On savouring the restored Umrao Jaan, and going down nostalgia street

[From my Economic Times column]
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An important trope of the Hindi cinema I cherished as a child – the action-oriented, male-centred films – was the one where a weepy-faced boy would dramatically morph into the adult star 15 minutes into the narrative. Sometimes it happened during a chase scene: the child actor’s legs would turn into sturdier, jeans-clad ones, a boy would jump off a bridge and land on a train as the dashing hero. Or a match cut or camera swish might render Master Mayur into Amitabh Bachchan, and the whistles and yells of approvals could begin.

I was amusingly reminded of those scenes while watching the excellent restoration of Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 Umrao Jaan on a big screen recently. Mid-dance (or mid-twirl) the young girl Ameeran – sold into a Lucknow brothel and renamed Umrao – turns into the adult version of the character, played by Rekha. To my mind, this scene was as star-heralding in its own way as the ones I mentioned above. (In even the relatively grounded Middle Cinema of the period, you could expect a burst of sparkly music upon the first appearance of a protagonist played by Sanjeev Kumar or Jaya Bhaduri.) But Umrao Jaan is, of course, a very different sort of film otherwise from my childhood favourites, and I found myself rapt by this languid, introspective, woman-centric narrative – in a way that I wasn’t as a youngster. This must be what it’s like to grow up.

There was so much to absorb and savour here: the songs most obviously, the costumes and sets, the interactions between assertive women and effeminate or suppliant men. Or little details such as the tribute-casting of the veteran Bharat Bhushan (who had once played both Baiju Bawra and Tansen on screen) in a small part. Or the realisation that the child Ameeran here is played by the daughter of Shama Zaidi and MS Sathyu.

Much has probably been said about female solidarity (commingled with female conflict) in Umrao Jaan – about the balancing of scales not just between the sexes but also among women; about their interrelationships in precarious situations, where vulnerability goes hand in hand with the exercising of dignity and power. Dim childhood memories had fixed this as a story about Lucknowi tehzeeb – soulful poetry and music taking precedence, even in a setting where women’s bodies are traded; a world where even a wild-eyed bandit might be respectful towards the heroine – but the actual film is more dynamic and varied than that, and gets much of its impact from the profane moments that joltingly remind us where we are: the unexpected use of the word “randi” in an exchange, or the veteran Dina Pathak spitting out the line “Aise haraam zaade marte hain kabhi?”

For me, Umrao Jaan is also inseparable from my shifting view of Rekha, who was not one of my favourites as a child – I saw her as one of Bachchan’s less interesting heroines (not as sophisticated or modern as Parveen Babi, not as naturally sweet as Jaya Bhaduri or as unconventional as Raakhee), and my interest in her tawaif roles was limited to Muqaddar ka Sikander. But over time, this yielded to a greater interest in the maternal aspect of the Rekha persona, as well as the image – supplied in 1980s and 90s film magazines – of the woman living in solitude, childless, partner-less, her closest companion a beloved dog who often appeared in those pages**. One’s view of the bereft Umrao Jaan can be deepened by what one knows (or thinks one knows) of Rekha’s real life – including her being cut off from a secure family life early on (much as Umrao is) despite being the child of a superstar.

But there is also something about watching an old, familiar film alongside someone with whom you have a long, complex history. My viewing companion and I have been in a strained relationship, imbued with sadness and separation – and yet when it came to little observations or childhood-memory-triggers around the film, we leant in and whispered to each other, as unselfconsciously as in the good old days. Compare Rekha and Naseer with their roles in Ijaazat later in the decade; look at how “seedha” Farooque Shaikh is here and how “tedha” Naseer is, in contrast to their roles in Katha; how much the Shabana Azmi of the present day resembles her mother Shaukat Kaifi (who plays the kotha madam Khanum Jaan). For a few moments, a shared experience of a film, and the many memories associated with it, had transported us back to a time and space when things were gentler between us. Maybe that’s why they call it a restoration.

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**P.S. Recently the actress Trisha Krishnan's dog died and she wrote an Instagram post saying simply "I have lost my son", with a video. It was a very brave thing for her to do on social media, because you can imagine the vicious trolling in the comments, including from people who were supposedly her fans but said they wouldn't follow her now because "how can you compare an animal to a human kid" etc. It was horrendous, and also predictable. Anyway, I was reminded of Rekha in those magazine interviews referring to her Pomeranian Pisti as her child, and one of my mother’s visiting friends saying something utterly nasty like "jab khud ka asli bachha nahin hota toh aise bakwaas karte hain".

A tribute to Raj Kapoor as one of our finest song-actors

[Wrote this piece for a special, Raj Kapoor-themed issue of Frontline magazine]

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This is something every serious cineaste knows: most films of a certain vintage – especially those made by a director with a sense of visual composition, movement and use of space – are very different beasts when viewed on a big screen in a dark hall. This is also true of melodrama, of the larger-than-life movie that reaches for heightened emotion and grand gesture, the sort of thing that can make a modern viewer, weaned on “realism”, squirm – but which seen in the right environment reveals all its emotional depths and layers. Allowing even the most rational of us to tap into the mysterious, atavistic sides of our own personalities – to be stirred in ways that a grittier work may not achieve.

Last year I watched Awaara and Shree 420 on a big screen in immaculate prints, in the company of a receptive audience. I believed I knew these films well; but experiencing them in these conditions, I realised I had never actually seen them at all. What I had seen were pale simulacra – imposters, smaller than life. Here, now, was the magic show, the circus, the sorcery.

Of course, you expect the Big Moments in a Raj Kapoor-directed film to land a punch. Even in the videocassette era of the 1980s, my generation of viewers grew up with the education that he was the ultimate showman, bigger than Subhash Ghai who had recently appropriated that term. Later, watching RK’s early work, especially Aag and Awaara, I thought about a quote attributed to another wunderkind, Orson Welles, about getting complete freedom to make Citizen Kane at age 25: “I felt like I had been given the best toy-train set a boy ever had.”

So, with Awaara in the hall, I was prepared to be thrilled by those great shots of Prithviraj Kapoor’s remarkable face caught between shadow and light, the tumultuous play of emotions flitting over him (Raj Kapoor’s father was his Muse here, more so than any of his heroines were), or the scene by the window with the rain-water pouring down the glass. And later, the famously opulent dream sequence featuring Raj and Rita (Nargis) – a scene I have showed students in a darkened room that could only partly replicate the big-screen experience.

But equally, the dark hall amplified things I hadn’t expected to be amplified. I found myself just as captivated by the subtleties in Raj’s performance – in the “Dam bhar jo udhar munh phere” scene, for instance.

