Spoilers ahead…

Why is Madhur Bhandarkar still making movies? This is not a question about craft, for it is evident that the word means to him something that flies in the sky or sails in the sea. This is more about his interest in exposing the seamy underbelly of dance bars, jails, the fashion industry, Bollywood, and so forth. Heck, give this man a camera and slip him into Sabarmati Ashram, and he’ll find something there – probably that a limp-wristed male employee is blackmailing Page 3 socialites caught doing it in the charkha room. Bhandarkar’s hysterical sensibility is made for television news. With his ceaseless preoccupation with what the nation apparently wants to know, he’d out-Arnab Arnab. So, again, why is he still making movies? His reply, courtesy a recent interview: “I feel when people can read about it, can gossip in corridors, can see it on TV sometimes, why can’t they see it as a film?” And so we have his latest exposure of female flesh exposé, Calendar Girls, a film that comes with the backing of a ‘lingerie partner.’

Calendar Girls is the story of five… uh, calendar girls. (In a Bhandarkar movie, what you see in the title is what you get.) One of them is from Kolkata. Her name is Paroma. Her boyfriend’s name is Pinaki. We see them eating puchkas and strolling around puja pandals. Bhandarkar lives in his own world – he’d have to, otherwise he’d watch his films and renounce this one – so the idea of a city being populated by multiple ethnic types completely eludes him. What if the Kolkotan went by the name Sharon Pinto? Or Mayuri Chauhan? Ah, but then Bhandarkar would have to think up a new name for the Goan girl and the girl from Rohtak. I clutched my armrests and braced myself for the inevitable South Indian, who’d no doubt be called Soundaravalli Subramaniam, and be seen ladling sambar on her plate of idlis. Surprise! The girl is from Hyderabad. And she’s called Nandita… Menon. And she addresses her friend as akka, which is Tamil for sister. Has Bhandarkar, finally, discovered multiculturalism? Nah. He probably just gave himself a crash course on South India by watching Chennai Express.

These girls leave their respective cities and land up in Dante’s ninth circle of Hell Mumbai. We expect the film to delve seriously into the world of, um, calendar shooting – the fashioning of those bras, for instance, and the intricacies of engineering that keep them in place. But no. The calendar shoot itself is quickly dispensed with over the course of a song, so that Bhandarkar can get to what really interests him: the continuation of his thesis that where there is an apple, Eve will bite. One of the girls becomes a high-priced escort. Another girl begins to seduce cricketers and fix matches. A third finds herself married to a tycoon who cheats on her. The only one who manages some fun is the girl who becomes an actress. In the film’s best scene – though that’s really not saying much – she accepts a fat fee to attend a funeral. I wanted to see more of her and her secretary, but halfway into the shoot, Bhandarkar probably decided to develop that subplot into a future film: Starlet.

Calendar Girls, in all respects, is root-canal painful. The acting is mostly terrible, but I wouldn’t blame the girls (Akanksha Puri, Avani Modi, Kyra Dutt, Ruhi Singh, Satarupa Pyne). The pacing of scenes brings to mind a goldfish gasping for air. (See the conversation between two girls getting a massage to know what I mean. It’s as if they shot the rehearsal and forgot to shoot the actual take.) One of the girls has the good fortune to come under a speeding car. As for the others, they soldier on through further indignities – bad lines, bad makeup, bad clothes. And bad co-stars. At some point, the film gets all meta on us by having Madhur Bhandarkar appear as himself. He sings his praises without a hint of self-awareness, without an iota of shame. I finally understood why his films don’t have comedy tracks. His delusions inspire more laughs than anything he could dream up.

KEY:

• charkha = see here
• puchka = see here
• puja pandal = see here
• idli – sambar = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Meghna Gulzar owns the directorial credit in Talvar, but this is really Vishal Bhardwaj’s baby. He’s the writer – the film is based on the Aarushi Talwar murder case that transfixed the nation even as it left some of us wondering whether a similar tragedy in areas of the country not named Mumbai or Delhi would have commanded so much airtime and attention. Bhardwaj writes the hell out the film, which begins with a perfunctory rendition of the national anthem. It’s lip service. And that’s what the investigation that follows is about – lip service to the idea of truth, justice, fairness, all that jazz that’s supposed to separate us from our four-legged friends. In a way, Talvar is like Court, which showed us how far-removed the practice of law is from the courtroom dramatics we thrill to on screen. Talvar isn’t a movie-style procedural – no nails are going to be bitten. It’s how these things happen in life. Cops aren’t ever-vigilant truth defenders but men who are easily distracted by incessant phone calls, men who can’t even remember the name of the deceased – and it’s a press conference. We’re not sure whether to laugh or cry.

The surface details are slightly different (note the names, for instance; just close enough to the real names), but the story is pretty much the same. Fourteen-year old Shruti is found murdered. The parents – Ramesh (Neeraj Kabi) and Nutan (Konkona Sen Sharma, who looks like a 14-year-old herself) – blame their missing servant Khempal. Then he’s found with his throat slit. What happened that night? Is it really “an open-and-shut case,” as a cop calls it? Bhardwaj doesn’t attempt an answer (though he hints that the parents are innocent). He’s more interested in viewing these questions through a Rashomon-type prism – a key scene is reenacted from various points of view. But this isn’t just a stylistic device. It’s deeply integral to the core of the film – for everything is about points of view. A female guest on a panel discussion on TV is convinced Nutan did it, otherwise how could a mother be so emotionless after her little girl has been taken away in a body bag? (And the body bag is pink – such a heartbreakingly little-girl colour.) This woman is judging another woman based on her point of view of how someone should behave in such a situation. It’s terrifying when these (casual) points of view add up, especially when they are coloured by class issues. Inspector Dhaniram (Gajraj Rao, pitch-perfectly embodying the middle class’s worst nightmares about going to the cops) and his cohorts, similarly, judge Shruti’s parents from their points of view. These upper-class people. Sheesh, they’re wife-swappers. Sheesh, they use bad language. Sheesh, their degenerate children have these things called “sleepovers.” Sheesh, they play golf. And then, we’re shown a scene from Nutan’s point of view. She’s still in the car, clutching the urn of ashes. Ramesh asks her to come in, but she says the pandit-ji has told her not to bring the ashes into the house. “I’m not leaving her alone,” she says. The audience, finally, is left with a point of view. Nutan still speaks of Shruti as a ‘her’. Surely this isn’t a murdering mother.

Bhardwaj writes the hell out the film. Have I said this earlier? I’ll say it again. Talvar is a smashing return to form for him, especially from the, um, point of view of those of us who preferred his Maqbool/Blue Umbrella/Omkara days. He’s taken a bit of a detour since then, he’s become something of a mannered formalist with a taste for the absurd. Some of these latter-day traits are very much visible, beginning with this film’s title – that wordplay on the real-life family’s name, which now refers to the sword in Lady Justice’s hands. (Continuing the film’s we-see-what-we-want-to-see theme, how many of you knew there was more to this Lady than just the scales and the blindfold?) There’s some more wordplay (not much, thankfully) in that contrived AFSPA/chutzpah-style – something about green and jealousy, something about Christ and the missionary position. But for the first time, Bhardwaj’s absurdist predilection doesn’t come off as strained, possibly because the events depicted here couldn’t get more absurd. We’re talking about a cop launching into a loud folk song so that his colleagues in the adjacent room can inspect the noise levels of the air-conditioner. We’re talking about a juicy hand print – in blood, no less – that remains unknown to forensic examiners and gets washed away by an absurdly unseasonal shower. The pink buffaloes in Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola have nothing on this.

But these bits remain bits, and through most of the film, we see the old Bhardwaj, the unshowy, solid, naturalistic craftsman. Take the scene where we learn about ACP Vedant’s (Sohum Shah, who looks like Farhan Akhtar’s long-lost sibling) betrayal. Till then, we are given the idea that Vedant and Ashwin ( Irrfan Khan), the Central Department of Investigation (CDI) officer, are some sort of Jai-Veeru, brothers in arms bent on cracking the case. Then we get a tiny throwaway of a scene where the topic of Vedant’s promotion comes up. And then, the betrayal – and this is when you know how good Bhardwaj is. A lesser writer would have tipped us off in the scene where the promotion is discussed, but we simply see that scene as one of those little asides meant to imbue a character with a few extra shades. Soon after, we learn about the betrayal as Ashwin learns about it. It’s as much a shock to us as it is to him. It’s redundant to say Shah plays this scene beautifully because the entire cast is outstanding – it’s not just about great actors but great faces as well, faces with wear and tear and plucked from life. The maidservant, for instance. Or even the CDI chief Swamy (Prakash Belawadi), who gets the interval scene where he tells his protégé Ashwin that Lady Justice’s sword has become rusty, and it’s time to do something about it. If you’d told me about this scene, I’d have winced – it sounds preachy and dialogue-y and awful. But it’s marvelous on many levels. It’s a call to action snuck into a wistful sigh.

To call Talvar Meghna Gulzar’s best film isn’t saying much. She has just two features to her credit, and both of them were better showcases of her observational powers and dialogue-writing capabilities than direction. I don’t remember too much of Filhaal except a maddening colour scheme (mauve/lavender) and a lovely moment where the husband finds out they’re going to have a baby. “We’re pregnant,” he says. Note the we. That’s the sensitivity Meghna imparted to her second film as well, Just Married, another story about a couple with problems. There’s a couple with problems in Talvar too – and these are the film’s weakest portions. As Ashwin, Irrfan gives a fantastic movie-star performance. In the midst of all these drawn-from-life people, he’s a hero. He’s introduced as the man who cracked the Telgi scam. You half expect someone to extend an autograph book and request a selfie. And like a star, he makes his own rules. He plays games on the phone when he should be listening. He looks at gruesome photographs of murder while gulping down dinner. He cajoles a colleague to let him eavesdrop on an interrogation session. He slaps a cop around (the latter, unsurprisingly is from a lower class). He’s a… stud, and the way he swaggers through the film, like one of those lone-wolf movie cops, he didn’t need to be saddled with a subplot about his separation from his wife (though Bhardwaj takes care to comment on this trial as well, where, according to this judge’s point of view, a couple needs a real reason to separate; they can’t be all upper-class and do whatever they want, whenever they want). At one point, the wife (Tabu) hands him a box with his things, his samaan – a card he once gave her, their wedding album. And he walks out humming Mera kuchh samaan. A Gulzar hat tip? Maybe their relationship was about intangibles, like in the song? Okay. But it gets worse when she calls him later while watching Ijaazat, and guess what song is playing in the background. This cutesy business is tonally off, given that Meghna keeps an emotional distance from the proceedings, the way the new CDI chief urges his men to. Even Vedant’s mention of a fiancée remains just that. A mention.

