I come to praise Olivia Colman (though the Oscar nerd in me doesn’t want her to win the best actress award)

For a First Post series about the Oscars, I set out to make the “shocking” declaration that I didn’t want Olivia Colman to win this year. But of course, the piece ended up more as a Colman tribute, as everything eventually does…
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Since even those of us who are Oscar sceptics or agnostics tend to make award-related declamations at this time of year, here’s one: I’d rather Olivia Colman didn’t win best actress for The Lost Daughter.

But before I am impaled on that statement, damned by film buffs with impeccably good taste, let me sue for peace with the following clarification: like most sentient people who have watched any of her work, I am a big Colman fan. I have enjoyed everything I have seen her do, from her leading role in Broadchurch to smaller but powerful parts in films like Murder on the Orient Express or shows like The Night Manager.

I even liked her as Queen Elizabeth II in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown, though that might be considered a thankless role, a waste of an actor with such a vibrant personality: by the time Colman played the monarch, Elizabeth had been turned into a cipher, a polestar around which the other characters – including volatile people like Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher – orbited and curtseyed. (Claire Foy, who played the younger version of Elizabeth, at least got a chance to depict a princess still sorting out tumultuous personal relationships, who hadn’t fully settled into placing duty above emotion.)

In fact, my favourite Olivia Colman Crown moment was a video of her and other cast members, in full costume, performing a little dance between filming – freed of the encumbrance of her role, here she was, goofy smile in place, gliding around and waving her arms more enthusiastically than anyone else. It was delightful (here's the YouTube link), and it made one feel like all monarchies would be a lot cooler if queens modelled themselves on Olivia Colman.

Even in last year’s The Father, which was emphatically an Anthony Hopkins film with an author-backed role for the octogenarian – who won his second Oscar for it – I never thought Colman was overshadowed: as the despairing daughter of a dementia-afflicted man, she effortlessly caught the many shades of a caregiver playing a supporting part in someone else’s story – balancing love, concern and guilt with the knowledge that she must find a way to move on with her life, otherwise she might break down herself. Anyone who has been in a comparable situation should be able to relate with every trace of self-doubt or hurt or exasperation that flitted across her expressive face.

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If Colman played a child struggling with her duties toward a parent in The Father, in her current Oscar-nominated role in The Lost Daughter she plays someone who carries an even greater weight of societal expectation: a mother. On holiday in Greece, as middle-aged college professor Leda observes the shenanigans of a boisterous family around her, she is led into memories of her time as a young mom burdened with the “crushing responsibility” of children – at a point in her life when she was trying to concentrate on her work and make a name in the competitive, exclusionary, often sexist world of academia.

Colman vividly depicts Leda’s surfaces – here is someone who tries to be polite and social up to a point but also has an innate impatience and doesn’t suffer fools gladly – while also letting us sense something of her restless inner life: does she really regret some of the choices she made in the distant past, or was it all inevitable? Is it possible to both love your children and, on some level, wish you had never had them?

It’s a stunning performance. And yet, to return to the blasphemy that kicked off this piece, I would be a tad annoyed if she were to win best actress this year.

This has nothing to do with the quality of her work, or with the idea that there is someone better or more deserving in the competition. (I am in no position to make such judgements anyway, having watched only one of the other best actress-nominated performances – Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos. She was okay, though perhaps that’s my bias speaking – only Lucy can play Lucy.) In any case, the idea that Oscars go to the objective “best” in a category is the sort of conceit that only a child can believe in – it has never been true of any competitive awards in the arts.

No, there are other, more whimsical reasons. One is a residue from the nerdy adolescent years I spent being obsessed with the Oscars. Obsessed, not because I hoped that my favourites would win, but because I was interested in the awards’ long history and in their complicated workings: I spent a lot of time poring over analyses and charts and alternate-world scenarios to try and understand how many combinations of factors (apart from merit) went into determining both the shortlist of nominees and the eventual winners.