There is plenty here that shows the eye of Kapoor the director: the beautiful visuals of the boat in the water, the reflections of the lovers, the dark clouds and the moon that frees itself from them. But Raj the actor is in full fettle too. Take this vignette. Rita has just sung the opening lines of the song, and now it is his turn. The camera switches to his face as she concludes “… baatein hazaar kar loongi”, and in those couple of seconds we see him moving his lips silently to her singing – before commencing his part.

This can be interpreted in diegetic terms: a young man appreciatively mouths the words to his girlfriend’s song, in kinship. Or it could be Raj Kapoor – connoisseur of music, maintaining full control over his vision – lost in the moment, counting the beats before his own lip-synching. Either way, it works beautifully. It is one of those small moments (in a grandstanding, symbolism-laden film) that the critic Manny Farber alluded to when he described a non-essential gesture by Humphrey Bogart (in The Big Sleep) bringing alive a whole world outside the specificities of the film’s narrative.

But also note how the ground has been prepared for Raj’s silent lip-moving earlier, in a playful little exchange before the song begins, a melody of “Hmms” and “Uhhs”, where Rita and Raj’s voices almost overlap. (She is trying to find out what he is thinking about, he is replying distractedly; he is passionate about her but also melancholy and uncertain, conflicted about his circumstances.) In the song sequence itself, Nargis is in the disadvantaged position of performing gyrations and coquettish gasps to express girlish enthusiasm (including what looks like a mercifully truncated pole dance of sorts) – but the scenario allows Raj to be introspective, and what he achieves here is something rare: a quiet psychological realism in performance, even while operating within the contours of an upbeat romantic song (the sort of number that literal-minded viewers refer to as synthetic).

“Dam bhar ke” represents a Raj Kapoor skill-set that one tends to overlook. When we think of Raj the actor, we don’t think of subtlety: we think of the displays of animal passion in romantic scenes (even the “Dam bhar ke…” scene was preceded by Raj smacking Rita around), or showy self-pity mixed with KA Abbas-penned lectures about the state of the world. But here is an inward-looking restraint, something Raj did rarely, but very effectively: another example is in the “Duniya Banane Waale” scene in Teesri Kasam, where he is as subdued as Waheeda Rehman, as he sings gently for her.

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When it comes to the more flamboyant Raj Kapoor, the man with the flourishes – running the gamut from Chaplin-esque slapstick to Chaplin-esque pathos and beyond – it is obvious why a song sequence provided a full canvas for him. In a straightforward dramatic scene with regular dialogues, Raj could become a bit hard to take – even if he was being truthful to a loud character. In such cases a viewer’s sympathy can easily veer towards the quieter, more understated performer – say, Dilip Kumar in Andaz, or Ashok Kumar in Bewafa, or even Rajendra Kumar in Sangam. But when a Hindi film moves into the magic realm that is the song-and-dance scene, the bench-posts shift; in this exalted meter, everything becomes more palatable if done with conviction – and few did it with as much conviction as Raj did. Watch “Awaara Hoon”, or “Kisi ki Muskuraahaton Mein”. If this isn’t rigorous acting, what is?

(One can also point out – and apologies if this sounds facile – that Raj’s own voice in normal dialogue scenes could be gratingly whiny when he was playing the narcissistic man-child or the inspirational joker concealing his pain. Mukesh or Manna Dey were easier on the ear.)

In my view there is no equivalent elsewhere in Hindi cinema of an actor-director who so brilliantly filled both roles – behind the camera and in front of it – while orchestrating song sequences. Guru Dutt and Manoj Kumar were, in different ways, very skilled at visualising songs, but neither of them was the song-performer that Raj was. And while this is most evident in the first decade or so of his career – when he was relatively lithe and spry – it can be glimpsed in later films too, including Mera Naam Joker and Dharam Karam, and even in his small cameo as himself in the “John Jaani Janardan” song in Naseeb, playing the accordion to the delight of the other guests at a film party.

For me, and for many others, Exhibit A of Raj as great song actor is Shree 420’s “Dil ka Haal Sune Dilwala” – which I also had the pleasure of watching on a big screen last year. In a fairer world, I texted a friend after the scene was over, he would have walked off with an Oscar for best actor in a short film.

The sequence has the protagonist, who recently made his way to Bombay, settling down with a group of footpath-dwellers who ask to hear his life-story – which he elaborates through song. But that description doesn’t begin to capture the quality of this extraordinary scene, which builds in tempo – moving seamlessly from the intimate and personal to big-picture motivational speak and social commentary. Much credit must go to the combination of the lyricist Shailendra, music directors Shankar-Jaikishen and the other performers in the scene. But holding it all together, controlling its tempo, is Raj the director – and its beating heart is Raj the actor.

Here he is, drawing on his theatre training in the comical interludes such as the one where he mimics a “budhaa darogaa” (old policeman); then he returns to a more conventional mode, playing a dafli like a romantic hero (or a Mr Tambourine Man of the streets) while a shy young woman dances alongside him. In keeping with the rising pace of the music, he spins the dafli above his head like a sudarshan chakra (or like a playful Abhimanyu using a wheel as a weapon against the world’s slings and arrows), then deftly recovers in time for the song’s next stanza – the one with the hint of pedantry, words of wisdom about the crooked ways of the world, and about the nature and craft of protest. (Meanwhile the rich man in the house nearby has called the police to stop this ruckus.)

As the writer and film historian Pavan Jha puts it, this is a classic street anthem and protest song, very Indian in style, with dancing at its heart. Watch Raj’s footwork here – also shown to great effect in “Ichak Daana Beechak Daana” where he combines Little Tramp mannerisms with a Hindi-film-song idiom, tapping and pirouetting from a distance as Nargis sings riddles to children. The repeated tipping of his hat to the children, the cutesy pratfalls and attempts to mimic the Chaplin-duck walk… these can get grating when overdone, but to watch sequences like this one, or “Mera Joota Hai Japani”, is to see how adeptly tics borrowed from an earlier screen God can be incorporated into an Indian form of storytelling, and into a particular cultural milieu. If Raj’s character can sing “my clothes and shoes are from other lands, but my heart and essence are Indian”, this is true of his appropriation of the Chaplin persona too.

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In his memoir Khullam Khulla, Rishi Kapoor relates how he had to tell his son Ranbir the importance of actually singing a song on the sets out loud while shooting a musical sequence – as opposed to silently moving his lips, which would dilute the performance’s credibility. Rishi also mentions that during his own years as a leading man, he made an effort to be convincing in musical scenes even when playing instruments that he didn't actually know how to play.

It's easy to posit that this trait came from Raj – apart from the genes he bequeathed to his children Randhir and Rishi, he must also have influenced his younger brothers Shammi (one of our most uninhibited and rambunctious musical performers) and Shashi, who would have watched him as they were coming of age.

