[Did this short interview with Roddy Doyle before I moderated his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival; a version of this appeared in M magazine. Roddy said many other interesting things during the actual session, but I don’t yet have a transcript]
Intro: For over two decades now, the Irish writer Roddy Doyle has nimbly straddled the line dividing “popular writing” and “literary writing”. Doyle’s work has been immensely popular, both in his country and abroad: most of his books, including The Commitments (which was made into a very successful film by Alan Parker) and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, have been bestsellers; his 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is among the most widely read Booker Prize winners ever. His fiction, driven by conversation, working-class slang and short, staccato sentences, is accessible to a large readership. But Doyle, now 51, is also a very respected writer, particularly acclaimed for his ability to bring very different types of characters to life: the voice of the 10-year-old protagonist in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is pitch perfect, as is the book’s non-linear structure, which mirrors the restlessness of a young boy’s mind; Paula Spencer in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is one of the most convincing female narrators ever to be created by a male author.
A testament to Doyle’s versatility is that he participated in three sessions at the Jaipur Literature festival this year: the first dealt mainly with his novels, the second was about writing for children and young adults, and the third was about screenwriting (in the company of the director Stephen Frears, who made the movie versions of Doyle’s novels The Van and The Snapper).
Have you been to India before? What are your expectations of the literature festival?
No, I haven’t been here before. What to expect? The company of people who love books, and food that will bring a shine to my bald head!
But I’ve been following developments in Indian writing in English – I’m a great admirer of the work of Rohinton Mistry, and I wish Arundhati Roy would write another novel. I recently read Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which shocked and entertained me – two things I love in a book. I suppose one of the things I look forward to in Jaipur is being told what other Indian fiction I must read!
You have a talent for getting under the skin of very diverse characters. When you first began writing, did you consciously set out to stretch yourself as much as possible, to do something notably different with each new book?
It wasn’t a conscious decision at the start. I just wrote a book (The Commitments), finished it, and started a new one. As I finished one book, I’d be thinking about the next, and, I suppose, by the end of the third I was consciously deciding to stretch myself. I wrote Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in the first person because I’d never done that before and thought it would be interesting to try it. I found that I enjoyed the first-person voice, so I did it again with the next book, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors – but with a very different type of narrator. I try not to repeat myself.
The characters, or narrator, often drag the style of a novel behind them. Young characters will bring their language, rhythm and preoccupations; a mature woman will bring hers. I decided to write the second Paula Spencer book in the third person because I didn’t want to write a “sequel” to the first, or to try and repeat it. The first book was about an entire life, to the time of the book’s conclusion, but the second book was a single year in Paula’s life. Different book, different approach. Again, I wanted to avoid repetition.
What sort of research is required to “get” the cadences of the speech of people like Paula Spencer and Paddy Clarke?
I did no research for Paddy Clarke. I used to be a 10 year old boy; that seemed to be enough. I was a school teacher when I wrote it, all the time listening to young people yapping away: that helped. I’ve always loved the sound of people talking; I grew up listening to the neighbours and my parents mimicking the neighbours. If I was to set Paddy Clarke in 2010 instead of 1968, its rhythm would be somewhat different – different slang, different grammatical rules broken, but the same energy.
With Paula Spencer, the cadence came easily; the narrator, Paula, is about the same age as me, from the same part of the world etc. Other aspects of the book were foreign to me – the gender, the violence, the poverty, the dependency on alcohol. These slowed me down; I had to work hard to fashion the sentences that would bring her life to paper.
You deal largely with the working class – with the little triumphs and disappointments of “working-class heroes”. Have you ever been tempted to write a novel set in a completely different milieu?
In Ireland when I was growing up, there was a grey zone between working class and middle class, where most of us lived, one foot in each camp, so to speak. I’m comfortable, and more interested in, writing about the working class, the world of the Rabbitte family [in the Barrytown Trilogy], and the lower middle class, where Paddy Clarke comes from – where I come from, I suppose. I’ve been writing short stories for a while, about new arrivals into the country – Africans, East Europeans – coming into contact with people born here, in Ireland. Because of the nature of the work they do, for example, child minding, they often work in “big” houses. I’ve also written a novel, Oh Play That Thing, set entirely in the US.
Do you often get feedback from readers in other countries – Asian countries, for example? Because I wondered if your distinct sense of humour – often driven by Irish colloquialisms and local references –translates well to other cultures.
I don’t get much feedback. I often don’t “get” a joke because it’s being told ten miles up the road. So I’d always assume that people from outside Dublin or Ireland would have problems – but isn’t that one of the reasons why we read fiction? I read Adiga’s The White Tiger, not in the hope of finding the very familiar, but to read about a “foreign” world that was also very human and, therefore, familiar. I never think about readers as I write but I try to make sure that, if I use a colloquialism, there are words and phrases surrounding it to reveal, or hint at, its meaning.
Contemporary Irish writers are often expected to be spokespersons for their country or to explicitly deal with its history. Are you personally affected by these expectations?
The short, and honest, answer is No. I find the temptation to be a spokesman for my country very easy to resist, although I love the place. It’s never boring in Ireland.
Unlike your earlier work, the current series (The Last Roundup) is set in a distant time period. Did that involve a lot more research than the other books? Also, tell us something about the forthcoming book, The Dead Republic.
I often wonder, if I’d known how much research I’d have to do to write the three novels of The Last Roundup, would I have started? Probably – but I think I’d have drawn a deeper breath before starting. Luckily, I love reading! The first book is set in Dublin in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly in the slums. Some of those slums were still standing, still frightening, when I was a child. Being middle aged has its advantages! The final book, The Dead Republic, brings the narrator, Henry Smart, back to Ireland, from the USA, in 1951. He tries to settle into a quiet life but becomes involved with the IRA – not recommended if you crave the quiet life!