This emotional distance makes some of the early portions a little dry – we keep thinking ‘competent’ rather than ‘inspired.’ When we see Zodiac (where David Fincher slowed time down to reflect the sluggish pace of the investigation) or Not A Love Story (where Ram Gopal Varma rubbed our face in the passion in that crime of passion), to take two other films based on real-life crime, we sense a strong directorial presence. True, Talvar is Meghna’s best film, but we keep wondering if that isn’t more due to the great writing (and great acting). And it doesn’t help that a lot of the story (along with the way these investigations generally take place) is familiar to us. But slowly, as things get increasingly absurd, the film really takes off. The last half-hour is astonishingly good. It’s just talk, but it pulls together everything we’ve seen so far, all the points of view, in a startlingly hilarious fashion. We’re not sure whether to laugh or cry.

KEY:

• the Aarushi Talwar murder case = see here
• Court = see here
• Rashomon-type prism = see here
• Maqbool = see here
• Blue Umbrella = see here
• Omkara = see here
• AFSPA/chutzpah-style = see here
• Lady Justice = see here
• Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola = see here
• Filhaal = see here
• Just Married = see here
• Mera kuchh samaan = see here
• Zodiac = see here
• Not A Love Story = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Singh is Bliing isn’t a movie so much as a collection of colourful bits (the real bliing is in the cinematography) in the style of what one may call a nautanki or a vaudeville performance – and for a while, that’s the film’s strength. Some bits are brilliant in the way a Mr. Bean episode is brilliant when you are in the mood. Director Prabhudheva is alert to slapstick possibilities and he keeps the running gags… running. Every time a car is put in reverse, it knocks down a couple of people – that sort of thing. It’s a breezy Shammi Kapoor premise about a well-off but irresponsible young man (Raftaar Singh, played by Akshay Kumar) who’s packed off to Goa to… um, become more responsible. Let’s not question the sense in that. After all, Raftaar thinks he can put a wig on a dog and pass it off as a lion. Like many things in this movie, this scene shouldn’t work – except it does. Prabhudheva sets up the gags well, and makes us wait for them to explode. Sometimes, literally. There’s a female assassin prowling around with a bomb.

We keep getting comedies all the time, but they try too hard, with actors mugging madly. Singh is Bliing has a different vibe. It’s silly in a relaxed, good-natured way. We like these characters, even if some of them, like the absent-minded uncle, are underused. We might have seen more of him had the film stayed in Punjab. How I wish it had. These films work best when set in warm, Indian climes – though I do wonder if Punjabis are as annoyed with these stereotypes (drinking tall glasses of lassi, scampering about in mustard fields, going balle balle at the doctor’s when he asks where it hurts) as, say, Tamilians are with the heads full of jasmine flowers and mouths full of idlis. But this Indian-ness, this we-are-like-this-wonly vibe, is essential to the success of these films – especially when faced with a non-desi heroine.

In Goa, Raftaar runs into Sara (played by a red, one-strap swimsuit emerging from the ocean… er, Amy Jackson). She speaks no Hindi. He speaks no English. So there’s a translator (an amusing Lara Dutta), who becomes the go-between – even during a song in which Akshay appears to be mimicking an epileptic train. In contrast, the other duets (the conventional ones, with just hero and heroine) are boring affairs. But there’s a twist. Sara isn’t just arm candy. At least for a while, she gets the stunt scenes – she’s an accomplished fighter. The film is really about her journey. The hero, on the other hand, does what Sonakshi Sinha usually does in Prabhudheva’s films. He’s also the comic relief, though Lara Dutta chips in as well. One bit has her sleepwalking and dropping coconuts on the sensitive parts of amorous men. I learnt something new about myself when I burst out laughing. Apparently, I am like this wonly.

At some point, the film changes its mind about being just a series of sketches. An actual plot kicks in. Sara asks Raftaar to find her mother, who disappeared from her life when she was a child. So okay, I thought. Maybe this mother has had a sex-change operation. Maybe she’ll run into Raftaar in the men’s loo. But no. The film is serious about this. She owns a nursery (the kind with plants) and showers love on a little girl, a substitute for Sara. No one seems to have realized that this is the exact opposite of comedy. It gets worse when the story shifts to Romania, where a gangster named Mark plans to marry Amy. Kay Kay Menon has fun as Mark. He seems to be starring in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali production inside his head – he practically sings his lines. But poor Akshay is stranded. He thinks he’s going to marry Amy, and wades through a song sequence buying a suit and flowers. I wanted to yell at the screen: For heaven’s sake, he’s a buffoon. Stop treating him like a character. As the buffoon, Akshay lights up the screen, but his amazing energy isn’t enough to tide us over long stretches of this sentimental nonsense. Why can’t we make just pure comedy – without action, without missing mothers, without villains? I’d have ended up happier had I walked out during the interval.

KEY:

• nautanki = see here
• lassi = see here
• idli =wow, someone actually made a Wiki page for it, here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Thoughts on the often-overlooked producer of a film, occasioned by the passing of Edida Nageswara Rao.

When I heard that Edida Nageswara Rao had died, my first thoughts were about the three films – Shankarabharanam, Sagara Sangamam (Salangai Oli in Tamil), Swati Muthyam (Sippikkul Muthu in Tamil, Eeshwar in Hindi) – that defined him as a certain kind of producer, at least to non-Telugu audiences. But before getting into that, we may need to consider that producers never really become “names” to the average audience member. We remember the splashy banners – say, the AVM production house, or Yash Raj. We remember directors. We remember stars – the people right in front of the camera, the people whose faces draw us in. Ask the man on the street, and he’ll tell you Salangai Oli is a Kamal Haasan movie, and that Jayaprada looked mind-bogglingly beautiful in it, and that the film had a magnificent score by Ilayaraja. A smaller bunch may recall the director, K Viswanath. But only film-industry trackers and those who write about cinema would probably remember Edida Nageswara Rao, whose money made the movie possible in the first place.

This isn’t a uniquely Indian problem. Even with Hollywood films, no one outside the business really cares about the producer. Well, maybe they used to, once upon a time – which is why the poster for the biggest blockbuster of 1939 announces “David O Selznick’s production of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind.” You’ll have to search, far below, for the name of the director, Victor Fleming. But gradually, the cult of the director took over. He replaced the producer – at least in public perception – as the driving force behind a movie. By the 1950s, you begin to hear of “Hitchcock films.” But a producer can be as instrumental in shaping a film. Take the case of Brokeback Mountain. Sometime in 1997, Diana Ossana, the film’s eventual producer and screenwriter, read Annie Proulx’s short story, about two gay cowboys, in The New Yorker. “Two-thirds of the way through reading the story, I began to sob, and I sobbed all the way to the end,” she said later. “I was floored. Emotionally exhausted, I went to sleep, got up the next morning and read it again because I wanted to see if it affected me as much in broad daylight as it did in the middle of the night. Its effect on me was even more profound.”

Ossana asked (eventual co-screenwriter) Larry McMurtry to read the story. He loved it. They wrote Proulx a letter, asking to option the story to them so that they could adapt it for a screenplay. Proulx responded within a week, and by the end of 1997, there was a screenplay. They tried to get the script into production. Many directors came and went. Many actors were interested, until they weren’t anymore. Then, in late 2003, Ang Lee came on board. “I never really lost faith,” Ossana said, “but I didn’t think it would take seven years… People wouldn’t truly commit. They’d read it, they’d love it, they’d waver or anguish about it – and then something that paid more money or whatever would come along, and they’d just let it go. And then I’d simply press on, contacting more directors and actors, sending it to people to read and to consider.” The film was finally released in December 2005.

This is what a producer does, sometimes. They’re the first people in on a project, and they bring in the others – the others who, ironically, go on to become more identified with the project. I take the example of Brokeback Mountain because Edida Nageswara Rao’s films were as tough a sell in the marketplace. I don’t know if he conceived these films, the way Ossana did – maybe he did, or maybe the director approached him with an idea and asked if he’d like to produce it. I’m just talking about the fact that he financed these projects that were no one’s idea of a sure-fire hit.  Shankarabharanam had at its core the guru-shishya tradition, and it was filled with Carnatic music – there was even a plot point about a mis-sung avarohanam. And Salangai Oli, the story of a classical dancer who weeps at the commercialization of dance, is practically a mirror to the movies, where art often matters less than commerce.

Picture courtesy: moonramkonam.com/

It’s easy to mock the other kind of producer, the more commercial kind – but consider the way movies are made in India. There are a few studios, yes, but most films are produced by individuals who spend crores on star fees and director/technician fees and production costs. It’s only natural that, in order to recover these investments, they veer towards the more commercial end of the spectrum. But that’s why a producer like Edida Nageswara Rao becomes even more remarkable. Even in this market, he made those movies. You may argue that it was easier to make these movies then because the audience was open to a larger variety of films, and they weren’t as distracted by other entertainment options as they are today – but how many others, back then, made similar films? The opening credits of Salangai Oli appear on still pictures of religious iconography – conch shell, discus, the U-shaped forehead mark, the bow and arrow – and Rao’s name appears on an image of the god’s palm, raised as if in benediction. That’s pretty symbolic. Without the producer’s blessing, there would be no film to talk about today.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Sanjay Gupta’s Jazbaa is the mature actor’s answer to those star-son launch pads that tell us this boy can dance and ride a horse and isn’t allergic to glycerine. This is about Aishwarya Rai Bachchan announcing she’s back. She’s first seen in a track suit, stretching and running and generally posing against the Mumbai skyline. The message is clear. The post-baby fat that she was cruelly criticised for – it’s all gone. She’s saying: Show me another 41-year-old who looks like THIS! She’s saying she’s worth it. It’s an interesting time we are in. Actresses who are no longer young enough to play arm candy to older heroes are still figuring in leading roles. I’m also thinking of Rani Mukerji and Mardaani. In the 1980s, they may have ended up playing demure wives and doting bhabhis, but those roles no longer exist and these heroines are saying they can be the hero. For a while, Aishwarya’s character – a top lawyer named Anuradha Verma – seems really interesting. She knows that there’s no money in defending the innocent. “Jo beqasoor hain, woh mera fees afford nahin kar sakte.” That’s an amazingly matter-of-fact admission from a leading lady, and Jazbaa is about how this philosophy comes to bite her in the behind. When her daughter (Sara Arjun, last seen in the lovely Tamil film Saivam) is kidnapped, she’s forced to defend a man whose guilt is in little doubt. Not only is he a murderer, he’s a rapist too – he’s every mother’s nightmare, and Anuradha Verma, if she wants her daughter back, has to somehow overlook the fact that she has to free someone who robbed another mother of her daughter.

