Mix and match: Tumbbad, meet The Terror

[Did a version of this piece about a lush new film and a haunting TV series – both of which are about greed, hubris and overvaulting ambition – for my Mint Lounge column]
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One of my pet fetishes as a movie buff is looking for little connections – tenuous, whimsical ones or clear and resonant ones – between films that might be very different on the surface. This might be sparked by a minor detail, such as a similarity in names, which then leads to a deeper engagement and, perhaps, an identifying of thematic and visual links.

A recent example: Tumbbad and the Tuunbaq.

On first hearing about Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad, and learning that it was (in part) a horror film, my thoughts went back to the excellent limited series The Terror, released in eight episodes early this year (and available on Amazon Prime). Based on Dan Simmons’s bestselling historical novel, this show is about an 1840s Arctic expedition beset by a monster called the Tuunbaq.

A phonetic connection between two unusual words, then, and a shared genre: nothing more at this point. But on watching Tumbbad, I found that it shares a visual and aural lushness with The Terror, making for a very distinctive experience. Both works are spooky, majestic and affecting at the same time. And in each, these qualities come from the set design, the use of music, and the evocation of a place that is like a breathing thing, slowly corroding the thoughts and actions of the people in it.

In The Terror, that place is the vast Arctic where two Royal Navy ships are stuck in the ice in the middle of nowhere, with 120-odd men left to fend for themselves; as if this weren’t enough, they are stalked by a huge, bear-like creature that may be a manifestation of an ancient demon from Esquimaux lore. In Tumbbad, the setting is the Maharashtrian village that gives the film its title, and which – as the story opens in 1918 and continues through the next three decades – is the last abode of a long-forgotten deity-demon. Within this village, the film will later show us another, confined space, but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself.

Here are two period works that draw on invented mythologies – one Indian, the other Inuit – and pit our hubris against the detached implacability of nature. Tumbbad and The Terror are, in different ways, about human hunger and covetousness: the need to push ever further, the need for instant gratification, altering the cosmic balance in the process. And in both, the characters face a hideous, misshapen comeuppance.

Tumbbad opens with a Gandhi quote about the world having enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed, and then tells us a story about a goddess who gave birth to all of creation, while also mothering an insatiable child called Hastar. One reading of such a story could be that our species is the child that can never have enough. And perhaps this is why there is something so unsettling about the most explicitly “horror-film-like” sections of Tumbbad, which are set, literally and metaphorically, inside a womb.

A very specific story plays out here: the protagonist Vinayak (Sohum Shah) travels into the belly of the beast, knowing he might come away with priceless riches, or be destroyed in the attempt. Or that both things might happen at the same time – he might realize his dreams while relinquishing his soul. But at a broader level, if you accept this film’s conceit that the womb contains the universe, what we see isn’t just the story of one man or one family: it is the stuff of life itself, with Vinayak a representation of a species always trying to find that eternal balance between self-interest and restraint. And it is telling that the film ends in 1947, the year of India's independence, with a character achieving another sort of freedom.

The Gandhi quote is applicable in another sense to The Terror, which, apart from being a horror story about a group of explorers, is also a commentary on British colonialization, its devastation and exploitation of the more pristine parts of our planet. I was reminded of the show again last week when I read about the recent report by the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change, presenting the possibility that our planet might reach a point of no return as early as 2040 – and the likelihood that we won’t be able to do enough about it, so firmly complicit are our political and corporate systems.

Each film also has an eerie, otherworldly music score, one that doesn’t feel manmade but seems to flow from the deepest recesses of nature (more than once I thought of the Ray Bradbury story “The Fog Horn”, where a lonely monster living in the ocean’s depths falls in love with a lighthouse siren, thinking it is the sound of a long-lost mate). In The Terror, the music heightens the sense of agoraphobia created by the boundless Arctic; in Tumbbad, it creates the opposite sensation, claustrophobia, evocative of distant heartbeats in caverns deep beneath the earth.

Through the plaintive soundtrack, both places seem to cry out: don’t ravage us, take only what you need. But can humans ever heed such entreaties? We are a contradictory lot, and our worst qualities are inseparable from our better ones. We plunder and destroy in the name of advancement, but in so doing we also create things – like art, or cinema – that give us a channel for reflection and self-criticism. And then we go back to being our narcissistic selves. 
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[An earlier mix-and-match piece here, about Madhumati and Vertigo. And a short piece about The Terror is here; but if you watch the show, do read these wonderfully detailed episode-by-episode reviews on the AV Club]

Naked invisible men I have known: Mr India and his forebears

(My latest Mint Lounge column, on how old Hindi cinema dealt with the invisibility theme in its own special way)
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Many people of my generation who grew up watching Hindi films in the mid-80s will remember their well-worn Mr India videocassettes: there was so much repeat value in this fantasy-romance about a compassionate underdog who acquires the gift of invisibility just as evil forces are bearing down on him. Those of us who knew HG Wells’s The Invisible Man felt an added frisson of excitement that a popular Hindi movie –close to home, with stars and songs – could draw on a classic sci-fi book, even while working with the vigilante-hero format.

Watching the film multiple times, a scene that always had me leaning forward in anticipation was the one where the genial Professor Sinha (Ashok Kumar) snaps at a student who asks him about invisibility. This is it, I would tell myself as the scene began and Sinha droned on about how today’s technology would have seemed like magic to people living centuries ago; this was where the film’s main plot device came into focus, and one felt vaguely pleased that it was endorsed by that most daunting of subjects, Science.

Little did I know that Ashok Kumar himself, thirty years earlier, had played the lead in what is widely considered India’s first film involving invisibility: the 1957 Mr X, directed by Nanabhai Bhatt (Mahesh Bhatt’s father), which was spun into a minor franchise.

I haven’t seen the original Mr X, but I remember the 1964 spin-off Mr X in Bombay, in which Kumar’s younger brother Kishore got to perform both physical comedy and pathos within a pseudo-sci-fi plot. More recently, I saw the 1965 Aadhi Raat ke Baad (that’s a generic title – it could have been called Mr X in Rangoon, since it deals with an invisible man’s adventures in that city), which also stars Ashok Kumar. This one gives us one of the most (unintentionally) harrowing filmic introductions to an invisible hero: pouring liquids into test tubes with only his white gloves visible, he slowly comes into view as a twang of star-heralding music plays on the soundtrack. And he is shirtless! With a coy expression, he turns sideways and puts on a white gown.

Now, I’m an Ashok Kumar fan on many levels, but not so much at the level of chest hair and man-boobs; on the physical-attractiveness gauge, I defer to Mukul Kesavan’s observation that mid-career Dada Moni resembled a cupboard wearing a dressing gown.