In the 1959 Anari – directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, but a Raj Kapoor film in many ways, with many of his regular crew-members involved – there is a scene where Raj is finding it hard to express his romantic feelings to Aarti (Nutan) in dry prose; she asks him to sing instead, which is the cue for the song “Dil ki Nazar Se”. Nearly 60 years later, in Jagga Jasoos, his grandson Ranbir plays a stuttering protagonist who needs to sing the things he wants to say, so that it “comes out smooth”. (“Mere words bhi so-so ke nikalte hain / Isliye gaa ke bolta hoon.”)

Whether or not this was a conscious homage, it feels like a symbiotic link between two very different types of cinema, calling out to each other across the decades, bound by a belief in the idea that music and rhythm could achieve things that regular conversation could not. However far we think we have moved from the quaint language of old Hindi films, the freshness of Raj Kapoor’s song performances will remain, and will remain accessible to those lucky enough to seek them out. As the Joker sang, “Jee chaahe jab hum ko awaaz do / Hum hain wahin, hum thay jahaan.”

Kaali Dilli, bheegi billi - two films about the chaos that is Delhi

[From my Economic Times column]

Perhaps because I re-watched Woody Allen’s Manhattan recently – with its hysterical and bittersweet love-letter to New York in the opening sequence – I have been thinking about cities in cinema. And in a funny coincidence, last week I watched two unrelated films (each directed by a Dibakar) that begin with an unexpected location title involving Delhi.

Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees, completed in 2022 but under a censorship cloud after being shelved by Netflix, begins with the words “New Delhi, 2043”… placed atop an image of an ocean (of all decidedly non-Delhi things)! Then, as an animated black cat – “Bheegi Billi” – walks towards the camera, we get the punch-line: this is a virtual image, communicating with someone who is physically located in the capital.

Meanwhile Dibakar Das Roy’s comedy Dilli Dark – currently in halls – opens with a title saying “Dilli, 1240 AD”, along with a view of an idyllic forest. This is a reference to the Razia Sultan story and her supposed romance with a man of African origin – which serves as underlying commentary for a present-day narrative about Michael, a Nigerian who is trying to complete his MBA while negotiating the city’s racism.

These are very different types of films, but both show Delhi as a messy, threatening place where no one can completely belong – and which also, in its own weird way can be a pluralistic space when you least expect it.

It would be a stretch to call Tees a Delhi film (in the sense that Banerjee’s brilliant Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! was) – it is too wide-ranging for that, moving across a number of periods and settings, including the Kashmir of 1989, in its depiction of an India hurtling towards totalitarianism. But some of its most intriguing scenes, the futuristic dystopian ones (which probably played a part in getting the film held back), are set in a Delhi where new AI technology and Third World grime coexist – with images that suggest India will always, for good and for bad, be chaotic.

Dilli Dark is in a clearer way a Delhi movie, with the city as a character – but which version of the city? We get views of the vast AIIMS crossing, cluttered Neb Sarai, the Gyarah Murti statue, and the perspective throughout is that of an outsider. Samuel Abiola Robinson, who plays the lead (he also played the title role in the Malayalam film Sudani from Nigeria years ago), has a charismatic, sympathetic presence that runs through the film and makes even its slightly less inspired moments watchable. At a recent promotional event Robinson mentioned that some of the incidents depicted here came from his real-life experiences as an African in Delhi: exploitation by landlords, police being called on him for no good reason.

Still, I would venture that some of Michael’s dislocation and frustration is relatable even for those of us who have been in Delhi all our lives. Using goofy, irreverent – sometimes bordering on facile – humour, Dilli Dark gets many things right in depicting a city where, as Michael puts it, even two-year-olds learn certain cuss words before they process anything else (and such abuses can be used for anyone, not just Africans); where the topography of the place suggests that something is wrong with its Vaastu-shastra (“Insaan gol gol ghumta jaata hai, bas,” as a character puts it); and in one of the funnier descriptions of the Qutab Minar I have come across. (“Can you imagine the king who made this? It’s like showing a giant middle finger to the sky and saying, tu jaanta nahin mera baap kaun hai?”)

So, Delhi is about swagger and power. But it is also about anarchy, which can have a democratising effect. At one point in Dilli Dark, a city-wide power failure comes to the rescue by plunging everyone – including aggressors – into darkness. In the closing scenes of Tees, madness comes to the Delhi Metro, riding a horse – and one feels that even an autocratic government trying to be all-controlling, like China, can’t strictly regulate everything in a place like this.

As Robinson – sounding affectionate – put it when asked about the difference between working in Kerala and shooting in crowded parts of Delhi: “In Delhi you never know what the f*** will happen.” 

[Related posts: Sudani from Nigeria (and other contemporary Malayalam cinema); Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!]

'Slow down, have a silent moment': a new exhibition pays tribute to In the Mood for Love

[Worked on an interview-profile after a long time – this one for Open magazine, about an exhibition of paintings by the 25-year-old Varad Bang; a tribute to Wong Kar-wai’s celebrated film. On the Open website, the piece is here]
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He was studying at the Florence Academy of Art, but Varad Bang was restless, frustrated by a curriculum that emphasized slowness over quickly observable results. The world was still under Covid’s shadow, he was an Indian boy abroad, finding it hard to gel with people; the course was such that it took weeks to complete a drawing. “My parents would ask, what are you doing there? There was a big gap between my expectations and the output – it made me question my decision to give up architecture for painting.”

It also became easy to get lost in the world of social media, including Instagram artists who produced at breakneck speed. “I was looking at people who were doing quick comics, sketches, doodles, and I did some of this too, before realising I was more drawn to what was being taught at the Academy.”

In the first year most of the students were only working with charcoal. But slowly the transition to colour began, with the restricted hues of the Grisaille palette – white, umber, black – and Varad found his footing. “I started giving myself more time to do realistic paintings, capturing deep emotions, studying light and shadow.” He know it was coming together when the Academy principal singled out one of his works for approval – in front of a class of more experienced students – without knowing who had painted it.

That uncertain journey has shown rich results now, leading to eighteen paintings, oil on linen, that make up his current exhibition “The Weight of Love” – a lush, layered tribute to a film that first cast a spell on cinephiles 25 years ago.

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For many of us movie nerds who were in our twenties when Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love came out – and especially for those struggling with messy romance – the film is inseparable from certain moods and motifs: the ache of unfulfilled love, the loneliness that can be felt even when you’re in a crowd, the image of two people passing each other like ships in the night, or caught in a brief encounter that could have been so much more. The bond between the protagonists Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung) – neighbours in an apartment complex in 1960s Hong Kong – begins when they realise their spouses are conducting a clandestine affair. But it grows into a profound relationship on its own terms – one that is destined to be thwarted by a combination of factors, including their determination to be “better” than their unfaithful partners.