Jazbaa is based on a South Korean thriller named Seven Days, and I wonder if this subtext was worked in more convincingly in that film – because after this set-up, after hinting at Anuradha’s complicity in a legal system that has come to favour those with money and power, Gupta backs off. I suppose you cannot have a star vehicle that screams, You deserve this, bitch! But in that case, why bother? Why not simply enshrine Anuradha Verma as the epitome of motherhood, as the rest of the film does? In court, we are pointedly shown that Anuradha wears high heels, but look at her replace them with sneakers as she takes part in a sports meet at her daughter’s school. She’s the modern Mother India, which may be why Gupta opens his film with a shot of the tricolour. (Too bad he isn’t as reverent towards other mothers, like the now-ubiquitous gau mata – a character is shown tucking unapologetically into a steak dinner.)

Aishwarya is the perfect actress for a Jodhaa Akbar, where her face does the talking. Here, she’s asked to resort to her voice, and that’s a mistake. She cannot do inflections. Every line seems to have been read off a teleprompter. She’s cold, distant. As if recognising this, Gupta gives her an overblown scene where she catches a glimpse of her daughter in the kidnapper’s car – she runs behind it and screams and falls and pounds the earth and causes sand to rise in little slow-motion clouds. In comparison, Shabana Azmi, who plays the mother of the murdered girl, needs just one look lasting about two seconds to clue us in to her anguish. Having someone like Shabana Azmi share frames with Aishwarya is a little like stumbling into someone’s bookshelf where a Chetan Bhagat rests against a David Foster Wallace – but the film would be unwatchable otherwise. At least this way, we get glimpses of lived-in characters. Jackie Shroff has reached a stage where his mere profile, in a close-up, suggests something. He speaks in a growl that’s pitched a couple of notches below his usual speaking voice, and we instantly know what kind of scum this politician is. And Chandan Roy Sanyal has great fun as the accused, playing the character as nonsensically as the material deserves demands. This isn’t simple hamming. Orwell could have made a farm out of it.

The first half lurches unconvincingly from scene to scene, but slowly, the film settles into a zone that’s as lurid as the neon-green light Gupta drenches his frames in. I especially enjoyed the last half hour – it’s sleazy pulp heaven. After a generally bleak view of courtrooms in films like Court and Talvar, it’s fun to see the place crackling with Perry Mason energy. I wish the film had had more of Irrfan Khan though. He plays Anuradha’s friend Yohan, but on the side, he seems to be auditioning for the lead role in a Salim-Javed script. There were hints of the masala hero inside him in Haider, where he made a smashing entrance. Then Talvar saw him as a starry investigator. Here, he turns full-blown star. He gets superb Kamlesh Pandey lines to chew on, and he spits them out with unbelievable flair. Main khud langar ki line mein khada hoon, tere liye daawat kahaan se laaoonga? Here’s another: Neend mashooqa ki tarah hoti hai. Waqt na do to rooth ke chali jaati hai. At one point, the film morphs into a music video. We just see Irrfan drinking, putting a face to these amazing lyrics: Jaane tere shehar ka kya iraada hai / Aasmaan kum, parindey zyada hain. The world-weariness he channels here, the casual way he tosses off those florid declamations (perfectly walking the prose-poetry tightrope) made me think of Amitabh Bachchan, who was an equally unconventional-looking (and tall) leading man. None of today’s heroes can pull these lines off, and you don’t have to recall Imran Khan in the ill-fated Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara! to underline the point. How strange that the strongest links to our older commercial cinema seem to lie in the “art film” actors of today. I kept imagining Irrfan Khan’s hero here pitted against Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s gloriously entertaining villain in Kick. It would be the masala blockbuster of 1975.

KEY:

• jazbaa = emotion/passion
• Mardaani = see here
• bhabhi = see here
• Jo beqasoor hain, woh mera fees afford nahin kar sakte = the innocent can’t afford my fees
• Saivam = see here
• Seven Days = see here
• gau mata = er, Mother Cow
• Jodhaa Akbar = see here
• Court = see here
• Talvar = see here
• Haider = see here
• Main khud langar ki line mein khada hoon, tere liye daawat kahaan se laaoonga? =
• Neend mashooqa ki tarah hoti hai. Waqt na do to rooth ke chali jaati hai = 
• Jaane tere shehar ka kya iraada hai / Aasmaan kum, parindey zyada hain = 
• Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara! = see here
• Kick = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Luv Ranjan, the director of Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, would probably make a good stand-up comedian. He thinks in terms of snappy bits. There’s a bit about the futility of honking in a traffic jam. There’s a bit about our parents’ obsession with the first-IIT-then-MBA course plan. There’s one about who pays for a dinner when there are six people at the table. And there are many bits about the ping-pong of modern-day relationships. These bits are basically a lot of foreplay leading up to a giant explosion (delivered, as in the earlier film, by Kartik Aaryan) about – and against – women. A lot of this rant is funny, especially a killer observation about the couple in Titanic. It’s politically incorrect – sure. But that’s where the good laughs usually are. Seth MacFarlane, during his Oscar-hosting gig, made a crack about Quvenzhane Wallis. “To give you an idea of how young [she] is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It’s terrible. It’s also kinda funny.

It’s a pity, then, that Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 tries to tell an actual story. This time, too, it’s about three men (Kartik Aaryan, Sunny Singh, Omkar Kapoor) who fall for three women who are really lemon squeezers in disguise – only, the receptacle is testicle-shaped. One of them (Nushrat Bharucha) is a Chihuahua who keeps yapping that the salon lady did her nails in periwinkle blue instead of sky blue. Another (Sonalli Sehgall) makes the man do endless chores for her parents, even as she’s unable to commit to him. And the third (Ishita Raj) seems to love her boyfriend for his credit cards. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara had one annoying, infantile female character (played by Kalki Koechlin) – but there were relatively grown-up women around her, and they balanced things out. Here, everyone’s a Kalki Koechlin. It feels like a fart in the face of a gender. You wonder why these men put up with it.

It isn’t love, for sure. We hardly get any moments that suggest intimacy (there’s only the physical kind). What we get are scenes like the one in which the boy is working out. He checks out the girl who’s working out alongside, dressed in a handkerchief and doing squats with the camera positioned behind her. He asks her out for coffee. She says, Do you really want to have a conversation? She invites him home. He puts on a cassette tape (this generation knows what those are?) and does a striptease. She returns the favour by performing a belly dance. The over-forties in the audience are surely ruing their first dates, filled with fumbling conversations about hobbies.

Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 is overlong and it tries to make us feel outraged on behalf of these guys. These poor men, who were so carefree and happy until these evil women, these rhymes-with-witches, landed in their lives. I didn’t buy it for a second. To use the film’s lingo, surely there are other chicks in the farm. We may have bought one man being strung along – but all three? But then, that’s how Ranjan structures his screenplay. Everything happens in threes. The three men fall in love. The three men discover that their women are making them do things they don’t want to. The three men decide to grow a pair. The film ends with the three men on the phone with their mothers – the only woman, apparently, whose love is unconditional. Pathetic? Or a stinging comment about the Indian male? Hopefully, that phone call came with a side of gajar ka halwa.

KEY:

• Pyaar Ka Punchnama = a post mortem of love
• Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara = see here
• gajar ka halwa = see here; something every Indian mother, according to Bollywood, makes for her son

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Remembering Ravindra Jain, and the India he made music for.

When I heard about Ravindra Jain’s demise, I thought of Naseeruddin Shah. Not the most obvious association, I know, but think of Jain’s title song for Sunayana, the 1979 Rajshri Productions’ romance, and recall Shah trying to do the romantic-hero thing, flailing his arms about in a candy-coloured set, the centrepiece of which was a fountain springing forth from a giant lotus. According to the lyrics, the Shah character is saying, O beautiful-eyed one, I want to see you enjoy the sights of the world, but his face says, Someone shoot me, please. In his entertaining memoir, And Then One Day, Shah says, “All I thought I had to do was lip-sync perfectly… What in fact I should have done is study the songs in Shammi Kapoor’s movies… It took me years before I learnt the difference between merely singing a song and ‘performing’ it.” It’s easy to understand Shah’s befuddlement at the time. He came from a different world, the world of Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika and Junoon. The rest of India, while not queuing up for the Bachchan movies, was watching Chitchor and Sawan Ko Aane Do.

Ravindra Jain’s demise also brought to mind a song from Sawan Ko Aane Do, the one that goes Kajre ki baati. This isn’t Jain’s music, as I discovered after a bit of Googling – the composer is Rajkamal. I suppose the confusion came about because audio cassettes, in the India of those days, carried songs from two films of the same era, and it’s possible that I’d first listened to Kajre ki baati on a Chitchor/ Sawan Ko Aane Do combo. (Chitchor had Ravindra Jain’s music.) But my point isn’t about the music. It’s about the lyrics. This is one of those songs where the heroine is bawling her eyes out, and she compares her kohl to a wick and her tears to oil. (We are left to complete the metaphor in our heads: the eye is the lamp.) It’s an exquisitely beautiful image, a very Indian image. It’s also an image that’s no longer marketable. At the pharmacy, I see ads for Lakmé Eyeconic Kajal and L’Oréal Kajal Magique. We live in an India of Madison Avenue makeovers, endorsed by a size-zero Kareena Kapoor. The kajal in the Sawan Ko Aane Do song is different. It’s kajra, the black cake in the little round container you may have seen in your mother’s cabinet as she dipped a finger in and lined her eye and wiped off the excess in her hair. That was what this music was, the music of Rajshri Productions, the music of Rajkamal, the music of Ravindra Jain.