But once I had survived this scene and started to relish Aadhi Raat ke Baad’s corniness and tonal shifts, I found myself thinking about the main function of the invisible hero in our films. Internationally, such characters have done many things in cinema and literature, from crime-fighting to crime-committing to being martyrs in the interests of science to, well, just being smutty: the title character in the 1988 The Invisible Kid directs his energies to sneaking into girls’ locker rooms; Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man isn’t a paragon of virtue either when it comes to such matters; and in the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore successfully recasts Griffin (the protagonist of Wells’s story) into a sex-starved psychopath.

But since our mainstream films moved blithely from one register to another, Aadhi Raat ke Baad isn’t required to pick a motif and stick with it. It combines suspense, sci-fi, B-movie noir and goofy slapstick – the last involving the fine comedian Agha, who gets his invisible friend to perform “magic” for him by moving ashtrays around. This leads to an unexpectedly sweet and poetic scene where Agha sings to a roomful of young women – some of them dancing and playing musical instruments – while a lone saxophone (held by our unseen hero) sways plaintively in the middle of the room. A quasi-horror moment follows, with the excellent line “Abbay yaar, yeh bhi koi tareeka hai aane ka? Bagair sar ke koi aata hai kya?” (“Is this any way to show up? Who comes without a head?”)

It must be remembered that the above sequence is an interlude in a story where the hero is preoccupied with serious and urgent things – clearing his own name of a murder charge, finding the real killers as well as his own kidnapped girlfriend. But there is still time for some tomfoolery along the way.

Tomfoolery is also central to the 1971 Elaan, arguably the most entertaining invisible-man film I have seen (with apologies to Mr India, which will always occupy a special place in my shrine). Elaan has too many eye-popping things to mention here, but consider just this: Vinod Mehra must take off his shirt, pop a ring in his mouth, then remove his trousers – in precisely that order –  before he can become fully invisible. And if someone so much as throws a cloth on him, he becomes visible again.

This, it can be argued, makes Elaan as much about the revitalizing power of nudity as about anything else. Whatever you make of the film’s main plot, you’ll never forget the sideshow antics involving the complicated obtaining and discarding of clothes. Ah, to be riding naked on the leather seat of a motorcycle, with best buddy Rajendra Nath cracking cheesy jokes as he sits behind you clutching your bare (but thankfully invisible) midsection. HG Wells may never have imagined such a thing, but we pulled it off.

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[A more elaborate piece about that eye-popping classic Elaan is here]

The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, now in Marathi

Some welcome news. The Marathi translation of my book The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee is now ready. Sharing the final cover and the poster below. (Cool to see that both "Bemisal" and "Khubsoorat" have been incorporated into the book's title.) 

Thanks again to Manasi Holehonnur, who worked so hard and so enthusiastically on the translation — and to Mugdha Kopardekar and Indrayani Sahitya, who took the project on. I hope the book reaches many more film enthusiasts this way. Please do spread the word about this to any Marathi readers who are interested in cinema.

Manto, movie buffs, time machines

[My latest “moments” column for The Hindu is about watching the cinematic past come alive in Manto]
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There are so many good and honourable things in Nandita Das’s Manto – which intersperses vignettes from Saadat Hasan Manto’s life with scenes from his short stories – that I feel a little sheepish mentioning the moments which aren’t central to the film but which sent me into a pleasant reverie.

One was the early scene, set in the mid-1940s, where the writers Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Krishan Chander sit at a table with Manto, bantering away and no doubt thinking about the challenges and repercussions of India’s impending independence. Watching this was to be reminded that Bedi had scripted Satyakam, which has a scene set in 1946 where a group of idealistic youngsters discuss how things will change forever once the British leave.

The other was the scene at the film-industry party where Manto mingles with such personalities as the singer Jaddanbai (played by Ila Arun), her teenage daughter Nargis – headed for movie stardom – and one of Hindi cinema’s first major male stars, Ashok Kumar.

For anyone who knows the young Kumar – through films of the 1930s or 40s, or through the writings of Manto, Nabendu Ghosh and other contemporaries – an essence of the man was recognizable in Bhanu Uday’s performance even though there was no recourse to caricature. Tapping a glass to make an announcement, then swaying unselfconsciously as Jaddanbai sings, here is the star who was steeped in a tradition of Indian classical music but also slipped easily into an urbane, westernized avatar, becoming a producer, mentor and an anchoring figure in the Hindi-film industry.

I liked that Das didn’t underline things too much in these scenes. Discussing the film at a class a few days after watching it, I had the sly pleasure of seeing looks of astonishment spread over the students’ faces when told that the woman who sang in that party scene was the grandmother of Sanju baba – Sanjay Dutt – and that the beaming, smooth-complexioned girl next to her… that was Dutt’s mummy, of whom they had seen a more fully fleshed out version in Rajkumar Hirani’s Sanju.

(If the students had been closer to my age, I might have mentioned that the “Ashok Kumar” shown amidst star-struck crowds was the peak-career version of the well-loved Dada Moni who introduced Hum Log and played small avuncular parts in films like Mr India. But oh, well.)

I can’t say if these scenes and performances would have worked if this had been a full-fledged biopic about the Hindi film industry, but they worked just fine as a snapshot of an era and its people. They reminded me of scenes from Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, such as the depiction of an episode I had first read about in a film book: Howard Hughes flies down from the clouds, lands on a beach where the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett is being shot, and saunters across for his first meeting with Katharine Hepburn. While Hughes and Hepburn (played by Leonardo Dicaprio and Cate Blanchett) are central to the film, this scene also has a split-second shot that only a bona-fide lover of old Hollywood would register: we see Cary Grant and director George Cukor looking with bemusement at the aviator.

Not long after this comes a rambunctious party scene where Errol Flynn (played by Jude Law) turns on the charm, swaggers about and gets into a brawl – all within a minute or two! Though sensing that this scene was a bit of affectionate myth-indulging by Scorsese (who is a huge movie buff and historian), I also gave in to the spell: this is how it might have been like in those days, I thought.

And it made me yearn for the gift of time travel. Having recently read Trisha Das’s novel Kama’s Last Sutra, in which a young archeologist is sent back to the 11th century, I could relate to the character’s awe at participating in the history she had read about – much the same way I could relate to the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, rubbing shoulders with Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein in a Paris of a bygone time.

For someone obsessed with cinema’s past, the nearest thing to a time machine would be a good, well-scripted film – or a long-form series! – about pivotal moments from our film history. International shows like Feud – about the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford rivalry – have managed to be seriously researched while also pleasing star-struck fans of the era in question, and there’s no reason why something along those lines can’t be done for Indian cinema.

