Connecting dots (and being underwhelmed by Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug)

Usually, when adapting a book into a film, the scriptwriters don’t take it for granted that their viewers have read the source text; the movie should work on its own terms. But it gets trickier when a film tries to do new things with the template of a very well-known tale and a degree of familiarity is presumed. I enjoyed Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hamlet adaptation Haider when I saw it two months ago, but since then I have wondered how I would have felt if I had watched it knowing nothing about Shakespeare’s play. Because the thrill of connecting the dots was central to my viewing experience – noting how Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer had turned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into buffoons who idolise Salman Khan, or anticipating the famous grave-digger scene, complete with the “Aha!” moment where Haider holds up a skull, and the goofy little song (“So Jao” – a take on the recurring links between sleep and death in Hamlet?) that would probably have delighted Shakespeare’s own, plebeian heart.

Would the descent into madness of Haider’s girlfriend Arshia have been credible if one weren’t prepared for it by knowledge of Ophelia’s tragedy? Possibly not: the film is cantering along at this stage, and the abrupt cut to the scene where Haider sees Arshia’s funeral procession might puzzle an unprepared viewer – I remember a few murmurings in the hall – especially since being reduced so quickly to a nervous wreck doesn’t seem consistent with Arshia’s personality (unlike the sheltered Ophelia, she is a journalist working in Kashmir, accustomed to seeing bad things happening).

To some extent the question “How important is pre-knowledge?” applies to all of Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare adaptations (even if the answer to the question is unclear or variable). The first and still arguably the best of them, Maqbool (Macbeth), began with a brilliantly atmospheric scene where two crooked cops gossip about the Bombay underworld and use astrology to predict a gangster’s rise and fall. The scene works well by itself, but gains a new dimension once you realise these are versions of Shakespeare’s witches, commenting from the sidelines while also helping to engineer and direct events. And who can forget Maqbool’s pitiful “Main bachunga ya maroonga?” followed by the witch/cop’s reassurance that he is safe until the “dariya” comes right up to his house, a Birnam Wood drifting to Dunsinane.

Anyway, what started me on this "adapting an over-familiar tale" subject was a recent re-encounter with Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film Kalyug, a modern-day Mahabharata about a business family split into rival factions. I loved Kalyug when I was 10 (back then it was the only Benegal film I would have touched with a long spoon, much less forced my mother to take me to Palika Bazaar to find a video-cassette of, as I did)... or at least I thought I loved it. Possibly what really stimulated me was the Mahabharata dot-connecting game (then as now, I was obsessed with the epic), and especially seeing my hero Karna sympathetically portrayed by the film’s biggest star (and producer) Shashi Kapoor.

Watching it again now, I was disappointed. It is enjoyable in bits and pieces certainly – the cast is full of interesting people, and the plot is busy enough: the cousins keep raising the stakes passive-aggressively until things get out of control; Amrish Puri plays a Krishna who doesn’t have anything like the agency and influence of the charioteer-God; Kulbhushan Kharbanda is an amusingly priapic Bheema; Rekha and Raj Babbar sleep in separate beds and look unhappy; the smooth Victor Banerjee looks as if he would be perfectly happy sleeping alone forever; Supriya Pathak is sexy. But these elements don’t add up to very much. The film shifts between big-canvas cynicism – with its caution about how, in the machine age, everyone sinks morally into quicksand – and trying to evoke sympathy specifically for one character, the underdog Karan (using Shashi Kapoor’s personality and star-cachet to achieve this without a great deal of help from the actual writing). There is a neither-here-nor-there feel to the whole, which is a reminder of the film’s unusual conception: getting a Serious Director to helm a project that would be backed by money and a cast of well-known names from the mainstream, but would also have the sort of verisimilitude that can be created by Om Puri seething and shaking his fists in a small part as a trade-union rabble-rouser.

Take away the Mahabharata-awareness and this is a confused story with too many characters, most of whom are underdeveloped and don’t get enough screen time. There are tensions and meaningful silences that don’t seem to stem from anything – except, well, as a viewer you are simply supposed to know that Karna was rejected by Draupadi at her swayamvara, or that Yudhisthira is a bit of a non-entity who is over-fond of gambling, or that Abhimanyu may simply have been an overenthusiastic kid who got too involved in adult games. And those who don’t know all this are naturally foxed. A non-Indian friend, who loves old Hindi movies but hasn’t read Vyasa’s epic, had this take on Kalyug: she felt it played like a sort of home video where a viewer has all the relevant information beforehand about the people, and then indolently watches their little dramas play out. Interestingly, in the film itself, there’s a scene where the characters sit together watching a video of themselves at a wedding function. Vanraj Bhatia’s stirring music score aside, I’m not sure that Kalyug on the whole is much more interesting than that footage.

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Update: a follow-up conversation with my erudite friend/fellow Mahabharata nut Karthika Nair helped me articulate another reason why Kalyug didn't work for me this time: the best Benegal films, including the ones that are more "art-house", like Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda or Mammo, are very far from the art-cinema cliche of the "boring", "educative" movie; they are kinetic and have a sense of style, they do interesting things visually (look at Nihalani's cinematography in Bhumika, and how it uses four  different types of film stock to capture different periods in the protagonist Usha's life). Whereas this film, for all its glamorous, "commercial" trappings, is formally static, and content to rest on the Mahabharata references.

[Two old posts about Benegal films I like very much: Trikaal and Charandas Chor. And this one on Junoon, written back when I was trying to sound more knowledgeable about Benegal than I actually was, and which I should probably watch again some time]

On Habib Tanvir, Shyam Benegal, and a truthful thief

Given that Shyam Benegal is one of our most respected directors, I’m a little surprised by the under-the-radar status of his second feature film, the 1975 Charandas Chor. This version of Habib Tanvir’s famous play about an honest thief was done in collaboration with Tanvir – before the play itself had acquired its final shape – and I think it is one of Benegal's most enjoyable movies and one of Hindi cinema’s sharpest satires. But it is often overlooked, perhaps because it was made for the Children's Film Society and therefore seen as being geared to a non-adult audience. I have read Benegal profiles that refer to Ankur, Nishant and Manthan – cornerstones of the Indian New Wave – as his first three films, with no mention of Charandas Chor. (See the second sentence of this Wikipedia entry, for starters, and the “Feature Films” subhead.) Even Dibakar Banerjee – a voracious movie-watcher and a big Benegal fan – had not seen the film when I spoke with him last year, though he was certainly familiar with Tanvir’s play. (Banerjee noted that the play contained a precedent for the Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! theme of a thief’s career becoming a comment on the society around him.)

