A classroom tryst with nepotism: on the obscure origins of Princess Leia

Whatever your views on nepotism in cinema, it can make things a lot easier for a film teacher trying to provide points of identification to young students. During a panel discussion on Satyajit Ray at Jindal University a few weeks ago, we oldies were chattering familiarly about Sharmila Tagore, with full confidence that everyone in the audience would know who she was – then I noticed the students looking blank or confused, and briefly considered interrupting my fellow panellist and yelling out “We are talking about Sara Ali Khan’s grandmother!” (Something similar could have been done with Jaya Bhaduri – whose name also came up – as Navya Nanda’s nani.)

 

And then there are serendipitous moments like the one I experienced while showing a short clip from Singin in the Rain in class a few weeks ago. The scene in question was mainly to illustrate a point about the difficult transition from silent films to “talkies”, but as I ended the clip it happened to pause at the exact moment where Debbie Reynolds makes an appearance, jumping out of a cake at a party. 

 

Hit by sudden inspiration, I asked if any of the students knew the Star Wars films. Yes, came the response from many of them. You know Princess Leia? I asked (briefly nervous that they would only know Star Wars through recent fan fiction, and nothing at all about the original films). Yes of course, they said. “Well,” I said, feeling like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, or a Jabba out of a Hutt (or a Debbie out of a cake), “Princess Leia was played by an actress named Carrie Fisher, and this young woman you see here was her mother – in real life, I mean.”

 

Interested murmurs filled the classroom, but in this moment of triumph I went and overreached. Remembering who had played Leia’s mother in the Star Wars prequels, I said “Does she look anything like Natalie Portman to you?” Blank stares. They had probably watched the original Star Wars because their parents had made them, but they were too young to know who Natalie Portman was…

The boy stood on a sinking island: about Anees Salim's The Bellboy

I loved Anees Salim’s latest novel The Bellboy, and rank it with earlier favourites such as Vanity Bagh, Tales from a Vending Machine and The Small-Town Sea. Here is another demonstration of how Salim can bring so much life and vigour – and, yes, joy – to a story that, in a broader sense, is arcing towards tragedy and decay. (This was also particularly true of The Blind Lady’s Descendants, a book-length suicide letter that somehow managed to be uplifting and even affirmative.)
Wrote this short review of The Bellboy for India Today…

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At one point in Anees Salim’s deeply moving new novel, the protagonist Latif – a young island boy working at a lodge on the mainland – mulls a newspaper headline he had read earlier. “Saffron Sweeps Nation” was the headline, but since Latif, with his very limited English, can’t be sure, he rearranges the words in his head as he tries to fall asleep. Was it “Nation Saffron Sweeps”? “Nation Sweeps Saffron”? Much later, when the words reappear at a crucial moment in his life, he will still be unable to understand their import.

In the hands of many writers, this political headline – and its appearance in Latif’s story – might be used in a straightforward way to underline the plight of the lower-class Indian Muslim: in danger of being hounded, distrusted, made a scapegoat, or disproportionately punished. But Salim is such a fine storyteller, so good at immersing us in his characters’ worlds, he seems incapable of being pedantic in that way. The beauty of the final, shattering passages of The Bellboy (including a menacing conversation between Latif and a policeman) lies in the fact that while this *can* be read as a story about the vulnerability of minorities, stranded on a fast-sinking island, it doesn’t have to be read that way; either way, it retains its power as a specific tale about a specific person.

Anyone who has experienced Salim’s work over the past decade will know this quality. As a long-time fan, I felt his last novel The Odd Book of Baby Names was a little less effective than his best work, mainly because it moved between the stories of a dozen characters, so we never got much time with a single one of them. With The Bellboy, Salim returns to the form that made earlier novels like Vanity Bagh and Tales from a Vending Machine so brilliant and empathetic. He gives us a single unforgettable protagonist, makes us care for Latif even as we see his little missteps and foibles – or rather, the qualities that make him as human as any of us. Even when Latif is a victim – of poverty, of circumstance, possibly of bigotry – he is so many other things. He is the boy who, in one marvelous tragic-comic passage, finds himself in the blasphemous position of reading surahs from the Quran for a just-deceased uncle while aware that he is still wearing a condom under his trousers. It’s a laugh-out-loud moment, yet it doesn’t take away from the solemnity of the occasion – and there are countless passages like this across Salim’s body of work. (I think about Hasina reflexively shouting “Allahu Akbar” right back at a “terrorist” during an airport drill in Tales From a Vending Machine.)

In keeping us rooted to Latif’s consciousness, Salim gives us – as he so often has in the past, particularly with characters like Hasina, Imran and Amar – the many shades and layers of a life. When people commit suicide in their rooms in Paradise Lodge, where Latif works, he watches as the hotel manager tucks away their valuables before calling the police. Witnessing an awkward moment involving a woman, her lover and the doleful husband who has been cuckolded – and surprised by how quickly matters are hushed up, even with the police involved – he wonders if the two men had shaken hands at the end, or exchanged shirts the way footballers did.