Personally, I would love a filmic depiction of V Shantaram’s early years, and the setting up of the Prabhat Film Company. From there, we can move slowly – very slowly – into the 1930s, and then let our time machine determine its own course. Any takers?

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[An earlier, related nostalgia post is here. Other Hindu columns are here]

On a new anthology of “electrifying Bengali pulp fiction”

[Did this short review for India Today magazine]
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For readers like yours truly, conditioned to think of Bengali culture as dauntingly highbrow, the idea of Bangla pulp can be hard to digest, much like the realization – late in one's movie-watching career – that veteran actors like Soumitra Chatterjee didn’t feature only in Satyajit Ray’s polished cinema but also in dozens of shoddily made potboilers.

Of course, the jury will always be out on what “pulp” truly is. The new collection The Moving Shadow: Electrifying Bengali Pulp Fiction includes a sinister, gripping Ray story – “Bhuto”, about rival ventriloquists – though it’s debatable whether anything Ray wrote can be labeled pulp in the disreputable sense of that word. But as Arunava Sinha, whose prolific career as a translator-curator has given non-Bengali readers much to cherish, puts it in his Introduction, most Bengali writers considered themselves all-rounders and attempted “a more genteel version of pulp fiction […] more in the genre of noir as a literary form, an excuse to tell a literary story without being bound by the plausible”.

Sinha divides the book’s eight stories into two sections: “Crime stories”, which includes the three longest pieces, and the much slimmer “Horror stories”. My favourites include the title tale by Swapan Kumar – in which a mysterious figure known as the Moving Shadow conducts strange, illegal acts, while claiming to be working for the public good – as well as Gobindolal Bandyopadhyay’s creepy interior monologue “Saradindu and This Body”, and Muhammed Zafar Iqbal’s weird “Copotronic Love”, in which a robot named Prometheus becomes both refined and lovelorn.

An allegation often directed at Indian genre writers (and story-writers for popular cinema) is that of derivativeness, or outright plagiarism. The central mystery in Premendra Mitra’s “Parashar Barma Makes a Bid” (I won’t give details but it involves a dream about a suicide) is taken directly from an Agatha Christie short story called "The Dream". At the same time, the Mitra story has a more elaborate storyline and makes some entertaining detours before even arriving at this mystery.

Similarly intricate is Vikramaditya’s novella-length “The Secret Agent”, which at first seems like the archetype of the seedy pulp narrative: rambling and convoluted, with dashing men and love-starved women buzzing around two high-society Delhi clubs, caught up in espionage and extra-marital affairs. But the resolution reveals the story – and its heavy-drinking protagonist Maqbool – to be sharper and more self-aware than one may have thought.

Perhaps because most of the crime anthologies I have read are very bulky, my main complaint is that this one got over too soon – it’s more a tasting menu than a full-fledged meal. But what is here is consistently entertaining, full of corny dialogue and wondrous sentences like “Don’t you know I dream of handsome men after lunch?” and (this one is more literal than you might realise) “The Moon has returned to Mother Earth”. And perhaps most befuddling, from a story no doubt set in a very distant age: “It was 9 pm. Most of Delhi was already asleep.”

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[Related post: on Blaft's Tamil pulp fiction anthologies]

“You can’t match the absurdist comedy going on around yourself” – Mohammed Hanif on Red Birds

[Did this interview with Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif – mainly about his new novel – for Scroll. Note: this interview was conducted on email, which isn’t the ideal way of discussing a book at length; there isn’t much scope for a free-flowing conversation or an unexpected detour created by one of the answers. But Hanif is always an engaging subject regardless]
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Introduction: Before we meet the vivid red birds on the cover – and in the title – of Mohammed Hanif’s new novel, we encounter other sorts of animals. There is Momo the lab rat, an ambitious 15-year-old in a refugee camp, who becomes a research tool for a woman trying to understand the Teenage Muslim Mind. There is the American soldier, Ellie, a sort of vulture (or angel, depending on your perspective) who falls from the sky when his plane crashes and he goes from being a predator to becoming part of what he was targeting. And there is Mutt the dog who really is a dog but also a bullied victim and a savant for our troubled times.

Red Birds is Hanif’s third novel, after A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, and like its predecessors it is marked by irreverent, absurdist humour and deep sadness – both things often coming together in the same paragraph. A sad woman is described as “making her afternoon tea and working her rosary with such passion, as if she was a teenage boy self-pleasuring”. The dog, electrocuted while peeing on a pole, screams and yelps like “a Mutt prophet who has just received his first prophecy and wants to return it to the sender”. Ellie discovers the gap between Desert Survival courses and real life, but doesn’t quite realise an important truth about his own state of being.

This book is about a madcap clash of civilizations but it is also about the importance of not forgetting, about lingering ghosts, and about the coexistence of the savage and the compassionate in human nature. As the pilot puts it, “If I didn’t destroy, who would rebuild? Where would all the world’s empathy go?”

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You don’t name the novel’s setting – we only know it’s a Muslim country that the Americans first bomb and then set up refugee camps in. What was the thinking behind this, given that your first two novels were set in a very identifiable Pakistan, and built around real-life incidents?

I think the process with this novel was completely different. I of course exaggerate when I use the word process, I didn’t really have an excel sheet or flow charts. It came to me in little revelations, with long periods of silence and mourning. My eyes were mostly blurred during this period. It could be that when I wrote the first two novels and a little book of non-fiction I was missing Pakistan too much. I think maybe I got over that lingering homesickness.

The setting is not that abstract, I think, it’s a refugee camp. We have been at war for about forty years now, with a few years’ break here and there. The refugee camps of my childhood are proper slums now, some are even proper towns and villages. And new refugee camps are still coming up. We keep forgetting about the ones that were set up last year. So I guess it’s that idea about our own rather smug, comfortable lives that are made possible by forgetting that we set up a camp last year.

You have three main narrators here, which then broaden into many more voices later in the book. Which of these voices, if any, is closest to your own?

All the voices are mine, or at least they are filtered through a certain madness going on in my head. They are all me and I am trying to hear all those voices and then somehow try and recreate them on the page. I think finding Momo’s voice was a struggle, but having found it, it took me back to a much younger self when you used to be able to jump from roof to roof on a sizzling July afternoon and forget where you left your slippers.

Have your own experiences as a pilot informed any of Ellie’s narrative?

No, not at all. Except for some half-forgotten bits about jungle and desert survival tips.

Mutt the dog is – overtly at least – the wisest of the narrators and thinks of himself as a philosopher, though it’s also possible his brain got fried in an accident. Is he a prophet, a philosopher, just raving mad – or are they all the same thing?