This lack of… individuality may be why Ravindra Jain did not rise to the heights expected of him after his scores for Saudagar and Chitchor. Compare the way he used Yesudas to the way Salil Chaudhury used the singer in Chhoti Si Baat, the Basu Chatterjee-Amol Palekar collaboration that came before Chitchor. Jaaneman, jaaneman, tere do nayan… There’s pizzazz. You want to dance. With Jab deep jale aana (Chitchor), you want to sit in a corner, close your eyes and lose yourself. This isn’t about which is the better song, which is the better way of making music. It’s about versatility, range. It’s about why Ravindra Jain is remembered fondly, with a lot of nostalgia, but without the “genius” word being thrown around too much. Salil Chaudhury, in Chhoti Si Baat, also gave us Lata Mangeshkar’s wistful Na jaane kyon, a number that makes you want to sit in a corner, close your eyes and lose yourself. Plus, there was the ebullient Yeh din kya aaye, by Mukesh. In contrast, the songs of Chitchor, though lovely (and still dewdrop-fresh), share the same DNA. Jain was happy in his little corner. Or maybe the word is modest. He had his hits with bigger singers, but he seemed content in his little world with Hemlata and Yesudas.

Listening to his songs, we slip back into that world, the India of Chitchor, where the hero would, without smirking, liken his love to kohl and ask the heroine to line her eyes with it. Meri preet ka kaajal tum apne nainon mein male aana… Kohl keeps coming up in these songs (many of them written by Jain himself), for one of the things the heroine liked to do was sit down and make herself pretty for her beloved… Sajna hai mujhe sajana ke liye, as the song went in Saudagar. The entire sequence is about Padma Khanna getting ready to meet Amitabh Bachchan. There was a whole genre of song woven around words denoting ornaments and makeup. Gajra. Kajra. Jhumka. Payal. Kangana. The latter, today, is one of our top actresses, and she wouldn’t be caught dead playing coy in one of these numbers – or endorsing the sentiments in them. In the gorgeous title song of Ankhiyon Ke Jharokon Se (one of my favourite Ravindra Jain compositions), the girl sings, Tum ho jahan saajan meri duniya hai wahin pe. Her world is where the man is. Women like these don’t exist today – at least on screen, where they go to work and come back home to live-in partners. The cosmetics, too, have changed, and unless your name is Gulzar, you’re going to struggle to work “Hydrating Super Sunscreen SPF 50 PA+++” into a tune.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

The most interesting aspect of Wedding Pullav is that it’s been directed by the great cinematographer Binod Pradhan, who has done stellar work with Rakeysh Mehra and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. I still remember watching 1942: A Love Story on a massive 70-mm screen. It was the beginning of the song Pyar hua chupke se. Manisha Koirala is at the bottom of the screen, running towards the hills, which extend all the way to infinity. And on top, the sun bursts through brown clouds – God’s own klieg light. Me and my companion gasped audibly, in unison. This isn’t empty nostalgia. This is about the kind of time and energy it must have taken to get the light just right, for just those few seconds of film – and then doing this over and over through that film, and other films. How does such a perfectionist reconcile himself with going through the motions in Wedding Pullav? The film is so bland, it could have been directed by Baby Guddu – it would have made no difference.

Though, seen one way, Wedding Pullav isn’t actually a film. It seems to be more of an educational video put together for future generations to get an idea of the ingredients in the rom-coms of our time. And so you have the grandmother with a saucy tongue, the young man desperate to lose his virginity, the loud Punjabi father, the divorced parents who just need a nudge to know they still carry a torch for each other. Rishi Kapoor shows up as the manager of a hotel who knows just when to dispense words of wisdom.  The first time he appears, we hear a snatch from the Saagar background score. That film was released in 1985, thirty years ago. Someone thought that that touch would please the kids who are the target audience for this film. There’s an antakshari scene. A karwa chauth scene. A scene where the hero (Diganth Manchale) dances to an RD Burman oldie (Gulaabi aankhen, if you must know). We even have the scene where the hero looks at the formerly tomboyish heroine in a dress and realises she’s a… woman.

She’s also the producer’s daughter, Anushka Ranjan. I don’t have a problem with rich parents forking out a few crores to help a child with starry ambitions . Heck, I’d be a much happier man today had my father bought me an island. But I do object to recycling the plot of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which has already been remade in Hindi, as Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, at a time Bollywood bigwigs still thought we’d buy tickets to see Uday Chopra. Hero falls in love. Heroine falls in love. They’re happy for each other… until they realise they’re in love with each other. It’s a long slog to the end. I’ve seen toothpaste commercials with more verve.

KEY:

• pullav = see here
• 1942: A Love Story = see here
• Baby Guddu = see here
• Saagar background score = see here
• antakshari = see here
• karwa chauth = see here
• Gulaabi aankhen = see here
• Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai =  see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Sanjay Gupta’s Jazbaa is the mature actor’s answer to those star-son launch pads that tell us this boy can dance and ride a horse and isn’t allergic to glycerine. This is about Aishwarya Rai Bachchan announcing she’s back. She’s first seen in a track suit, stretching and running and generally posing against the Mumbai skyline. The message is clear. The post-baby fat that she was cruelly criticised for – it’s all gone. She’s saying: Show me another 41-year-old who looks like THIS! She’s saying she’s worth it. It’s an interesting time we are in. Actresses who are no longer young enough to play arm candy to older heroes are still figuring in leading roles. I’m also thinking of Rani Mukerji and Mardaani. In the 1980s, they may have ended up playing demure wives and doting bhabhis, but those roles no longer exist and these heroines are saying they can be the hero. For a while, Aishwarya’s character – a top lawyer named Anuradha Verma – seems really interesting. She knows that there’s no money in defending the innocent. “Jo beqasoor hain, woh mera fees afford nahin kar sakte.” That’s an amazingly matter-of-fact admission from a leading lady, and Jazbaa is about how this philosophy comes to bite her in the behind. When her daughter (Sara Arjun, last seen in the lovely Tamil film Saivam) is kidnapped, she’s forced to defend a man whose guilt is in little doubt. Not only is he a murderer, he’s a rapist too – he’s every mother’s nightmare, and Anuradha Verma, if she wants her daughter back, has to somehow overlook the fact that she has to free someone who robbed another mother of her daughter.

Jazbaa is based on a South Korean thriller named Seven Days, and I wonder if this subtext was worked in more convincingly in that film – because after this set-up, after hinting at Anuradha’s complicity in a legal system that has come to favour those with money and power, Gupta backs off. I suppose you cannot have a star vehicle that screams, You deserve this, bitch! But in that case, why bother? Why not simply enshrine Anuradha Verma as the epitome of motherhood, as the rest of the film does? In court, we are pointedly shown that Anuradha wears high heels, but look at her replace them with sneakers as she takes part in a sports meet at her daughter’s school. She’s the modern Mother India, which may be why Gupta opens his film with a shot of the tricolour. (Too bad he isn’t as reverent towards other mothers, like the now-ubiquitous gau mata – a character is shown tucking unapologetically into a steak dinner.)

Aishwarya is the perfect actress for a Jodhaa Akbar, where her face does the talking. Here, she’s asked to resort to her voice, and that’s a mistake. She cannot do inflections. Every line seems to have been read off a teleprompter. She’s cold, distant. As if recognising this, Gupta gives her an overblown scene where she catches a glimpse of her daughter in the kidnapper’s car – she runs behind it and screams and falls and pounds the earth and causes sand to rise in little slow-motion clouds. In comparison, Shabana Azmi, who plays the mother of the murdered girl, needs just one look lasting about two seconds to clue us in to her anguish. Having someone like Shabana Azmi share frames with Aishwarya is a little like stumbling into someone’s bookshelf where a Chetan Bhagat rests against a David Foster Wallace – but the film would be unwatchable otherwise. At least this way, we get glimpses of lived-in characters. Jackie Shroff has reached a stage where his mere profile, in a close-up, suggests something. He speaks in a growl that’s pitched a couple of notches below his usual speaking voice, and we instantly know what kind of scum this politician is. And Chandan Roy Sanyal has great fun as the accused, playing the character as nonsensically as the material deserves demands. This isn’t simple hamming. Orwell could have made a farm out of it.

The first half lurches unconvincingly from scene to scene, but slowly, the film settles into a zone that’s as lurid as the neon-green light Gupta drenches his frames in. I especially enjoyed the last half hour – it’s sleazy pulp heaven. After a generally bleak view of courtrooms in films like Court and Talvar, it’s fun to see the place crackling with Perry Mason energy. I wish the film had had more of Irrfan Khan though. He plays Anuradha’s friend Yohan, but on the side, he seems to be auditioning for the lead role in a Salim-Javed script. There were hints of the masala hero inside him in Haider, where he made a smashing entrance. Then Talvar saw him as a starry investigator. Here, he turns full-blown star. He gets superb Kamlesh Pandey lines to chew on, and he spits them out with unbelievable flair. Main khud langar ki line mein khada hoon, tere liye daawat kahaan se laaoonga? Here’s another: Neend mashooqa ki tarah hoti hai. Waqt na do to rooth ke chali jaati hai. At one point, the film morphs into a music video. We just see Irrfan drinking, putting a face to these amazing lyrics: Jaane tere shehar ka kya iraada hai / Aasmaan kum, parindey zyada hain. The world-weariness he channels here, the casual way he tosses off those florid declamations (perfectly walking the prose-poetry tightrope) made me think of Amitabh Bachchan, who was an equally unconventional-looking (and tall) leading man. None of today’s heroes can pull these lines off, and you don’t have to recall Imran Khan in the ill-fated Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara! to underline the point. How strange that the strongest links to our older commercial cinema seem to lie in the “art film” actors of today. I kept imagining Irrfan Khan’s hero here pitted against Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s gloriously entertaining villain in Kick. It would be the masala blockbuster of 1975.

KEY:

• jazbaa = emotion/passion
• Mardaani = see here
• bhabhi = see here
• Jo beqasoor hain, woh mera fees afford nahin kar sakte = the innocent can’t afford my fees
• Saivam = see here
• Seven Days = see here
• gau mata = er, Mother Cow
• Jodhaa Akbar = see here
• Court = see here
• Talvar = see here
• Haider = see here
• Main khud langar ki line mein khada hoon, tere liye daawat kahaan se laaoonga? =
• Neend mashooqa ki tarah hoti hai. Waqt na do to rooth ke chali jaati hai = 
• Jaane tere shehar ka kya iraada hai / Aasmaan kum, parindey zyada hain = 
• Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara! = see here
• Kick = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Luv Ranjan, the director of Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, would probably make a good stand-up comedian. He thinks in terms of snappy bits. There’s a bit about the futility of honking in a traffic jam. There’s a bit about our parents’ obsession with the first-IIT-then-MBA course plan. There’s one about who pays for a dinner when there are six people at the table. And there are many bits about the ping-pong of modern-day relationships. These bits are basically a lot of foreplay leading up to a giant explosion (delivered, as in the earlier film, by Kartik Aaryan) about – and against – women. A lot of this rant is funny, especially a killer observation about the couple in Titanic. It’s politically incorrect – sure. But that’s where the good laughs usually are. Seth MacFarlane, during his Oscar-hosting gig, made a crack about Quvenzhane Wallis. “To give you an idea of how young [she] is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It’s terrible. It’s also kinda funny.