The neglect notwithstanding, Charandas Chor is a notable film on many levels. It represents a rare meeting between cinema and folk theatre (with vital contributions by musicians and actors of the Chhatisgarhi Nacha troupes who worked with Tanvir) and is a document of one of our most significant modern plays in a nascent, transitional form – but it is also recognisably a film, cinematically imaginative and dynamic. It was one of Govind Nihalani’s most impressive early outings as a cinematographer, as well as the feature debut of the young Smita Patil, as a beautiful princess who is besotted by the bumpkin Charandas.

Despite the seriousness of its themes, its form is that of a playful entertainment from the very first image, a medium shot of a doleful-looking donkey, its tail apparently wagging in tune to the folk-song on the soundtrack. While this animal plays a functional part in the narrative (it belongs to a dhobi who will become Charandas Chor’s sidekick), the ass motif is integral in a wider sense: many of the side-characters, including a “chatur vakeel” (clever lawyer), are depicted in illustrations as donkeys that Charandas will get the better of (or expose as hypocrites). The film's episodic structure is quickly established too, with Charandas (Lalu Ram) encountering the dhobi Buddhu (Madan Lal), who wishes to become his chela. The scene employs the language of an enlightened guru addressing his disciples: asked to impart his gyaan of thievery, Charandas replies, "यह कला है, बेटा - बड़ी साधना से मिलती है।" (“This is an art, son – it requires practice and rigour.”)

But this being a parable about the duplicities of social structures – including the ones rooted in class and religion – we also meet a “real” guru who, as Charandas observes, has an even more efficient money-making gig going. “आपका धंदा बैठे बैठे, और आमदनी ज़्यादा" (“You sit and do nothing, but earn more than me”) he tells the sadhu with genuine reverence in his eyes. This lampooning of authority figures extends across hierarchies: for instance, a view of temple idols shorn of their ornaments (making them look bald, comical and most un-Godly) is echoed by a shot of three unclothed policemen drying their uniforms by the riverbank. Through most of these episodes, the chor maintains his essential dignity and his moral compass while the “law-abiding” world is revealed as hollow, rotting or plain naked.

There is so much to enjoy here, for children and adults alike. There is Nihalani’s black-and-white photography (inferior Orwo film had to be used due to import constraints of the time, but the occasional graininess goes well with the subject matter and the bucolic setting) and his imaginative use of zooms, particularly effective in chase sequences that evoke the silent cinema's Keystone Kops. Also the Nacha music, which continually comments on the action, and wonderful lead performances by village actors from Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, including the emaciated Madan Lal – one of Tanvir’s favourite actors – who played Charandas on stage but plays Buddhu in the film.

Inter-titles are used like chapter heads, and Tanvir himself reads them out in his nasal voice, fumbling over big words the way a child might. ("बुद्धू का चोरी के दाव... दावपेंच सीखना।") In a funny little cameo, he also appears as an absent-minded judge who might have dropped in from Alice in Wonderland, holding large scissors and a walking stick instead of a gavel***. And there is the casual drollness of such exchanges as the one where Charandas, miffed by the princess’s show of largesse, proudly tells her “मैं चोरी करता हूँ, दान नहीं लेता" (“I steal, I don’t accept alms”) while the sadhu standing behind her pipes up "दान लेना तो मेरा काम है, बेटी" ("Taking alms is what I do").

*****

A few months ago I briefly spoke with Benegal about Charandas Chor, particularly the divergence between his version and the one that Tanvir finalised for the stage. One important difference was the ending: in both film and play Charandas is put to death, but in the film a humorous epilogue shows him plying his roguery in the afterlife, where he steals Yamraj’s buffalo and presumably sets off on a fresh round of adventures. (This narrative circularity is of course common to many myths or fables; one might also recall the last scene of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, with the rake coolly strolling into the far distance as a TV news reporter blathers on.) But Tanvir’s later modifications to the play made it bleaker and more hard-hitting, with a conclusion that allowed his hero to maintain his integrity – to die for the truth he holds so dear, while the world around him continues on its merry path. “He turned it into a sophisticated tragedy,” Benegal told me, “whereas my film was a moral story done as a comedy for children.” The playwright also opted for a sparer, more minimalist idiom, removing the part of Buddhu along with other extraneous elements, including that zany courtroom scene.

But film and play have one important thing in common: Tanvir and Benegal were both influenced by Brechtian alienation, wherein the audience is asked to be intellectually aware of the issues raised in a story, rather than becoming emotionally immersed in it or “forgetting” the constructed nature of what they are watching. In her book Habib Tanvir: Towards an Inclusive Theatre, Anjum Katyal observes that Tanvir made atypical use of Indian folk music: while our folk theatre tends to use songs in a didactic way (explicitly telling the audience what is good or bad), Charandas Chor follows the Brechtian technique of having two songs express contradictory ideas (e.g. one might say “Charandas is not really a thief, he is a good man, there are bigger thieves in society” while another goes “he is a dangerous thief, protect yourself from him”) and letting the viewer weigh each stance and consciously work out his own attitudes.

Many of Benegal’s later films, notably Arohan (which begins with Om Puri directly addressing the camera, speaking about the subject of the film and introducing the other actors) and Samar, would use similar distancing techniques. One sees it also in Nihalani’s directorial ventures such as Party or Aghaat, where self-conscious, expository dialogue takes the place of naturalistic conversation. The film of Charandas Chor doesn’t do this to the same degree (it was, after all, made for children and needed something resembling a conventional narrative flow) but it does draw attention to the storytelling process through its titles, illustrations and voiceovers. At one point the images on the screen even shake and rupture – as if there were an error in the projection – and Tanvir’s sharp voice asks “Kahin film poori toh nahin ho gayi?” In its own way, this entertaining “children’s movie” is very much a companion piece to the meta-films in the new art cinema of the 70s and 80s.

P.S. For anyone interested in Tanvir, the English version of his unfinished memoirs (translated by the multi-talented writer, historian and dastangoi Mahmood Farooqui) has just been published. I haven’t yet read it, though I intend to (it only covers Tanvir’s life up to the 1950s, I think). Anjum Katyal’s study of his life and career, mentioned above, is strongly recommended too.