I think before anything else he is a Mutt, I kind of refuse to believe that dogs don’t have philosophical thoughts or don’t deal with ethical dilemmas. Most prophets were declared raving mad in their times (and in some cases posterity confirmed it). He is a wild dog who is trying to curb his wild side for love, which is a struggle we are all familiar with or should be.

Momo is probed by a researcher trying to understand the “teenage Muslim mind”, but his mind is full of things that she probably wouldn’t have guessed at. Do you feel there tends to be over-analysis of what young Muslims are thinking? Too much presuming and judging?

Of course there is. We do the same thing. I live in a place called Defence Phase 5 in Karachi and most of us constantly judge people who live in Phase 2 Extension. White people presume more because most of them see us as a blur of brown or black or yellow faces, and think we have a claim to some silly innocence. A long time ago when a Pakistani could roam the streets of Delhi, I asked a young man what did he know about Pakistanis. He said they sleep with their sisters. I was so flabbergasted that I couldn’t even tell him that no I have never slept with my sister, and don’t plan to and I don’t know anybody who does.

I told this to a journalist friend in Delhi and he said the young boy probably meant you guys sleep with your cousins. And I was like, maybe he has a point.

In one passage, there is the intriguing suggestion that the cyclical process of destruction and rebuilding is organic to human nature. Is it futile to expect the world to ever become a better, violence-free place?
I have a young child, so I have to hope that this world will become a violence-free place. But I also realize we parents inflict a lot of violence on this world in the hope that it will become a safer place for our children. I don’t know how that can work out.

Simplistic question: what do the red birds in this novel represent to you? This is another way of asking what the book’s principal theme is.

Missing someone who is gone. And hoping someone who has gone misses you as well.

In all your novels, a fantastical, exaggerated approach is employed to deal with real and pressing issues. Would you consider writing a completely straight, dramatic novel?

Trust me, I start every novel as a straight, dramatic novel. And then the first bit of drama happens and you know that your characters are not as straight as they appeared to be. The world is not as straight as it promised to be. Increasingly, you can’t match the absurdist comedy going on around yourself, I think people like me have to actually tone down stuff –  believe me, my books are much less violent and less absurdist than the life on my street. And I am not even talking about Trump, Modi, Netanyahoo, Bashar ul Asad. I am just talking about my own neighborhood.

Does absurdist comedy also help a writer be less pedantic? Your stories involve oppression and cultural hegemony, yet there is a lack of judgementalism or preachiness in the telling; the emphasis is on observing people and their idiosyncrasies.

I do get very angry sometimes and then realise that it's just high blood pressure and my anger will fade away if I just sit down and have a glass of water. I do get angry when someone close to me is killed or dies randomly. But all that rage is quite impotent. So I think I do grief better than I do anger. I am sure I judge people all the time, but I think if you spend seven years with a character, you begin to empathize with their worst traits. (That already sounds judgmental.)

What about writing a novel in Urdu?

I do a lot of journalism in Urdu, so I guess Urdu ka shauq poora ho jata hai. I have recently started doing some video blogs in Punjabi and I feel more free than I ever have; it’s like there is no wall between me and the audience. I think I am very tempted to write fiction in Punjabi. But there are about seventeen-and-a-half people who read in Punjabi and most of them are my friends. But I think I’ll give it a go anyway.

You have also written a play, a libretto on the life of Benazir Bhutto, and columns that attempt to explain Pakistan while also satirizing aspects of it. Which of these forms do you like best?

I think my favourite form doesn’t involve writing, it involves sitting down with a bunch of friends sharing stories, trying to remember old couplets, and songs – but that form doesn’t earn you a living. So I write anything and everything because that’s pretty much all I can do. Within that, novels are my favourite because you can spend year after year living with the same characters, in the same house, it’s like having an imaginary family.

You have a childhood story about asking your teacher “Even if Ahmedis are heretics, can’t we buy things from their shops?” and being slapped. Given the current controversy about the removal of Atif Mian from the Economic Advisory Council, so soon into Imran Khan’s prime-ministership, what are your expectations of this new era in Pakistani politics?

Oh dear. That was like forty years ago, I was probably in class 2 and the Pakistani parliament was in the middle of declaring Ahmedis kafir. Since then we have declared them kafir many times over and we are still looking for new ways to torment them.

I do have expectations from this new era: they will find new names for old cruelties, they will inflict the same old insults on their own people. And I fear they will succeed.

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[Related post: here are a few outtakes from a story I did long, long ago about Pakistani writing in English - snippets of conversations with Kamila Shamsie, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Moni Mohsin, Aamer Hussein and Azhar Abidi]

Through a glass, darkly: watching films as a child, and as an adult

[my latest Mint Lounge column, about cinematic memories that haunted me for years]

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“These CCTV cameras aren’t capturing anything,” a bewildered man named Khuddoos (Manoj Bajpayee) says in Gali Guleiyan, which was released in theatres this month after having been on the festival circuit for a while. “I need other cameras.”

Khuddoos doesn’t know this, but no available lens – however sophisticated – will show him the footage he wants to see; what he needs is a magic looking glass. Gali Guleiyan, a haunting film about the nature of memory and childhood trauma, is set in grimy Chandni Chowk, but when it ended the question that crept into my mind was from the realm of science-fiction or fantasy: what if we had cameras that enabled us to peer into our distant pasts? What would we learn about our child-selves?

Given such a device, one thing I would want to revisit is how much I relished being scared in my early years as a movie buff: how a nascent interest led to a full-blown obsession with many varieties of horror films. And how being scared often went hand in hand with being confused or disoriented.

Consider two scenes – each involving a figure in white, each misleading in its way – which terrified me as a child.

1) A photographer leads a group of children to a snowman sitting on a bench. “This guy can’t see or hear,” he says, “so let’s make eyes and ears for him.” As he scratches away in the vicinity of the immobile figure’s head, a chunk of snow falls off to reveal a dead body sitting stiffly on the bench – a murder victim, covered overnight by falling snow.

2) The character played by Amitabh Bachchan has died in a film’s climax. Along the way, he made friends with a little boy. The film is about to wind up, we are watching the obligatory cremation scene, my attention is already elsewhere and I have exited the room – but glancing back at the distant TV, I see that Bachchan has returned and is holding the child. He is wrapped in white bandages and is watching his own funeral pyre. The boy looks content and sleepy-eyed. And none of the adults watching the film even comments on this bizarre ending!

These visions gave me nightmares as a child, and much later, long after the fear had gone, I remained puzzled about what I had seen. Especially since I never encountered those films during my growing-up years (the internet hadn’t yet made it possible to research just about anything) – as the memories grew mistier, I began to wonder if they had even existed or came from a childhood fever-haze, perhaps during one of those dull summers when I was bedridden with mumps or chickenpox.