It’s a pity, then, that Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 tries to tell an actual story. This time, too, it’s about three men (Kartik Aaryan, Sunny Singh, Omkar Kapoor) who fall for three women who are really lemon squeezers in disguise – only, the receptacle is testicle-shaped. One of them (Nushrat Bharucha) is a Chihuahua who keeps yapping that the salon lady did her nails in periwinkle blue instead of sky blue. Another (Sonalli Sehgall) makes the man do endless chores for her parents, even as she’s unable to commit to him. And the third (Ishita Raj) seems to love her boyfriend for his credit cards. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara had one annoying, infantile female character (played by Kalki Koechlin) – but there were relatively grown-up women around her, and they balanced things out. Here, everyone’s a Kalki Koechlin. It feels like a fart in the face of a gender. You wonder why these men put up with it.

It isn’t love, for sure. We hardly get any moments that suggest intimacy (there’s only the physical kind). What we get are scenes like the one in which the boy is working out. He checks out the girl who’s working out alongside, dressed in a handkerchief and doing squats with the camera positioned behind her. He asks her out for coffee. She says, Do you really want to have a conversation? She invites him home. He puts on a cassette tape (this generation knows what those are?) and does a striptease. She returns the favour by performing a belly dance. The over-forties in the audience are surely ruing their first dates, filled with fumbling conversations about hobbies.

Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 is overlong and it tries to make us feel outraged on behalf of these guys. These poor men, who were so carefree and happy until these evil women, these rhymes-with-witches, landed in their lives. I didn’t buy it for a second. To use the film’s lingo, surely there are other chicks in the farm. We may have bought one man being strung along – but all three? But then, that’s how Ranjan structures his screenplay. Everything happens in threes. The three men fall in love. The three men discover that their women are making them do things they don’t want to. The three men decide to grow a pair. The film ends with the three men on the phone with their mothers – the only woman, apparently, whose love is unconditional. Pathetic? Or a stinging comment about the Indian male? Hopefully, that phone call came with a side of gajar ka halwa.

KEY:

• Pyaar Ka Punchnama = a post mortem of love
• Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara = see here
• gajar ka halwa = see here; something every Indian mother, according to Bollywood, makes for her son

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Remembering Ravindra Jain, and the India he made music for.

When I heard about Ravindra Jain’s demise, I thought of Naseeruddin Shah. Not the most obvious association, I know, but think of Jain’s title song for Sunayana, the 1979 Rajshri Productions’ romance, and recall Shah trying to do the romantic-hero thing, flailing his arms about in a candy-coloured set, the centrepiece of which was a fountain springing forth from a giant lotus. According to the lyrics, the Shah character is saying, O beautiful-eyed one, I want to see you enjoy the sights of the world, but his face says, Someone shoot me, please. In his entertaining memoir, And Then One Day, Shah says, “All I thought I had to do was lip-sync perfectly… What in fact I should have done is study the songs in Shammi Kapoor’s movies… It took me years before I learnt the difference between merely singing a song and ‘performing’ it.” It’s easy to understand Shah’s befuddlement at the time. He came from a different world, the world of Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika and Junoon. The rest of India, while not queuing up for the Bachchan movies, was watching Chitchor and Sawan Ko Aane Do.

Ravindra Jain’s demise also brought to mind a song from Sawan Ko Aane Do, the one that goes Kajre ki baati. This isn’t Jain’s music, as I discovered after a bit of Googling – the composer is Rajkamal. I suppose the confusion came about because audio cassettes, in the India of those days, carried songs from two films of the same era, and it’s possible that I’d first listened to Kajre ki baati on a Chitchor/ Sawan Ko Aane Do combo. (Chitchor had Ravindra Jain’s music.) But my point isn’t about the music. It’s about the lyrics. This is one of those songs where the heroine is bawling her eyes out, and she compares her kohl to a wick and her tears to oil. (We are left to complete the metaphor in our heads: the eye is the lamp.) It’s an exquisitely beautiful image, a very Indian image. It’s also an image that’s no longer marketable. At the pharmacy, I see ads for Lakmé Eyeconic Kajal and L’Oréal Kajal Magique. We live in an India of Madison Avenue makeovers, endorsed by a size-zero Kareena Kapoor. The kajal in the Sawan Ko Aane Do song is different. It’s kajra, the black cake in the little round container you may have seen in your mother’s cabinet as she dipped a finger in and lined her eye and wiped off the excess in her hair. That was what this music was, the music of Rajshri Productions, the music of Rajkamal, the music of Ravindra Jain.

This lack of… individuality may be why Ravindra Jain did not rise to the heights expected of him after his scores for Saudagar and Chitchor. Compare the way he used Yesudas to the way Salil Chaudhury used the singer in Chhoti Si Baat, the Basu Chatterjee-Amol Palekar collaboration that came before Chitchor. Jaaneman, jaaneman, tere do nayan… There’s pizzazz. You want to dance. With Jab deep jale aana (Chitchor), you want to sit in a corner, close your eyes and lose yourself. This isn’t about which is the better song, which is the better way of making music. It’s about versatility, range. It’s about why Ravindra Jain is remembered fondly, with a lot of nostalgia, but without the “genius” word being thrown around too much. Salil Chaudhury, in Chhoti Si Baat, also gave us Lata Mangeshkar’s wistful Na jaane kyon, a number that makes you want to sit in a corner, close your eyes and lose yourself. Plus, there was the ebullient Yeh din kya aaye, by Mukesh. In contrast, the songs of Chitchor, though lovely (and still dewdrop-fresh), share the same DNA. Jain was happy in his little corner. Or maybe the word is modest. He had his hits with bigger singers, but he seemed content in his little world with Hemlata and Yesudas.

Listening to his songs, we slip back into that world, the India of Chitchor, where the hero would, without smirking, liken his love to kohl and ask the heroine to line her eyes with it. Meri preet ka kaajal tum apne nainon mein male aana… Kohl keeps coming up in these songs (many of them written by Jain himself), for one of the things the heroine liked to do was sit down and make herself pretty for her beloved… Sajna hai mujhe sajana ke liye, as the song went in Saudagar. The entire sequence is about Padma Khanna getting ready to meet Amitabh Bachchan. There was a whole genre of songs woven around words denoting ornaments and makeup. Gajra. Kajra. Jhumka. Payal. Kangana. The latter, today, is one of our top actresses, and she wouldn’t be caught dead playing coy in one of these numbers – or endorsing the sentiments in them. In the gorgeous title song of Ankhiyon Ke Jharokon Se (one of my favourite Ravindra Jain compositions), the girl sings, Tum ho jahan saajan meri duniya hai wahin pe. Her world is where the man is. Women like these don’t exist today – at least on screen, where they go to work and come back home to live-in partners. The cosmetics, too, have changed, and unless your name is Gulzar, you’re going to struggle to work “Hydrating Super Sunscreen SPF 50 PA+++” into a tune.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

The most interesting aspect of Wedding Pullav is that it’s been directed by the great cinematographer Binod Pradhan, who has done stellar work with Rakeysh Mehra and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. I still remember watching 1942: A Love Story on a massive 70-mm screen. It was the beginning of the song Pyar hua chupke se. Manisha Koirala is at the bottom of the screen, running towards the hills, which extend all the way to infinity. And on top, the sun bursts through brown clouds – God’s own klieg light. My companion and I gasped audibly, in unison. This isn’t empty nostalgia. This is about the kind of time and energy it must have taken to get the light just right, just for those few seconds of film – and then doing this over and over through that film, and other films. How does such a perfectionist reconcile himself with going through the motions in Wedding Pullav? The film is so bland, it could have been directed by Baby Guddu – it would have made no difference.

Though, seen one way, Wedding Pullav isn’t actually a film. It seems to be more of an educational video put together for future generations to get an idea of the ingredients in the rom-coms of our time. And so you have the grandmother with a saucy tongue, the young man desperate to lose his virginity, the loud Punjabi father, the divorced parents who just need a nudge to know they still carry a torch for each other. Rishi Kapoor shows up as the manager of a hotel who knows just when to dispense words of wisdom.  The first time he appears, we hear a snatch from the Saagar background score. That film was released in 1985, thirty years ago. Someone thought that that touch would please the kids who are the target audience for this film? There’s an antakshari scene. A karwa chauth scene. A scene where the hero (Diganth Manchale) dances to an RD Burman oldie (Gulaabi aankhen, if you must know). We even have the scene where the hero looks at the formerly tomboyish heroine in a dress and realises she’s a… woman.

She’s also the producer’s daughter, Anushka Ranjan. I don’t have a problem with rich parents forking out a few crores to help a child with starry ambitions . Heck, I’d be a much happier man today had my father bought me an island. But I do object to recycling the plot of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which has already been remade in Hindi, as Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, at a time Bollywood bigwigs still thought we’d buy tickets to see Uday Chopra. Hero falls in love. Heroine falls in love. They’re happy for each other… until they realise they’re in love with each other. It’s a long slog to the end. I’ve seen toothpaste commercials with more verve.

KEY:

• pullav = see here
• 1942: A Love Story = see here
• Baby Guddu = see here
• Saagar background score = see here
• antakshari = see here
• karwa chauth = see here
• Gulaabi aankhen = see here
• Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai =  see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

When we say “fairy tale” in the context of a certain kind of narrative, we usually refer to the deliberate unrealness, the escapist-wish-fulfilment-happiness of it all – but Vikas Bahl seems to take the term literally. His earlier film, the pleasant enough though over-praised Queen, was one. I wrote in my review that it is “a sun-dappled fairy tale, with a line of fairy godmothers cherishing and protecting [the protagonist]…” Now, we have Shaandaar, where the Brothers Grimm seem to have sat in on the screenwriting discussions. There’s a castle, a frog, a coach carrying a cute pumpkin of a girl, a Cupid-like boy with a bow and arrow. The story centres on an orphan (Alia, played by Alia Bhatt) who, in the tradition of fairytale heroines, is in constant communion with nature – she speaks to that frog, the insects on her sweaters keep springing to life. Alia has a stepmother, naturally, who, if not wicked, is utterly indifferent to her existence. But there is a wicked witch (Sushma Seth), who’s killed when her “curse” rebounds.