P.P.S. A few months ago I discovered that Charandas Chor was on YouTube in a good print, and despite my reservations about watching movies on a computer screen I grabbed this available option. Unfortunately the YouTube video was removed a few weeks ago. But perhaps this indicates that a fresh print of the film will soon be made available on DVD. One can hope.

*** The stammering judge in Charandas Chor is probably an extension of the role Tanvir played in the 1948 IPTA comedy play Jadu ki Kursi, which also had Balraj Sahni in an acclaimed lead performance.

Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray

[Did this profile of Satyajit Ray for the African magazine Cityscapes. Since the piece was meant for a largely non-Indian readership – including people who would know of Ray only in passing – there is necessarily some formality and simplification, including the setting down of biographical detail that is widely known in India. But I tried to avoid making it a dry, encyclopaedia-like piece and to discuss something I personally find intriguing, the divide between Ray’s “serious” work and his excursions into fantasy. As always, no attempt at being “comprehensive” here: it would be possible to write a hundred such essays about Ray without saying everything interesting there is to say about him.]

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The tall man – very tall by Indian standards – is moving about a cluttered room, monitoring elements of set design while his film crew get their equipment in place. Depending on whom he talks to, he alternates between English and his mother tongue Bengali, speaking both languages with casual fluency. He jokes and banters for a few seconds, asks an actor to try a rehearsal without his false moustache, but then shifts quickly back into the meter of the sombre professional, the father figure keeping a close watch on things. He sits on the floor at an uncomfortable, slanted angle and looks through the viewfinder of the bulky camera, placing a cloth over his head to shut out peripheral light; so pronounced is the difference in height between him and his assistants, it's akin to seeing Santa surrounded by his elves, examining the underside of his sleigh.


Satyajit Ray is multi-tasking in ways you would expect most directors to do during a shoot, but there is something poetically apt about this busy yet homely scene, which opens a 1985 documentary - made by Shyam Benegal - about his life and career. Ray was an auteur in the most precise sense of that versatile word. Apart from directing, he wrote most of the screenplays of his movies – some adapted from existing literary works, others from his own stories. He also composed music, drew detailed, artistic storyboards for sequences, designed costumes and promotional posters, and frequently wielded the camera. Above all, he brought his gently intelligent sensibility and a deep-rooted interest in people to nearly everything he did. He was, to take recourse to a cliché with much truth in it, a culmination of what has become known as the Bengali intellectual Renaissance.

The Indian state of West Bengal, from which Ray hailed, has long been associated with capacious scholarship and a well-rounded cultural education, with the towering figure in its modern history – certainly the one most well-known outside India – being the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, a multitalented writer, artist and song composer. As a young man in the early 1940s, Ray studied art at Shantiniketan, the pastoral university established by Tagore, but this was just one episode in his cultural flowering. He was born – in 1921 – into a family well-steeped in the intellectual life: his grandfather Upendrakishore (a contemporary and friend of Tagore) was a leading writer, printer, composer and a pioneer of modern block-making; Ray’s father Sukumar Ray was a renowned illustrator and practitioner of nonsense verse whose work has delighted generations of young Bengalis (and now, increasingly through translation, young Indians across the country).

From this fecund soil emerged a sensibility so broad that it defies categorisation. If cinema had not struck the young Satyajit’s fancy (he was an enthusiast of Hollywood movies, interested initially in the stars and later in the directors) he might have made an honourable career in many other disciplines. He worked as a visualiser in an advertising agency and as a cover designer for books before embarking on his film career; even today, people who are familiar only with one aspect of his creative life are surprised to discover his many other talents. And for this reason, a useful way of looking at Ray is through the prism of the narrow perceptions that have sometimes been used to define or pigeonhole him. These usually come from those who are only familiar with his work in fragments: viewers from outside India, as well as non-Bengali Indians who may have seen only a few of his films.

Simplistic labels have been imposed on him ever since his debut feature Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) came to international attention and won a prize at the 1956 Cannes festival. Based on a celebrated early 20th century novel by BibhutibhushanBandopadhyaya, this subtle, deeply moving film is about a family of impoverished villagers, including a little boy named Apu, who would become the protagonist of the celebrated Apu Trilogy – travelling to Calcutta as an adolescent in Ray’s next film Aparajito (The Unvanquished) and finally coming of age in Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). Though Pather Panchali is rightly regarded a milestone in the history of Indian cinema, it was also the subject of misunderstandings among those who were not yet accustomed to dealing with directors and movies from this country. In a perceptive 1962 essay about a later Ray film Devi (The Goddess), the American critic Pauline Kael noted that some early Western reviewers had mistakenly believed Ray was a “primitive” artist and that Apu’s progress over the three films in some way represented the director’s own journey from rural to city life. Indeed, the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of Apur Sansar that while Ray handled village life well enough, he was “not up to” telling the story of a young writer in a city, which is “a more complex theme” – the implication being that rural stories were somehow truer both to Ray’s own life experience and to the Indian condition in general.

If so, this is a laughable idea. Ray was very much the product of a cosmopolitan setting and way of life: he lived in a big city, travelled abroad extensively before becoming a filmmaker, and spoke English with a clipped accent that contained traces of the British colonial influence. It was in choosing to film Bandopadhyaya’s novel with its village setting that he had stepped out of his personal comfort zone: the worlds he chronicled in later, urban films, such as Mahanagar (The Big City) and the Calcutta Trilogy of the 1970s were much more intimately familiar to him than the world of Apu’s penurious family was. These “city films” are diverse in their themes and subject matter, but the best of them are particularly insightful depictions of restive middle-class youngsters in a soft-socialist society increasingly besotted by the go-getting, capitalist way of life – a milieu that was conservative in some ways but forward-looking in other ways – and of how an individual might gradually get corrupted by a system.

However, there is a related point to be made here. If one is seeking a “quintessential Indian filmmaker” – meaning a director whose work represents the movie-going experience for a majority of Indians – Satyajit Ray was not that man. His films had a cool, formal polish, an organic consistency, which was far removed from the episodic structures and dramatic flourishes of commercial Indian cinema. He was influenced not by local moviemakers but by foreign directors ranging from Jean Renoir to Billy Wilder. And he had a sensibility rooted in classical Western and Bengali literature, which sometimes manifested itself in hidebound snobbery towards films that indulged “style” at the expense of “substance”, or theatrical melodrama over “realism”. In 1947, Ray and some of his friends co-founded Calcutta's first film society. “We were critical of most Indian cinema of the time,” he says in the documentary mentioned at the beginning of this piece, “We found most of our stuff shoddy, theatrical, commercial in a bad way.”