It was years later that I connected the dots and found the scenes on YouTube. The snowman film was a thriller called Kaun? Kaisey? while the Bachchan film was the 1975 Faraar. And in both cases, the scenes playing in my head all those years were very different from what I now saw.

The snowman scene was much tackier. The image of the photographer’s fingers scraping at the figure was followed by a clumsy cut to what seemed a completely unrelated shot, with different lighting: a close-up of a human eye. And the photographer was played by the great comedian Deven Varma, who often showed a genially dark sense of humour, but whose presence added nothing to this kind of scene.

The Faraar ending was even more perplexing. The bandaged Bachchan ghost whom I thought only I had seen (and had long been haunted by) turned out to be a widowed grandmother dressed in a white sari, who picks up the boy and holds him in her arms, turning away from the camera, in the last shot. Looking at the scene in the light of day, on YouTube, I couldn’t for the life of me see how I had been fooled; apart from the child and the old woman, Sharmila Tagore and Sanjeev Kumar were in the scene too, and the camera kept cutting to their reactions. There was nothing ambiguous about it.

Anyone knows that when you watch a film as a child, and later as an adult, you are seeing two entirely different films – you’re another person now. (Not always wiser or more discerning. But… different.) This seems to apply in special ways to viscerally scary scenes. Others in my private memory-bank include the werewolf film Silver Bullet, with its grisly opening image of a decapitated head squished by a passing train (and a creepier moment where we see the blood-soaked kite a slaughtered boy was playing with). And the 1985 Khamosh, with its eerie scenes involving the Shabana Azmi character sleep-walking.

I’m not sure how I would react to these scenes today, but I know they instilled in me the sense that there was something inherently magical and fearful about cinema. And that obsessive movie-buffs are movie-makers too, constantly constructing and reassembling things in their heads. Like Gali Guleiyan’s protagonist, keenly looking at available footage but also wanting impossible new camera angles.
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[Other Mint Lounge columns are here. An earlier piece about Gali Guleiyan is here. And some related thoughts in my essay “Monsters I have known”]

Short take: an Emmy for "Paterfamilias"

All competitive awards should be taken with a giant vat of salt, and it’s been decades since I closely followed the Oscars or Emmys (much less got excited about any of the results) – but I just chanced to hear that the Emmy for best direction in a drama series went to Stephen Daldry for “Paterfamilias”, a stunning episode of The Crown. I won’t say things like “right decision” or “well deserved” (that would be stupid on multiple levels; I haven’t even watched any of the other shows nominated), but I’m weirdly pleased about this, because I didn’t even know that “Paterfamilias” – an operatic, sweeping yet tightly constructed mini-film about the boarding-school childhoods (25 years apart) of Prince Philip and his son Charles – was nominated in this category. I loved it when I saw it last year.

Whether it’s Chaplin saying he wasn’t interested in Shakespeare’s plays because he didn’t care about the problems of kings and queens, or modern-day critics who won’t try to engage with a show like The Crown (or a film like Dil Dhadakne Do), there is a tendency to dismiss – or to at least feel sheepish or resentful about – creative works that try to present the conflicts in the lives of insanely privileged people. I’m far from enamored by, or even interested in, the British royals (though I enjoy the real-life Philip’s nasty, politically incorrect sense of humour), but all that was irrelevant when I watched “Paterfamilias”. It’s beautifully structured, performed and, perhaps best of all, scored (by Hans Zimmer), and combines grandeur with intimacy in a way that for me recalls the similar paralleling of the lives of a father and son in The Godfather Part II. Which, obviously, is a big compliment.
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And a postscript, based on a Facebook exchange: yes, I know The Crown has been a celebrated show, winning Golden Globes and Emmys among other things. I suppose what I was referring to was the general, wary reaction to this sort of glossy show in some of the circles I move in -- among viewers who prefer edgier and more grounded material like Breaking Bad.
Also, in the Indian context, some of the reactions to The Crown are inevitably and understandably linked with our feelings about our colonial past. But for me personally, it's possible to (just one example) denounce the things that people like Churchill did to countries like India as gatekeepers of the Empire, while also feeling for Churchill the individual in another terrific episode, "Assassins", where his portrait is done by Graham Sutherland. (Everyone contains multitudes etc etc)

[More on The Crown near the end of this piece, where I *health advisory alert* stand up for Padmaavat]

Notes on Love Sonia: a journey into the heart of darkness (and a return)

[On another recent film I liked very much, which you can probably catch on the big screen for another few days at least]
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The straightforward way to describe Tabrez Noorani’s Love Sonia is that it is a stark, hard-hitting film about human trafficking, told through the story of a village girl who travels all the way to Mumbai – and later, much beyond – in search of her sister, who has been sold into the sex trade.

But, and this is not to be flippant or to diminish the horrors suffered by the protagonist, I also saw Love Sonia as a twisted travelogue. As well as a coming-of-age tale (or a Bildungsroman, if you prefer) that follows a character’s journey from a small, circumscribed world to a much larger, never-before-imagined one – and from where she returns, far from unscathed, but wiser and more self-assured. Over the course of this narrative, Sonia (superbly played by Mrunal Thakur) goes from a rural setting where she and her sister Preeti could see the stars in a clear night sky to a dazzling international metropolis where she looks out a window and mumbles “Aasmaan se zyaada zameen chamak rahi hai”. There are many layers to this journey from innocence to experience, and the film prepares us for them: for instance, a guileless remark like “Tere liye toh ladkon ki line lagne waali hai”, spoken in a warm and happy context very early in the story, later comes to feel like a sinister foreshadowing.

But for all the superficial differences between the many places that Sonia travels through – from the feudal village to Bombay’s nasty underbelly to Hong Kong and Los Angeles – her experiences in these settings are very homogenous, and this is part of the film’s point. Outward appearances change, the sex trade becomes more "sophisticated" – from sweaty couplings in a filthy chawl to escort services in a luxurious LA penthouse – but the basic framework is the same: women are exploited and raped for business, virginity is preserved for months until the best buyer can be found, then surgically "restored" if needed, bribes are given to let illicit cargo through even in First World countries.

Unlike many conscientious social-message films, Love Sonia doesn’t get weighed down by good intentions – it has cinematic sense, is well-paced, the performances in the key roles are excellent, and the writing has an authenticity and an empathy that probably comes out of Noorani’s firsthand experiences with rehabilitating trafficking victims. The upshot is that a story which might easily have been cliché-ridden instead offers much that feels fresh, even when it involves stock characters such as the vicious pimp (Manoj Bajpayee in a razor-sharp performance, miles removed from his role in Gali Guleiyan) who blows hot and cold and lapses into ma-behen gaalis while trying to speak in English with a customer on the phone; or the hardened prostitute who has a tragic back-story of her own (Freida Pinto and Richa Chadda are both terrific in variants on this part); or the good-hearted social worker who goes undercover (a bearded Rajkummar Rao gets to play rescuer for once). Through all this, there is also the sisterhood theme, which begins with a specific, loving relationship between two blood-sisters but expands to the generalised experiences of exploited and savaged women finding degrees of kinship with each other. (And there is this recurring motif too: “sisters” being driven into positions of distrust, resentment or outright antagonism towards each other because they have been manipulated by men.)

