[Did this interview with Ritesh Batra for Scroll. Would have liked a more in-depth conversation about the challenges of adaptation, but it was a phone interview and he didn't have too much time. Maybe a sequel-interview, after the film is out...]
Intro: Ritesh Batra, director of the acclaimed The Lunchbox, has just finished filming an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending. The book is about a man whose attempts to make sense of his distant past are constantly stymied. As the elderly Tony tries to understand the full implications of things that he did forty years earlier, a woman whom he had briefly had a relationship with tells him: “You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will” – these words can be seen as a refrain for a story that repeatedly draws attention to the unreliability of human memory and our tendency to create comforting, self-aggrandising narratives (or “endings”) for ourselves.
Batra speaks here about the film, in which Jim Broadbent plays the older version of Tony and Charlotte Rampling plays the enigmatic Veronica.
How did your association with The Sense of an Ending come about? Had you read the novel before you were approached to direct the film?
I’m a big Julian Barnes fan and had read the book when it was published in 2011; I had even considered working on an adaptation at the time, but I was under the impression that something was already in progress – and besides, I usually prefer to work with my own stories. Then, a couple of years later, the offer came to direct the film, along with a draft of a wonderful screenplay done by Nick Payne.
I worked closely with Nick, it became a collaborative process, we made a few changes here and there.
Was Barnes involved in the process? Did you get to meet him?
He wasn’t involved with the screenplay, but he came on the set to give us his blessing. He told us, “Go ahead and betray me.”
What appealed most to you about the novel?
What I found most interesting was that it is about an elderly man coming to terms with his past, but the book spoke to me even as a youngster. I found myself looking back at the relatively short life I have had, thinking about things that had happened, seeing them through new eyes. It was also a reminder that great literature is all around us, in all our lives – there are fascinating stories at the next table in a restaurant. Life itself is the stuff of great literature, you just need the hand that will write it down.
Then of course there are little ways in which one starts to relate to the characters and their relationships, tie them to one’s own life. My daughter is three now, she had just been born when this project began, but I found myself reflecting on Tony’s relationship with HIS daughter – who isn’t really a presence in the book, we only hear about her once in a while, but it created a connection.
It is such an interior novel – so much of it deals with the narrator’s reflections on memory, self-deception and guilt. What was the challenge in making it cinematic? Did you and Payne place greater emphasis on the plot-and-conversation-driven passages?
As you say, it’s a very interior book, full of Tony’s ruminations. Every page was a challenge for us, and it is still a challenge even after the shooting is over – we are in postproduction now, doing music and sound, and those things help determine the final effect of a film.
In adapting it, we did of course focus on plot and action, but more than that one looks at what drives the engine of a story. I’m a little hesitant at this point to discuss The Sense of an Ending in detail, but take the example of The Lunchbox, which is also a very interior story: what is driving that film is the characters’ need to reach out to each other, the sense of anticipation – waiting for each other’s letters, the Irrfan character Saajan waiting for the tiffin every day. In a way, The Lunchbox was like a novel that I had inside me, one that I didn’t actually have to write out.
The Sense of an Ending is the sort of story where not very much seems to happen at the level of plot, but so much is happening inside the characters’ heads – and to convey that, it’s very important to work closely with the actors, to find the right texture for the characters. Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling were wonderful to work with, and brought so much to the roles.
The book’s ending is ambiguous and subject to interpretation – the sort that has readers analysing and arguing. How does one deal with such ambiguity in a feature film?
Yes, for instance, there is the character of Sarah Ford (Veronica’s mother), who is so ambiguous. She appears only in a few pages but is very central to the narrative. On the question of reaching for a definite conclusion – yes, you grapple with this constantly, and you have to be careful. Again I can’t get into details of how we handled certain scenes – that is best discussed and dissected after the film is out – but I had similar pressures on me while making The Lunchbox too. There was pressure to have the Irrfan and Nimrat characters meet in the end, to have a clearly spelled out moment like that, or to even just use the sound of a doorbell to convey to the audience that they definitely are meeting. I resisted that. With stories like these, one has to find an ingenious way to convey ambiguity, and convey the new realities in people’s lives.
A movie can never equal a book, but you want the adaptation to complement the novel in some way, while finding its own voice. The worst adaptations in my view are the ones that try to be slavishly faithful. I think of the relationship between a good film and its source text as being akin to the relationship between two step-siblings who really happen to get along very well – they aren’t blood relations, but they have a bond.
One of the big themes of the book is the huge gulf between youth and old age: the impetuousness of young people – their capacity to be alive and vibrant, but also unfathomably cruel – set against the more measured, safer attitudes that most people develop as they age. Given that you are only in your mid-30s, did you ever feel intimidated by the subject?
As I said, the book did speak personally to me. Obviously I can’t be what I’m not – I can’t be Tony Webster, either in terms of his age or his personality, so there’s no point worrying that I wouldn’t be able to deal with the old-age theme. What’s more important is that one has to have the inner motivation and sustain it for a year – the time it took to do this – and I got that both from the material and from the people I was working with.
Did any films serve as reference points for you while making this one? The flashback scenes in the novel are set in the British school system of the 1960s; while reading them I thought both of the kitchen-sink British films of the early 60s and a cry-against-authority film like Lindsay Anderson’s If…
My reference points weren’t so much films that had similar content or settings, but in terms of visual style I became more interested in movies that had static frames, with the camera staying still for long periods: the sort of work that Yasujiro Ozu, Kurosawa, or even John Huston, did. I think part of the reason for this is that Barnes’s story is already about ambiguity, about a narrator who might be unreliable at times, and I didn’t want to muddy things further. When you’re reading Tony’s narrative in the novel, you’re swept along and you take some of the things he says at face value. In a film though, one is constantly second-guessing, wondering if this or that is true. And I didn’t want to manipulate viewers on yet another level by having the camera swishing around, doing lots of different things.