One of those factors, for example, was the “holdover” prize, a term used for a situation where an admired actor (or director, or sometimes a writer or cinematographer) doesn’t win for their most celebrated work but is compensated later by being awarded for something that most people agree isn’t their best. Much-discussed examples include James Stewart getting best actor In 1940 for what was mainly a solid supporting part in The Philadelphia Story (it was widely seen as a holdover for his iconic role in Mr Smith Goes to Washington the previous year); or Al Pacino winning for Scent of a Woman decades after not winning for The Godfather films or Dog Day Afternoon. This also applies to the lifetime-achievement awards given to legends who never won in the competitive categories in their prime.

But if the holdover is a well-known Oscar phenomenon, what about the inverse situation, where an actor is awarded relatively early in a career for what might not be his or her most worthy work… and then, just a few years later, they do something truly extraordinary but now the feeling in the air is: should this person get a second award so soon?

Olivia Colman might be in that situation this year. A mere three years ago she won best actress for a very flamboyant role as the depressed, tantrum-throwing Queen Anne in The Favourite. She was terrific (again, lest I haven’t made it clear: Colman is terrific in everything), but the rub was that Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz had equally central parts (the film was really about their characters’ rivalries) and were very good in less showy roles; and yet they were relegated to the supporting actress category. Given this minor injustice, the old Oscar pedant in me feels it's too soon for Colman to get another best actress prize.

The other reason has to do with a weird protectiveness I feel about Colman – I’d prefer her to stay relatively unsullied by Oscar’s claws.

Though the awards throughout their history have tried to balance or spread the acting honours among a wide swathe of performers, they occasionally latch on to a few actors as perpetual favourites or contenders. And when Oscar fixates thus on people, more often than not it has the effect of straitjacketing them, making them look boringly honourable.

Consider Katharine Hepburn, who was one of my favourite actors (in a certain sort of role) and more importantly one of my favourite public personalities of the last century, but whose final three best actress Oscars – all given after she turned 60 – had an element of myth-making and canonising to them. (One of those awards – in the hot-button “issue” film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – came a few months after Hepburn’s long-time partner Spencer Tracy died, and she saw it as much as a posthumous award for him; the last, for On Golden Pond, felt like another sympathy gesture for a film that had brought two screen legends – her and the terminally ill Henry Fonda – together for the first time in their seventies.) Hepburn didn’t win for some excellent performances earlier in her career in small gems like Alice Adams or Summertime, but the floodgates opened once she went past a certain age and could be treated as a grande dame performing nobly in “significant” works.

More recent entrants in this club of patron saints have included Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis and, most recently, Frances McDormand, who won a third best actress Oscar last year for Nomadland (a film that you’re only supposed to watch in reverential silence and discuss in hushed tones). McDormand is a wonderfully unpredictable presence who first won for the lovely, offbeat Fargo, but now she has been shoehorned into the Hall of Worthies, doomed for all time to bear the insignia “three-time Academy Award winner” before her name.

Maybe, in the end, that’s all there is to my wish: I want Olivia Colman to escape the morbidly respectable fate of becoming a multiple Oscar winner while she’s still just in her forties. She’s too dynamic and too interesting for such overrated honours. Even as a queen, she looks better kicking up her heels in a behind-the-scenes dance act than sitting on a throne with a heavy crown on her head and a stoical look on her face.

[Earlier First Post pieces are here]

On the new marital (erotic) thriller Deep Water

Had hoped for more from this new film based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel (and directed by Adrian Lyne, who is still making erotic thrillers in his eighties… which could be part of the problem here). The film retains the snails that so often appeared in Highsmith’s writings, but it’s just as sluggish as they are. Wrote this for First Post
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Anyone familiar with the dark and caustic writings of Patricia Highsmith will know that her work didn’t show a high regard for human nature – or for sacred human institutions like marriage. Across a range of short stories, Highsmith depicted marriage as a form of self-cannibalising in which personalities are swallowed up, laying bare the many ways in which spouses can wound, dominate or play games with each other (while also masochistically inflicting hurt on themselves).