Varad, born just a year before In the Mood for Love released in 2000, encountered the film when it was well-enshrined as a modern classic. Growing up in Aurangabad, he had been insulated from subtitled international cinema (“It was a middle-class background, I knew nothing of art films or theatre”), but after moving to Italy he found more culturally adventurous friends, and Wong’s film left an immediate impact. “I was in the post-state of a heartbreak, and could relate to how he showed silences and unspoken emotions. It wasn’t about the grand things people do in love.”

He was also struck by how the film – intense, languid – emphasized the relationship between people and their environment; in this, it evoked one of his favourite painters, Vermeer. “How the space we are in witnesses our emotions, and experiences them too – that idea stayed with me.”

So he began painting, working with some of the film’s most iconic visuals (Chow seen from the back, cigarette smoke swirling above him; Su and Chow sitting contemplatively in a taxi, or crossing each other in a narrow alley), but also making some atypical choices, moments that might flash by when you watch them in the film: a gesture, a shadow, a glow cast by a street-lamp on an oppressive, rainy night. “A lot of thought went into choosing the scenes – at times I wanted to add something as a reference to an earlier scene.” He also wanted to alternate between images where you don’t see the characters’ faces – “This allows you to be in their shoes, you directly feel what they might be going through” – and those where the faces are visible: “Now you see them as other people, removed, to whom something is happening. I aimed for that push-pull effect.”

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I had spoken to Varad on a video call, and seen the paintings on a laptop screen, but just as some films become very different animals in a dark hall, it is essential to view these artworks up close, as part of a well-curated exhibition. The Gallery Pristine Contemporary is on one of south Delhi’s more chaotic roads, but this adds to the effect of descending into the hushed space designed by Sumant Jayakrishnan. You leave the city’s summer and its street noise behind, and walk into a 360-degree experience, visual and aural. The decor evokes the period setting through rotary phones, a transistor, lamps, vivid red wallpaper and drapes; even a small room with three of the paintings in it seems to replicate the film’s cramped spaces. And there is the unforgettable music, including the lilting “Yumeji's Theme”, which for many of us is impossible to dissociate from this film (even though it was originally used in an earlier work, the 1991 Yumeji).

As Varad points out, the works are designed to be seen in a particular order. The initial paintings are warm and inviting (Su and Chow are together in most of them, becoming increasingly close) but as we move past the halfway stage the paintings become cooler, more distant; the protagonists are rarely seen together, each appears lost in their own thoughts. “It is like love and memory fading away over time,” he says.

Proprietorial fans of In the Mood for Love may be discomfited by one of his decisions: to depict a couple of scenes that didn’t appear in the film, and which might even be seen as going against its dominant mood. In the narrative, Chow and Su appear to decide that they won’t consummate their relationship. What they do or don’t do is (to a degree) open to interpretation, but it’s worth noting that Wong shot and then discarded a scene of the couple kissing – so there is no evidence of physical intimacy in the final cut. For many viewers this non-realisation of desire is what gives In the Mood for Love its particular appeal.

Varad, however, has painted not just that deleted kiss, but another scene that depicts the protagonists in bed together, looking furtively at the viewer. Did he have an alternative version of the film in his head? “I wanted a touch of mischievousness,” is his response, “but I also think it’s notable that in the film the only physical contact – leaning on each other, clasping hands – occurs when they are both sad, not in moments of happiness.” The bed painting is imbued with guilt: “It’s like they are asking the viewer if what they are doing is right or wrong. There is the sense of a love that can never be easy or smooth.”

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“Every scene is like a painting” is a cliche associated with In the Mood for Love, and turning its scenes into artworks might seem an obvious fanboyish thing to do. With the most faithful representations – such as one of Chow and Su walking away together after learning of their spouses’ transgressions – one might even initially wonder what the point is. But in the gallery space, mimicking the film’s womb-like aesthetic, it is easier to see how the paintings are a palpably different form. In the freezing of a moment so that one becomes attentive to things one might miss in a single, continuous viewing of the film: the colour and design of a lamp, the creases in a white shirt. Or how an arm, in mid-gesture, has a smudged quality, even when the other features are sharp. Some paintings have an almost impressionistic quality, such as the one of Su as a small figure against a wall, a familiar image from the film but very different in texture here: her features aren’t clearly delineated, instead one recognizes her by the bright green dress and the pose. The viewer fills in the details.

What attracted Varad was the possibility of capturing a tangible sense of movement within a still image. Painting portraits, he says, wasn’t something that had interested him much: “That was too static for me. Films, on the other hand, have movement and action, a mix of absence and presence.”

“As a viewer I don’t have control over how long I am looking at a film scene, but as an artist I want to make viewers linger over a particular feeling, without the pressure of the next frame.”

Cinema being by far the younger medium, there have been nods to painting throughout its history – from the 1936 film Rembrandt evoking elements of the great artist’s style (despite being shot in black and white) to more contemporary films that pay tribute to well-known art: a scene in Shutter Island that recreates Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss”, countless nods to Edward Hopper in films as disparate as Psycho and Blade Runner. Is the relationship now moving in the opposite direction? “It’s a two-way street, definitely,” says Varad, mulling other films that he might have used as inspiration “There are moments which have tempted me – the striking bathtub scene in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, for instance. Many beautiful scenes from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or La La Land, or Hitchcock’s works.”

What he is working on now, though, has no connection to cinema. It is a series that comes from his own imagination, influenced by Vermeer, but also making contemporary references. A painting he shows me on his phone depicts a topless woman sitting up in bed, looking like she might have come out of the Dutch Golden Age – except there is a mobile phone on the side-table, with the Bumble app visible. It is a compelling picture of loneliness, a theme that is close to Varad’s heart. “Life has got so busy now – even while eating you’re looking at the phone. People are afraid of solitude, but loneliness can be beautiful. A person lost in thought, making a small unselfconscious gesture – that’s very appealing to me.”

Online, one can still see some of the black-and-white illustrations Varad did during his own social-media phase: giant eyeballs, bird-tree hybrids in fantastical settings. These are vivid, playful creations, but they represent a phase he has left behind – they were a rite of passage, a way to attain clarity about what he really wanted to do. “My job as an artist is to slow people down when they come to a gallery.” In a world where creativity is under pressure from artificial intelligence, with its constant threat of getting things done fast – and from Instagram Reels that encourage rapid scrolling – Varad aims to do personal art that takes time – and then in turn demands time and introspection from the viewer too, a readiness to put the clutter of the world aside. “To stand and absorb, and have a silent moment.”