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A dramatic scene featuring Naseer and Vipin Sharma (who played the stern dad in Taare Zameen Par)...
...and the actors in a more relaxed mood. The rocks seated up to seven or eight people during the outdoor shoots.
More worrying was when some of the crew members would fall asleep near the edge (see extreme right). Wake up suddenly and there's a 70 percent chance of rolling right off.
Naseer gets his body makeup done for a scene involving blood...
...and later, plays the biking stud with the ladies.
Meet Shaji Fernandes D’Souza, the most sardonic jeep-driver in Kerala. “I am three people in one,” he said as he told us his full name. (“So am I,” I replied, announcing mine.)
It takes a scoundrel to know a scoundrel, and I credit myself with having realised, very early on, that Shaji was a poker-faced practical joker. The others in our small sightseeing group took everything he said at face value and gasped in outrage when he proclaimed that he would charge us Rs 500 for waiting at a spot for a few minutes or Rs 100 for playing a particular radio channel. They also bitched about him in Hindi and were suitably mortified when he told us, at the end, “Mujhe bahut achhi Hindi aati hai”. I thought he was enormously entertaining. Only people like him should be allowed to procreate.
One thing we learnt about Vagamon was that every major tourist spot is called “Suicide Point”. Initially we thought there was one; later we learnt there are as many suicide points as there are jeep-drivers in the vicinity. Most of these spots are so beautiful, however, that death loses its attraction once you’re there, which makes it more like Suicide Pointless.
Abhilasha takes a picture of Aahana and Meghna near a suicide point.
A Shiva temple near another suicide point, with small rock carvings of lizards, would you believe. The ladies made filmi poses near the edge of the cliff, but we won’t put up those photos here.
Silhouette shots from one of the loveliest, most idyllic places I’ve ever seen, the Vagamon meadows, full of picture-postcard hillocks and no trees, so you get a clear view for miles around (no greenery in these pics, but we wouldn't have got the right effect anyway).
Of course, the hillocks and the “plains” were all situated atop a mountain range – we were already 1500 metres up to begin with – but you could scarcely make that out. This is a popular location for para-gliding.
We also went to the nearby Belgian monastery, famous for doubling up as a dairy farm and supplying thousands of packets of milk to the region every day. Very colourful flowers on their grounds; Aahana’s camera did them some justice (mine didn’t).
The monastery has these very Swiss-looking cows.
In general, the cows in Vagamon are not benign creatures. Possibly they resent human intrusion on their territory. One cow, locally known as Mrs Antony, was part of the shoot and everyone was mortally scared of her. (“We need a milder cow,” Anup said to me in one of his more candid moments, “but the problem is where to get one?”)
Two rabbits were also part of the shoot, but for most of us the scene where Naseer had to carry one by the ears was cringe-inducing. He wasn’t too happy about the whole thing either.
At one point, after doing particularly well in a take, Tipu the star dog bounded towards a rabbit-containing bag, thinking perhaps this was to be his reward. “Would it be too logical to keep the dog separate from the rabbits?” asked the soft-hearted Jessica – Satish’s wife – caustically. She cradled one of the rabbits more adeptly than anyone else in the crew had managed so far.
(There’s a joke here involving “Jessica Rabbit” but I can’t think of it)
Later, on the rocks, I spoke with Naseer about Maarten ’t Hart’s essay “Rats”, about his experiences as a rat-trainer on the sets of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu and his horror at how thousands of domesticated rodents were treated on the sets (boiled alive in a muddleheaded attempt to dye white rats brown; starved so that they turned carnivorous). Naseer agreed that this was unconscionably cruel but added “Look at the films [Herzog] made though! Anyone would be willing to go very, very far for a director like that.” The constant lugging of heavy shooting equipment through steep and winding hill roads reminded me (on a much more modest scale, naturally) of the ship being transported over the hill in Fitzcarraldo.
(Continued from here. Click pics to enlarge)
This was pretty much my first view of the shooting. After a climb up a rough mountain road near Anup Kurian’s family house in Vagamon, we stumbled out of some foliage to find the crew shooting a scene with three singers (sisters) from Nagaland, atop a large rock. We had been walking through largely desolate terrain for the better part of an hour, so I couldn't resist saying "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" to Anup as I shook his hand.
In the background are the Naga sisters, carrying traditional music instruments shaped slightly like scythes – which is appropriate, since they are associated with death in the film.
Yes, that IS Naseeruddin Shah on the left.
It was his idea that Colonel would have dreadlocks, so he had these long braids stitched onto his real hair before arriving for the shoot. It seems like an overly flamboyant touch at first, but Naseer pulls it off really well, and having read the script I think it suits the character. (“There was no way I was going to wear a handlebar moustache just because the character is referred to as Colonel,” he told me.) It’s very uncomfortable though, especially in hot weather – he’s had to keep the braids on around the clock for over 30 days now, and will only be able to get rid of them once the shooting is over.
Naseer told me something interesting when we spoke later in the day. He conceptualised the Colonel as an older version of the cop he played in the 1987 film Jalwa (a remake of Beverly Hills Cop). “This is the man who busted a narcotics ring, shot the head guy and then, for his pains, was dismissed from the service. It fits in perfectly, because such a thing WOULD happen to an inspector who goes and shoots a Dawood-like character; he would be fucked for life. So he has nothing to live for and he says okay, I’m going to grow marijuana and survive. Fuck honesty, fuck the police force after what they’ve done to me.”
I thought it revealing that he could trace a character arc like that, from a completely unrelated (and very different type of) film made two-and-a-half decades ago. For many of us who were kids when Jalwa was released, the film was an introduction to a new Naseeruddin Shah: the arthouse actor recast as a muscular man of action. Naseer tells me he was in a gym recently when a beefy young man came up to him and said, "Sir, when I saw you in Jalwa I decided to start body-building. I thought to myself, if YOU can do it, then ANYBODY can do it!" Backhanded compliment, what?