This may also be the time for a personal aside: the cinema of Ray was not the cinema of my childhood. Growing up in north India, I mainly watched the escapist entertainers of the Bombay film industry, latterly known as “Bollywood” – movies that mixed disparate tones and genres and contained narrative-disrupting song-and-dance sequences. It was only in my teens, in the early 1990s – around the time a feeble Ray, lying on his deathbed, was giving his halting acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Oscar – that I entered his world. I had become interested in what we called “world cinema” – beginning with classic Hollywood, then the French, Italian and Japanese movie movements – and I saw Ray’s films as part of a tradition defined by exclusion: everything that was not mainstream Hindi cinema. I grew to love his work, but even today I feel a little lost when faced with specific Bengali references in his films; a little cut off by virtue of not understanding the language or having been born in that cultural tradition. (It doesn’t help that the subtitles on most Indian DVDs are execrable.) I also feel ambivalent about his condescension towards commercial Hindi cinema.

But given the cultural disconnect between my world and his, it is remarkable how accessible Ray’s films were in most ways that mattered. This may be because, as the critic-academic Robin Wood put it, “Ray's films usually deal with human fundamentals that undercut all cultural distinctions.” His best work hinges on instantly recognisable aspects of the human condition: from the loneliness of a bored housewife, dangerously drawn to her younger brother-in-law, in Charulata (one of Ray’s most accomplished films, based on a famous Tagore story) to four restless men making a languid, not properly thought out attempt to escape city life in Aranyer Dinratri (Days and Nights in the Forest). In his capacity to engage with the inner lives of many different types of people and to find the right expression for them, he is one of the most universally appealing of directors.

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In the memoirs of Ray’s wife Bijoya – recently published in English translation as Manik & I – there is a glimpse of the director as a privileged and mollycoddled man. One anecdote has Ray being startled that Bijoya knew how to replace a fused light-bulb herself, without having to call an electrician. In the no-nonsense style of the spouse who can deconstruct the myth around a great man, she writes: “He never once touched the air conditioner in our room. If he entered the room for a rest and couldn’t see me anywhere, he’d shout out, ‘Where are you? Please switch the AC on for me.’ Such was my husband.”

Amusing and revealing though these stories are, they should also guard us against making facile connections between an artist’s work and his life; they take nothing away from Ray’s interest in people who were much less privileged, who did not share his background or personal concerns. In fact, “humanist” is a word that has often been used to describe Ray’s film work – so often that it has become a closed term, sufficient in itself. Roughly speaking, it can be taken to mean that he cared deeply about people and their circumstances, and that he chose empathy over judgement (his best films lack villain figures who can serve as easy explanations for why bad things happen). But I would argue that to properly understand this quality, one must recognise how complex and apparently contradictory he could be as an artist.

Consider, for instance, that the man who could be narrow-minded about genre films (in a book review, he airily dismissed Francois Truffaut’s efforts to present Alfred Hitchcock as a serious artist) was the same man who admitted in an essay that if he could take only one film to a desert island, it would be a Marx Brothers movie. The filmmaker known for his literariness and economy of expression also displayed a light, absurdist sense of humour and wrote many delightful stories in such commercially popular genres as science-fiction, detective fiction and horror.

Many of the perceptions of Ray swim around a basic idea: Satyajit Ray was a “serious” filmmaker. Now this statement is not in doubt if the word is used in its broad sense, to describe any rigorous artist who has achieved at a high level. But in a developing country like India, where cinema is often seen as having an overt social responsibility, very sharp lines tend to get drawn between “escapist” and “meaningful” films, and the word “serious” is sometimes used as an approving synonym for pedantry, humourlessness, absence of personal style or lack of interest in things that are not self-evidently a part of the “real” world. However, none of these qualities apply to Ray. There was nothing pedantic about his major work. His narratives are so fluid, it is possible to get so absorbed in his people’s lives, that one is scarcely conscious of watching an “art” film. And the identifiably weaker moments in his oeuvre are the laboured or self-conscious ones. For most of its running time, his 1971 film Seemabaddha (Company Limited) is an absorbing narrative about an upwardly mobile executive slowly being drawn into compromise and amorality. But the very last shot – where a key character literally vanishes into thin air, thereby identifying her as a symbol for the protagonist’s conscience – is one of the notable missteps in Ray’s career, a classic example of a filmmaker spoon-feeding an idea to his audience at the last moment, rather than letting the accumulation of events in the film speak for themselves (as they have been doing).

An offshoot of the “serious” tag is the idea that Ray was concerned only with content, not with form. But watch the films themselves and this notion quickly dissolves. Even Pather Panchali, his sparsest film on the surface – made when he was a young director with an inexperienced crew, learning on the job – is anything but a bland documentary account of life in an Indian village. It is full of beautifully realised, carefully composed sequences (many of which derive directly from Ray’s delicate storyboard drawings) and thoughtful use of sound and music.

There is clearer evidence of Ray the stylist in such films as his 1958 classic Jalsaghar (The Music Room), about a once-rich landlord now become a relic of a forgotten world. It is obvious right from the opening shot that Ray intended this to be a film of visual flourishes. (In an essay in his book Our Films, Their Films, he admitted that having won an award at Cannes shortly before making Jalsaghar, he had become a little self-conscious and allowed himself the indulgence of a crane for overhead shots.) There are carefully composed shots which draw attention to themselves – a chandelier reflected in a drinking glass, an unsettling zoom in to a spider scuttling across a portrait, a view of a stormy sky seen through the windows of the music room – as well as sequences that stress the contrast between the zamindar’s past glory and the delusions that now crowd his mind. One constantly gets the impression of a director trying to use the camera in inventive ways, as one does in other movies such as the 1966 Nayak (The Actor), with its stylistic nods to scenes from Federico Fellini’s Eight and a Half, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and other international films, and the 1970 Pratidwandi (The Adversary), which makes effective, ghostly use of negative film at key moments.

But for the most pronounced sense of Ray’s creative flair and versatility, one should consider a film that has long been among his most beloved and well-known works in Bengal, and at the same time among his most neglected, least-seen films outside India: the 1968 adventure classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha). Based on a story by Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore about two lovable adventurer-musicians who foil a wicked magician’s plans in the fictitious land of Shundi, this film (along with its 1980 sequel Hirak Rajar Deshe) is an important pointer to Ray’s strong fabulist streak, and a conundrum for those who would construct pat narratives about him being the solemn antidote to Bollywood escapism – as a man who only told stark, grounded stories about the “real India”.