(More images of the artworks are here)

Unbridled fandom meets detailed analysis, in a new book about Vijay and Dev Anand

(Wrote this short review for India Today)
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A large number of Indian cinema publications are anecdote-driven or based on salacious behind-the-scenes-stories. Occasionally, though, a book is written with such care and attention to detail that it makes you want to drop everything and head straight to the films being discussed – so you can savour what the author saw in them, or disagree with her, or both at the same time. Tanuja Chaturvedi’s Hum Dono – a “guru-dakshina” for Vijay and Dev Anand and the classics they made together – is in this category.

Chaturvedi’s relationship with the Anand brothers’ Navketan films began in childhood (she got to meet Dev Anand at age five, an overwhelming experience for a girl who had only watched the charismatic star on the big screen) but took a new shape at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) where she learnt to appreciate Vijay Anand’s technical proficiency and “command over every aspect of filmmaking”. This was followed by a professional stint as Dev Anand’s chief assistant director.

Every facet of this long-lasting bond is represented here. The book has two dominant tones. One is that of the awestruck fan: the child who was rapt while watching films like Guide, as well as the adult who retained her passion for the Navketan flair, the songs, the modern approach to city life. The second tone, more pedantic, is that of the scholar and practitioner who knows a great deal about film history and likes to show off this knowledge, making references and connections that may seem whimsical or pretentious to a casual reader: from Camille Paglia’s take on the differences between men and women (in the context of gender roles in the 1961 Hum Dono) to fleeting invocations of Jungian psychology to a mention of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (while discussing the process of adapting RK Narayan’s The Guide for the screen).

And yet, somehow, these two modes come together very well in Chaturvedi’s chronological examinations of individual films – from 1957’s Nau do Gyarah to 1971’s Tere Mere Sapne. Notably, though the book is presented as a “Dev and Goldie story”, and though the author is a big fan of Dev Anand (the star and the person), she focuses a little more on Vijay Anand’s special qualities as a director. This includes analyses of the celebrated song sequences in films like Jewel Thief, Guide, and Johny Mera Naam, as well as Goldie’s intuitive understanding of framing and camera movement, the gambles he took with narrative structure, and how he incorporated a progressive sensibility into even his early work such as Kala Bazar. To read Hum Dono is to see an egalitarian passion for the medium, unconcerned with the usual labels and hierarchies – popular vs art, serious vs entertaining – that often restrict film analysis.

In praise of excess: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Padmaavat, related thoughts

(Wrote this for my Economic Times column, combining thoughts from a recent screening and an unrelated book launch)
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A Ukrainian film from 1965, a riverside scene by the Carpathian mountains. A young man, learning that his lover may have drowned, joins the search party looking for the body, stumbling about wildly – while the camera seems to teeter too, sometimes following him, sometimes going past him in delirious, looping, disorganised movements. There are similar compositions elsewhere in the film too, along with bold colours and the haunting use of music and reflections in otherworldly scenes such as the one where the man is visited by his lost love.

Watching Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors for the first time recently – on a big screen, at the Habitat film festival – I was thrilled by its showiness. (An old review which noted that the film was a one-of-its kind – “as if its director had simply discovered the camera, and how best to use it, by himself” – summed it up well.) The screening was preceded by a live piano performance that seemed to invite us to contemplate the horrors unfolding in present-day Ukraine; but poignant as this prelude was, when the film itself began we were immersed in its unusual, inventive telling of a tragic romance – the political lens, or the terrain’s broader history, was secondary.

Many people I know, always more preoccupied by plot or theme than by form, would call Parajanov’s film excessive. “Style over substance.” “Visuals drawing attention to themselves, at the expense of story.” These are banal allegations often directed at a certain type of flamboyant creative work. And they often come from viewers who have trouble opening themselves fully to the intense emotional palette of such a film – while being very keen to discuss it in the restricting terms of its ideological position or “message”. A few weeks ago I watched the controversial Emilia Perez, much-reviled (for, among other things, its depiction of Mexicans and trans-people) by those who look at cinema largely through an identity-politics lens. But watching it in the company of a friend who is, like me, fond of melodramatic forms of expression, it was entirely possible to be stirred and moved by the film’s splashy, emotionally demonstrative telling of a specific human story.

Despite loving plenty of quiet or minimalist films, I often find myself more stimulated by “excess” – by things that are labelled over the top (including, but not restricted to, popular Hindi cinema). Sometimes this serves cathartic functions: growing up, I preferred Dharmendra’s loud Veeru in Sholay to Bachchan’s reticent Jai, even though I shared more personality traits (and a name) with the latter. But perhaps there was a closet extrovert in me, knocking desperately from within at the shell of the inhibited boy?

I thought about this again during a recent discussion where Prathyush Parasuraman – author of a book about Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema – was asked about how much excess in cinema was “excessive” (the context being the dazzling opulence of Bhansali’s cinema, which can sometimes be too much to take even for his fans). Parasuraman’s answer touched on what the “baseline” is for each viewer – if kitchen-sink realism is your baseline, then Bhansali would of course seem painfully excessive. But for someone who has grown up with a view of cinema predicated on larger-then-life-ness, the baseline would be different.

Some of the most interesting things at the session were said by the academic-writer Madhavi Menon, who (sadly but predictably) was one of the few people in the room who was a serious Bhansali fan, and spoke eloquently about her love for the climactic sequence of Padmaavat – much criticised in “liberal” discussions for its supposed glorification of the idea that women must sacrifice themselves for honour; but analysed by Menon in terms of the recurring Sufi motifs in Bhansali’s cinema, including the idea of burning in desire, and of desire never ending in fulfilment. “The film does include commentary on how a certain type of Hinduism treats women, about the spurious notions of honour, about women’s bodies,” she pointed out, “All that politically is ingrained in the narrative. But the beauty of it is its treatment of desire unfulfilled.”

Speaking about how the politics of excess in Bhansali’s work, she said “He refuses to give us containment. And we are living in a world where everything is about containment and separation, about putting up walls. Everything needs to be in its own category, you cannot mix religion or food. Compare this injunction against mingling, which is the dominant political injunction in the world today, with his films, and tell me which is more politically brave.”

“Objecting to excess is an act of conservatism.”

She also amusingly remarked on the contrast between Bhansali’s work and strait-laced social-issue films such as the ones starring Ayushmaan Khurana – noting that such a film, even when it deals with a provocative subject like queerness, is “very heterosexual, straight, judgemental in its telling”. There is little to argue about.