Naseer on a new Royal Enfield bike that initially stalled a bit – not an advisable thing for a bike to do on steep mountain roads. It eventually settled into the groove of the shoot though.
On the left is Meghna Gandhi who does makeup, and on the right is Aahana Kumra, the bright young actress who plays Jaya; she was Naseer’s student at Whistling Woods a few years ago and is understandably thrilled about acting with him in her first feature.
They rehearse a scene together.
In the background are the greenhouses with the marijuana plants – more accurately, large cloth plants flown in from China!
Tipu the German Shepherd who plays Kuttapan (originally named Slumdog), with his trainer.
At age three Tipu is already a veteran, having worked in around 50 Malayalam films. This role was a bit exacting for him because there are lots of reaction shots – lots of acting - whereas in his earlier films he mainly played police dogs who ran after criminals. But he’s nothing if not a professional, and Naseer was very impressed by him. ("It's the humans who are the problem," he says laconically when things go wrong during the shoot. I submit that this is generally true of life as well.)
On most days, lunch was served at the little stream that runs near the two principal outdoor locations. Grab a plate, pour out the rice and rasam, pick a rock, sit down.
After a scene is shot, the crew gathers around as Naseer studies the take on a little screen.
Standing in the bright blue shirt is Yuvraj, Naseer’s Man Friday who has worked with him for 15 years – we were mighty impressed by his Jeeves-like efficiency and powers of anticipation. At extreme right in the white shirt is Vishwamangal Kitsu a.k.a. Mangal, the director of photography.
During a scene with an elephant in Vagamon town, Anup’s friend Satish Menon – an imposing presence in his orange kurta and straw hat – stands in the middle of the road, directing traffic and ensuring that car horns and other sounds don’t interfere with the shoot.
Shouts of “HORN! OFF!” and “OFF! HORN!” rent the air, and Satish had quite the sore throat at the end of the day. However – and this is apparently a worldwide phenomenon at location shoots – onlookers can NEVER be made to understand that they are supposed to be quiet or not make faces at the camera. My favourite was the guy who made a reassuring “I understand perfectly” gesture when he was asked to simply walk past, but who then proceeded to look intently into each of the crew’s faces as if he expected the Meaning of Life to be hidden therein.
Abhilasha reads Sidin Vadukut’s Dork in between takes of the elephant scene, when things aren’t too exciting.
Shameless plug: we both enjoyed the book hugely. The trope of the unreliable narrator is something I usually associate with serious literary fiction, but Sidin pulls it off very convincingly in a fast-paced comic narrative. His protagonist Robin Verghese is magnificently clueless about what’s really happening around him.
(Photos 2 and 10 courtesy Aahana Kumra. More from Vagamon in the next post)
When Anup Kurian - director of the 2004 film Manasarovar and a longtime online acquaintance - invited me to watch some of the shooting of his second feature (tentatively titled "The Hunter") in Vagamon, Kerala, I was immediately interested. Nearly anyone who's watched a film being made will tell you that it's a tedious, banal process, one that quickly disabuses you of any delusions about the "glamour" of moviemaking. But as a longtime armchair film buff who’s never been close to a movie set before, I didn't want to pass up an opportunity like this, especially since “The Hunter” is very low-budget, and I wanted a firsthand sense of the challenges that go with making a film on limited resources.
The second attraction was that the lead role is being played by the peerless Naseeruddin Shah, a man whom I've long admired not just for his acting (and his dedication to acting as a craft that must continuously be honed, even when you're already acclaimed as one of the finest performers around) but also for the forthrightness and intelligence that always comes through in his interviews and writings. Anup's invitation seemed especially serendipitous in light of the fact that I had had a couple of phone chats with Naseer a few months ago (in connection with my book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro - another low-budget film made in very trying conditions 28 years ago!) but never got to meet him.
So off Abhilasha and I went to Vagamon, which is a very beautiful hill town located around 100 km from the Cochin airport. Our five days there were deeply satisfying, despite the fact that stretches of the shoot were expectedly slow (mainly the ones that took place in the middle of the day, under a fierce sun). Really, when you watch the filming and re-filming and re-re-filming (over several hours) of what will eventually be a 30-second scene, you wonder how a movie ever reaches its finished form.
A quick word about the film: it centres on a recluse known mostly as “Colonel”, living with his dog Kuttapan(!) in a forest retreat secured by high-tech surveillance equipment. Here he cultivates a potent variety of marijuana, an activity that makes him the object of unwanted attention (mainly from his unscrupulous buyers), and his life is further complicated when he is forced to play host to a young woman, Jaya, who is in mortal danger.
I'll be writing a feature about the visit at some point (it might take a while) but for now I’m putting up a few posts with photos and snippets. The film's release is at least 4-5 months away, but Anup has given me the go-ahead to publish the low-resolution photos I took with my own camera. Watch this space over the next few days.
Abhishek Chaubey’s (or should that be Vishal Bhardwaj’s?) Ishqiya is set in the dark heart of a Gorakhpur populated by gun-runners, small-time and big-time hoodlums, double-crossers and avenging angels. The film’s leading men Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) are crooks too, but they are fleeing a sadistic boss (some things stay constant across cultures and settings), and in this landscape they are practically innocents abroad – a bit like R2D2 and C3PO fumbling their way through the desert in Star Wars. Then Krishna (Vidya Balan), a widow with an enigmatic past, invites them into her house, but the lighting and framing makes her look like a spider at the entrance of her web, and this is no reassurance that Babban and Khalu are any safer than they were on the road. Is Krishna pari or tawaif, or a combination of both, or something much more lethal?