As for the period of the story, we researched extensively to get the details right. I was friends with the late Alan Rickman, who had been to school with Julian Barnes, and he told me a lot about the time, what it was like growing up in this particular milieu with particular sorts of people.
This is a rare case of an Indian director helming a film that has practically no Indian connection. Do you see this as a sign that walls are falling when it comes to defining/labelling a particular director or writer?
Well, I hope so. I still don’t know what to make of it – all I know is that I had a great time making the film, the actors were wonderful, and Barnes himself was so generous and supportive.
I have spent a lot of time here [in England] making this film, and I would like to come back and deal with an Indian story, perhaps something set in Mumbai.
Both your features have been sophisticated, inward-looking narratives. Do you see yourself sticking with this tradition, or will you ever do something that’s a little nearer to the tradition of mainstream Indian cinema?
It can be a bit of both, maybe – I don’t know, it’s hard to say beforehand, because what typically happens is that when you actually work on a film, you feel your way through it and develop a sense of what is the right approach for this material. In any case, I’m not sure it’s easy to say these days what is mainstream and what is not – I’d like to think The Lunchbox was mainstream in its own way! More than those categories and labels, I’m most interested in doing something that I find truthful.
[A post about visual storytelling in The Lunchbox is here. And here are two posts about book-to-film adaptations; 1, 2]
[Did a shorter version of this piece for The Hindu]
If you call yourself a movie buff and haven’t yet seen Vijay Anand’s Guide, or don’t remember it well, you must make up for that lapse soon – but for now, just go to YouTube and search for “Guide snake dance”. Watch the scene where Rosie (Waheeda Rehman), a former dancer “rescued” from a courtesan’s life and now stifled in a marriage to a self-centered man, breaks her shackles during an outing with Raju the guide (Dev Anand).
See the look on Rehman’s expressive face as she watches a village girl perform the cobra dance; how Rosie, initially seated on a cane chair like a privileged memsahib, gets up and perches on the floor as the performance begins; how she begins to sway while still in that position, continues her graceful movements while rising, and then joins in the dance. (Meanwhile Raju goes from being a “mere” guide to occupying that chair himself and supervising her 
performance – a foreshadowing of what will happen to their relationship later in the story.) Note the long takes that follow – so characteristic of Anand’s cinema – culminating in the scene where the camera follows Rosie dizzily as she circles the arena, and how the sequence as a whole suggests that she is having something like a religious experience, the bliss of self-expression combined with the joy of having transgressed.
Now here is the equivalent passage from RK Narayan’s novel The Guide, two sentences in Raju’s voice: “She watched [the cobra] swaying with the raptest attention. She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm – for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.”
Rather terse, isn’t it, compared to that mesmerising scene?
Which is not to imply that the movie is “better”, or that Narayan’s cool, refined prose (more elaborate elsewhere) expresses Rosie’s circumstances less poignantly than the combination of Rehman’s acting, SD Burman’s music and Fali Mistry’s cinematography do – it is just to point out that a good commercial film may achieve its ends in very different ways from the literary work it was based on, and that it can be silly to compare two such disparate forms. Such comparisons are usually more deferential to literature anyway, more sympathetic towards writers whose visions were “ruined” by money-minded filmmakers. In an essay titled “Misguided Guide”, Narayan related, with dry humour, the processes by which his low-key, Malgudi-centered story was transformed into a colourful, pan-India extravaganza. But it is possible to enjoy that essay even while appreciating how Guide uses cinematic form and language.
Those long takes, for instance, add dramatic intensity to many scenes – such as the one where Rosie confronts her husband Marco in the caves, a brilliantly atmospheric setting for the playing out of overwrought emotions – and give the performances the dimensions of good theatre. Music – and the way it plays out on screen – is another of the film’s crowning achievements. (Would it be facetious to point out that the book has no soundtrack?) Look at the “Tere Mere Sapne” scene where Raju plights his troth to Rosie. “Khandaron mein guide khada hai” (“There is a guide waiting for you amidst the ruins”) he first tells her in dialogue, but prose is inadequate to this situation (a woman has just left her husband; a hitherto carefree man is baring his heart to her), so he has to shift to the more exalted meter of song. Though more than four minutes long, the sequence is made up of just three shots – there are only two cuts, each of which occurs after Rosie draws away from Raju; she is still conflicted, and the process of reassuring her must begin anew. This is then done at a dual level, by the song’s lyrics as well as by the camera’s sympathetic, probing movement – leading up to the long, pivotal final shot and a beautiful moment where Raju stands at a distance and holds his hand out, and the camera first tracks from him to Rosie, bridging the large gap between them, and then tracks back, this time “coaxing” her to him by not allowing her the option of “escaping” to another shot (via a third cut).
Music and visuals meld perfectly in other scenes too, such as the shot in “Aaj Phir Jeene ki Tamanna Hai” where Raju emerges from the darkness of a Chittoor Fort ruin as Rosie sings the line “Kal ke andheron se nikal ke”. Or in the heartbreaking contrast between the union of Rosie and Raju in “Tere Mere Sapne”, and the distance that has opened between them in “Din Dhal Jaaye”.