I thought the film briefly hit a false note with a scene in Los Angeles, where Sonia’s firang client goes on speaking to her in English despite knowing she can’t understand most of what he’s saying; it felt too much like spoon-feeding for the audience. But even here, the slow build-up of the scene, its emphasis on mundane talk and niceties, is effective in its own way, letting us see that in the end this genial-seeming man in his big luxurious apartment is no different from the rough customers having their way with the girls in the filthy Mumbai brothel.

In short: lots to appreciate here (though of course it’s a given that you need high tolerance for dark and disturbing subject matter). Hope it stays in halls for another two or three weeks, but I’m not holding my breath.

The cow-girl, the bad husband and the fascist Alsatian: on Gaai aur Gori

[Given that Abhishek Bachchan spent much of Manmarziyan looking ruminative and bovine, I’m pleased to report on a 1973 film in which his mommy nuzzles and whispers sweet nothings to a cow. My latest Mint Lounge column]
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Here’s a plot summary for a 1973 film. Identify it.

Jaya Bhaduri plays a village girl who enjoys singing and represents an idealized, pastoral way of life. She marries a young man from the city and suffers because of his narcissistic and insecure behaviour. Eventually he repents, and all ends well. And, oh yes: Bindu plays the Other Woman, and there is a scene where Bhaduri confronts her to assert her claim on her husband.

Abhimaan, you say? That sounds reasonable, but what if I throw this memorable one-line description into the mix:

“A woman must choose between an abusive husband and the cow who loves her unconditionally.”

Thus reads an online synopsis of Gaai aur Gori. (Which you can translate as “Cow and Girl”, or “Bovine and Belle” if you want to be alliterative.) It’s a film I had only vaguely heard about, and found most intriguing when I got around to watching it – even when it is tying itself up in knots.

A film with a cow as protagonist – mother, friend and guardian to the human heroine – has a resonance in our time, when “cow-protection” has become a national fetish and a pretext to tyrannize those who don’t subscribe to the gau-as-deity narrative. But Gaai aur Gori is notable for other reasons too. For instance, watching the first few scenes is to be reminded of how rarely our mainstream cinema has depicted genuine affection in a human-animal bond.

Even when an animal is used for sentimental purposes onscreen (the elephant in Haathi Mere Saathi, the dog in Teri Meherbaniyan), there is usually an air of carnival about the whole project, and a sense that the creature is a gimmick. To a degree, Gaai aur Gori follows that path too. Lakshmi the beefy brown cow, constant companion to Vijaya (Bhaduri), spends a lot of time performing tricks: escorting children to school, crossing a railway track after scrutinizing the signal, saving a train from being derailed, entering a house where a function is taking place so a paayal can be placed on her foot. The film gets emotional mileage from close-ups of Lakshmi weeping during sad scenes (this sort of thing always makes me cringe – not because it is melodramatic or unscientific, but because I wonder what they put into the animal’s eyes to produce such a reaction), and her symbolic function is evident in scenes like the one where Vijaya sings about how mothers only feed milk to their own children, but a cow – being the Supreme Mother – nurtures the whole world.

However, there are also some surprisingly tender and moving scenes where the gaai is just a well-loved gaai (not a symbol or a performing flea). It’s startling to see Vijaya planting big wet kisses on Lakshmi’s forehead (the latter waggles her ears approvingly), or keeping her head in a tight grip while saying sweet things. (Bhaduri rarely showed as much depth of feeling with her romantic heroes as she does in some of these sequences.) It helps that Lakshmi is a personable animal. That is usually the preserve of cinematic dogs – yet some of the best-known dog scenes in Hindi films involve circus stunts, such as Tuffy’s cricket-umpiring in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. Lakshmi, on the other hand, is dignified, knowing and affectionate at the same time.

Meanwhile, other things are afoot. When Vijaya’s path crosses that of the film’s villain-cum-hero Arun (Shatrughan Sinha in one of his many fine early roles as a smooth-talking scoundrel with a caustic sense of humour), value systems get muddled. Without giving too much away, the hitherto independent-minded Vijaya starts trying to win over a husband who has deceived and mistreated her. In so doing, she manages to be both condescending (towards “westernized” people) and discomfortingly submissive (towards pati-parmeshwar). As a champion of the idea that tradition must be unquestioningly upheld (in this case: marriage is sacred, no matter how messed up its foundations were), she comes across as not very different from some of today’s gau-fetishizers.

And yet it would be simplistic to say – as many liberals do while judging cinema – that Gaai aur Gori is a “regressive” film or, more patronizingly, “acceptable in its time”. Such a view must be balanced against the marvelous presence of Arun’s mother (played by Sulochana) who, after initially being manipulated by her son, transforms into a much firmer figure who flatly tells him he should leave her house if he mistreats his wife (and her cow). Lakshmi disapproves of what is going on too; both mother figures – the human one and the bovine one – fight an unambiguous feminist battle for the girl, even when the girl herself is playing doormat.

All this can make a viewer feel very ambivalent. On the one hand, Arun does see the error of his ways in the end, asks for forgiveness and makes a real effort to mend the situation; on the other, Sinha’s charismatic performance has made the man seem a little too appealing throughout, and one feels that he has been allowed to get away with too much (certainly more than Amitabh Bachchan’s sulky Subir got away with in Abhimaan). We want to like the heroine, but we almost start sympathizing with the villains instead – including Bad Girl Bindu, who looks good in hot pants (and drinks Vat 69 in a wine glass at 10 AM) but gets heavy-handed lectures from Vijaya because she performed a “vulgar” dance on stage.

Still, if you don’t want to grapple with these ethical issues, you can occupy your mind with subtextual deconstructions of scenes like the one where Lakshmi gets the better of a nasty Alsatian in head-to-head combat. Does the German Shepherd – mascot dog of the Nazis – stand for hardline fascism, you may ask, while the cow stands for a more seemingly benevolent, paternalistic approach to tradition – gentle but still insistent? And if so, does anyone realise how similar these two creatures are beneath their hides?

"Doggone!"

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[Earlier Lounge columns are here. And here is an old piece about Teri Meherbaniyan and other doggish things]

A few stray thoughts on Gali Guleiyan...