At any rate, things are equally dangerous inside and outside. This is a place where crime, betrayal and violent recrimination are taken for granted. Thakurs and Pandeys are determinedly assembling their little armies and gun-stacks to resolve feuds that have been raging for generations; minions must dig their own graves if they fall out of favour; when a businessman calls his wife to say he needs money, her first, almost matter-of-fact response is, “Kidnap ho gaye kya?” Everyone is debauched, and ostentatiously religious too (a man with a fondness for S&M meets his whip-wielding mistress in a room with a large Radha-Krishna poster on the wall). From a salty little exchange between Babban and a street-smart young boy, we gather that children in the region are taught how to use rifles before they are toilet trained; later, a hilarious scene gives us visual confirmation of this.
“Taught how to use rifles before they are toilet-trained”?! What sort of lame attempt is that to translate this film’s dialogue? (You’re spending too much time in Select Citywalk, Jabberwock.) Actually, it’s pointless, in a post written in English, to try to convey the rustic, bawdy vigour of Vishal Bhardwaj’s script; it has to be experienced firsthand, and as spoken by these actors. How to express the precise way, for example, in which Arshad Warsi (in a performance that’s every bit as good as his career-defining Circuit) says he has a bad case of acidity, pronouncing it so it sounds a bit like “STD”? Or his “May-ter [matter] kya hai?” when something seems to be wrong. Or the cheerful lewdness of his banter with the young boy whom he asks to show him the local red-light area. I admired the way Ishqiya throws us full-heartedly into this milieu, providing no safety nets for the big-city multiplex viewer who isn’t intimately familiar with the cadences of speech in rural Uttar Pradesh. (Bhardwaj’s Omkara did this too, but there the informed viewer at least had the bulwark of knowing that the film was based on the Othello template – which made the story and character arcs easier to follow. In this one, we're more adrift.)
Though I liked Ishqiya a good deal, I felt a sense of dissatisfaction at the end, a sense that I hadn’t spent enough time with the three principal characters; that I needed to know them better and see how their strange inter-relationships play out. And no, this doesn’t mean I wanted the film to be longer (two hours is a comfortable running time) – I just thought it became more convoluted than it needed to be, investing too much time and attention on side-characters who weren’t nearly as interesting as the three leads. The romantic-triangle-that-isn’t-quite-a-romantic-triangle between Babban, Krishna and Khalujaan is the most compelling thing about this film (along with the great score); everything around it is embellishment, or should have been.
I’m not a fan of most of Vidya Balan’s early work, but she’s made some sensible career choices in recent times, and she can be quite good when she isn’t darting her eyes about in that self-conscious, coquettish way. I remember thinking, when I drifted off while watching Eklavya (as described in this post), that she’d make a very convincing psychopath if given half a chance. Well, she doesn’t quite play a psycho in Ishqiya, but her potential for darkness is certainly tapped: Hindi cinema has waited many decades for a convincing portrait of the sari-clad small-town widow as femme fatale, and now at last we have one. There’s a stretch in the film when you can see that Krishna is cynically manipulating both men in line with their different personalities – tugging at Khalu’s heartstrings with one hand (he’s a middle-aged romantic who loves old Hindi songs and has soft-focus daydreams where he and Krishna are doing nothing more scandalous than getting married) and at the sex-starved Babban’s pyjama-strings with the other hand. We aren’t sure about her motives, and for once the trace of something manipulative behind the familiar Balan smile is completely appropriate to the role. Earlier, when she played goody-goody heroines, I was the only one – on or off the screen – who could see the menace lurking behind that smile, and it drove people around me crazy. Now I feel vindicated.
P.S. The shot of Babban and Khalu sitting glumly in a grave they’ve just dug for themselves reminded me of this publicity still from Manorama Six Feet Under – another fine rural noir.
[Was asked by Crest newspaper to do this piece about characters played by many different actors onscreen. Fairly assembly-line and hurried, as such write-ups tend to be, but fun to do – reminded me of the light cinema pieces I used to write for the Cafedilli website a decade ago. Only putting this up here because the blog is malnourished these days]
When Robert Downey Jr took off his shirt for an action scene in the new Sherlock Holmes, movie historians dashed to their research hubs: was this the first onscreen Holmes to get into a topless fight? We may never know the answer – the legendary detective has been portrayed so many times on film that keeping track of “firsts” is impossible. It’s best to stick with the subjective assessment that Downey Jr has the most impressive pectorals.
Fine actor though Downey Jr is, he isn’t the best Holmes; the competition is too stiff. Consider Christopher Plummer, nicely sardonic in Murder by Decree, which pitted the detective against no less a quarry than Jack the Ripper. Or Michael Caine, playing an actor hired by Dr Watson - who's the real star of the show - to impersonate Holmes in the genre-bending comedy Without a Clue. Jeremy Brett’s Holmes in the 1980s series was probably the most “authentic”, but that was television so I’ll only give it an honourable mention. My personal vote for best feature-film Holmes (and I haven't seen them all, I should add) goes to the urbane Basil Rathbone, who played the part in a very popular series of films in the 1940s. The profile, the cap, the voice... everything about Rathbone was exactly as readers of the original stories envisioned, even if the plots were sometimes updated to fit then-contemporary events.
Conan Doyle’s sleuth is one of many fictional characters that the movies never tire of; his closest competitor in the popularity stakes (pun unintended) is Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel. The Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi initiated the portrayal of the bloodthirsty Count as a darkly attractive figure, Christopher Lee sank his teeth even further into the part in the British Hammer films, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version had Gary Oldman playing a dashing combination of Dracula and Vlad the 
Impaler, with a bit of werewolf (!) thrown in. But the creepiest vampire portrayal ever is from the great silent film Nosferatu. With his lean physique, spidery fingers and rodent-like face, the German actor Max Schreck was perfectly suited to the part. His vampire was repulsive and otherworldly – so otherworldly, in fact, that it was possible for another film made decades later to play around with the premise that Schreck was a vampire in real life! Nosferatu gets extra points for being decidedly unsexy, unlike the vampires in popular culture today.