Part of Narayan’s concern was that the film had made something too big-canvas and starry out of his narrative about circumscribed lives. But the expansion of scale and setting doesn’t compromise the story’s essential concerns: how people and their power equations can change over time, how love can fade and be replaced by self-deception or self-interest, and how, despite all this, a form of redemption may still be possible. This is also a rare popular film that comes close to transcending the expectations created by the star system: it is possible to watch Waheeda Rehman and Dev Anand, to be fully aware of who they are, and to still feel how stifled Rosie is, how liberating the very act of walking through the marketplace in her ghungroos is for this girl who loves dancing more than anything else, for whom it is an art (and who has tragically been told that practicing it consigns her to the damned).
Because Rehman’s performance is one of the finest we have ever had, it is easy to overlook Dev Anand. He was at a point in his career where the urbane charm of his early days had begun veering towards the self-conscious, head-bobbing mannerisms that became so common through the 1970s and later. Yet that rarely happens in this film, even with the obvious temptations of the scene where Raju gives Rosie a lecture about self-actualisation. Anand seems to know exactly when to stay in the background: watch his expressions during the snake-dance scene and the ones around it, where he discovers new dimensions to Rosie’s personality and begins to be intrigued. This is a performance made up of finely observed moments, such as the way he doesn’t look directly at Rosie when she comes down the stairs at a party shortly after they have had a bitter argument; or a split-second shot where Raju, reeling after a physical altercation with his friend, tries feebly and fails to shut the door of a car that is about to drive away.
Guide does have minor weaknesses: in its final leg it uses the plot thread about Raju being mistaken for a holy man to indulge the traditional narcissism of the Hindi-movie hero; it seems a pity that a film with such a fascinating, ahead-of-her-time heroine should marginalize her in its final half-hour and end with a close up of its male star looking saintly, his voiceover saying “Sirf main hoon” (words that would define Dev Anand’s later screen work!). Thankfully, that pat ending can’t diminish the power of all that went before it. Now 50 years old and yet timeless, this is one of our cinematic landmarks, and a testament to the possibilities of artistic collaboration within a commercial system.
[A longer post about "Tere Mere Sapne" is here. And more about RK Narayan's "Misguided Guide" here]
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]
To begin by stating the obvious – Hamlet isn’t a great, enduring play because of what it tells us about the politics of 16th century Denmark or Europe. The reasons for its appeal are more universal: the quality of the poetry and how it fuels the narrative, creating a weave of human emotions, relationships and duplicities; the portrait of the sensitive young prince at the centre of it all, wise and callow by turn, child and man at once, never quite sure of what he must do; and the many ways in which the particular sheds light on the general. (I have always been puzzled by Charles Chaplin’s remark that he wasn’t too interested in Shakespeare because the plays were mostly about privileged royals whom he couldn’t identify with.)
But Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider isn’t “just” an adaptation of one of the most celebrated English plays ever (which would have been a big enough challenge) – it is also concerned with the recent history of Kashmir, which is an immediate, politically charged subject (so
charged that the film has already run into trouble for its refusal to treat the
Indian Army as unblemished angels of mercy and righteousness). And what made Haider compelling for me was the friction I sensed within the film: a conflict between the need to do well by Shakespeare – to do new things with a major literary text that has universal appeal – and the need to address Kashmir’s complexities. This tightrope act gives a pleasingly schizophrenic quality to a movie that is, after all, about a young man on the cusp of madness.
Some thoughts (mainly for those who have seen the film):
– Can a script that carries the load of Kashmir PLUS Hamlet avoid patches of heavy-handedness? Probably not, but Haider acquits itself well in the circumstances. I liked the non-underlined way in which this story's Gertrude – Haider’s mother Ghazala, wonderfully played by Tabu – becomes a sort of symbol for Kashmir herself: the object of desire or (blood)lust, the thing that needs to be possessed (the film isn’t coy about Haider’s own ambiguous relationship with her), the woman – “our sometime sister, now our queen” – whose very body is a battleground (an idea literalised in an explosive climax where Ghazala is given more agency than Gertrude has in the closing moments of the play).
– Other noteworthy things are done with the original text, such as the use of the character Roohdaar, who presents himself as the “rooh” (soul) of Haider’s father, a mouthpiece for a dead man. It’s a good way of sidestepping the supernatural aspects of the play, but it also ties in with a basic ambiguity in Hamlet itself: until the moment of Claudius’s confession, we can’t be completely sure if Hamlet’s father really was betrayed and murdered; the prince might be hallucinating, or the ghost might be a malevolent spirit leading him astray. In Haider, the very nature of the setting – the moral murkiness, the deceptions and counter-deceptions – is such that there exists at least a small possibility that young Haider is being set up. This adds a layer to his madness, uncertainty and his rambling, Toba Tek Singh-like soliloquy, which touches on how the people of Kashmir are caught in events they can’t fully understand. Which side, which border to trust?
– Scenes such as the gravediggers’ goofy song “So Jao” are reminders of how similar Shakespeare’s work is to a certain type of Hindi film: the episodic structures with constant shifting of moods and tones, the melodrama and the cheerful bawdiness, the use of clowns as sutradhaars who get to say unexpectedly profound things. Watching the “Ek aur Bismil” sequence where Haider confronts his uncle during the course of a celebratory song, even someone who knows his Hamlet might forget the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king and instead recall “Ek Haseena Thi” in Karz – but of course Shakeapeare’s “lowbrow” dramatic flair has influenced popular Hindi cinema for decades, and that Karz song is part of the tradition.
This is also one reason why Haider’s wildly over-the-top Rosencrantz and Guildenstern worked for me. Turning these two spy-buffoons into Salman Khan-obsessives in a video parlour (complete with the playing of “Tumse jo Dekhte Hi Pyaar Hua” on the car stereo in a grim late scene) was an inspired touch. It’s loud, cutesy, front-bencher stuff…and I think Shakespeare would have heartily approved of it.