To watch Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is to marvel at how playful Ray could be. One of his grandest achievements as a filmmaker was this film’s mesmerising, six-minute-long ghost dance, featuring four varieties of ghosts representing archetypes from India’s colonial past – a scene that is immediately followed by a darkly poetic sequence where the King of Ghosts (speaking in rhyme, and in Ray’s own synthesiser-distorted voice) grants the two heroes a series of boons. However, this wonderful adventure story also has a strong undercurrent of pacifism, which finds expression in an uplifting climactic scene where hungry soldiers lay down their weapons and make a beeline for pots of sweets that Goopy and Bagha have conjured for them. The anti-war theme isn't underlined, but it is there for anyone to see.

The fantasy genre allowed him to display his warmth in its rawest, least guarded form, and this gentle, unselfconscious erudition is on view throughout his writings too. He wrote dozens of short stories for younger readers, most of them initially published in the popular children’s magazine Sandesh (founded by his grandfather in 1913, revived by Ray himself in the early 1960s) – but many non-Bengalis I know have experienced them for the first time as adults, and attest that their sharp characterisations, expert pacing, and eye for detail make nonsense of the idea that they are meant only for children. These stories often broaden the reader’s horizons, supplying a wealth of information about places and histories; but they invariably do this by embedding the information in the fabric of a well-paced narrative rather than presenting it in a professorial manner.

Along with tales about ghosts and monsters, there are some subtle but moving stories about people caught in a life-altering moment. In one of my favourite stories “The Class Friend”, a well-to-do middle-aged man, Mohit Sarkar, is unexpectedly visited by a former school friend named Joy, whom he has not seen in 30 years. Joy has had a hard life and has aged beyond recognition, though the anecdotes he relates seem to confirm his identity. However, when it becomes clear that he has come seeking financial assistance, the preoccupied and wary Mohit manages to rationalise that the man before him is an imposter; or even if it really is his old friend, the gap between them is now so great that he wants nothing to do with him.

By this time, the reader – accustomed to little subterfuges in Ray’s stories – doesn’t quite know what to expect, but the tale ends with an understated variation of the more pronounced twists in Ray’s supernatural work: after being rebuffed once, Joy sends his 14-year-old son to Mohit’s house to collect the money; Mohit looks at the boy and at last recognises the face of the friend he had known in a much more innocent time. This personal epiphany closes an ostensibly “simple” story that is really quite complex and mature in its cognisance of the self-deception of human beings and the cleansing power of memory. Importantly, it conveys all this with characteristic lightness of touch.

It is also, in a strange and moving way, a story about the importance of maintaining faith – which is perhaps a peculiar observation to make about a man who was himself a firm rationalist. One of Ray’s greatest films – the 1960 Devi, about a childlike old man who believes his daughter-in-law is an incarnation of a goddess – is as sharp an attack on the perniciousness of organised religion and the follies of those who unquestioningly fall under its sway as any Indian filmmaker has ever dared to make. In a fiery tribute to Ray shortly after his death in 1992, the actor-playwright Utpal Dutt held this film up as a shining rebuke to the maudlin religious movies and TV serials regularly made in India. And by all accounts, Ray lived his life by the precepts of the questioning spirit. But he also recognised the human need – especially the child’s need – for the regenerating power of fantasy and imagination. He was sceptical of charlatans posing as mystics, feeding off the vulnerabilities of insecure people – a common phenomenon in India – but he was also open to the idea that there are things that lie beyond our understanding, things that current science has not yet been able to reveal.

Hence the paranormal elements in his stories – as in “Two Magicians” which is, among other things, an elegy for an old-world mysticism buried by the trickery of modern-day conjurors. In another story “The Maths Teacher, Mr Pink and Tipu”, one might expect Ray to be on the side of a mathematics teacher who forbids a child from reading fairy-tales “that sow the seeds of superstition in a young mind”. But the teacher, for the purposes of the story, is an antagonist: our sympathies are with the little boy, Tipu, who is being denied the opportunity to immerse himself in the magical (in more than one sense) world of storytelling. And eventually it is a brush with the supernatural that brings the story the resolution we are hoping for.

It would be easy to overlook these works, or to clearly demarcate them from the rest of Ray’s achievements, as if they constituted his own brand of self-indulgent escapism that did not belong in the same moral universe as his more grounded work. But I think that would be a mistake. To appreciate the wholeness of his vision, one should look at each film and story as a vital part of an organic career, rather than resort to distinctions such as “for mature viewers” and “for children”. The wide-eyed sense of wonder, the surrealism and nonsense verse of Goopy Gyne, are as much a part of his legacy – and his artistic sensibility– as the clear-sighted rationalism of Devi, or the starkness of the Apu Trilogy, are. The apparent paradoxes in his work are not paradoxes at all but indicative of a well-rounded, inclusive understanding of the frailties, needs and potentials of human beings – and ultimately, perhaps, this is what “humanist” really means.

[Some earlier posts on Ray and his work: an essay on Nemai Ghosh's photos of Ray; Goopy and Bagha; the restored Jalsaghar; Beyond the World of Apu; Devi; Professor Shonku]

A cinematic time machine - notes from the centenary film festival

[Did a version of this for my DNA column]

“These films were made during the relatively short period in cinema history when the only way to see a motion picture was to gather in groups in a darkened theatre,” writes George Stevens Jr in the anthology Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The words (and the book itself) are an ode to a time when film-watching was not yet possible in the privacy of one’s home, and I thought about them a few months ago, while watching Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment in a mini-theatre; it was a reminder that despite my love of old Hollywood, I have seen very few of those films in conditions approximating a traditional theatre setting. And as a professional writer, one can feel like a bit of a fake pontificating about such movies despite being so removed in space and time from the way in which they were first seen (and intended to be seen).

I thought of Stevens’ words again at the Centenary Film Festival in Delhi last week, where I saw movies like the Navketan classic Baazi and Bimal Roy’s iconic Madhumati in a large hall in the Siri Fort Auditorium. Though the screen wasn’t covered end to end (most of the films I saw took up barely half the total screening space) and the prints weren't consistently good, it was still an experience to be valued. Early in Baazi, there is a terrific, symbolism-laden scene where the small-time gambler Madan (Dev Anand) is taken to a swish club and led ever deeper into a den of urban vice; as one door after another opens to admit him, new secrets come into view. I could relate to Madan’s wide-eyed expression: watching these films in this environment, I felt like I was walking through a time portal into a new and exotic place.