Dracula is famously undead, but Death has a long tradition of appearing in human form in movies, the most iconic representation being in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, about a medieval knight being shadowed by the Grim Reaper. Brad 
Pitt made a luscious Death in the overlong drama Meet Joe Black – the camera was clearly in love with this toy boy – but my favourite is the Grim Reaper parody in the goofy comedy Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. In Bergman’s film, the knight challenged Death to chess; in this one, Bill and Ted make him play Twister and electric football, and beat him like a drum. Cheating Death was never such fun.
It’s difficult to choose just one among the actors who played another death-cheater, James Bond, but we’ll do the purist thing and stick with Sean Connery. Timothy Dalton, George Lazenby (remember him?) and Daniel Craig were more laconic – arguably closer to the spirit of the Ian Fleming novels – but Connery’s roguish charm and litheness gave 007 a dimension that even Fleming hadn’t envisioned. Roger Moore comes a close second. Pierce Brosnan? Fine actor, but for anyone who watched Remington Steele for more than one season it’s impossible to associate him with another recurring character.
From the ultimate man of action to a tragic hero burdened by indecision: Shakespeare's Hamlet has long been a litmus test for actors, and its screen adaptations are innumerable. Laurence Olivier won the best actor Oscar for the atmospheric 1948 version, and Mel Gibson gave one of his better performances (which isn’t necessarily saying much) in Franco Zefferelli's 1990 film, but I have to go with Kenneth Branagh, whose sumptuous-looking four-hour version retained the entire text of the play, yet still managed to be gripping throughout. Branagh was a wonderfully energetic Hamlet; his recitation of some of the key soliloquies was so vivid that I can still hear the words in my head years after I last saw the film.
Among the Bard's heroines, Lady Macbeth has had a long and varied screen life. In Roman Polanski’s excellent 1971 Macbeth, the fragile-looking Francesca Annis performed her hand-washing soliloquy in the nude, whimpering as she is supervised by nurses. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool gave us a fine desi Lady Macbeth, Nimmi, all the more effective because we never thought the ethereal Tabu could be a manipulative vixen. But the best Lady Macbeth by a country mile was in Akira Kurosawa’s classic Throne of Blood. Isuzu Yamada’s chilling performance as Asaji isn’t rooted in psychological realism – the film is based on the Noh theatrical form, and Yamada’s face is made up to resemble an impassive mask – but when she’s on screen it’s impossible to take your eyes off her.
One character it’s surprisingly easy to take your eyes off is Indian cinema’s favourite tragic hero, Devdas. Here’s a role that can make a lazy performance look good: produce a distant, glaze-eyed expression, slur a little and you’ll be admired for “understated acting”. This is what most actors from K L Saigal to Abhay Deol have done over the decades, so why not judge the role by its very limited requirements and hand the trophy to that master of self-conscious “understatement”, Dilip Kumar, who played Devdas in Bimal Roy’s 1953 movie? (Yes, this IS a back-handed compliment.)
Of course, recurring characters don’t have to be fictional. Historical figures can be very popular too, and the more colourful the better: take England’s Henry VIII, famous for dispatching wives and ministers to the royal chopping block. The mercurial monarch has been played by some fine actors, including Richard Burton (Anne of the Thousand Days), Robert Shaw (A Man for All Seasons) and, most recently, Eric Bana (The Other Boleyn Girl), who took the modern, interior approach and avoided being influenced by stereotypes. These are all fleshed-out 
performances, but ironically the best screen Henry of them all was a deliberate caricature of the king as a gluttonous buffoon. The 1933 British film The Private Life of Henry VIII makes no pretence at being historically accurate, it just has a grand old time depicting Henry’s boudoir shenanigans, and the great Charles Laughton (who, incidentally, also gave the definitive screen performance of other popular characters such as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame) chews up the scenery magnificently, in an Oscar-winning role.
In fact, so iconic was Laughton’s performance that it ended up defining Henry for generations of viewers. Which returns us to Downey Jr and a troubling question: will future generations think of Sherlock Holmes as that dude with the rippling muscles?
Quick notes on some books I've read recently: I’m doing full-length reviews of a couple of them but will only be able to post those once they’re out in print.
- H M Naqvi’s Home Boy is a very energetic debut novel about three Pakistani men in New York coming to terms with a changed, post-9/11 world – a world where “everybody is busy parceling myths and prejudice as analysis and reportage, and everyone has become an expert on different varieties of turbans”. I thought it was similar in some ways to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (which I wrote about here) but in form it reminded me equally of Gautam Malkani’s very ambitious Londonstani. The narrator, Shehzad (nicknamed Chuck), and his “metrostani” friends Ali Chaudhry (AC) and Jamshed Khan (Jimbo) exude “coolth” and speak a language that mixes gangsta-rap with Punjabi slang, but underlying their hipness is cultural unease, and Naqvi brings this out really well. Lots of droll humour too.
(Longer review coming soon)
- Tranquebar has a very good-looking “short fiction” series out – novellas between 100-150 pages in length – and Kalpish Ratna’s The Nalanda Chronicles is the perfect book for this format: richly comic, written with surgical precision and hardly an extraneous sentence. (As it happens Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, who jointly write under the “Kalpish Ratna” pseudonym, are surgeons. I can’t work out how they manage to be such prolific writers too.) There are many sharp character sketches here, including Mr Thomas the wisdom-dispenser; Maya and Arun, who “belong to a generation that is powerless to be anything but polite in public” and who must therefore content themselves with seething quietly rather than quarrelling openly; Farheen, whose long, white and solid legs set her apart from “the dowdy company of shins squamous or hispid, lurking within saris or salwars”; and Francis Figueredo, a spy who worries a great deal. These people and others are members of the Nalanda housing society and they travel to Nariman Point in a red-and-cream minibus, which, as the story move into fourth gear, is hijacked. Much chaos ensues.