– In Hamlet, because the focus is on individuals and their conflicts, revenge is a relatively straightforward thing: there is a sense of loss, of course, and a sense that innocents like Ophelia have been swept away in other people’s battles, but the canvas is small and self-contained. In Haider, despite the emphases on relationships (Haider and his mother, Haider and Arshia, Arshia and her father), the big picture is always in view. And the thought that inteqaam followed by more inteqaam can only lead to wholesale destruction is a philosophical statement that keeps in mind the generations of self-perpetuating distrust and antagonism in Kashmir. (It is also an apt thought for a film released on Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary.)
I liked the way the film ended, but I felt it might have been even better if the last shot had been the one of Haider indecisively holding the gun over his uncle’s head, and a simple fadeout on that image, along with the dual voiceover, one voice urging revenge, the other urging restraint: that would have been a fine encapsulation of the “to be or not to be” (or “to do or not to do”) theme, and an image of Kashmiri lives in a state of suspension.
P.S. Shortly after writing the above, I spoke with Basharat Peer who, in preparing the Haider screenplay, revisited Hamlet and simultaneously drew on his own wide-ranging experiences of Kashmir (including some that have been chronicled in his excellent Curfewed Night). Basharat said he wasn’t consciously thinking of Ghazala as a symbol for the “motherland”, but in writing the character – and in trying to make this Gertrude a more active 
participant – he had in mind the many stories involving unsung heroines from the Kashmir struggle: women who are often forgotten in official and unofficial records, and who defy the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman who stays at home with eyes lowered.
The gravediggers too were inspired by some of the old men Basharat knew who were running around trying to save – or avenge – their children. “When we talk of the violence, we usually think of young, able-bodied men," he said, "but there are so many older people too who picked up guns after losing everything. And people like that don’t do this for big ideological reasons, it is purely personal: you lose your child, and all you want to do is destroy the world. It’s all part of the overwhelming complexity of what has happened in Kashmir, where the personal is always mixed up with the political.” I thought it notable how this view of embittered old people, dealing with grief, knowledge of mortality and the possible meaninglessness of it all, fits so well with the absurdist-nihilistic graveyard scene in Hamlet, and with Vishal Bhardwaj’s own dark sense of humour (also mentioned here and here, in the context of his collaborations with Ruskin Bond).
Basharat also mentioned that the “roohdaar” – Haider's father's twin soul, so to speak – was drawn from a real-life incident where a man, fired upon and dumped into the river (with a sack containing the chopped-up limbs of his friends tied to his back), survived to tell the tale. Another case of fiction huffing and puffing to keep pace with the implausibilities of real life. No wonder great Elsinore to high Srinagar can come.
A few years ago, during this long conversation about his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid told me that the idea of art as artifice – “as a frame that is playful and stylised” – was important to him. The book is about a Pakistani man named Changez who goes to the US to study in Princeton, gets a job with a valuation firm, feels empowered by the American ideals of opportunity and equality – but finds himself becoming more defensive about his cultural identity in a divided, post-9/11 world. Importantly, this story is told in an abstract way: it takes the form of a long monologue addressed by Changez – now back in Pakistan – to an unnamed and voiceless American tourist, who becomes a stand-in for the reader. Changez’s tone is exaggeratedly courtly (“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America”) with a possible undercurrent of threat, so that the reader can’t quite tell what his intentions are, and what the eventual result of this meeting might be.
Actually, the meeting need not even be taken at face value; it could simply be a storytelling device akin to the use of a sutradhaar or a katha-vaachak. “The effect I was reaching for,” Hamid told me, “is that you’re in a theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play.” Watching a film in a large darkened room packed with strangers is an unnatural experience by its very construct, he pointed out. “Similarly, in a book, which is a packaged good, why can you not have an intermediary who allows you as a reader to move from your own world into the world of the narrative, while discussing that movement?”
It is ironical that Hamid used a cinematic analogy to discuss the “unreality” of his narrative structure, for Mira Nair’s new movie version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist has made the story less circular, and more like a conventional narrative. For Hamid, the very nature of his dramatic monologue implied a bias: the reader only hears the Pakistani side, the American never speaks. But Nair clearly wanted a more balanced approach, and her key change is to provide a context to the meeting between Changez and the American, doing away with the latter’s formlessness and giving him a distinct identity, voice and purpose. This inevitably also meant expanding the bits of the story set in Pakistan.
Does it work? Yes and no. The film, which is an earnest attempt to bridge the gap between civilisations in our troubled times (from the beginning, Nair seems to have been very conscious about dealing with a Big Theme and about her role as a healer and facilitator), has some beautiful things in it. I liked the use of music, which incorporates Sufi motifs with western ones (the end-credits composition by Peter Gabriel is very effective) and laterally comments on the action: a line from the great poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated as “I don’t want this Kingdom, Lord / All I want is a grain of respect” plays over a scene where Changez decides to relinquish his US job and return home. And Riz Ahmed brings a lot of dignity to a difficult role; a lesser performance could have completely sunk the film.
However, transferring an allegorical novel to a visual medium – and thereby literalising it – can be a tricky business. Theoretically it should be possible to watch the film on its own terms, as an independent creation, but this is not always easy, given the more obvious symbolism in Hamid’s story - for example, the main female character is named "Erica", a clear stand-in for America, which Changez is unable to truly possess or take stock of. Such devices are tied to the abstractness of the novel and can seem heavy-handed in a film that adopts an otherwise realist structure. (This is not, after all, a Bunuel or Godard movie.)