[On one of the most immersive films I have seen in a while -- and why I was reminded of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom] 
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There are many ways of looking at Dipesh Jain’s haunting Gali Guleiyan, a film that for much of its running time cross-cuts between a CCTV camera-obsessed man in Chandni Chowk and a young boy in the same milieu, who may be in danger. One can note, for instance, that the distinctive Old Delhi setting is central to the film’s effect and purpose; it wouldn’t be possible to tell this story in quite this way if it had been transposed elsewhere.

Because Gali Guleiyan makes unsettling use of the timelessness (or the perceived timelessness) of Chandni Chowk – as a place with narrow, winding lanes where small houses may be left abandoned for decades, people in the neighborhood barely registering their crumbling presence; where blankets of dust gather on forgotten mementos; where lives are easily petrified and minds can slowly decay as well; and from where, depending on how the chips fall for you, there might be no escaping. Its disoriented protagonist Khuddoos (Manoj Bajpayee) is one of these less-fortunate ghosts: at one point, it is indicated that taking an auto-rickshaw for a visit to south Delhi’s Greater Kailash would be as much of a journey for him – as intimidating – as it would be to take a train to start a new life in another city. We spend most of the film wondering how his life reached this pass.

The Chandni Chowk shown here is a place where cell-phones and broken-down CCTV cameras are among the very few markers of “modernity”, reminders that we are watching contemporary events. Otherwise, it’s all a bit fuzzy. One scene, where two boys settle down in a shop to watch a film on a video-cassette player, could be set two or three decades ago, but it could just as easily be set today. Even torn posters of 1980s films like Desh Premee could plausibly still be on these walls in 2018.
(But what of that old-style 100-rupee note we catch a glimpse of in one scene? Does Chandni Chowk have its own currency regime removed from the rest of the country? Can we take old, pre-demonetisation 500 and 1000-rupee notes and deposit them in this ecosystem?)

This is, among other things, a story about time; about how the past informs the present, even moves alongside it. And about a man who needs better cameras than the ones he has, but doesn’t know why his cameras aren’t good enough, why they can never capture the things he really needs to look at.

I know some of this sounds vague and elusive, but there is a two-pronged problem with discussing this film in detail: 1) it has a “twist” at the end, and I'm hesitant to provide spoilers; and yet 2) it wasn’t a twist where I was concerned, because I had figured it out 20 minutes into the film, and actually I don’t even think the film MEANT it to be a big reveal: Gali Guleiyan is suspenseful all right, a quiet, languidly paced thriller of sorts, but its suspense doesn’t reside in one “gotcha!” moment – it lies in an accumulation of events, in its use of editing and sound design, in our wondering exactly what is wrong with Khuddoos, in our wanting to know what happens to the young boy Idris, and if Khuddoos will succeed in tracking Idris down with his defective cameras and through the smoke-rings of his own mind.

Watching this film, I was reminded of another camera-struck protagonist: the disturbed photographer Mark in Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom. Both Mark and Khuddoos like peering into other people's houses and lives – a fetish that begins in childhood and extends into adulthood (where it takes the form of a profession or a part-time profession). There is a moment in Peeping Tom where Mark, persuaded for once to go out without his beloved camera, reflexively reaches for it when he sees something interesting, and then looks momentarily terrified and lost that it isn’t there. Similarly, one gets the impression that Khuddoos is most alive, most present in a moment, when he is looking at CCTV footage; without it, he has little control over his environment. There is one telling scene where his brother comes to visit him after decades, and the first time Khuddoos (and we) see the brother is as a grainy black-and-white image on a screen; then the door opens and the real flash-and-blood person enters – and Khuddoos barely knows how to speak with him.

Here are two people from two different films who, for various reasons, haven’t been able to look life directly in the eye and must look at screens or through lenses instead. In both cases, we get indications of what might have gone wrong in the past – Khuddoos and Mark are haunted by memories, haunted especially by tyrannical fathers who alternate between love and sadism. Both their present-day lives involve fleeting images just glimpsed from a distance, moving out of sight (or out of focus), and both films have long tracking shots that give us a sense of just how cut off from “reality” the protagonist is.

(All this said, the last scene of Gali Guleiyan reminded me not of Peeping Tom but of a famous last shot from another film with a photographer-protagonist: Antonioni’s Blow-Up in which the hero, no longer sure of anything, including the evidence of his own camera, simply disappears before our eyes.)
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[An old post about Peeping Tom is here]

Two princes or two paupers? Parvarish, and an identity non-crisis

[In the week of the Section 377 verdict, when we have reason to think about -- and celebrate -- the fluidity of identity (sexual and other kinds), here's a reminder of an egalitarian 1950s Hindi film that simply sidesteps the identity question and even lampoons those who get all hot and bothered about it. My latest “moments” column for The Hindu]
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Of the countless “child grows up to become the hero” transition scenes in Hindi cinema, this one must be among the most charming. We are a full thirty minutes into the 1958 film Parvarish. Two boys, Raja and Ramesh, have been raised together in a Thakur’s house. In their first appearance as adults, played by Raj Kapoor and Mehmood respectively, we see them performing for their music teacher Banke Bihari, whom they call “maama” (uncle).

First Ramesh plays skillfully on the sarangi. “Tu hee mera asli bhaanja hai,” the pleased teacher cackles. You are my real nephew. But then the camera pans right to show Raja performing with equal gusto on a tabla. Poor Banke is – not for the first time – confounded. “Bees saal se tum dono mujhe dhokha de rahe ho,” he says jovially; whereupon they get up and, in perfect sync, launch into the exuberant song “Maama, Oh Maama”. Jumping about goofily, they sing lines like “Asli hai kaun bhaiyya, naqli hai kaun?” – a question that hangs over the film.

There is a complicated back-story to all this. The film begins with two babies – one born to the Thakur’s wife, the other to a dancing-girl who dies in childbirth – being mixed up at the hospital, with no possible way of telling them apart. The lineage-obsessed Thakur (played by the always worried-looking Nazir Hussain) has no option but to take both babies home and trust that eventually he will figure out (through behaviour, bearing or complexion) which of them is his biological child. Meanwhile, he is also saddled with the crass-seeming Banke, who was the brother of the deceased tawaif and is just as concerned about his nephew’s well-being – he ends up as a permanent house-guest, teaching the boys music.

I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that we never find out who the Thakur’s child is. “Ek din khoon bolega, aur zaroor bolega!” the nobleman declaims early on, but blood doesn’t announce itself. (And of course, DNA testing was no option: its molecular structure was only just being discovered in faraway Cambridge around the same time!) The film uses the “confused at birth” premise to move its plot further, but it turns out to be blithely unconcerned with providing any answer to the identity question.