Though I nodded along happily to most of what Menon said at the session, I’m not one to insist that a film should only operate in this or that mode – I have time for all sorts of films, including many that have easily digested takeaways. But I agree with Menon that some celebrated “restrained” films can be quite conservative in style and idiom, even when they espouse progressive politics (that they are “less than meets the eye”, to use an Andrew Sarris term). While the best work of a director like Parajanov or Bhansali can be fresh and provocative, full of conflicting energies, opening doors to new arguments and counter-arguments. 

[Two old posts about Padmaavat here and here]

Daaru as dawa: on liquor and its many uses in cinema

(An ex-colleague, the food historian and curator Anoothi Vishal, launched her dream project, The Food and Travel Almanac, a few days ago – and I got a chance to write for it. Here is my piece about liquor depictions, including the notorious Vat69 bottle, in Hindi cinema…)
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For someone who grew up in the shrine of popular Hindi cinema in the 1980s, and continues to find invigoration and meaning in that cinema – even its tackiest aspects – here is an indelible moment. Amrish Puri and Prem Chopra are seated in a dim-lit bar – the former looking villainous as villainous can be, the latter a bit subdued by his own high standards of leering bad-guy-ness, as if aware he is the sidekick here. Moments earlier the two men ran into sweet, fair-complexioned Meenakshi Seshadri. Now, as a waiter comes bearing a Chivas Regal bottle, Puri – in his booming voice – demands a Black Dog instead. Chopra asks for the reason behind this choice, and Puri replies with the immortal words: “Jiss din main koi gori titli dekh leta hoon, mere khoon mein sainkdon kaale kutte bhaunkhne lagte hain. Uss din main Black Dog peeta hoon.” (The English translation, which does no justice to the line, or to its grand delivery: “The day I see a white butterfly, many black dogs start barking together in my blood. Then I order a Black Dog instead.”)

This has to be the rapiest product plug ever, goes a comment on a Reddit page, and who could disagree with that assessment? Even though this is a respectable mainstream film for the time – the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Shahenshah, directed by Tinnu Anand, with a story credit for Jaya Bachchan (though one assumes she didn’t come up with the above dialogue!).

But then this was also a cinema of archetype and myth, with characters who were neatly classifiable as heroes and villains, victims and aggressors – as opposed to multi-dimensional people. In Shahenshah’s Wikipedia entry, Amrish Puri’s character JK is described simply as “the crime boss of Bombay” – which is exactly what he is. No detailing necessary.

And in these films, alcohol often became an easy shorthand for vice. An unforgettable scene in the 1971 Elaan gives us, in just a few seconds, these wondrous sights: a topless Madan Puri (Amrish’s older brother) on a massage table, white-skinned girls in floral bikinis cooing over him, fake currency notes hanging from a ceiling… and on a nearby table a Vat 69 bottle, the ultimate symbol of perdition in a time of import restrictions and desh-drohi (nation-betraying) smugglers. But you could find similar things in dozens of other films. Dons stocked illegally procured liquor in their ornate lairs (to go with the spiky walls, rotating floors, acid pools or predatory sharks that made up the rest of the decor). Clinking Scotch glasses and cackling, they made diabolical plans; their molls, including the film’s main vamp, imbibed too, in between replenishing the glasses. She was a clearly defined counterpoint to the virginal good girl, the heroine.

However, despite its archetypes, popular Hindi cinema could encompass different modes, provide multiple energies within the same film, and reach little truths within frameworks that are often dismissed as being “escapist entertainment”. In Deewaar, the brooding anti-hero Vijay shares a drink (and a smoke) in bed with his girlfriend Anita, a woman with an unsavoury past, identifiable as a vampish sort in the early scenes. On the surface, their cocktail of pre-marital sex, cigarettes, liquor and atheism (Vijay stays pointedly away from temples) spells Vice – we know these are not goody-two-shoes protagonists, and they won’t get a happy ending. The one time Anita says no to Vijay pouring her a drink, it is because she’s pregnant, and intending to enter a life of social legitimacy. And yet, even when they are living outside the law (judicial and societal), they are sympathetic figures, and we have more emotional investment in them than in the conventional romantic couple elsewhere in the film.

Meanwhile, an exuberant, fun-loving personality like Helen could cause us to rethink our notions about the vamp – especially when she was lighting up the screen, whiskey glass in hand, in musical sequences that transcended the rest of the film. Helen could even briefly tempt the Good Heroine into her shadowy world, as in a Gumnaam song where her character gets leading lady Nanda drunk and hic-hic-hiccing away.

There are other special cases when it comes to the drinking woman. The once-straitlaced Choti Bahu (Meena Kumari) in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam isn’t someone you’d expect to become alcoholic (she goes down that slippery slope in an effort to retain the companionship of her drunkard husband), but when this happens she remains a tragic, haunting figure for the viewer (even as she is condemned by her milieu). There are mild parallels here, incidentally, with an American film made that same year, 1962 – Days of Wine and Roses, in which a couple sink together into an alcoholic vortex.

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A few other manifestations of the Hindi-movie drinker bypassed the good-bad binary. There were those who were seen as existing outside the Indian mainstream – as in the stereotypical portrayal of Anglo-Indians as jolly eccentrics who always had a bottle in their hand (Prem Nath as the titular heroine’s father in Bobby, Om Prakash in a similar part in Julie). There were lovable character actors like Johnny Walker (supposedly a teetotaller in real life, despite his adopted name) and Keshto Mukherjee, who could slur and sway and bumble away comically without ever having to present the darker aspects of alcoholism.

And, above all, to use a common phrase of the time, there was the tragic hero or anti-hero, rendered brooding or self-pitying by unrequited love – the Devdas template, endlessly recycled through Indian-film history – or by the more general barbs of life, as was the case with Bachchan’s Angry Young Men from Namak Haraam onwards. Set against this, and often going alongside it, was the funny-drunk hero – though to pull this off you need someone with the comic skills of a Dharmendra (on the water tank in Sholay, or going crazy in the “Yamla Pagla Deewana” song in Pratigya with one hooch bottle tucked into his crotch and another in his hands). Or a Bachchan, who famously became a one-man army, often balancing the act of playing tragic drunk and comic drunk in the same film.

This brings me to another point: alcoholism in cinema – even the addiction variety, not just social drinking – can be more “fun” than alcoholism in real life. As a child I delighted in Bachchan’s many antics in films like Naseeb and Amar Akbar Anthony, and adored the “chooha-billi” song from Sharaabi – sung by a drunk hero, extolling the virtues of inebriation – despite the fact that in the real world I was frightened of an alcoholic father capable of violence. Someone else in this situation may understandably have been triggered, but for me the drunkenness of the characters on the screen was something abstract and removed; but it may also have been therapeutic in a way, substituting the “endearing” drunkard on screen for the one I was living with.