For instance, in the chilling “When the Fleet was in at Mobile”, a diffident woman (who might be an unreliable protagonist) escapes her bullying husband after administering him a dose of chloroform – but finds that it isn’t so easy to return to a happy past. Even in the more light-hearted Highsmith stories about husbands and wives, you learn not to bat an eyelid when you come across a passage like this: “Sarah’s idea was to kill Sylvester with good food, with kindness, with wifely duty.” (That’s from “The Fully Licensed Whore, or The Wife”.) Or this from “The Breeder”, where a man finds himself with 17 children after barely a decade of marriage: “He was just sane enough to realise that his mind, so to speak, was gone. He was aware that he didn’t want to go back to work, didn’t want to do anything.”

I haven’t read Highsmith’s 1957 novel Deep Water, but I had no trouble identifying her touch in the broad outlines of the new film by that name – even if the story has been modernised and altered. (In an early scene, an oddball mix of the very new and the very quaint, a little girl asks Alexa to play “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”.)

Deep Water centres on the relationship between Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas), with their interactions making it obvious (even for those who go in knowing nothing about the plot) that there is something off, or unconventional, about their marriage. On the one hand they have been together for years, they have a child, the family appears stable (they even get a puppy!), and they seem to socialise often with a common group of friends. But Vic and Melinda don’t sleep in the same room, and when he sees her making out with a young man at a party, it isn’t presented as a shocking betrayal that will blow their relationship apart: Vic is disturbed but not exactly surprised, and he deals with the situation in his own private way – by telling the young man, pleasantly, that he had killed another of Melinda’s special “friends”.

This little episode sets the plot in motion, paving the way for the tension that arises when the body of that missing friend turns up a while later. More deaths follow. It’s hard to really talk about specifics, so I’ll be vague and say that our ideas about Vic – what he is and isn’t capable of doing – change as the story progresses (perhaps some of it comes as a surprise to him too). But around halfway through, as the ambiguity of the early scenes is lost and we get a clearer sense of what exactly is happening, the film also becomes more predictable and refuses to gather steam as a thriller.

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While many of Highsmith’s writings (not just her famous Ripley novels) have been adapted for the screen, it isn’t the case that the adaptations are always faithful: arguably the most well-known film based on a Highsmith book, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), made a crucial alteration in the book’s plot, allowing the leading man to retain his moral compass in keeping with the pressures of studio-era Hollywood. So Deep Water shouldn’t be judged on how closely it adheres to its source.

But this point has to be made: by moving the story to the present day, the film inevitably changes the way we look at its characters and their situation. What was transgressive, dangerous or at least very uncommon in small-town America in the 1950s – an open marriage and its effect on a community – is much less so today, and this blunts the edge of the main situation. What director Adrian Lyne and his writers Zach Helm and Sam Levinson seem to have done to compensate for this is to make the Vic-Melinda relationship more sexually charged, with much of that current coming from the arrangement between them: Vic is often an inexpressive, unemotional fellow (which partly accounts for Melinda’s frustrations), but he is most turned on by his wife, becomes most alive and passionate, when he sees or imagines her in sexual situations with other men.

So this is a thriller that’s largely about male jealousy and what it might lead to. In keeping with that focus, the perspective we get throughout is Vic’s: the things he sees or hears, or thinks about. Even while living in the same house, he often watches Melinda like a stalker, spying on her – while she speaks on the phone or dances with someone – through stairways and halls and corridors. He isn’t a “normal” husband, he says more than once – he doesn’t want to control her. But what is he doing exactly? What game are they playing? The real workings of their relationship (how they fell in love in the first place, how things changed over time) never quite become clear. And this is largely because we don’t get Melinda’s untrammelled point of view – we might conjecture that she does what she does because she is deeply in love with Vic and wants to stoke his hidden fires, but there isn’t enough evidence of this.

The result is an uneven, oddly paced film that feels like some connecting scenes mysteriously went missing in the editing room. It has a couple of funny moments early on, and other promising touches: for instance, the snails that Vic is breeding and seems to be obsessed with. (Snails were a Patricia Highsmith obsession too, they appear in many of her stories, including the horror stories. And they seem to fit this tale for another reason: the creatures have fluid sex lives, being hermaphrodites with both male and female reproductive organs.) But the scenes where the protagonists banter, or fight, aren’t anywhere near as electric as they might have been, and one key character – a writer who seems to suspect Vic of very dark things and see this situation as material for a new novel – never quite makes sense. (By the climax, he comes across as unintentionally funny.)