This is such an unusual narrative choice because the search for, and uncovering of, identity is one of the most irresistible of story arcs. Some version of the conundrum “Who am I, what is my place in the world – and what must I do after I get the answers to these questions?” exists in all the great mythologies (for instance, it informs the life of the Mahabharata’s Karna, whose story has had such a big influence on Hindi cinema) and in modern pop-cultural myths derived from those mythologies (look at “Mr Glass” in M Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable).

In another Parvarish, made nearly twenty years later by Manmohan Desai, a cop’s son grows up to be crooked while a criminal’s son becomes an upright policeman; Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony tells us that it’s okay for children born in a Hindu family to grow up as Muslim or Christian (and to marry bona-fide Muslim or Christian women); Raj Kapoor’s own Awaara similarly touches on the nature-nurture debate. But even in films that are progressive or egalitarian, the satisfaction of knowing the truth (or watching the characters finding out) is central to the effect. The 1958 Parvarish cares for none of that.

This film is about the fluidity of identity in many ways, not just at the level of rich-vs-poor, and this is underlined in the “Maama Oh Maama” scene. In old Hindi cinema, when a man performs classical music or dance (enacting rather than simply being the privileged watcher), we usually see a softer, more cultured side. In this scene, both men behave like they were brought up among artistes rather than as heirs in a haveli. Imagine how much this must irk the feudal-minded Thakur, given that he wants his son to “be a man” and lord it over others.

The variability of identity can also be seen in the erasing of the line between two archetypes of popular cinema: the cool leading man or Hero, and the sidekick who provides comic relief. Mehmood would play the latter role many times in years to come, but here the two actors are on level ground. They both clown about. They can’t even practice sword-fighting with a straight face; instead they irreverently wave the weapons about and parody the regal lifestyle. The elders may huff and puff about blood ties, class and pedigree, but Raj and Ramesh – stand-ins for young Indians of the post-Independence era – are unselfconsciously democratic.
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[Earlier "moments" columns are here]

In praise of visible film craft

[My latest Mint Lounge column – about the simplistic idea that the elements of filmmaking mustn’t draw attention to themselves]
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In one of the most arresting scenes in the 1960 film Anuradha, the heroine looks yearningly at the full moon, recalling the early days of her romance with the man she married, a doctor who is now preoccupied with his work. At the same time, her husband is looking through his microscope at a bacterium on a drop of liquid. The scene visually links the two white spheres, which represent different sorts of passions to the people observing them.

It’s a showy moment, guaranteed to draw attention to shot conception, framing and editing – even a casual viewer will notice these things. And it is hard to reconcile with some of the stories I have heard about the film’s director, Hrishikesh Mukherjee. “At a preview screening,” more than one of Mukherjee’s associates have said, “if someone exclaimed ‘What a beautiful shot!’, he snapped that he wanted the image cut out. He didn’t want viewers to be distracted by something showy.”

This is an oft-repeated theme if you read filmmakers’ interviews, and it can come from unexpected sources. Director Dibakar Banerjee once told me he cringed when someone commented on beautiful camerawork in a scene: “How can you even identify camerawork separately?” In a related conversation, his art director Vandana Kathuria said, “If someone comes out of the hall saying the production design was brilliant, it means we have failed.” I frowned, thinking of the many times in Banerjee’s films where cinematography creates a very specific mood (the stygian, oppressive look of Shanghai, for example) or where art design beautifully captures a sense of place: consider the cluttered spaces in a modest west Delhi house in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, helping us see why the protagonist wants to escape his small well for a bigger world.

There is a cult of movie-appreciation based on the celebration of invisibility or unobtrusiveness: the idea that when watching a film, you mustn’t be aware of the nuts and bolts; that cinematography, editing, music and other elements shouldn’t draw attention to themselves. But this is a reductive and conservative view. For starters, everything depends on the sort of film we are talking about, the emotional, visual and aural scales it is aiming for, and the relative importance of a director’s personal style. It might sound reasonable to say “Cinematography should be purely at the service of the narrative”, but what does that really mean? What if it is an anti-narrative film, where plot is less important than mood-development? Or what if the point is to create a distinctive “look” that facilitates a deeper understanding of the characters and the story? Think about Ashok Mehta’s brilliant use of candlelight in Shyam Benegal’s Trikaal, about a large Goan family ossifying in an ancient house.

It’s impossible to list the thousands of showy scenes in great films, where the ostentatious beauty of a shot is inseparable from our emotional reaction, but to take a few obvious examples: try imagining Awaara without that image of a shadow literally flitting across Prithviraj Kapoor’s face as the shadow of a doubt creeps into his mind (has his wife been with another man?), or Pyaasa without Guru Dutt standing in the doorway in the climax. Or The Third Man without the canted angles and shadows that capture a poetic-mythical Vienna, as opposed to a strictly realistic one. (What is “realism” anyway, when a film is shot in black and white?)

Similarly, what does it mean to say that background music should be subdued and unobtrusive? These things are subjective anyway, but there are films where the function of a good (if insistent) score is to direct our emotions or to underline the drama of a moment –and in a composite medium, this is perfectly valid.

If the type of film is one factor, another is the type of viewer: are you the “immersed” sort or the “watchful” sort? In an interview once, Aamir Khan said he usually gets so involved with a film that he might shout “Look out!” to an imperiled character. Others are just the opposite: even when thrilled by a narrative, I am usually very aware of a film’s inner workings, and this helps me appreciate it more. (I think to myself: Waheeda Rehman is so good as this fictional character Rosie; she does this and this so well. I don’t think: this is Rosie and she is a real person.) One viewer might watch a stylistically experimental film and still focus only on the “plot” – another might watch a story-driven film and still register the framing and positioning from one shot to the next.

Which brings me to the point that even seemingly straightforward narrative cinema – driven by dialogue or plot – involves dozens of little decisions at various levels, which can be noticed and critiqued. In the 1960s, the first generation of “auteurist” critics, including young British writers like VF Perkins, brought new vigour to film writing by pointing such things out: how, for instance, the gradual change in a character’s wardrobe over the course of a story – from brightly coloured clothes to greyscale ones – could be central to a film’s effect.

Admittedly, these are not things you’d expect a casual viewer to notice, especially on a first watch, but they are very much on the table if you’re trying to engage. And if anyone tells you otherwise, chances are they are being lazy or evasive, and are about to say those ghastly, eye-roll-inducing words: Don’t Analyze So Much. As if the only thing one can talk about while discussing a film is the plot, and everything else that goes into the process just falls together somehow, without any thought or deliberation.

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[Related posts: Walter Murch and The Godfather; Anuradha; Trikaal; Shanghai. Earlier Lounge columns are here]