(Also in this series: Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s fine translation of Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s Urdu novella “Numberdaar ka Neela”. More on that later.)
- The Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein is something of an anomaly in a world where every major fiction writer is expected to produce at least one mammoth novel (or “baggy monster”, as Amit Chaudhuri once called it). Hussein is more the miniaturist, specialising in short stories and delicate narratives. His new book, Another Gulmohar Tree, runs a mere 150 pages, and in the first 40 of those it’s common to find only a few sentences on a page (this is a standalone section containing fragments of fables, the purpose of which we learn later in the book). But less is more in this case. At the heart of Another Gulmohar Tree is the unlikely romance – culminating in marriage – between a Pakistani man named Usman and an Englishwoman named Lydia. This is a moving, elegantly told story about the trajectory of a relationship and how people come to find meaning and personal fulfillment in their lives.
- I liked the first 50 or so pages of Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night, but slowly the book wore me down. I thought it struggled to find the right balance between being an investigative thriller and a commentary on one of the ugliest aspects of Indian society: female infanticide and the treatment of girl children in small-town India. Desai, who has worked as a journalist for many years, examines the nexus between wealthy families and policemen who cover up their crimes, gives us statistics and no-holds-barred descriptions of how baby girls are killed (or otherwise treated, if they happen to survive infancy), but this is sometimes too heavy-handed for the thriller format; it reminded me of the weaker stretches of Stieg Larsson's Millennium books, where the real-world information weighed down the narrative. However, Witness the Night has a winning protagonist – a 45-year-old social worker named Simran Singh – and Desai intends to do a series of books featuring her, which is worth looking forward to.
And with that, I’m off to Kerala for a week – a work-related trip but hopefully with spots of fun. Back on the 8th.
(Continued from here)
One thing I’d really like to see in 2010 is a big improvement in our film-related literature. What’s badly needed in this field is writing that’s accessible yet intelligent, personal yet written with some rigour and background knowledge.
Most of our movie writing tends to fall into either of two extremes. On the one hand there are heavily academic, almost willfully abstruse books, guaranteed to chase off even the most engaged reader; on the other hand, booklets that are hurriedly written and published to capitalise on something that’s in the news. The result: shoddy writing, indifferent editing and abysmal fact-checking – all by-products of the need to quickly throw books together for a mass readership.
The lack of basic discipline can be embarrassing. Take a biography of Shyam Benegal, one of the key figures in the “New Wave” of Indian cinema in the 1970s. It looks well-produced enough from the outside, but open it and you discover an episodic work that doesn’t even pretend at narrative coherence. Inserted randomly into a section about Benegal’s early life is an autonomous mini-chapter comprising laudatory quotes (presented in ugly, visually jarring italics) from various people about the director. A recent book about Om Puri – an actor who deserves to be the subject of more than one well-written biography – similarly throws information haphazardly at the reader. Typos proliferate: the contents page even manages to spell Ardh Satya, a seminal Indian film and one of the most important in the actor’s career, as Ardh Staya. (More about this sort of thing in an old post about Mihir Bose’s Bollywood: A History.)
I suppose one shouldn’t really be surprised, given the attitude to movie reviewing in the country – starting with the minuscule space available for film reviews in our mainstream media. Given just 300 words to work with, even the most skilled writer can’t do more than make a cursory evaluation and give “marks” to each of the major elements of the film: acting, direction, music, script. At any rate, it’s assumed that the star rating is what the “casual reader” is really interested in; who has the time or attention span to read even a 300-word piece?
Which brings me to a troubling question: is this a case of a society getting the film literature it deserves? I’m tempted to answer yes when I overhear people (including people in my own house) animatedly discussing movie reviews in the most superficial terms. (If their assessment of a film conflicts with the reviewer’s, the only possible explanation is that he was “paid off” – either by the producer of the film or by the “rival camp”. And why do these writers deal in such big words and long sentences and complicated thoughts, they ask, if they chance to encounter a reviewer who really knows how to use the language and articulate complex ideas. Why can't they simply tell us if the film is Good or Bad?)
But I like to think the general situation can improve, if publishers provide the right support. (That’s a big, big “if”.) A start of sorts has been made. HarperCollins is currently doing a series of monographs on iconic Indian films, and the involvement of such writers as Anuvab Pal (he’s doing the book on Disco Dancer, which I’m really looking forward to), Meghnad Desai (Pakeezah) and Vinay Lal (Deewaar) is good news. (Full disclosure: I’ve recently finished my own contribution to the series, though I have no idea when it will see the light of day.)
Blogging will be sparse in the next three weeks because of the travelling (and don’t expect any live updates from the Jaipur festival either), so here are a couple of “tidbit” posts.
First, a few books I look forward to in the next three or four months:
- It’s always nice when you can claim an association with a forthcoming book. In this post about a lunch interview with Amitava Kumar, I mentioned Amitava asking me to stop the car so he could take photographs of some “wanted” posters. “I’m becoming very interested in the language used to describe terrorists, and how we are expected to recognise them,” he said at the time, “people who conduct terrorist attacks don’t usually look like stereotypes.” Well, this interest has spawned Evidence of Suspicion, which examines the hidden impact of the war on terror on our lives through interviews with S A R Gilani, Hemant Lakhani and others who have been caught in the eye of the storm. Amitava is one of our most methodical non-fiction writers, and I think he’ll have some insightful things to say about this incendiary – and very relevant – topic.