Most of all – and this may be the cardinal sin given that it’s directed by Lyne, whose stock in trade has been middlebrow erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction, 9 ½ Weeks, Unfaithful and Indecent Proposal – this isn’t a particularly sexy film. And this despite the presence of Ana de Armas who manages to be both sensuous (even while she is presented to us through Vic’s controlling, insecure gaze) and a basically sympathetic, melancholy figure. If she had been given more screen time, if we had a clearer sense of what Melinda feels about her situation and what exactly is at stake for her, this may have been a better film all around.

A podcast about 50 years of The Godfather

For a Times of India podcast that's now online (link here), I rambled a bit about The Godfather on its 50th anniversary - mainly providing context about the changes in American cinema in the late 1960s, the advent of the "kids with beards", and Francis Ford Coppola's personal history. (Did he relate with Michael on some level, given the nature of his own relationship with his big brother August?) Also some of my favourite moments in the trilogy, including the gloriously melodramatic ending of Part 3.

My bit starts around the 9-minute mark, but do listen to the nice insights provided by director Vikramaditya Motwane.

 

P.S. in the podcast I mention some of those great dissolves in The Godfather Part II, transitioning from Michael in the present to Vito in the past. Here are two of them: the second scene, as the writer Ryan Gilbey noted once, makes it seem like Michael is being absorbed into his father’s body. (Think about it in a certain light and it also looks like a moment from a Cronenberg film like The Brood. Or from the creepy opening-credit sequence of De Palma's Sisters.)
For a very long time (before the 1995 film Heat was made) these scenes were also the answer to the movie-nerd trick question “Have Al Pacino and Robert De Niro ever appeared in the same frame in a film?”

Nightmare Alley – the old one and the new one (and a discussion about “carnival noir”)

A belated sequel to the film noir discussions I had with my online group a year ago. As some of you would know, Guillermo Del Toro’s new film Nightmare Alley is one of the best picture nominees at the Oscars this year. Based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, it centres on a young drifter named Stanton who goes from being a carnival worker to swindling rich people as a mind-reading “spiritualist”. The story was first filmed in 1947, with Tyrone Power uncharacteristically cast in the lead – the film didn’t do too well when it came out, but it developed a cult following in later decades and is now viewed as a key work of that incredibly rich period for film noirs, the late 1940s. 

 

I watched both films earlier this week, and enjoyed them. (Note: Del Toro, though he’s a huge movie enthusiast himself, sees his version as a direct adaptation of the novel rather than a remake of the 1947 film. I haven’t read the book, but it’s easy to see that the new film could do more explicit things with the subject matter than a 1940s film could.) I thought it might be interesting to have a discussion not just about the two versions but also more generally about that sub-genre of American cinema, the dark carnival narrative set in a subterranean world populated by social outcastes or “geeks”. This could include films that are set entirely in carnivals or circuses or fairgrounds – like the 1932 classic Freaks – or films with important scenes in that dangerous-seeming environment: e.g. Orson Welles’s Lady from Shanghai or Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. 

 

(The carnival was a very important space in American pop culture of a certain period, definitely from the 1920s to the 1950s – in some books and films it has almost as transformative a function as the forest/aranyak has had over a much longer period in literature, ranging from the vanns of Indian mythology to Shakespeare’s Arden. And I think Stanton’s journey in Nightmare Alley is a fine example of the carnival as portal or distorting mirror.)

 

I have sent prints of the films to my online group, and hope to schedule a discussion for next week or next weekend. Anyone else who’s interested, let me know (mail me at jaiarjun@gmail.com) and I’ll send the films across.