Still, whatever you think of the book and the film, this is on many levels an interesting test case in the adaptation process and in an understanding of the differences between literature and cinema. A new book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film, contains short accounts of the film’s making through the eyes of Nair and crew members including screenwriter Ami Boghani, production designer Michael Carlin and editor Shimit Amin. But some of the most entertaining footnotes come from Mohsin Hamid himself, as he reflects on novel-writing and filmmaking. “For me a day’s work is like entering a quiet, sheltered, unhurried cocoon,” he notes, “For a director it’s like talking on three different cellphones while riding a unicycle on the wing of an airplane in heavy turbulence.”
[Did a version of this for Business Standard. An earlier post on adaptation here, including notes from a short chat with Hamid two years ago, while the film was being made]
Last year’s National Award winner for Best Feature Film in English, Unni Vijayan’s Lessons in Forgetting – an adaptation of Anita Nair’s 2010 novel – is playing in exactly four halls in the Delhi region this week. One of those is the ultra-luxurious PVR Director’s Cut in Vasant Kunj. You might well question the decision to screen a low-profile, relatively low-budget film – with potential word-of-mouth appeal – in a venue where the tickets are priced at Rs 1200 each, but that’s a subject for another piece.
Though this is a well-intentioned film with a certain visual flair, I had problems with it – much of the English dialogue wasn’t convincing to my ears, the story was diffused and a crucial lead performance was stiff and impassive. However, one thing I did find interesting and want to discuss here is how the narrative structure leads the viewer down a winding path, making us confront our attitudes to things like personal morality and the gap between “modern” and “traditional” lifestyles – issues that have been central to much of the discourse around sexual harassment recently, including the many outrageous statements about rape that continue to be made by people in positions of authority, and the voyeuristic attention directed at the “westernised” woman whose behaviour and dressing sense are seen as directly related to the bad things that happen to her.
(Plot discussion to follow, but no major spoilers) Very early in Lessons in Forgetting, we learn that a 19-year-old girl named Smriti had a terrible accident (though it might also have been an attack) on a beach in the town of Minjikapuram, Tamil Nadu: having suffered brain damage, she is now in a vegetative state at home, and her father Jak (Adil Hussain) is trying to understand what happened, while also learning things about the person she was. In one of the first scenes, a doctor at the hospital where Smriti was taken puts on a show of conditional sympathy. Yes, this is such a terrible thing, "but, you know, this Western culture..." and then his voice trails off, but he begins again: “I’m not blaming anyone, but when girls are let loose...” And he tells Jak that tests indicated his daughter had “been with” more than one man shortly before the tragedy.
Jak is stunned. He knew Smriti was leading a fairly independent life, that she was part of a theatre troupe and had gone on this trip with friends, including boys. But there are some images and ideas that his mind can’t directly process. And so it is apt that the narrative now resorts to stylised imagery, with a sand-art animation sequence that is one of the very best things in the movie.
As the opening credits play, the animation shows us a father and his little daughter on a beach; he playfully throws her in the air, she flies away from him (literally, for she has sprouted wings) and mid-flight she begins to turn into a adult woman, her hair growing longer, her breasts filling out. In the frank and daring cartoon visuals that follow, we see this young woman having sex with a man, then possibly participating in an orgy too – and this image looks like a throbbing brain, perhaps suggesting that much of what we are seeing represents the febrile imagination of the father, pondering what his “little girl” might be doing, with other men, with more than one man. Here is a loving, protective dad who also has a sliver of male sexual jealousy in his reptile brain, as so many loving, protective dads do.
Or at least, that’s how I interpret the sequence. The story of this father’s quest to understand his daughter’s life – and perhaps to reclaim or redeem her – also reminded me a little of Ethan Edwards’ obsessive search for his “defiled” niece in The Searchers (and of another film, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, in which George C Scott plays a man looking for his daughter who may have joined the porn industry).
Frankly, Adil Hussain’s bland, one-note performance as Jak doesn’t allow these comparisons to be sustained beyond a point, but what follows is still intriguing. Jak meets some of Smriti’s friends and discovers that she had been sexually intimate with more than one boy in her group. Through their stories (presented in inter-woven flashbacks) we learn that she was promiscuous and possibly a little flighty and irresponsible in how she treated the people she was close to. The boys themselves have clearly been scarred by their involvement with her: one has become a depressive alcoholic, another has taken quick-fix solace in religion but doesn’t seem to be at peace, and while all this is presented very simplistically we get the point.
To an extent, these scenes define our initial attitudes to Smriti. We are seeing her mainly through male eyes (and of course I can’t separate my own maleness from what I’m writing here) – as a free-spirited girl with showy eyebrow piercings, riding a scooter in a short skirt, flitting from one guy to the next without always being mindful of hurt feelings; and later, walking about a little imprudently in torn jeans in a small, conservative town, standing out from the other members of her group, constantly drawing attention to herself.
But late in the film, there is a subtle shift in perspective. The character comes into her own, the male gaze is supplanted, and vital gaps in the story are filled in by a sympathetic older woman who knew Smriti. We learn that she was plucky and good-hearted, with a conscience and an insufficient sense of self-preservation (“Don’t run away from the things that terrify you,” her father told her when she was a child – advice that he will have cause to regret later), and that what eventually happened to her was not only grossly disproportionate as “punishment” for her (real or imagined) faults, it is also a direct result of the compassion that stems from her “modern” upbringing.
The film's intensity meter rises in these final sequences: the slackness of the earlier scenes gives way to greater pace and urgency, and more convincing performances by Maya Tideman (as Smriti) and Raghav Chanana (as her last boyfriend Soman). And it builds towards an unflinchingly disturbing sequence where male group aggression takes on a carnival-esque form, with undertones of the faux-righteous double-think that lies behind so many cases of sexual assault: “Let’s teach her a lesson.”