Naturally, as Hindi cinema has moved towards greater realism and sociological detail in the past two decades, there have been more nuanced depictions of alcohol and drinkers: films about people succumbing under work stress or peer pressure, or using liquor to submerge their loneliness (as the sad old professor, persecuted for his sexual orientation, does in Aligarh). But my childlike preference remains for films that manage to incorporate a certain over-the-topness in their liquor scenes.

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Thematically, alcohol is associated with certain cinematic genres or sub-genres. For instance, drunkenness is a common motif in films with a redemption arc – where a washed-up cop or sports coach gets one more chance. Or a bomb-dismantler, as in the 1949 British film The Small Back Room where a scientist must help defuse a bomb while dealing with the demons that have driven him to alcoholism. What is notable about this film, made by the great team of Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger, is that it merges kitchen-sink realism with surrealist fantasy. Though mostly a gritty, dialogue-driven production, it contains one scene – a nightmare of dislocation – with imagery worthy of Dali: conveying the hero’s fevered state of mind through twisted shadows, a ticking clock, and an impossibly large, misshapen bottle of liquor.

Then there is the crime film. If the smuggling of imported liquor (among other things) was a trope of 1970s Hindi cinema, including the Angry Young Man films, internationally too alcohol has long been associated with the gangster genre. One can even argue that this major Hollywood form was founded on the liquor trade, with the first wave of 1930s gangster films (among them The Public Enemy and The Roaring Twenties, which made a superstar of James Cagney) dealing directly with Prohibition. Though perhaps the wittiest, most economical depiction of that era’s zeitgeist comes in the opening sequence of a much later comedy, Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot. This is an almost wordless car chase featuring a vehicle that seems to be carrying a coffin – until bullets hit the wood, liquid starts spilling out, the lid is opened to reveal not a body but dozens of bottles… and then the words “Chicago, 1929” appear on the screen, telling us all we need to know.

For every instance of liquor-consumption being associated with style or coolness – take James Bond and those countless shaken-not-stirred martinis – there have been reminders, even within popular films, of the ill effects: in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant –more suave than any Bond could be – is force-fed alcohol by the villains, to make plausible their story that he accidentally drove his car off a cliff.

There is a caveat here, though: while the film makes it clear that Grant has a drinking problem, part of the reason why he survives the murder attempt is that he is a habitual drinker with a very high threshold. In different ways, many films touch on this aspect of liquor – that it is harmful in obvious ways, but can be nourishing or life-enhancing in other ways. The Danish film Another Round – about a group of teachers in a mid-life crisis – presents a view of alcohol as something that can destroy lives, must be moderated, but can also make life more focused – and bring you closer to your real, unbridled self.

Which brings us back to popular Hindi cinema and its intrinsic connection with “nasha”: both can offer escape into a realm where anything seems possible. Think about it: many of our song-and-dance sequences can be viewed as the constructs of an imagination high on possibilities. Or consider a two-fisted hero beating up the bad guys to restore order to an unfair world, and then in the next scene staggering about playing the fool. Maybe all that justice-dispensing is the fevered imagining of a man who has been turned into a superhero (in his own head) by booze. With that subtextual analysis, even a deliriously over-the-top Manmohan Desai film can seem like rigorous kitchen-sink realism.

And so, let the last word belong to a legendary character actor. In Amar Prem, as a pani-puri vendor is about to put imli ka pani into the little hollow “puri” for Om Prakash, the latter stops him, extracts a whiskey flask and says use some of this “pani” too. Masala cinema and liquor makes for an equally pungent combination.

A stoical cat, Bob Dylan, and a post-human world: quick thoughts on the animated film Flow

(from my Economic Times column)
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Come Oscar season, those of us who aren’t too interested in the competitive debates – which film was “better”, who “deserved” to win – can still enjoy watching a bunch of the nominated works close together, and trace distant links between them: visual or aural ones, thematic ones. This year, I found myself thinking about the many monuments that human beings build for (and to) themselves.

These could be the actual physical structures – beautiful and grand (or ugly and grand) buildings (The Brutalist), or immense statues. Or the art: Bob Dylan’s epoch-altering songs (A Complete Unknown). Or religious conceits: intense discussions about the legacy of a just-deceased Pope, and what message the successor’s appointment should send the world (Conclave). Or an attempt to transcend the circumstances of one's birth, as in Emelia Perez.

Yet my favourite of this year’s Oscar-plated films is one that’s concerned with how temporary all our monuments can be (even though they seem so significant and long-lasting on the human time-scale). I went into the Latvian film Flow – winner for best animated feature – knowing it would probably appeal to me because it bypasses the anthropocentric worldview: being set in an apparently post-human world where a motley group of animals and birds contend with climate change. But I wasn’t fully prepared for the mesmerising visuals and the elegiac background music (composed by director Gints Zibalodis). The images of flood-waters effortlessly covering the highest man-made structures (and the tallest trees). The traces of Ozymandias-like hubris everywhere (but not a person in sight).

Most of all, there is the film’s decision to have the animals communicate purely as animals – at least in terms of them not talking to each other. There are scenes – two rescue operations, for instance – that take the narrative forward by having the characters engage in human-like deliberation and planning. But a few other moments that might seem contrived or cutesy – e.g. a lemur meditating with hands spread out, or being possessive of the trinkets it has found – are rooted in the real-life behaviour of these creatures.

The central figure in this story of survival and adaptation is a grey cat who is observer, anchor, and our point of identification – and it’s remarkable how much has been achieved with this character who barely has any “personality” as we’d normally define that term. The cat’s standard expression is a wide-eyed, fearful contemplation – punctuated by little mews – of everything going on in this watery landscape, and of the new creatures it has to interact with. There are a nice couple of moments where it is shown tapping into its essential “cat-ness” – sharpening its claws on the side of a boat, knocking something off a higher surface to the ground, playfully grabbing the lemur’s long tail. But this apart, it is mainly a spectator, who gets by on luck as much as initiative. (Curiosity keeps this cat alive.) I came to see it as a version of the deadpan Buster Keaton, navigating crisis after crisis, more bemused than heroic.

But I also felt a kinship between Flow’s cat and the young Bob Dylan (played by Timothee Chalamet) in A Complete Unknown. Both are protagonists, everything pivots around them, they both move forward and the story follows them. And yet they are ciphers too, chronicling their times while also maintaining a detachment, an unwillingness to get too involved with the things everyone else around them is preoccupied with.

The early-1960s folk music in A Complete Unknown is about very human concerns – the civil-rights movement, the addressing of many forms of social injustice. The beautiful background score in Flow, on the other hand, is like a majestic cosmic symphony, a tribute to the continuing glories of a world that may not have any people left. Such a contrast can be misleading, because the latter score did after all come from a human mind too – as did the sense of lament that runs through this beautiful film. However, it might be said that the greatest music in Flow is the undiluted sound of the natural world: water flowing gently or roaring by, animals and birds making their own urgent noises rather than speaking in human voices. A celestial score that would be beyond the efforts of even a Dylan.