“Whoa, that’s the same person?” (and other thoughts in the binge-viewing era)

(Did this piece for the Economic Times. More soon on other epiphanies involving performers whom one sees in different contexts across shows and films)
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A few months ago I watched the veteran Irish actor Ciaran Hinds play Julius Caesar in the series Rome. Hinds has been a familiar presence in many films and shows (he is an Oscar nominee this year for Belfast), and here he was in the Ides of March scene, blood-soaked, flailing about, and Et-Tu-ing. What I didn’t know though was that the same actor had once played the perpetrator of a famous underhanded killing from Indian mythology: the night-time guerrilla attack on the Pandava camp in the Mahabharata. A younger, leaner Hinds was Ashwatthama in Peter Brook’s stage and screen productions of the epic (he also doubled up as Nakula – anyone can – on stage).

I first watched the Brook film in the early 1990s, but have revisited it since, and shown scenes from it during a Mahabharata-in-pop-culture online course I taught with my writer friend Karthika Nair. You could even say I was over-familiar with it. And yet I never made the Hinds connection until I happened to flip through a book about the production. It is one of a few “Whoa! That was the same person?” moments I have had lately, while watching actors across a range of shows and films.

There are too many such epiphanies to list here, but another recent one was the realisation that the educator Kamla Chowdhry in the new historical show Rocket Boys was played by the same actress (Neha Chauhan) who was the salesgirl in Love, Sex aur Dhokha more than a decade ago. LSD was a favourite film back in the day, and I remember wondering what had happened to its lower-profile actors. But it took a perusal of IMDB before I made the connection between the T-shirt-and-jeans-clad Rashmi, emotionally abused by a co-worker, and the elegant Kamla.

Such lack of recognition is understandable in some cases: say, when an actor whom one doesn’t know well is heavily made up. (I was astonished to find that the Danish actor David Dencik, from the crime show The Chestnut Man, was also the worried Mikhail Gorbachev, “apologising to friends and enemies” – as a current Russian leader is definitely not doing – in Chernobyl.) But at other times one wonders if the old brain cells and memory receptors are corroding fast due to age.

For obvious reasons I prefer alternate explanations, so here’s one: such disorientation is inevitable in this cluttered era of movie-and-series viewing (or as some nasty people put it, “content consuming”). We have a much larger pool of things to see than ever before: those of us who move outside comfort zones (rather than obediently following algorithms) might, in the same week, watch a Tamil film followed by a Nordic crime series and then a mainstream Hindi film populated by shiny debutants who turn out to be the grandchildren of actors we knew in the 1980s. We encounter a number of performers, across cultures and genres, whom we may have only seen fleetingly before.

How this affects you – or whether you even realise it – also hinges on the type of viewer you are. I am the sort who keeps a film’s or show’s Wikipedia page open while watching it, so I can check little things like an interesting performer’s filmography, or (in the case of a convoluted narrative) a plot point that wasn’t clear. This is partly necessitated by being a professional writer who must take notes, but it is a personality kink too. I don’t understand how people binge their way through show after show after show without taking a break to process what they have just watched (and give their eyes a rest), to think about performance, visual design, narrative structuring. And this isn’t about age-related fatigue: even as a much younger, fresher movie buff, I couldn’t bring myself to watch three or four films back to back at a festival.

Which is not to say that such confusion didn’t happen in an earlier time. As a teenager getting into world cinema in the early 1990s (when one didn’t constantly have information on one’s fingertips via the internet), I remember how thrilling it could be to form an impression of a previously unencountered actor’s persona or “type” in a foreign film, and then to subsequently see him or her in a very different role or environment. After watching Toshiro Mifune as the scruffy, bearded Samurai in Edo period settings in Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress, how weird to see him as a clean-shaven cop, walking the noirish mean streets of 1940s Japan in contemporary clothes in Stray Dog.

Once, upon realising that Chishu Ryu, the old man in the Japanese classic Tokyo Story, was still only in his forties and youthful-looking in other films of the time, I wondered if this was a case of extraordinary versatility or a viewer’s disconnect caused by unfamiliarity. Would a non-Indian viewer, wading bravely into popular Hindi films of the 1980s, have a similar experience if he saw Rajesh Khanna for the first time as the elderly man in Avtar (another Tokyo Story-like film about the generational divide and the neglect of old people)? Would this viewer be astounded if he then saw RK as he was at the time, still playing romantic hero – even if the films and performances were pedestrian? 