The last Hindi film to so explicitly evoke children’s literature was Sachin Kundalkar’s Aiyyaa – Rani Mukerji’s heroine was Alice, the film was her wonderland. Alia, on the other hand, is Sleeping Beauty – rather, given her insomnia, she’s an un-sleeping beauty. (There’s a magical scene in which a deep sleep falls over the entire kingdom, even the animals.) And of course, there’s a prince. Alia’s loving father (Pankaj Kapur, in a beautifully poised performance) tells her that one day she’ll find the prince of her dreams – or at least, a prince who will make her dream, a “sulaane wala rajkumar.” He arrives in the form of Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor, cruising through a part that asks nothing of him). We expect him to charge in on his horse and whisk Alia away, but there’s a hitch. He cannot ride. He’s an un-prince.

Shaandaar also nods in the direction of Bollywood’s fairy tales, the cinema of Karan Johar. Because Alia cannot sleep, her father gives her sheets of paper with sketches for dreams – these are but the oneiric equivalent of the letters the dead mother wrote to her daughter in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. From Kabhi Khushi Kabie Gham, we have the overweight “ugly duckling” blossoming into a swan (not as literally, though; in that film, the boy transformed into… Hrithik Roshan) – and when a couple of ditzy girls see the castle for the first time, they squeal, “OMG! This is like K3G!” It’s a stretch, but you could also make a case that Alia’s father is in an unhappy marriage like the ones in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. And how can we miss the refreshingly casual gay character, who’s allowed to be both a limp-wristed figure of fun (holding a very phallic gun, no less) and someone whose sexuality does not come in the way of his family’s loving him. Indeed. Shouldn’t we be able to laugh at people we also love unconditionally?

But all these ideas, all these layers, don’t come together satisfactorily. The film is rhythmless and somewhat dull, and you keep wondering why it all sounds like so much fun and yet there’s so little to enjoy. Why doesn’t the Sanjay Kapoor character, who could be called The Man with the Golden Gun, make us laugh more? Why is the Mehendi With Karan segment – such a clever concept, in a  wedding-themed movie –written so blandly? Why are scenes – one about a drug-induced hallucination, another where the leads cut loose to Eena Meena Deeka – allowed to go on like this, long past the point where they’ve made their point? And what is it with that scene where Alia sits down for breakfast and discovers lingerie on her plate? Don’t worry. This isn’t a spoiler. This was in the trailer, like all the other moments that make us sit up. If they handed out awards for how to kill the movie experience by giving away the highlights, Shaandaar would sweep them all, no contest.

And why isn’t there any romance? At least for this question, I think, there is an answer. The intent was probably to stick as closely as possible to an innocent fairytale template, without a whiff of sex – hence the scene where Alia and Jagjinder, when alone, opt to pillow-fight. But another reason is that Bahl keeps wanting to transcend the traditional registers of Hindi cinema. And this works sometimes – when Alia’s stepsister Esha (Sanah Kapoor, making a confident, charming debut) tells her father that Alia has always been his favourite, or when Alia is dismissed as an “anaath” by her grandmother. Normally, these scenes would be a cue for stung expressions and smudged mascara, but this matter-of-fact mode works too. After all, these aren’t fresh insights to these girls. These are things they’ve lived with all their lives, the tears long expended.

Alia Bhatt handles this scene wonderfully. There’s a brief flash of hurt, a wince, and then it passes. She seems to have no false notes in her repertoire, and she keeps coming up with the most unexpected reactions and line readings. Just look at how she handles the scene where she finds out who her father is and calls him “real papa.” Her only disadvantage may be that face, that babyface that makes you want to cover your eyes and yell “child porn” when you see her in a bikini. I wonder what kind of roles she’ll fit in after she’s too old for these roles – but that time, thankfully, is far away. You wish the film’s Alia had been as convincing. Shaandaar keeps giving its characters these bitty traits. Like insomnia. Like Jagjinder’s fear of the night. Like Alia’s Google-like memory for fun facts. But they’re just bits. They don’t add up to anything.

And at least some scenes needed to be less matter-of-fact. Bahl deserves credit for always trying to fight his way out of the box, but rendering emotional stretches in animation – for instance – simply says “I’m so cool,” without helping the movie. Alia’s father’s flashbacks would have worked much better as live action. There’s a difference between drama and melodrama. The latter is a pitch, but the former gives audiences something to invest in, someone to care about. That thing they say about the baby and the bathwater keeps coming to mind. Oddly, Bahl stages his scenes “naturally,” with pauses and silences, without cutifying exaggerations, but he goes all blingy in his songs. It’s like standing under a shower that can’t decide whether to go hot or cold.

And yet, and yet. You don’t want to write off Shaandaar. At least one of those songs is a beauty. It’s a battle-of-the-sexes qawwali (music by Amit Trivedi), and I was as gobsmacked to see it as I was when Agent Vinod brought back the mujra. Amitabh Bhattacharya’s rhymes are dizzyingly delightful – nakli noton ka ek bundle/senti wali mental; God/fraud; sandal/accidental; hirni chaal/ 2 BHK hall; demand/James Bond; falooda/behuda. At one point, the banter acquires a mean sheen, when Esha’s weight is mocked, but her father and Jagjinder swoop in from the sidelines and save her. It’s an important scene for a couple of reasons. One, here’s a stretch of plot that could have been done straight, with dialogue, but is instead done through song, the way we hardly see anymore. (Most songs, today, are just shiny distractions.) But more importantly, we see the dynamics in this family, how they stand up for each other. I can hear a faint feminist cry that Esha isn’t being allowed to retaliate by herself, that she needs these men, but note the glorious scene at the end where she walks away – all by herself – from a marriage that has doom written all over it. She slips out of her bridal finery – she strips down, actually, and proudly presents a sight we never ever see, the non-mocking image of a plus-size woman in body-hugging innerwear, fashioning her curves into a giant middle finger for those who cannot see beyond them. The cutest touch is that her “emancipation,” if you will, is all too human. “I’m not that fat,” she says defensively. Whether she is or isn’t is not the point, which is more about the little lies we tell ourselves to make us feel more… shaandaar.

KEY:

• shaandaar = fa-a-abulous
• Queen = see here
• Aiyyaa = see here
• “sulaane wala rajkumar” = a prince who will put you to sleep (not that way, though)
• Kuch Kuch Hota Hai = see here
• Kabhi Khushi Kabie Gham = see here
• Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna = see here
• Eena Meena Deeka = see here
• anaath = orphan
• qawwali = see here; also here
• Agent Vinod = see here
• mujra= see here; also here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Violent films usually invite us to take off our politically correct hats and indulge our inner atavists. The spurts of blood in the work of Scorsese and Tarantino are like the money shots in porn films – we get off on them. There’s a very different kind of violence in Kanu Behl’s Titli – it deadens us, makes us numb. The violence isn’t presented like highlights. It courses through the film, through the lives of its characters. Vikram (Ranvir Shorey) starts beating up a furniture delivery man because… It’s hard to pin down one pat reason as the “because.” It could be because the delivery man began talking to Vikram’s wife Sangeeta, requesting this woman to intercede in the argument he’s having with Vikram. It could be because Vikram and Sangeeta are having problems. It could be because Vikram is stuck in a cramped hellhole that he doesn’t like to be reminded of – hence his lashing out at his youngest brother Titli (Shashank Arora) when the latter says he dreams of getting out of this narak, hell. “Sab ke sab bhenchod mera khoon choos rahe ho,” Vikram snarls, dripping spittle. Their father (Lalit Behl, the director’s father) watches calmly, dipping biscuits in tea, as though these happenings were occurring on a television soap.

We learn that this is a family of carjackers – in other words, we are watching a movie whose protagonists were the villains in NH-10. Inevitably, the sympathy factor is very low. We feel for the Anushka Sharma character in NH-10 because her fears are ours. How do we begin to empathise with Vikram and Co., who take a hammer to a car salesman’s head, smashing him to a pulp? It says something about Shorey’s explosive performance that we come to care about (or at least feel something for) this horrible man. Watch him react to Sangeeta’s demand for a divorce. He would have slapped her senseless, but there’s a social worker in the room, and you can’t tell whether the tears in Vikram’s eyes are due to the loss of a wife or the loss of face. (Sangeeta returns an earring he gave her, the result of one of his carjacking outings – it’s a small moment, but it’s as if she’s throwing his life in his face.) There is the hint that Vikram did not choose to be this man. He had no choice.

It’s through Titli, the relatively peaceful one in the family, that we get a glimpse of the circumstances that made Vikram Vikram. He goes to a Ford dealership to buy a Figo. (At least, that’s what he claims.) The salesman sizes Titli up and realises this man probably cannot afford this car. I’m not familiar with Delhi’s geography, but Titli says he’s from Jamna-paar, the other side of the Yamuna, the wrong side of the tracks – and the salesman picks up on this and humiliates him, not heeding his request for a test drive. There’s more emasculation at home. Titli turns towards Neelu on their wedding night, but she pushes him away. (She’s got streaks of violence too.) Later, we discover she has a lover – named (cough, cough) Prince (Prashant Singh). Neelu dreams of a fairy-tale ending too, a redemption from the hell she’s trapped in. She makes Titli take her to Prince, and closes the bedroom door as a bemused (and, again, humiliated) Titli hangs around outside. It doesn’t take much imagination to dream up a scenario where Titli does indeed turn into a Vikram.

But Titli chooses flight. Titli is like Udaan, a reminder that family isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, but without the rah-rah anthems that made us cheer for the young protagonist. We aren’t invited to empathise with Titli. In a different kind of film, we’d take the title to mean some kind of metamorphosis, the butterfly emerging from the ugly cocoon, et cetera. But there’s no beauty in Titli’s transformation, which is preceded by a scene where he dry heaves and gets all the bile out. It’s possibly the most symbolic, cathartic instance of vomiting in cinema history – and there’s a lot of expectorating in this film, across generations, in front of a mirror speckled with grime. This is practically an invitation from the filmmaker: You are cordially invited to read meanings into this. Immutable male behaviour? Like father, like sons (and brothers)? Or are they all clearing out the earlier day’s toxins, so today becomes at least a little more bearable?