We follow his little triumphs, along with his fear that trouble will come for him precisely at a moment of glory, his attempt to be a saviour when a boat carrying a group of convent girls stalls, his crippling sadness about the death of his father, his concern for his mother and sisters, and for the island that has been declared doomed by visiting ecologists, his creation of an alter-ego named Ibru, when he tells stories to a sympathetic co-worker. There is no idealising – instead there is a portrait so truthful and multi-layered that it no longer seems useful to think of a person in such limiting terms as “good” or “bad”, “happy” or “unhappy”, “ours” or “theirs”. This makes Salim’s work more capacious than many novels with grander canvases can be, and The Bellboy is a worthy addition to his oeuvre. 

(Earlier posts about Anees Salim's work: The Small-Town Sea, A tree named Franklin, The Odd Book of Baby Names)

‘Gory’ tera gaon bada pyaara: slasher queen on the Yellow Brick Road

In my Economic Times column, I wrote about two great new films by Ti West -- X and its prequel Pearl. (Pleased that the print layout for the column, which you can see here, uses an image of Pearl and the scarecrow – Pearl is most unlike Dorothy in this scene, and we definitely aren’t in Kansas any more)
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Among the many ways of being an incurable movie nerd, here are two. You might love bright Technicolor movies from the 30s and 40s, in genres like the coming-of-age musical or the family weepie (or something like Meet Me in St Louis, which combines both). Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, you can be a fan of the dimly lit slasher films of the 70s, seedy in content and appearance, with much chopping and chainsaw-ing of limbs as well as some gratuitous pre-carnage sex.

Or, maybe, you like meta-commentary on cinema and how it became a channel for dreams and nightmares, aspirations and destroyed hopes.

I enjoy all of the above, and if someone had told me that a contemporary filmmaker, on a modest budget, had simultaneously shot two movies (set in the same dramatic universe) that covered these genres while also mashing them up, I would have found this hard to believe. But here is writer-director Ti West and his team, notably the wonderful actress Mia Goth. West’s slasher film X (on Prime Video) is about young pornographers running afoul of an ancient couple (and an equally wrinkled reptile) on a Texas farm in the late 1970s. The prequel Pearl, set 60 years earlier during the first World War (and another global pandemic), is about the youth of the wizened antagonist Pearl whom we met in the first film. Both are horror-gore movies, broadly speaking, but they are also about the need to get “a ticket out” to a better life; about what the passage of time can do to us; and the empowering thrill of performing for a camera and an audience.

And their aesthetics are breathtakingly different, so much so that it’s hard to believe they were conceptualised and made around the same time, by the same crew. But the visual differences between the films are essential to their depiction of the characters’ frames of mind, the gap between dreams and disappointment to come, as well as a commentary on how the cinematic landscape changed over those six decades.

X is shot in the gritty, de-saturated style of 1970s B-horror (such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which has now become a canonised work of the genre), complete with explicit sex scenes that will remind you of the heyday of the unselfconsciously raunchy teen-horror film right up to the Friday the 13th and Evil Dead franchises. Pearl, on the other hand, deliberately employs the dazzling look of the Hollywood musical just as it had started to employ colour stock, most notably with The Wizard of Oz. (Though this narrative is set two decades before the iconic 1939 film was made, there are thematic links or contrasts between the stories of Pearl – who, in one memorable scene, molests a scarecrow – and Dorothy.) It is, first, a film about cine-love and about the desire to become one of those stars you see on the big screen; only after that is it also a horror movie about the birth of insanity in a young woman who realises she will never get a ticket to that distant constellation.

For me, experiencing Pearl a few weeks after X brought urgency and added poignancy to the earlier film. When I watched X, I was already moved by the tender scenes between the old Pearl and her husband Howard, their envy and resentment of the young people traipsing around their property (there is also a lovemaking scene between these octogenarians, which may repulse some viewers but is central to the film’s purposes). But watching Pearl’s backstory in the prequel gave everything a new layer: here is someone who, if the chips had fallen a bit differently, might have left for stardom in Europe, become a marquee name in this exciting new medium – like Vicki Lester in A Star is Born – and had the world at her feet. Instead she must live her life out in the boondocks, memories becoming dimmer with the years, old photos mocking her dreams. And now she has to see these brash, condescending young people (one of whom reminds her of her younger self) showing off their bodies for a new type of movie camera, gaining temporary, underground celebrity through a smutty film.

So what is the real horror of X and Pearl? The overtly gory scenes, the eyeballs being yanked out with pliers, the rotting pig with maggots crawling all over it? The savage killing of people with pitchforks, the cutting of their limbs in loving slow-motion, before throwing them to an alligator named Theda (after Theda Bara, the legendary silent-movie vamp)? All of that counts, of course; you can’t deny those genre thrills. But there is also the horror of wasted lives – a reminder that loneliness and discontentment have always been among the major subjects of horror and noir. “I was young once, too,” says old Pearl to a young woman named Maxine in X (both are played by Goth). “One day, we’re gonna be too old to fuck,” says another character in the same film, making a case for enjoying their porno-movie-shoot as much as they can. Between these two lines is an ocean of desolation and yearning, and that gives these films so much of their power.