These are questions to ponder, but alas, one can only think about them – if one does – in the very narrow spaces between our binge-watching sessions.

A rant about 'respected' RWA members (and a Cat People video)

A couple of weeks ago there was a nice online discussion about the lovely anthology Cat People (edited by Devapriya Roy), in which I have an essay about my mother and about our cats of old. The link to the video is here. As you can see, around the 30-minute mark, I briefly activate my Activist Mode and rant about people in my neighbourhood who say that we "should think of human welfare instead of animal welfare”. (As if those are mutually exclusive things, and as if we don't already live in a completely human-shaped-and-dominated world.) The most dramatic-sounding thing I said during the session — though in my view it’s still an understatement — was: This planet is almost dead because of thousands of years of “human welfare”.

 

I have written various posts about this broad subject before (this for instance), but the most recent provocation happened at a colony meeting where the agenda was for the AWBI to mediate between those who feed dogs and those who have various issues with the colony’s animals and their carers. (I’m trying to choose my words carefully: one of the things we have been encouraged to do as part of these conciliatory efforts is to not use polarising terms such as “animal lovers” and “animal haters”, which pave the way for each side to label, alienate or judge the other. That makes sense to me anyway; for reasons that I won’t get into here, I don’t instinctively think of myself as an “animal lover” or even a “dog lover”. It’s more complicated than that.)

 

Anyway, this meeting began with the amicus curiae, an Animal Welfare Board representative, spelling out the salient issues facing small, congested colonies like ours — including the need to clearly designate feeding spots — and the importance of setting up an “animal welfare committee”. At the very first mention of this dangerous-sounding term “animal welfare”, a Respected Elderly Man cleared his throat very loudly, looked around to make sure that all eyes were on him (this is usually a prelude to terrifying things; we see it all the time at literature festivals when audience questions are invited after a session), and said, in the grand, pause-laden manner of one who thinks he is delivering a scintillating insight (or witticism) that has never before been voiced: “I would like to ask a question. [Solemn pause.] We are hearing this term ‘animal welfare’ a lot. May I ask, is there also such a thing as… *human* welfare?”

 

This particular octogenarian, not surprisingly, was a former RWA president himself. Again not surprisingly, he succeeded in disrupting the flow of the amicus curiae’s measured talk and drawing chuckles from most of the people gathered there: both those who approved of what he was saying and those who wanted to indulge him or “lighten” the atmosphere. *He* wasn’t joking though: he truly, genuinely believed in the validity of what he was saying. And this despite having lived in Saket long enough to know firsthand of a time, a mere 50-55 years ago, when we homosapiens began encroaching on what was then forest land. 

 

I try not to be judgemental of people who have led almost fully anthropocentric lives: I know from firsthand experience that it isn’t easy (especially if you’ve always been in an urban environment or if you have large human families to worry about) to develop a serious interest in — to *look closely at and think about* — other species. This June will mark 10 years since my Foxie went. Before she came into my life in 2008, I barely registered the presence of dogs, even though my mother was crazy about them. (Some of the most ardent animal-carers I know have had similar life trajectories. One of them, Hemali Sodhi, has written movingly in her Introduction to The Book of Dog about a time when she was terrified of dogs.) But even so, I am sometimes stunned at the realisation that so many “honourable” senior members of our societies — people who have reached high positions in their respective fields — think of other creatures as nothing more than pests that have to be put up with (because, well, all those animal lovers make such a noise). Screenshots of yesterday’s Supreme Court order, misinterpreted by many people as saying that it is no longer permitted to feed street animals, are being used as a bludgeon by countless RWAs to bully animal-feeders even more, especially the ones who don’t have a good support system around them. The gloating messages I have been seeing about this on my colony WhatsApp groups provide a clearer sense of why things are now so bad for this planet than any politically charged Left-vs-Right arguments can. 

 

More on this soon. (I wish I could disclose details of some conversations from the meetings or almost-meetings with the RWA, but that would be unwise. Some of it should go into a book anyway.) Meanwhile, do watch the Cat People video if you feel like, and do consider picking up the book too. It's a great collection.