- One of the great "sleeper hits" in recent Indian publishing was the delightful (and wonderfully well-produced) Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. The sequel is being published this year and will include a horror story by a Singaporean Tamil writer (you read that right) and a vintage Karate Kavitha adventure comic, among many other goodies. It's one of the books I'll be looking forward to most. Blaft will also continue its English translations (by Sudarshan Purohit) of novels by the enormously popular Hindi crime fiction writer, Surendra Mohan Pathak.
- While on crime writers in translation, the revered Urdu crime writer Ibn-e Safi – author of the popular “Jasoosi Duniya” and Detective Imran series – is also set to be introduced to English readers. Random House India is publishing two books, The 
House of Fear and Shootout at the Rocks, and Blaft has a series of four Jasoosi Duniya novellas planned. Agatha Christie’s endorsement “I don’t know Urdu but I know about detective novels in the subcontinent and there is only one original writer – Ibn-e Safi” will no doubt be widely used in publicity material. The quote doesn’t have to be taken very seriously – why would Christie know how many "original" crime writers there were in the Urdu-speaking world if she wasn’t familiar with the language? – but these books should be a lot of fun nonetheless.
- The reticent Siddharth Chowdhury (who wrote the excellent Patna Roughcut) returns after a hiatus with Day Scholar, a novel about a young boy from Bihar who joins Delhi University in the early 1990s, as the Mandal Commission and Ram Mandir sagas start to unfold.
- And two of India’s funniest and most popular bloggers, Arnab Ray and Sidin Vadukut, have first books out. Vadukut’s Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese is about a loser who makes it to the top of the corporate ladder, while Ray’s May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss, described as a sarcastic look at Indian popular culture, will supply a “read and weep” strategy for handling terror attacks, discuss what goes into the making of successful TV serials, and attempt a deconstruction of “the NRI who loves his country by staying outside it”. If you don’t already know Vadukut and Ray’s online writings, it’s a good time to get acquainted.
(To be continued)
So here's the usual annual reminder about the Jaipur Literature Festival; it's on from the 21st to the 25th of this month and the list of attending writers is very impressive, as you'd expect. The day-by-day schedule is on the website, but do keep checking because there will undoubtedly be some changes in the next few days.
I spent four delightful days at the festival last year but this time my visit will be more rushed - I'll only be there for a day and a half, because I have some more work-related travelling to do at the end of the month (and need some time to prepare for it). However, I will be moderating a conversation with the Irish writer Roddy Doyle (author of the Barrytown Trilogy, the Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and my favourite among the books of his I've read so far, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors) on the 24th. That should be fun. In my short time there I also hope to meet the filmmaker Stephen Frears, who directed the screen adaptations of two Doyle novels, The Van and The Snapper (as well as many other fine films such as Prick up Your Ears, Dangerous Liaisons and Dirty Pretty Things; he was also assistant director on Lindsay Anderson's great 1968 film If..., which is a personal favourite).
Too lazy to link to individual posts now, but see my January archives for 2009, 2007 and 2006 for reportage from earlier editions of the lit fest.
One of the iconic images from the Japanese horror film Ringu (and its American remake The Ring) is a view from the bottom of a deep, dark well: a circular patch of sky occupying the centre of the frame, the rest of the screen dark. When the mouth of the well is covered with a makeshift lid, the image becomes the sinister glowing “ring” of the film’s title.
I’m not sure about this, but the patch-of-sky view could be inspired by a similar shot in Kaneto Shindo’s creepy 1964 film Onibaba (The Devil Woman), which I watched on one of those fabulous Criterion Collection DVDs a while ago. The shot comes very early in the film. The first scene is an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds – more than six feet high – swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside the hole, looking up. Then the film’s opening credits begin, accompanied by a strident, percussive music score.
The pit's existence is known only to a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (this is medieval Japan and the son/husband is away fighting in an army), the two women murder wounded Samurai who stagger into the grass looking for shelter, dump the bodies in the hole, and then trade the armour for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile they also get by with killing rats, dogs and whatever other creatures they can get their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.
Things change when a neighbour, a man named Hachi, starts making advances on the daughter-in-law. Their clandestine relationship terrifies the older woman, who fears being left to fend for herself. She tries to dissuade them by talking about hellfire and divine punishment for carnal sins, but to no avail. Then she gets her hands on a demon mask and an idea presents itself.
Onibaba isn’t a scary film in the usual sense – there isn’t a single jump-out-of-your seat moment. But it’s a very disturbing one, creating atmosphere through hand-held camerawork, eerie aural effects (including bird sounds in the scenes where the young woman, her face rapturous, races through the grass to meet her lover), and of course the unusual setting itself. The stark black-and-white photography creates a very vivid, particular world. (The colour footage of the film’s shooting in the DVD Extras felt all wrong to me; it was difficult to imagine that this movie was actually made by a crew – some of them dressed in T-shirts! – who set up camp near the marsh.)
On the face of it, the deep hole, into which the bodies of the murdered men are thrown, seems like an obvious sexual symbol – implying the woman as predator. But the two protagonists aren’t evil or insane. They are doing what they need to do to survive. The grassland – and the little hut in its centre – is their home, and outside its borders great battles are taking place: kings are trying to usurp each others’ territories, men are dying by the thousands, villages are being pillaged and burned to the ground, once-proud warriors are fleeing in fear. (Though the story is set in roughly the same period as Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, there is no place here for the codes of honour that were central to that film; chaos and degradation rule.) There are rumours that a black sun rose on a nearby land a few days earlier. In a world gone so rotten, what’s so wrong with hastening the deaths of a few men who are doomed anyway?
Despite the film’s title, there are no “devil women” here, only human beings – a point underlined by the unforgettable final scene, a series of jump-cuts punctuated by a cry of anguish (I can’t reveal more, you have to watch the film for the spine-chilling context). More than anything else, the scene leaves you with a sense of sadness for wasted lives; for people struggling to get by in the face of hunger and loneliness.