An Irawati Karve biography + The Girl with the Needle: scattered thoughts

A few days ago I attended a stimulating discussion about Irawati Karve and her work — it was centred on the new book Iru, coauthored by Karve’s granddaughter Urmilla Deshpande and the Brazilian anthropologist Thiago Pinto Barbosa. I first became acquainted with Urmilla/Umi around 17 years ago when I had written about Karve’s celebrated collection of Mahabharata essays Yuganta; I subsequently reviewed one of Umi’s books too, the short-story collection Slither: Carnal Prose. (She is genially miffed that no one knows about her previous work while this Karve book is a bestseller, and even mentioned it once during the session!)

Highlights, apart from the talk and the readings, included a terrific saxophone performance by Tissa Khosla (Umi’s son) of “Mack the Knife” -- a song that was composed in Germany in the 1920s, a time when Irawati Karve was working there (measuring skulls because she was expected to prove the superior reasoning skills of white people; her research led to no such conclusion, and it nearly cost her a PhD and got her into trouble).

I also enjoyed the points that Umi made about the many contradictions and complexities in her grandmother’s personality (feminist in one context, seemingly not so much in another; with traces of both irreligiosity and religiosity), her ability to change her views over time — and how each generation feels the previous generation didn’t do enough in the name of progressiveness.

Have begun reading the book and am enjoying it - fast-paced, clear and thoughtfully written even when dealing with weighty subjects (and therefore “fun” even while dealing with morbid things).

On a related note: it often happens, when you’re reading books and watching films close to each other, that unexpected little connections arise between two unrelated texts. A recent example: in my new screening space in Panchshila Park last week, I watched the Oscar-nominated Danish film The Girl with a Needle, full of stark and haunting black-and-white frames – none more so than the images of the protagonist’s husband, who has returned home after being badly mutilated in the first World War (the film is set in 1919-20). And then, yesterday, I read in the Karve biography about Karve’s daily glimpse of just such a man, during her commute in 1920s Berlin; see the text here.

(I was also reminded of the two versions -- one filmed in 1919, the other in 1938 -- of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, with the climactic sequence where real-life soldiers, many of them fearfully disfigured, play the role of dead soldiers who have arisen and march like zombies back to their homes…)

The little girl who lives on the edge – thoughts on children as adults onscreen

(Wrote this for my ET column)
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Among my most satisfying viewing experiences of last year was a film I should have watched decades earlier – the 1976 thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, with 12-year-old Jodie Foster (she turned 13 during the shoot) as a girl who draws much attention from other townsfolk because she appears to be living by herself, her father mysteriously missing (*cue Twilight Zone music*). Shot a few months after Foster’s more famous, Oscar-nominated performance as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, this role requires arguably an even greater display of poised “maturity”. I can’t discuss the plot without giving away spoilers, but suffice it to say that the protagonist Rynn runs a house and deals with adult visitors by herself, and even gets into a full-blown romantic relationship. And Foster is completely convincing throughout. She was a child prodigy in real life, hence perhaps well equipped to meet some of the demands of this part.

But the fact remains – she was barely a teenager. Does this knowledge make some difference to our perceptions? Was the shoot a “safe space” for her (to employ an overused phrase of today)?

There is a fleeting nude scene where Foster’s own older sister filled in as her body double – which means the adolescent was protected to a degree. But couldn’t that scene still result in a sexualising gaze directed at Rynn? What if a viewer doesn’t know about the body-doubling?

Then again, maybe this particular narrative is okay with such sexualising, maybe that’s even part of the point: the film is about a young person matter-of-factly leading an independent, self-sufficient life. In a sense the premise isn’t dissimilar from that of stories like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, about children placed in a position where they are reorganising a world, without supervision. In such cases, conventional notions about age-related appropriateness might not apply.

Anyway I thought about Foster again when a friend and I, discussing Shuchi Talati’s new film Girls will be Girls, mulled that the young lead Preeti Panagrahi was 20 or 21 when it was made, around three years older than her character (a schoolgirl named Mira). A three-or-four-year gap between actor and character doesn’t seem like much, but within the adolescence-teenage bracket it can mean plenty: a 19-year-old playing a 15-year-old can feel off-kilter, unrealistic, even inappropriate, in a way that a 50-year-old actor playing forty wouldn’t. But there are also reasons for such casting, when a very young person is depicted in certain situations. (Girls will be Girls has a discreetly presented masturbation scene involving Mira, and another where she tries to figure out how to put a condom on her boyfriend.)

A fictional character can be shown as doing anything – within the plausibility of the world being depicted – but it’s a grey area to have under-age actors enact things they might not have actual life experience of. And strict guidelines, parental supervision and intimacy coordinators aren’t always enough. Even the TV series Riverdale, known for being edgy and subversive, mainly used performers who were in their twenties when the first season was shot. (KJ Apa, who played Archie, was the youngest at 19, but even he felt a little too well-built and jockish for the iconic red-headed high-schooler. And Cole Sprouse, as Jughead, was twenty-four going on sixteen.)

We have come a long way (at least in mainstream films where many safety nets are in place) from the time when a six-year-old Shirley Temple was image-managed to be a wee replica of a glamorous adult star (to use Graham Greene’s controversial but accurate description, “infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult”), but even with the best intentions and more sensitised handling today, some scenes involving child actors can be discomfiting: e.g. 10-year-old Kiernan Shipka as Sally in Mad Men, “touching herself” while watching a TV show late at night; or a romantic kiss between Nicole Kidman and a child actor in Birth.

That said, some young performers are so canny and blasé in real life that lines get blurred. Auditioning for the lead in The Exorcist, 13-year-old Linda Blair casually said “she masturbates with a crucifix” while describing the film’s plot. A startled William Friedkin, after a glance at Blair’s real-life mother, asked the girl if she knew what that meant. “It’s like jerking off, isn’t it?” Blair said. “Have you ever done that?” Friedkin asked. “Sure, haven’t you?” Blair replied. Little wonder she got the part of the demon-possessed child. 

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P.S. as it happens Jodie Foster had major roles in as many as FIVE films that were released in 1976 – including at least two, Bugsy Malone (which is constructed on the conceit of child actors playing adult roles) and Freaky Friday (mother-daughter switching bodies) that by their very nature require forms of “adult acting”. Because she had a career lull in the 1980s, it is easy to forget that her childhood acting stint was solid all by itself.

(Another somewhat related piece on child performers, in a Chaplin and Kiarostami film, is here.)