It was a place where you could see stars like Dilip Kumar rendered youthful again, on a big screen in a darkened hall, and imagine that this was how the original audiences saw them. You could gape at an opening-credits list that read like a roll-call of legends. (From Baazi: Guru Dutt, Balraj Sahni as writer, S D Burman and Sahir Ludhianvi, Zohra Sehgal in charge of “Dances”, and as assistants in small font size, V K Murthy, who would become one of our finest cinematographers, and Raj Khosla. From Madhumati: Bimal Roy, Ritwik Ghatak as screenplay-writer, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Salil Choudhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee as editor.) Watching with the benefit of hindsight, you could engage in speculation too. To see an early, vulnerable Dev Anand – before his trademark mannerisms had been honed, and long before he went down the thorny road of self-parody – is to wonder: what if the audience hadn’t connected with this young man’s personality? What if Baazi had been a flop, Navketan had never got off the ground and Guru Dutt’s directorial career had been shelved? What would the history of Hindi film have looked like then? In a dark hall, these questions have a special immediacy.

To clarify, I’m not romanticising the theatre experience for the sake of it. Personally I like watching films on my own time and in my own space, many of my most cherished viewing experiences have been sans company, and there is a wider case to be made for the virtues of non-communal movie-watching. (In the US in the 1950s, home viewing begat a generation of movie students-turned-filmmakers who could appreciate personal, individualistic films without being distracted by other, possibly unresponsive viewers.) Nor was the Centenary Festival shorn of irritants. People walked in and out of auditoria, talking loudly, leaving doors open with light and sound flooding in. The emceeing before some screenings was over-earnest, there were prolonged and self-aggrandising speeches that sometimes led to delays.

And yet there was something special in the air. I felt it when a large section of the audience cheered loudly at the first appearance of the young Dev in his cap, scarf and old jacket – made up to look like a scruffy street vagabond but still an undeniable “star” presence – and when Rajesh Khanna burst through the door of the doctor’s clinic in Anand. Or when rows of viewers whistled at Johnny Walker’s drunken act atop a tree in Madhumati. Or when the man sitting in front of me began humming the opening notes of “Suhana Safar” in anticipation, during the montage of nature shots preceding the song.

Even watching the Fearless Nadia-starrer Diamond Queen – in a poor and poorly projected print – brought its own frisson. I overheard conversations between old people who had a dim memory of what Homi Wadia films were like (“lots of stunts”) but seemed to have forgotten about their remarkable blonde action heroine (playing a liberated “city-returned girl” who would have greatly intimidated Baazi’s Madan). A gentleman behind me, apparently knowledgeable, said a confident “Yes yes, Fearless Nanda” while reading out the opening credits for the edification of his companions.

There are other facets to watching old movies in this way. Performances which seem over-declamatory on TV can sometimes work better in a hall, because you feel like the actor is directing his gestures at a theatre full of people. It is closer to the experience of the stage, and one isn’t preoccupied with “naturalism” because this isn’t a mundane setting like your living room – it’s a special space that you have paid to be admitted into, where you perform the unnatural ritual of sitting quietly in the dark, like an audience at a magic performance, while pictures flash before your eyes at 24 frames a second. “Originally, the idea was to take yourself out of normal time to see a film,” the director Shyam Benegal told me during a recent conversation, “But when you watch a film on TV, you can be doing other things – chatting, eating, answering the door; you aren’t out of normal time.”

These screenings mostly took me out of “normal time”, but there were some unseemly ruptures in the fourth wall too. During a screening of Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, the sound vanished for a few minutes until someone yelled in the general direction of the projection room. Shortly afterwards, the framing went awry, and finally there was an alarming moment when the film seemed to dissolve and burn in front of our eyes mid-scene. (The effect was akin to what Ingmar Bergman did in Persona, deliberately fraying the reel to interrupt the film’s narrative. But formally inventive as Mirza's film is in its own ways, that definitely wasn't what was going on here.)

For a tense five minutes, some of us wondered if we had been unwilling witnesses to a crime against art – the grisly destruction of an important print – but the film resumed and we were sucked back into the illusion. Still, it was a sobering reminder of what has and can be lost. The centenary fest was a welcome initiative, but on the 100th anniversary of the first public show of Raja Harishchandra, the poor state of film preservation and careless attitudes to screening often beg the question "Dadasaheb Phalke ke bhoot ko gussa kyon aata hai?"

Meeting Nikhil Bhagat: a former actor remembers his brush with fame

[Did a version of this piece for the March issue of The Caravan]

On an unusually chilly Kolkata evening this January, at the inauguration of the Apeejay Literary Festival at the Victoria Memorial, I chanced to witness a little reunion. As guests gravitated towards the event's keynote speaker Shyam Benegal, the tireless festival director Maina Bhagat brought her 49-year-old son across to say hello to the filmmaker. “You haven’t changed at all, sir,” said Nikhil Bhagat, a wide, boyish smile peeling the years off his face. Trim, youthful-looking, Bhagat himself hadn't changed all that much since 1985, when he played a small but important role in Benegal’s classy ensemble film Trikaal. The year before that, aged barely 20, he was the rebellious football player Raghu, locking horns with a discipline-seeking sports coach in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray.

20-year-old Nikhil Bhagat with co-star Neena Gupta during the Trikaal shoot in Goa

Not many actors can claim to have made their only two films (playing key roles in both) with directors of the stature of Benegal and Jha, and then to have slipped conclusively out of the movie world. Nikhil Bhagat’s star had shone briefly in the firmament of “parallel” cinema: this article by Avijit Ghosh on the Times of India website notes that he “induced nationwide hysterical squeals from pretty young things” after the Hip Hip Hurray release. He was nominated for a Filmfare Award as best supporting actor for that film, losing to the more experienced Anil Kapoor in Mashaal. And yet you will be very lucky to find a photo of him on Google Images today. (Even the official Shemaroo DVD cover of Hip Hip Hurray has pictures of others who had smaller roles in the film, but none of him.)