Given how effective that ending is – and how powerful and lovely that animated sequence in the beginning was – it’s a pity that so much of the midsection of Lessons in Forgetting is trite and uninvolving, the dialogues and the acting rubbing against each other in awkward ways. “They? They who? I thought this was an accident,” Jak says when he hears for the first time about people who had scores to settle with his daughter. Each word is enunciated clearly in Hussain’s refined voice, but there is little tension behind them; this isn’t so much a grieving father wanting to uncover the truth as a student in an elocution class. (It’s just as well that the residents of Minjikapuram are allowed to speak their own dialect rather than a stilted version of English, which so afflicts much of the film.)
I was also puzzled by some of the decisions made while adapting Nair’s novel. In the book, Jak is one of two central characters, the other being a middle-aged woman named Meera, who works for him and is going through a personal crisis of her own. The film chooses to focus on the Jak-Smriti story, which is fine – but it is done in a half-baked way so that Meera (Roshni Achreja) continues to be nominally important, a sort of second lead, without ever becoming a fleshed-out character. We get only fragments of her life and it feels like bits and pieces have been carelessly left out (her teenage daughter, for instance, appears to be shaping up to be an important counterpoint to the Jak-Smriti story, but then simply fades out of sight). Watching the scenes about Meera and her family, I felt like the film had originally been an hour longer but had had an unseemly encounter with a chopping block.
Still, the good bits in Lessons in Forgetting reminded me of the good bits in two other flawed but interesting films I saw in the last few months: Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid and Listen... Amaya. The link with the former is clearer – both Lessons in Forgetting and Jalpari deal with female foeticide, with a well (or a pool) of dark secrets harboured by small, self-contained communities, and both link gender discrimination with a damaging imbalance in nature. (In Jalpari, the village that is determined to stop producing women also has a serious water scarcity; Nair’s book uses cyclones as an important metaphor, one that isn’t really explored in the film.)
The more tenuous similarities with Listen... Amaya have to do with the relations between children and single parents who are very close to each other: if the latter can be over-protective and reluctant to loosen the strings, children can be just as insecure about the idea of their parents having a sexual side. In this context, I felt Lessons in Forgetting may have been a better-realised film if it had explored the bond between Jak and Smriti at fuller length, letting us see how a certain type of parent-child relationship can be a little like walking gingerly across a beach littered with very sharp shells – and how it can affect the subsequent choices and actions of both sets of people.
The process of comparing a film with the book it was adapted from is often ridden with simplifications; such comparisons also tend to have an inbuilt bias towards the book, being premised on the condescending idea that cinema is merely illustrated literature. But I think most people who have seen the new film Kai Po Che! and also read the Chetan Bhagat novel The 3 Mistakes of my Life will agree that the film is a more fully realised work, and it may be worth looking at where its strengths lie vis-a-vis the source text.
At his best, especially when writing about things that he has firsthand experience of, Bhagat knows how to pace a story for his target readership and give them characters and conversations they can relate to. (An old post about this here.) But a self-conscious strain enters his work when he deals with situations requiring gravitas – such as violence during a communal riot – and in The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the writing becomes most clunky at the points of highest drama. Consider this bit from the book's climax, which reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a well-crafted passage in a finished novel; an inert, disjointed description of things happening one by one, rather than an attempt to convey the messy, urgent wholeness of the moment:
Mama closed his eyes again and mumbled silent chants. He took his folded hands to his forehead and heart and tapped it thrice. He opened his eyes and lifted the trishul. Ali stood up and tried to limp away.
Mama lifted the trishul high to strike.
“Mama, no,” Omi screamed in his loudest voice. Omi pushed the man blocking him. He ran between Mama and Ali. Mama screamed a chant and struck.
“Stop Mama,” Omi said.
Even if Mama wanted to, he couldn’t. The strike already had momentum. The trishul entered Omi’s stomach with a dull thud.
“Oh...oh,” Omi said as he absorbed what happened first and felt the pain later. Within seconds, a pool of blood covered the floor. Mama and his men looked at each other, trying to make sense of what had occurred.
Even a moderately well-directed and well-performed movie sequence would be an improvement on the above passage (a competent sound designer might also replace the “dull thud” when a sharp weapon enters human flesh with a more appropriate sound), and Kai Po Che! is more than a moderately good film. It is wonderfully acted and has a real sense of character development. The screenplay – on which Bhagat collaborated with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor – is more focused, and the dialogue more authentic-sounding, than the often flat prose in the book. The decision to remove the novel’s framing 
device (in which Bhagat receives a suicide note from an Ahmedabad businessman) was a sensible one, as was the paring of a couple of flabby subplots and peripheral characters such as the Australian cricketer who uses similes like “I’m off like a bride’s nightie”.
In the history of Auteurism (which I will not go on about here!), there are many instances of directors choosing source material that will enable them to revisit their cherished themes and personal obsessions. Though it’s way too early to call Abhishek Kapoor an auteur – even if you’re using the word in the most modest possible sense – one should note that like his last film Rock On!, Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi – are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it. The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic local Hindu party.
With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s, partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of 
Bhagat’s strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.
The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they have been weak for too long.) Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports shop earlier in the story.
Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down the line. Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no real parallel for it in the book.
[Some earlier posts on adaptations: Susanna’s Seven Husband/Saat Khoon Maaf; A Kiss Before Dying; notes from the Times of India lit-fest]
[A version of my latest column for GQ magazine]
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This is an unusually busy time for movies based on high-profile novels. Deepa Mehta’s film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is finally ready, as is Ang Lee’s adaptation of another Booker-winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Meanwhile the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s marvellous The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been given cinematic life by one of my favourite directors Mira Nair, and Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqi are in the process of adapting Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel Sea of Poppies.
