“Main tumhein kaise chhod ke ja sakti hoon?” “Tum toh mujhe bahut pehle chhod ke chali gayi thi.”) At the same time, perhaps because we have become used to today’s OTT shows being grittier, more subdued, there is something anachronistic about these scenes – especially since Hush Hush’s uneven structuring means that the younger women are suddenly off screen for large patches of time.

All this notwithstanding, some sense of resolution or closure would have been welcome. But my overall disappointment with the series coalesced into a sinking feeling in its final moments when I realised that season 1 wasn’t attempting to be a stand-alone story: at the end threads are still untied, the bad guys are running free, there is a new death and the arrival of a new character, all of which provides the set-up for a presumed second season. I won’t be queuing up for that one. 

(My earlier Money Control pieces are here)

Friendship and vendetta in 1984: on the new film Jogi

(Wrote this review for Money Control)
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My chief memory of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 is how distressed my grandfather – a proud man who had retired from the Army as a Brigadier a decade earlier – was when he had to blank out the “Singh” on the nameplate of our house in a posh South Delhi colony. That this was probably the worst thing to happen to my immediate family during those days means, of course, that we were very privileged compared to scores of other Sikhs who bore the brunt of the violence – and it was only years later, through news reports, literature (Ranjit Lal’s The Battle for No. 19, Jaspreet Singh’s Helium) and films (Shonali Bose’s Amu), that I began to process the full magnitude of what had happened.

Ali Abbas Zafar’s new film Jogi, set in the immediate aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, is about the horrors visited on some of those less fortunate families. Jogi (played by the always-likable Diljeet Dosanjh) lives in east Delhi’s Trilokpuri. As a day that began like any other quickly turns surreal, he watches uncomprehendingly; before anyone can even understand what is going on, his brother-in-law has been burnt alive in his shop, and goons are coming for every Sikh they can find.

Many of these goons, we soon learn, are convicts who have been let out of prison by the local councillor Tejpal (Kumud Mishra), for the express purpose of collecting bounty. Rs 1,000 per dead Sikh. Or Rs 5,000 if the victim has a high profile. An infrastructure is in place for the slaughter: weapons, large quantities of diesel. Science teaches us that every action has an equal reaction, the councillor explains – words that echo Rajiv Gandhi’s famous line about the ground shaking when a big tree falls.

Shortly after Jogi and a few dozen others hide in a local gurudwara, his childhood friend Ravinder (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), a cop defying Tejpal’s political orders, offers to transport Jogi and his family to safety in Punjab – an operation that wouldn’t be too difficult to pull off with just a small number of refugees. But Jogi insists that everyone else – close to a hundred people – must be taken along, and this becomes the film’s plot-mover, the engine that turns it into an action-adventure thriller about escaping a cauldron.

****

This is, it almost goes without saying, a very well-intentioned film, telling a story of horrific times with dignity and compassion – and also perhaps with an eye to making a larger, more universally applicable statement about the vulnerability of minorities in a country where the politics of bloodthirst and vengeance play out quickly (and where police can be given instructions to cooperate with the agenda of the moment). It is full of images that are clearly at the service of larger idealism: Sikhs being given shelter in a dargah, for instance, with food served to them by maulvis. (Jogi and Ravinder get essential help from another friend, a Muslim, who owns a truck company; so here are people from three faiths coming together to deal with communal hatred.)

There are issues at the execution level, though. Jogi firmly believes in spelling things out – no such thing as too much exposition – and protracting the emotional moment as much as it possibly can. Which can defeat the purpose in a race-against-time narrative like this. It’s understandable that there is much sentiment to be milked from a scene where Jogi tearfully cuts his hair in slow motion; but the languorous pace here and elsewhere belies the urgency of the situation. Responding to Jogi’s mother’s shock about the loss of his hair, a Sikh priest pedantically explains that he has made this big sacrifice to save them all, so it will bring him closer to God. This need to constantly underline is also manifest in the film’s Incessant Flashback Syndrome – too often, just a few minutes after we have seen something happen, we are given sepia images and dialogues from the same episode as a character recalls them: this is the sort of spoon-feeding that seems based on the assumption that viewers have such low attention spans now (perhaps they do, or perhaps they are constantly checking their phones while watching) that they need every dramatic moment regurgitated.

While there are a few hard-hitting images of riot violence, there is also some fairly basic visual shorthand – repeated aerial shots of Delhi with smoke plumes rising from one or two spots, for instance – and some old-fashioned storytelling: a widowed woman continuing to stitch a shirt for her husband (even though she knows he was killed) before embracing reality and breaking down; an altercation in a bus where Jogi and his father are improbably the only ones who don’t know yet about the assassination.

The performances are as sincere as everything else in the film, though Ayyub, a fine actor, has little to do beyond looking worried (and being understandably startled by Jogi’s explosions of anger towards him). The major acting chomps are divided between the antagonists: veteran Mishra (who just about succeeds in transcending the very stereotyped aspects of his role as the power-obsessed councillor using Sikh bodies as a stepping stone) and Hiten Tejwani as an enigmatic, stone-faced character named Lali who turns out to be very central to the plot, since he has an old score to settle with Jogi.

That score-settling is explained in a flashback sequence that comes late in the film and feels structurally very off – it involves the sudden, very belated introduction of an important person in Jogi’s life, and the hurried depiction of a life-changing episode. This also brings a strange, hard-to-define friction to the narrative. On one hand, this is a big-picture story about a major national tragedy and about a man who chooses to look out for his whole community rather than just his own family and loved ones; but on the other hand, as the full scope of the relationship between the protagonists becomes clearer in the final act, the line between personal and political is blurred; we see how events of the past define the actions of people in the present. Jogi sometimes moves uneasily between being a social commentary about one of modern India’s biggest tragedies and being an intimate thriller about private vendetta.

(My earlier Money Control pieces are here)

A brahmin, a butterfly and a 121-year-old 'love story'

What you see here are a couple of blurry images from the 1901 film The Brahmin and the Butterfly, by the legendary magician-cum-pioneering director Georges Méliès. He plays a flute-wielding “brahmin” who summons a large caterpillar from the forest, affectionately kisses it (the caterpillar kisses him first in case you’re worrying about consent), then puts it in a cocoon whereupon it transforms into a beautiful butterfly and then a princess. Brahmin and princess frolic and gambol for a bit, but then there’s one final twist. All in a running time of under two minutes.

This is one of the works from cinema’s first decade that I have been watching as part-preparation for a film history/film appreciation course that I will soon be teaching at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication. The little film is most enjoyable on its own terms, but I also thought it notable as possibly the first cinematic expression of the idea that love means trying to control/change another person into the image you have fixed in your head. That theme is central to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the force of its execution in that film (as well as the subtextual commentary on a director/artist trying to dominate and transform his actors/raw material) has made Vertigo a critical favourite for decades now. But Méliès was there a full 57 years before (in a much more rudimentary form, of course) – and he was also an illusionist by profession, using people and objects as shape-shifting tools for his art.

Anyway, the critic Paolo Cherchi Usai called The Brahmin and the Butterfly “the most beautiful love story of early cinema", which is a more concise description. You can watch it here. (Many other Méliès films are available online too.)