Having coincidentally watched both movies over the past year (I wrote about Trikaal here), and perhaps swayed by dramatic filmi narratives myself, I had wondered if a tragic tale lay behind his enigmatic disappearance. All such thoughts dissolved that evening at the Victoria Memorial. Bhagat is still handsome, well-turned-out, and apparently comfortable in his own skin. But speaking with him then, and on the phone afterwards, I could tell he was unused to being interviewed; he struggled to make sense of his movie stint, admitted to its randomness.

He was studying in St Xavier’s College in 1983 when Prakash Jha made a hurried Calcutta trip to scout for an athletic young man who could play football. The college put up a notice, 19-year-old Nikhil went with some friends to the hotel where Jha was staying (a couple of hundred students must have showed up in all) and nearly left after a while (“who’s going to wait so long?”) – but before he knew it he was in a final shortlist of three, and then Jha, who had already got permission from the college, was telling him to pack his bags for Ranchi. For Nikhil and his flummoxed parents, who hadn’t even known about the auditions, everything happened in a blur. He had just enough time to collect a pair of contact lenses from the one optician in the city who dispensed them at the time.

He spoke very little Hindi and his voice would have to be dubbed by someone else (friends would later tease him about this, his mother Maina told me), but Jha had clearly seen in him a combination of rugged insolence and vulnerability that would suit the role very well. Raghu is a posturing, cigarette-smoking teen who is confused on the inside. (“Don’t butt your head against a wall before your horns have even grown,” the coach, played by Raj Kiran, witheringly tells him; their clash is the earliest representation of what would become a recurrent theme in Jha’s cinema, the channelling of masculine energies into leadership, with positive and negative consequences.)

Later, Benegal saw him in Hip Hip Hurray and got in touch, and Trikaal happened. Nikhil would also work briefly with Benegal on his TV series Yatra, set on trains travelling the length and breadth of India. “My role got over quite fast,” he told me, “but I was on that train journey almost throughout the shoot, for two months.” (He has a small part in this episode.)

With Shyam Benegal

It would be an overstatement to say that those two films reveal a brilliant performer (and it would be unfair to expect that much from someone who only had brief experience of acting in school plays, and none at all for the camera). What they do show is a callow young man with definite screen presence, someone who might – with experience and nurturing – have gone on to big things. In Trikaal – a more sophisticated, better-directed film than Hip Hip Hurray – he already looks maturer, a little more at ease in front of the camera, even though he might have been lost in the large ensemble cast. He has a striking entrance scene too: Naseeruddin Shah’s narrator, introducing the viewer to figures from his past, says “Aur woh main, 25 saal pehle” and the camera picks out Nikhil, standing amidst a crowd at a funeral wake, the hint of a cocky smile on his face as he looks towards Anna, the girl he has a crush on.

There is something ingenuous and unrehearsed about Nikhil’s recollections of his acting stint. He couldn’t relate to Raghu, he says, but having watched movies like To Sir with Love, he knew about such character types and played it by instinct. He had never serenaded, or sung a lament for, a girl himself, but “you know, at that age one does have experience of raging hormones” – and so he lip-synched through a memorable little scene in Trikaal where Remo Fernandes strums a guitar next to him while Maqsood Ali – later famous as Lucky Ali – watches from a distance; with hindsight, this is a touching image of three young people with very different futures in the entertainment industry.

With Remo Fernandes in Trikaal

Nikhil's closest firsthand brush with his own celebrity came when Hip Hip Hurray was released in a Calcutta hall and friends spread the word that he was in the audience. “The crowd became unruly and I ended up sitting in the manager’s office until they had dispersed.” That apart, the St Xavier’s boy lived in a world far removed from the Bombay film industry, and he sounds nonchalant even when he speaks about the Filmfare nomination – “I was aware of it, but there was no real question of going to Bombay for it.” He had college to finish.

Belatedly, after graduating, he did go to Bombay for a while to try his luck, but soon realised, first, that public memory was short - "I hadn't struck when the iron was hot" - and second, that he lacked the inner drive needed for this profession. “You have to be either passionate about acting or desperate to become a star, and I was neither. I am a private person, and was unwilling to push myself beyond a point.” Besides, the divide between mainstream and non-mainstream cinema was sharper then: most serious movie buffs today know of Trikaal’s cinematic worth, but in 1985 it fell under the radar of most audiences; having it on his resume wasn’t going to get him auditions. There were missed opportunities too. Ketan Mehta called him for an interview for Holi – the film that would mark the debut of a youngster named Aamir Khan – but Nikhil couldn’t go because the floods in Kolkata that year made travel impossible for five crucial days.

For 25 years now he has worked in leather exports – he is now the director of Orbit Leathers – and says that while life has had its ups and downs, “as in any business”, he has no regrets. “How many people become film stars anyway, even if for a very short period? And those who do often end up living in golden cages, without the freedom to be normal people.” In fact, one doesn’t have to look far for cautionary tales about stardom and the dream factory: consider the sad story of Nikhil’s Hip Hip Hurray co-star Raj Kiran, who was last heard to be recuperating from a mental breakdown in the US. And then remember the rousing final scene of that film, the proud coach handing the baton of progress to the transformed Raghu.

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The photos above are courtesy Maina Bhagat. And here are two pictures of Nikhil as he is today:

 

Candle-lit memories: time and light in Shyam Benegal's Trikaal

“If the most important subjects of film are light and time,” wrote Peter von Bagh in this excellent essay about one of my favourite movies, “I can’t think of a more poignant work than A Canterbury Tale.” I was reminded of these words while watching Shyam Benegal’s 1985 film Trikaal, especially its first half-hour. Time and light can be said to be central motifs of Benegal’s film too (though perhaps not in the exact sense as von Bagh meant in that essay). One of its main themes is the continuing hold of the past on the present, even as an old and tradition-bound world makes way for a newer, brasher one: set in the Goa of 1960, on the verge of being “liberated” from the Portuguese, it is the story of a family trapped between a grand history and an uncertain future. And at a formal level, its most striking quality – one that consistently enhances the narrative – is Ashok Mehta’s camerawork and use of lighting, among the best I’ve seen in a Hindi movie. (Even on the standard-issue DVD I watched, this is a splendid-looking film; I can imagine how much more satisfying it would be in a restored Cinemas of India print.)