Naturally the release of each of these films will be accompanied by much hand-wringing and cries of “but...but...but...” by viewers who have read the books (and by some who haven’t read them but have mastered the enviable art of speaking knowledgeably about them nonetheless). Each of us will at some point morph into a version of the comic-strip goat who, after chewing on a roll of celluloid, says ruminatively to his companion, “The book was better.” Questions of faithfulness to the original will be raised, omitted passages will be bewailed, shock will be expressed at the casting of this actor in that role. Midnight’s Children in particular will be closely dissected, since Rushdie’s novel is nearly as much of an Unavoidable Baggy Presence for Indian Writing in English as Ulysses was for 20th century fiction; even a flawless film might easily be weighed down by unreasonable expectations.
Personally I try to judge movies based on what they achieve with their medium's techniques, rather than as slavish illustrations of literary works. But I confess to a flicker of trepidation about the adaptations mentioned above, because some of the things I most like about these books don’t seem easily translatable to film. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for instance, is marked by a distinctive first-person voice: the protagonist, a Pakistani man named Changez, addresses an unnamed American tourist in a courtly, almost ingratiating style. (“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”) This narrative has a stylised, off-kilter quality that makes it difficult for the reader to know exactly what Changez’s intentions are (in an interview, Hamid told me the effect he was reaching for was “that you’ve walked into a darkened theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play”) and what effect he is having on his listener - so that even the simple description of someone putting his hand into his jacket pocket is laced with the possibility that he might be reaching for either a business card or a weapon.
With Life of Pi, the potential pitfall is one that is especially relevant to the fantasy (or part-fantasy) genre: a book lets you imagine its characters and incidents for yourself while a film gives them immutable shape. (I mostly loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but its depiction of the flaming Eye of Sauron in the final sequences was problematic; presented as a roving, Twentieth Century Fox-style flashlight, Tolkien’s bodiless villain lost the chillingly abstract quality he - it? - had in the books.) Martel’s novel – about a teenage boy adrift on a lifeboat with a fearsome Bengal Tiger – gets much of its force from the irresolvable ambiguity of the narrative: is Richard Parker the tiger a real presence or is he an invention, a wish-fulfillment device that allows young Pi to focus his thoughts and survive a difficult ordeal? But the movie, by its very nature, has to literalise the book's central voyage, and if you see a large tiger on the screen once, it is difficult to be subsequently convinced of his unreality.
The adaptation that most intrigues me though is the Sea of Poppies one. Rizvi’s film is provisionally titled Afeem (19th century opium trade being central to Ghosh’s story) and anyone familiar with her debut Peepli Live knows she can bring the required sensitivity to this tale of people from various backgrounds journeying across the ocean, driven more by despair than expectation. ("Both Peepli Live and Sea of Poppies are stories about the psychological effects of migration," she told me during a recent chat.) But the most riveting thing about Ghosh’s novel wasn’t its plot – it was its use of language. Its lascar sailors (“who came from places that had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean”) speak a dynamic hybrid of tongues, made of words picked up from various countries, and the European characters who have been living in India for generations use phrases such as “He turned a ship oolter-poolter” and “It would never do to be warming the coorsey when there’s kubber like this to be heard”.
To my mind at least, such details work better on the printed page than on the screen (where, if not handled exactly right, they might too easily devolve into tedious slapstick). However this is, as always, dependent on the quality of the treatment, the casting and the performances. During our conversation, Rizvi mentioned that most of the script would be in Bhojpuri – something that is singularly appropriate for this book – and it was nice to read a blog entry by Ghosh expressing enthusiasm for the project. Authors aren’t always the best judges of movies based on their work, of course, but of the adaptations mentioned above Afeem sounds like the one that is most worth warming the multiplex coorsey for.
[Earlier posts about book-to-movie adaptations: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; notes from the Times of India lit-fest; A Kiss Before Dying; R K Narayan on a movie set]
[Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]
At the Times of India Literary Carnival, I participated in a panel about books being adapted into films. Adeptly moderated though the discussion was – by author, screenwriter and all-round funny man Anuvab Pal – there’s no way an hour-long session can cover all bases on this wide-ranging topic. Still, it was a good excuse to put together some of my scattered thoughts about adaptation. Here goes:
One of my peeves as a film buff is that too many reviews these days discuss movies almost exclusively in terms of their plots. Overemphasis on story has the effect of neglecting how the story is told with the techniques that cinema has at its disposal (and which differentiate it from literature). It also fosters a culture where some reviewers (both in mainstream and online media) don’t even feel the need to be acquainted with the most rudimentary camera movements: the difference between a pan and a tracking shot, for example, or between a match cut and a jump cut.
If you even mention these things while discussing a film, you might be accused of getting “too technical”, but this is basic moviemaking grammar. It would be unthinkable for a professional book reviewer to not know the difference between active voice and passive voice, or between a first-person and third-person narrative. (Actually a good book reviewer would be expected to know much more, but I’m deliberately setting the bar very low here!) It’s a pity then that movie critics are held to much lower standards simply because cinema is such a popular and egalitarian form.
Anyway, this may be something to keep in mind while assessing the quality of an adaptation and the ways in which a film deviates from the book it was based on. One of the things that came up during our discussion was that the high quality of a literary work does not necessarily translate into high quality in the movie made from it. (If that were the case, a stationary-camera recording of a good stage production of Hamlet would automatically be a great film.) As our co-panellist Sooni Taraporevala, the screenwriter of such films as Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, put it: “A film mustn’t simply be an illustration of the book.”