This is an impressive debut, and the only one I can recall right now that puts up such a loveless, unlovable bunch on screen. The key aspect of Titli is its leaden numbness. It’s there on Titli’s immobile face. It’s there in the scene where the family goes to Neelu’s (Shivani Raghuvanshi) house to ask for her hand for Titli – no one seems to care that the boy and girl look the least interested in each other. It’s there in the superb (if a little show-offy) scene where Titli breaks Neelu’s hand – long story – as though hammering a nail into a broken chair. It’s there in the filmmaking too, which (intentionally) leaves us distanced, detached. Even at the end, we aren’t sure what to make of Titli, because his freedom comes at the cost of his brothers’ imprisonment, a noirish double cross he engineered. (There’s a middle brother as well: Bawla, played by Amit Sial.) We remember his friend’s words: “Bhai jaisa hi hai tu.” He’s just like his brothers. At least they are doing things for the family, making sure there’s a pineapple cake for a birthday and so forth. Titli is just thinking about himself, about the parking lot he wants to buy in a mall, which, in our films, is code for upward mobility and Shining India. Titli wants out of Jamna-paar.

Sangeeta has a terrific scene where she points out Titli’s selfishness and hypocrisy. The women in Titli suffer greatly, but the film isn’t your typical indictment of patriarchy. They take it – but only up to a point. Take Sangeeta. (I don’t know the name of the actress, but she’s excellent, like everyone else. It’s the kind of ensemble acting where you say things like “not one false note.”) When she’s had enough, she seeks out that social worker and breaks free from her marriage. She’s a kind of titli too. I laughed when I discovered she had a “friend” named Sooraj, the Prince in her life. Neelu, too, doesn’t take things lying down. When Titli is humiliated by the Ford salesman, she stands up for him – she yells at the salesman. There are a lot of interlocking layers in Titli, whose only flaw is a studied kind of artiness that keeps signalling us about how unflinching, how uncompromised all this is. But everything else is great – the detailing, the Ram ratan dhan paayo on the radio (that’s the only dhan in these impoverished lives), the polyphonic conversations and their pitch-perfect staging. I wished, at the end, that there had been some closure to the character arcs of Vikram and Bawla, but perhaps the point is that sometimes there are no clean endings. Even with Titli, we see him in flight, riding on the roads towards a new life, but who knows what will happen the next time he runs into a snarky Ford salesman?

KEY:

• titli = butterfly
• “Sab ke sab bhenchod mera khoon choos rahe ho” = You fuckers are bleeding me dry.
• NH-10 = see here
• “Bhai jaisa hi hai tu.” = You are just like your brother.
• Ram ratan dhan paayo = a popular bhajan; see here for translation
• dhan = wealth

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

A monumental sex comedy could be erected from the premise of a young man who finds, one day, that his “man power” has transformed into a “sone ka tower” – but Guddu Ki Gun isn’t it. It isn’t for lack of trying, though. Kunal Khemu is game as ever – he must have the most reserves of equanimity in Bollywood. If the good roles don’t come, he’s saying, I’ll prick pick what I get, even if it’s a story about my junk turning to gold. (Would the French call this an “Au Pair”?) And Brajendra Kala is at hand as a shady sex doctor – the very image induces a smile. The problem is that the directors, Shantanu Ray Chhibber and Sheershak Anand, don’t, um, rise to the occasion. They’re content with little bouts of wordplay – “sona hamesha oopar hi jaata hai,” that sort of thing. Along with various euphemisms for the thing itself. Like “dingdong.” And “nunu.” If you remember, the villain in Austin Powers in Goldmember suffered from a similar condition. I’d tell you about it but it’s a schlong story.

As these things go, Guddu Ki Gun isn’t very, uh, hard to sit through – but situations that should have made us spurt with laughs are rendered somewhat limp. There’s a journalist who learns about the “Lord of the Lings.” He’s out for an exclusive – with a photograph. There’s a cuckolded husband. There’s an “ugly girl” whose sacha pyar will cure Guddu. (Why get all serious in a film with this story?) There’s a Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro-inspired climax that riffs on Mughal-e-Azam. Meanwhile, the golden gun itself is stolen, hunted for, and, eventually, welded back into place. After an hour, the outrageousness gets old, and things really peter out.

KEY:

• sone ka tower = tower of gold
• “sona hamesha oopar hi jaata hai” = gold always goes… up
• sacha pyar = true love
• Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro = see here
• Mughal-e-Azam = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

We remember Charles Sobhraj as a serial killer, but Prawaal Raman’s biopic (though it doesn’t actually call itself one, or use the name “Sobhraj”) Main Aur Charles isn’t very interested in murders and gore. It follows the time-tested Godfather or Don strategy of hinting at a bad side but focusing on the things that will make the character an attractive protagonist. A hero, even. Charles (an excellent Randeep Hooda) gets the kind of entry the leading man gets in a Tamil or Telugu masala blockbuster. First, the feet. Finally, the face. And there’s a reason. The film makes the case that Charles is a celebrity. He’s such a superstar by the time of his arrest in Goa that the lowly cop who caught him becomes something of a star himself. He soon finds himself regaling others with his how-I-caught-Charles stories during dinner at an upscale restaurant. He doesn’t know it yet, but there’s a reason he’s telling these stories. It’s the film’s delicious twist.

The centrepiece of Main Aur Charles is Sobhraj’s escape from Tihar jail, which is first-rate material for a thriller. Only, seeing the film, you wouldn’t know it for a while. For the longest time, we seem to be watching a real-life Maxim photo shoot, with woman after undressed woman falling for Charles’s charms. He was a smooth talker, a hypnotiser, a lady-killer in more ways than one. And he filled up voids in more ways than one. “I must say tumhari life kitni exciting hai,” coos a princess, dulled by the monotony of wealth and now intrigued by Charles’s (fake) plan to help a few dissenters. As for Mira (Richa Chadda, horribly miscast as a breathless innocent), she hates her very name. It’s too ordinary, she says. Charles makes her life so extraordinary that she goes on to argue, after being arrested as Charles’s accomplice, that he is the product of a dysfunctional family and a system that failed him. These women were a big part of Charles’s life, true – but Raman keeps hitting this point so insistently that we want to say: We get it. Can we move on to the jailbreak, please?

Another problem is the way the film is structured, edited. It’s a slick, Hollywood approach, with slivers of this event segueing into slivers of that one. (You could say Main Aur Charles tries to be as cool as it imagines Charles to be.) Some parts are confusing (just who are these foreigners with Charles, and why not tell us how they came to be with him?) and there’s no grip. It’s just one escapade after another. But after Charles’s arrest, which happens around midpoint, the film settles down and becomes a very watchable story about a very warped man. (Someone claims he ate a lizard in jail.) The seventies/eighties details are great fun. The Dyanora Solid State TVs. The club dancer with the plaited string across her forehead, singing Jab chaye tera jadoo. The wacka-chaka background music, from films like Don. In fact, Salim-Javed could have based their script on Charles instead of Chinatown. As the police here routinely discover, Charles ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai.

Even more fun is Adil Hussain, as Amod Kanth, the cop on Charles’s tail and the “main” of the title. His scenes with his wife (Tisca Chopra) are a quiet riot, especially when he finds her appearing a little too fascinated by Charles. You can hear him thinking, I can handle all these other women falling for him… but you too? But that’s the man Charles supposedly was, and we’re teased with hints about this enigma. After his arrest, a cop reads out names from his multiple passports and asks, “Tum ho kaun?” Charles replies, with a smile, “Sab.” Hooda’s smile never slips. It’s more of a smirk, as if he’s playing a game. He keeps clippings of newspaper stories about him, and when he finds one with an unflattering picture, he screams, “Press ko naye pictures bhej do.” Talk about star tantrums. An associate warns Charles that it’s just a matter of time before the cops catch up with them. Charles replies, smile intact, “Let’s see ow long zey take.” Ze accent comes from Charles’s French roots. Ze beret too. But he prefers German films, like Metropolis. It’s hard to fault a film for falling head over heels for such an international man of mystery.

KEY:

• Main Aur Charles = Charles and I
• Don = the film that this film was a remake of
• “I must say tumhari life kitni exciting hai” = I must say your life is so exciting.
• Jab chaye tera jadoo = see here
•  The wacka-chaka background music = see here
• Chinatown = see here
• Charles ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai = a riff on a famous line from Don
• “Tum ho kaun?” = Who are you?
• “Sab” = Everyone.
• “Press ko naye pictures bhej do” = Send new pictures to the press.
• Metropolis = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Baradwaj Rangan reports on a film market at the Mumbai Film Festival, which hopes to help directors like Vetri Maaran target the screens on your laptops and smartphones.

On the second day of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, the producer Guneet Monga (The Lunchbox, Gangs of Wasseypur, Shaitan) screened a two-minute trailer of her film Monsoon Shootout to a bunch of distributors gathered in a small room. Afterwards, she recalled the Orson Welles quote about a filmmaker’s life being about 2 per cent movie-making and 98 per cent hustling. “We’re starting the journey of hustling from here,” she said. Everyone laughed.

Monga went on to apologise for the lack of subtitles in the trailer, but there was really no need. The slickly photographed clip had candlelit romance, cops, a snarling Nawazuddin Siddiqui, lots of gunfire. Perhaps sensing that the film might be perceived as male-oriented actioner, Amit Kumar, the director, quickly added that the women in the audience during a screening in Russia saw the story as one about choices: to be with the good guy or the bad guy, to be with the guy with money or the guy without money. In case the distributors were still not convinced, he said that the film had been tweaked from the version that was shown at Cannes, in 2013. Now, it was India-ready. Now, there was an explanatory voiceover. Now, there were songs. This was 100 per cent hustling.

Monsoon Shootout was part of 24 films (18 features, 6 feature-length documentaries) selected for the Mumbai Film Market (MFM), an initiative by Kiran Rao (Chairperson of MAMI), Anupama Chopra (Festival Director), and Smriti Kiran (Creative Director, Programming, Production and Operations). “For a while now, I’ve been wondering how to make films that are not market-driven,” Rao told me. “Building a bridge between risky/independent/small films and the audiences for them – this concerns me as a filmmaker. When I came on board MAMI last year, I thought it was an opportunity to start looking at this.”

Both Rao and Chopra have deep-rooted connections in the industry – the big players, the distributors and studios and sales agents. They called on them. “It’s a small, one-day market,” Rao said. “The vision is that MAMI should be a place where independent films are discovered and encouraged and celebrated.” Chopra joked that this was their version of an arranged marriage. “The boys and girls are going to check each other out.” To officiate the proceedings, Rao and Chopra called on Saameer Mody, Managing Director of Pocket Films. With good reason. He helped them round up the grooms, produce the market.