Mehta, who died just a few months ago, was a highly respected cinematographer, noted for his work on Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Girish Karnad’s Utsav and Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane (the last had a magnificently show-offish nightmare sequence shot in black-and-white and featuring three generations of the Kendal-Kapoor family). In Trikaal he composed some stunning interior shots using candlelight, which plays a big part in crafting the film’s dominant mood: that of an intimate chamber-drama in which groups of people play out their mini-tragedies and mini-comedies in an enclosed, isolated setting. The lighting brings a distinct character to an ancient house full of secrets, and creates a world that seems older than it actually is (offhand I can’t recall if there is a single scene in this film that even acknowledges the existence of electric lights).

In fact, the assuredness of Mehta’s camerawork – and its importance to the film – is obvious right from the opening sequence, in which we see a man journeying (almost literally) into the past. The middle-aged Ruiz Pereira (Naseeruddin Shah in a small sutradhaar role) is revisiting his Goan village Lotli after 24 years, and the taxi – his time machine, so to speak – passes vistas that are new to him, including bland cement buildings and roads built for the recent Commonwealth conference. Music, photography, acting and writing combine to very good effect in this fine establishing sequence. As the cab moves from open, sun-lit roads to canopy-shaded ones, shadows play across Ruiz’s face and long tracking shots from inside the car give us his dreamy-eyed view of his “watan”. (Shah’s subtle performance in this short role allows us to see the years falling away from Ruiz’s face; as the cab draws into Lotli he looks rapt and boyish.) Vanraj Bhatia’s lilting score is a reminder that the Benegal-Bhatia artistic collaboration is among the most underappreciated in our cinema. And there is Shama Zaidi’s dialogue. “Mera gaon jaise Ming daur ka khubsoorat phooldaan hai,” Ruiz muses, “Uska itihaas, uspe naksh kahaani samajh mein na aaye toh keval ek sundar naazuk guldaan hi lagega. Usski poori sanskriti ahista ahista mitt jaayegi. Beetay dinon ki yaad ki tarah.” (“My village is like a Ming dynasty bouquet. If you don’t understand its history, the story inscribed on it, it will only look like a beautiful, delicate cluster of flowers. The culture associated with it will gradually fade away, like old memories.”)

Leaving behind the markers of a modernising world, Ruiz instructs the driver to take the old, rough road and soon arrives at a haveli now fallen to ruin. Well-travelled, clearly a man of the world, having lived in Bombay and worked in the Merchant Navy, he is nonetheless nostalgic about the world of his youth, and much of that youth was spent around this house, which belonged to the Souza-Soares clan. As he enters the darkened hallway, the light around him changes, becoming lush and warm, and the film elegantly glides into the old days.

In a long, amusing sequence we are introduced to the events and people of 24 years earlier (including Ruiz’s own younger self). We learn that the family patriarch Erasmo has just died and that his widow Dona Maria (Leela Naidu) refuses to face reality, continuing to listen to loud music in her room while her family and acquaintances bustle about in confusion. Dona Maria’s shrill daughter Sylvia (Anita Kanwar) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she realises that her daughter Anna’s engagement might fall through because of the long mourning period. And watching quietly from the sidelines is Melagrania (Neena Gupta in one of her best roles), the illegitimate child of the dead man, now working as a maid for Dona Maria.

Soon after the funeral, the callow, blandly beautiful Anna (Sushma Prakash) begins a clandestine relationship with a distant cousin of the family, a fugitive named Leon (Dalip Tahil), who is hiding in the cellar. If Anna is the face of the future, her grandmother has a tendency to cling obsessively to the past (while not completely making her peace with it: there is a bizarre subplot in which the old woman is confronted by ghosts from her family’s closets, victims of a tortured colonial history). But the divide between old and new ways of life also manifests itself in class tensions. Though on cordial terms with the family, young Ruiz and his uncle – the local doctor – are clearly outsiders; Ruiz is attracted to Anna, but there is no question of him being allowed to ask for her hand. (Melagrania, a sort of “half-breed” between the upper class and the servant class, is much more accessible to him.) I thought Ruiz’s relationship to the family was comparable to that of Eugene Morgan in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – a man who is an outsider in terms of perceived status but who is destined to cope more efficiently with the coming modern world than this family can.

Trikaal doesn’t quite live up to the assuredness of its opening 20 minutes. There is a hurried, incomplete feel to it, as if a couple of key scenes were accidentally left on the cutting table; there are more subplots than the film’s narrative can accommodate, we don’t get enough time with all the characters, and perhaps because of this some of the acting seems uneven or not fully realised. It isn’t as tightly constructed an ensemble movie as Party, which was directed by Benegal’s friend and former cameraman Govind Nihalani a year earlier. But there are things to recommend it, even apart from its visual quality. The scenes involving Dona Maria’s ambivalent relationship with Melagrania are particularly effective (Benegal has always been a sensitive director of women) and there are many interesting people in the large cast, including the under-used Ila Arun, a melancholy-looking youngster named Maqsood Ali (who would go on to singing fame as Lucky Ali a decade or so later), Jayant Kripalani as the perpetually drunk suitor of another Souza-Soares girl, and the rugged Nikhil Bhagat (whose only other major role was in Prakash Jha’s Hip Hip Hurray) as the young Ruiz. Remo Fernandes and Alisha Chennai show up too as a couple of local musicians.

Though the film’s ending was a little abrupt for my liking, I liked how the bookending scenes featuring the older Ruiz were used – how they have the effect of summarily cutting the past off from the present. There is something poignant about the fact that he never encounters an older version of any major figure from the past (which is something one might have expected in a narrative like this). He makes enquiries, gets token information about what happened to this or that person, but he doesn’t actually meet anyone again – there is no closure in that sense. And this allows the viewer to leave with the feeling that the spirits of all those people are still bickering and mourning and making toasts and partying in that creaky old house. In the lovely, ghostly light of Ashok Mehta’s thick candles.

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P.S. heavily made up in the role of Dona Maria’s mousy son-in-law Lucio is a difficult-to-recognise K K Raina – shuffling about in a hunched posture, with false teeth that have an embarrassing tendency to pop out during times of stress. I spent half my viewing of the film wondering which classical movie monster Lucio reminded me of – Nosferatu? No, not quite – and then at last I had it: Fredric March as Mr Hyde in the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

(I’m not being facetious: it isn’t simply a matter of physical resemblance but of a certain nervous ferocity in both performances. No intention of offending people - or monsters - with false teeth or overbites, or taking anything away from the conceptualisation of the Lucio character, which I thought was quite effective.)