I also liked the term Sooni used – “spiritual DNA” – to refer to the essence of a literary work, which is what an adapting screenwriter should mainly be concerned with. Thus, a good adaptation might capture the essential theme or mood of a book even if superficial details of period, setting and character names are altered. Shakespeare is a good example: there have been Japanese, Russian and Indian film versions of his work, made in languages that are arguably twice removed from the 16th century English he worked in. There have also been modernised versions, such as the 1995 Richard III which shifted the action to the pre-World War II years and included a scene where Richard speaks part of his “winter of our discontent” soliloquy while standing at a men’s urinal.
If you’re a purist, such changes might seem sensationalistic, but I think the film catches the essence of Shakespeare’s memorable protagonist: the self-loathing mixed with self-pitying, the insatiable appetite for scheming and deceiving, the need to avenge himself on everyone around him. (Another example in a similar vein: in Roman Polanski’s excellent Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does her sleepwalking scene in the nude. It has been cynically noted that the film was co-produced by Playboy, but I don’t think there’s anything gratuitous about the scene itself; it works quite well as a depiction of the sudden vulnerability of a character who has been so thoroughly in control for most of the play.)
But often, spiritual DNA isn’t easy to define, especially when adaptation involves a big change in period or setting. John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s 1903 novel Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, significantly updating the story – Conrad’s themes of imperialistic hegemony, exploitation and the savagery in human nature were set in a story about a man from a “civilised” country (England at the height of its powers) journeying into a “place of darkness” (the African Congo), and the film placed these ideas in the context of what America was doing to Vietnam in the 1970s. Yet the differences between the two works are just as important: Conrad’s book is full of darkness and despair, but it has a moral compass – a sense that one can visit the darkest areas of the soul and return with one’s sanity intact – whereas Apocalypse Now is a more nihilistic work – it’s very much a product of a century that had seen two world wars, nuclear destruction and the greatest horror of all, the Holocaust.
****
But there are also times when a serendipitous collaboration occurs between two people who might seem very different “types”. Consider Ruskin Bond and Vishal Bhardwaj. Bond’s writing style is genteel in the old-fashioned English way, the prose Spartan and direct; Bhardwaj’s films tend to be baroque, set in the Indian hinterland and peopled by rough-speaking types. The two men barely speak a common language, but I watched them in conversation at an event earlier this year and realised that in some things – notably in their shared penchant for black humour – they were on exactly the same wavelength. This helps explain their friendship and frequent collaboration, most notably on Bond’s children’s story The Blue Umbrella, which Bhardwaj made into a film that was much lusher in tone than Bond’s story (right down to the claustrophobia-inducing close-ups of Pankaj Kapoor as the greedy shopkeeper). It’s an example of a really good adaptation that doesn’t try to be slavishly faithful to its source material.
On the question of slavish faithfulness: when a literary work is being turned into a commercial or semi-commercial film, it’s almost inevitable that there will be changes that the original writer doesn’t care for; there will be a certain amount of pandering to the star system, and so on. During the audience Q&A, someone mentioned the “Dola re Dola” song in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version of Devdas, which brought together Paro and Chandramukhi, two characters who have nothing to do with each other in the original story. Even defenders of Bhansali’s opulent filmmaking style would probably concede that a large part of the motivation for the scene was having Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai together on screen for a spectacular, paisa-vasool dance performance.
I wrote in this post about R K Narayan’s sardonic essay about the making of Guide. The process of “glamorising” his small-town story and its characters would have begun at the point where Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman – big stars with established screen personas – were cast in the roles of Raju the guide and Rosie the dancer. And of course, many changes were made to the story itself. But however much one admires and sympathises with Narayan the writer, the film must ultimately be judged on its own terms (and many movie buffs would agree that the Hindi version of Guide is an outstanding achievement in commercial filmmaking). There are many instances of movies that are excellent in themselves while being less than satisfying as adaptations.
*****
During our session Sooni spoke interestingly about how, when turning a novel into a screenplay, she had to find an exterior expression for the interiority of a character’s thoughts. This must have been especially relevant to her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, because the book had surprisingly little dialogue; mostly it took the form of an omniscient narrator telling us about the lives and thoughts of Gogol and the other characters. Sooni had to create voices for these people, who had to be depicted on screen by flesh-and-blood actors who would actually talk to each other.
Writing aside, there are thousands of instances of a seemingly minor decision by a filmmaker adding layers to the story he is adapting – from Satyajit Ray’s use of Ravi Shankar’s shehnai music at key emotional points in Aparajito (based on Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s book which, needless to say, did not use music of any sort as an accompaniment to a dramatic scene!) to Stanley Kubrick filming a frenetic orgy in fast motion (and with a fixed camera impassively recording the action) in A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Burgess’s novel, which was widely believed to be unfilmable). I'll be putting up a few more notes on this subject in the coming weeks, with more examples. Meanwhile, here are some earlier, related posts: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; R K Narayan and Guide; The Namesake; Polanski’s Macbeth; my Yahoo column on story and storytelling.
Intro: Ritesh Batra, director of the acclaimed The Lunchbox, has just finished filming an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending. The book is about a man whose attempts to make sense of his distant past are constantly stymied. As the elderly Tony tries to understand the full implications of things that he did forty years earlier, a woman whom he had briefly had a relationship with tells him: “You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will” – these words can be seen as a refrain for a story that repeatedly draws attention to the unreliability of human memory and our tendency to create comforting, self-aggrandising narratives (or “endings”) for ourselves.
As I said, the book did speak personally to me. Obviously I can’t be what I’m not – I can’t be Tony Webster, either in terms of his age or his personality, so there’s no point worrying that I wouldn’t be able to deal with the old-age theme. What’s more important is that one has to have the inner motivation and sustain it for a year – the time it took to do this – and I got that both from the material and from the people I was working with. 