“Take off your mask,” whispers the old woman to a Samurai who has just told her that he has a beautiful face underneath the mask he is wearing, “I’ve never seen anything really beautiful.” The words open a window to a lifetime of deprivation, but they don’t prevent us from seeing that the mask is terrifyingly beautiful itself. It’s also just as impassive as the grassland where this human drama plays out.
[Other recently bought Criterion DVDs of old Japanese films: Misaki Kobayashi’s gorgeous Kwaidan, and Kon Ichikawa’s Nobi/Fires on the Plain. Will write about them if I get the time]
P.S. An old post on Koji Suzuki’s Ring series
The most entertaining put-down I’ve read recently was a long blog comment directed at all those annoying people who ask movie reviewers the question, “Why can't you just enjoy the movie for what it is? Why do you have to analyse it?” Do read the full comment on Aishwarya’s blog.
The “don’t analyse, just enjoy” line is very familiar; I hear it whenever I try to discuss a hugely popular film using any sentences more complicated than “This movie rocks from beginning to end!” Take Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, a film I enjoyed a lot on the whole. It’s full of some really good bits and the first half in particular was outstanding. But watching the second half, I couldn’t help wondering why so many good Hindi films take the trouble to establish a nuanced thought process and then simply cop out of it at crucial times. Why does it feel like five different writers were sitting in a room, each trying to tug the film in a different direction?
For an example of what I’m talking about, consider a superb 20-minute stretch close to the film’s midway point: the scene where the three heroes (fun-loving students at an engineering college) make a public spectacle of their colleague Chatura, a teacher’s pet who learns everything by rote. The sequence begins by placing us, the viewer, in a position of identification with the three leads. When one of them plays a phone gag on Chatura while another switches around the words in a Hindi speech he has to recite (“balatkaar” for “chamatkaar”, etc), we approve of the prank; after all, Chatura is such a smug little toady. We then laugh our heads off at him as he makes the unintentionally ribald speech (it’s one of the great paisa-vasool/taali-maar scenes you’ll ever see). But then – in the scene that follows – the film briefly turns the tables on us by allowing us to see his anger and humiliation; to see him as a victim of a flawed educational system.
Taken together, the whole 20-minute section is a brilliantly sustained sequence of moral complexity – one of the best I've seen in a mainstream Hindi movie. It builds up in such a way that when Chatura denounces the “three idiots” on the rooftop, he's also denouncing us in a sense. (At any rate, anyone who has been through the formal-education grind in India - and done even moderately well in school or college - should find it very difficult to take any sort of higher moral ground against Chatura. To varying degrees, we've all done what he does.) But this train of thought is never really followed through. Instead, the film makes the predictable, feel-good, mass-audience-pleasing decision to let Chatura remain a buffoon and a comic foil, as if he were personally the villain of the piece instead of a tiny cog in a giant broken wheel.
This also leads to a disconnect between the film's (over)stated “message” and what actually happens at the end (something I felt was a problem in Taare Zameen Par as well). 3 Idiots spends over two-and-a-half hours preaching about how personal satisfaction and following your dreams are more important than “success” as society defines it (status, bank balance, size of car, etc). But in the last 10 minutes it can’t resist giving the audience the very superficial thrill of seeing that the Aamir character has ended up in a position where he can make the pompous Chatura grovel. (And besides, isn't his Ladakh lake bigger than the rich NRI’s indoor swimming pool?)
There are a few other examples of loose writing. Like the Javed Jaffrey sub-plot, thrown in only because they couldn't find another way to justify the Aamir character cutting himself off from everyone after college. And the lazy handling of the "10 years after" scenario, with Kareena improbably on the verge of getting married to the same moron she was engaged to a decade earlier (you get the impression the writers stuck with the fellow only because he was such a soft target for humour).
When I spoke to a friend about these little short-cuts, he said, “Well, yes, but we expect our Hindi films to be wishy-washy about these little things, right?” I know what he meant, but I’m starting to wish that our default expectation mode about basic internal consistency in our movies didn't always have to be set low – especially when the film is so good in many other ways, as 3 Idiots undoubtedly is.
P.S. Another gripe I have with the "don't be so analytical" complaint is that most people use it in a manipulative, selective way. The thought process goes something like this: "Whoa, you didn't love the film I loved?! *Hmm, rationalise, rationalise* That can only mean you're over-analytical/you think too much." It's the same thing as people telling you to be "objective" about a movie when what they really mean is "Agree with my [subjective] view of it."
P.P.S. Some related thoughts on analysing and enjoying in this old post about Om Shanti Om.
It wasn’t a conscious decision at the start. I just wrote a book (The Commitments), finished it, and started a new one. As I finished one book, I’d be thinking about the next, and, I suppose, by the end of the third I was consciously deciding to stretch myself. I wrote Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in the first person because I’d never done that before and thought it would be interesting to try it. I found that I enjoyed the first-person voice, so I did it again with the next book, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors – but with a very different type of narrator. I try not to repeat myself.
With Paula Spencer, the cadence came easily; the narrator, Paula, is about the same age as me, from the same part of the world etc. Other aspects of the book were foreign to me – the gender, the violence, the poverty, the dependency on alcohol. These slowed me down; I had to work hard to fashion the sentences that would bring her life to paper.
I often wonder, if I’d known how much research I’d have to do to write the three novels of The Last Roundup, would I have started? Probably – but I think I’d have drawn a deeper breath before starting. Luckily, I love reading! The first book is set in Dublin in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly in the slums. Some of those slums were still standing, still frightening, when I was a child. Being middle aged has its advantages! The final book, The Dead Republic, brings the narrator, Henry Smart, back to Ireland, from the USA, in 1951. He tries to settle into a quiet life but becomes involved with the IRA – not recommended if you crave the quiet life!