* * *

When Pocket Films began operations – as a database (a sort of online yellow pages, really) for the film industry, named 1takemedia.com – Mody met a lot of people who’d made short films as a show reel but did not know what to do with them, how to take them to a wider audience. This was around the time YouTube had launched in India. Mody and his partners saw an opportunity and became channel partners. Today, Pocket Films is India’s largest aggregator and distributor of short films in the digital space. “Anyone can load their film on YouTube,” Mody said. “But Pocket Films comes with advantage.” It’s a site people seek out. It has films listed under categories: Short Films to Make You Believe in Destiny, Short Films That Will Put You in a Good Mood, Short Films That Will Make You Learn to be Happy with Small Things in Life. All of which means that the chances of your film being found by a viewer is much higher, especially after the debut of a one-hour TV show dedicated to short films on NDTV Prime, titled Prime Talkies With Pocket Films.

With MFM, Mody is extending his experience – one might even say expertise – to feature films and feature-length documentaries. This is not the first time a film festival has hosted a market, but this is the first time a curated set of films (culled from the Indian submissions to MAMI) is being presented to potential buyers. “The initial pool consisted of around 225 films,” said Bina Paul, Head of the Indian Program at MAMI, whose partner in the two-and-a-half-month curation process was Deepti DCunha (Programmer, Indian Selection). “We were really keen on the whole business of not concentrating on Hindi cinema, putting an emphasis on the fact that India is not just Hindi cinema.”

Hence the line-up of – apart from Hindi – Tamil, Assamese, Malayalam, Marathi, Haryanvi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu and Kannada films. There’s even a Hindi/Nepali/English entry, Chandrashekhar Reddy’s Fireflies in the Abyss. (Official synopsis: Even with the odds stacked against him, Suraj, an 11 year-old boy, fights his way out of a life in the ‘rat-hole’ coalmines to put himself in school.) “The market works in various ways,” Paul said. “Some might buy the film’s rights. Some may buy remake rights. Others may be interested in distributing the film with subtitles.”

“We have two objectives,” Mody said. One, to highlight good independent films for different distributors. “Sometimes filmmakers lose out because they don’t have the right sources or contacts. We are getting all these distributors in one room.” He spoke of theatrical distributors like Yash Raj, Eros, Fox, and also non-traditional buyers like hotstar.com and Amazon Instant Video, which brings us to Point Two. “Impress upon filmmakers that theatrical distribution is not the be all and end all.” Smita Jha, Leader – Entertainment and Media Practice India, PricewaterhouseCoopers, told the audience, “Put the mobile at the centre of your business strategy. In less than two years, 50 per cent of the world’s population will be mobile internet subscribers.” It’s no accident that the logo of Pocket Films is a smartphone peeking out of a denim pocket.

I asked Anupama Chopra if filmmakers would find it hard to reconcile to the fact that their films will be seen on a smartphone. “I know it can seem like defeat,” she said. “But filmmakers need to rethink.” She said that the Indian business model is now like Hollywood’s, where it’s easier to make a $200 million film than one costing $40 million. “For a mid-level film, costing around Rs. 4-5 crore, you have to spend something like 5-7 crore on publicity. And movie-going is so expensive today that the average viewer will choose the big mainstream movie at the theatre. You have to seduce them on other platforms. It’s the choice between not finding viewers at all versus finding them while they’re, say, having a meal. If your work is good, they may begin to seek you out, even in theatres.”

* * *

Vetri Maaran, the acclaimed Tamil filmmaker who is currently readying his Visaaranai for release, didn’t seem overly concerned about finding audiences through non-theatrical avenues. “I make films for my people, but with some international sensibilities,” he told me. “These markets can help to take my films to non-diaspora audiences.” He’s been to film markets at Cannes and Montreal, hawking his 2011 feature Aadukalam, and he pointed to Kaaka Muttai, which took the film-festival route to success in both domestic and international markets. He said he was interested in meeting with Amazon Instant Video, to explore the possibility of digital release a week after a film is released in theatres. “I want to see how they can help.”

But this isn’t about finding viewers, he said. At least, it’s not just that. “People who don’t go to theatres are going to see the film on a pirated DVD. This is about making more money for my investors.” He sees this as a way to recoup the money he loses by not compromising – only, when I dropped the word, he gently corrected me. “Filmmaking is about compromise at every stage.” He prefers the term “exploitation of viewers,” through commercial ingredients like item songs. He wants to reduce this exploitation. “That’s why we need to do something unconventional about the way we market films.”

There was another Tamil filmmaker on the list – Anucharan, who made the excellent Kirumi. When I asked Kiran Rao about the inclusion of films (like Kirumi) that have already been released in theatres, she said, “With some films, the run in cinemas is so short that you can’t really say they had a theatrical release. They have the potential to reach more audiences on different platforms.” Plus, the intent was to present to distributors a combination of attractive, mainstream-enough films and films that are a harder sell. “I know Visaaranai will find a release in the Chennai market,” she said. “But it’s a tough, intense film, and I don’t see it being widely distributed elsewhere. So it’s much smarter to consider a platform-release mode, wherein you release a film in a few territories and then expand the release based on word of mouth, or allow people to watch the film online, legally. This is going to be essential for filmmakers like me, who make films without stars.”

I asked Mody if the market was a level playing field, given its pre-selection of films that were allowed to make a pitch to distributors. These chosen filmmakers were even coached on how to make their pitch, how to work out sales strategies. Mody said, “We are inviting top-level distributors and decision makers. They have extremely busy schedules. We value their time and want to give them projects that have been curated.” Bina Paul used the word “accessible” a lot. “We chose films that are accessible at some level. This is, after all, the first year, the first time something is being done like this. It might be self-defeating if we put in films that the market is not interested in. We want to build this.” A few days after the market, Mody told me that “a lot of interesting conversations” have been happening, though nothing has been officially closed yet. I asked Anupama Chopra if the MFM could be seen as some sort of movement. She said, “It’s too ambitious to think about the market like that. But look, it’s finally a business. It’s dhandha, as crass as that sounds. Even if one film finds a distributor, we would have done our job.”

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Thoughts from a few days when Fassbinder rubbed shoulders with Rajinikanth and Guru Dutt….

How do you plan your viewing schedule at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival? One way is to simply let the film find you. Earlier this year, at the Berlinale, the documentary Fassbinder – To Love Without Demands was one of the hottest tickets. Understandably so. The subject, after all, was only the most important German filmmaker of the post-War period. And someone who died tragically young, at 37, leaving behind a huge if-only on the lips of filmgoers and critics. But in a span of 14 years, he directed 60 films, acted in films, put together 30 stage shows – it was almost as if he knew he did not have much time, that he had to cram it all in while he could. “Such a rate of production is unparalleled in cinema history,” says the Danish director and film historian Christian Braad Thomsen, who splices together his interviews with Fassbinder and reminiscences from collaborators. The result is a deeply moving tribute.

I couldn’t watch the film in Berlin. It was all sold out. So when I saw it in the MAMI line-up, the film practically sidled its way into my schedule. “I didn’t want to copy or imitate Hollywood,” Fassbinder says. He wanted to make films based on his understanding of Hollywood movies. But it’s not just about his career. It’s about his life. His childhood. His thoughts on the Oedipal myth. His reverence for the German émigré filmmaker Douglas Sirk. His dismissal of “art films,” which makes us wonder, with a smile, just what category he thought his own films would be clubbed under. His desire for a child versus his feelings about bringing one into this world. And, of course, sadomasochism. The latter trait announced itself in another documentary as well, one about Rajinikanth’s fans. It’s no news, at least to us down south, that the actor is revered as a god, but a fan gets so literal about it, he pierces his skin with hooks and hangs from a wire, the way devotees do at temples.

For the Love of a Man. That’s what Rinku Kalsy’s documentary is titled, never mind that a lot of the people featured in the film would take offence to their hero being called a mere man. The film lays out some basics about the cult of the star in Tamil cinema (and Tamil Nadu), and then follows a few men who aren’t just fans. One of them begins to weep remembering the time Rajinikanth was hospitalised. He couldn’t function. His brother had to go to Singapore and take pictures standing in front of the hospital in which Rajinikanth was admitted – only then did some semblance of normalcy return. Another fan is an auto driver. Near the steering, where others usually paste pictures of gods, for luck, he has pictures of Rajinikanth. I kept wondering what a foreign audience would make of all this, given that the sometimes fun, other times chilling phenomenon of star worship is so alien to them. And we’re talking star worship to the power of infinity. As a fan says, “This is not Kollywood or Hollywood. This is Rajiniwood.”

The film’s biggest laugh came from the mimicry artist who regales fans by impersonating Rajinikanth, and then admits, “Basically I am a Kamal Haasan fan.” If you don’t find this funny, you’re probably not from Tamil Nadu. I always try to squeeze a few documentaries into my viewing schedule at film festivals. For one, they are best seen on the screen, without distraction. At home, there’s always something else that’s an easier watch that you reach for at the end of a working day. Also, these documentaries are hard to come by once they disappear from the festival circuit. Vetri Maaran’s Visaaranai, on the other hand, is sure to get a theatrical release. But I watched it anyway because there’s no telling what the powerful film will look like once the censors get their hands on it. Aligarh, which opened the festival, was pretty controversial too. I couldn’t catch it, but  I wasn’t too bummed. It’s sure to land up in theatres, though someone told me later that there was a sort-of sex scene that might not make it.

The highlight of the festival, for me, was the restored version of Pyaasa, though I wouldn’t exactly call the film a favourite. I’m a bit ambivalent about this story of a Devdas-like masochist who reaches for balladry instead of the bottle. The film is rivalled only by Mera Naam Joker in the self-pity sweepstakes. My God, does he go on, right from the first scene in which a bee is crushed under the sole of a shoe. Guru Dutt plays the bee. The shoe is embodied, at different times, by his callous brothers, his callous ex-girlfriend, his callous publisher, the callous society. And yet, the film is a marvel, a true testament to cinema being a collaborative art. As a novel, as a lone creator’s creation, Pyaasa might have been unbearable, but with this music, with these lyrics, with this (often symbolic, and always breathtaking) cinematography, you cannot look away. And it was amazing watching the film with an audience. They cheered when Johnny Walker walked in with his bottles of massage oil. They knew when the songs were coming. Almost six decades later, Jinhen naaz hai Hind par is still so relevant, it could be the soundtrack to the lives of everyone who’s returning an award today.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

What could explain my affection for Sooraj Barjatya’s work? My sweet tooth, definitely. But also his rootedness in an ethos that we think of – maybe “imagine” is a better word – as “Indian.” We may not be that “Indian” anymore, and we may squirm, sometimes, at his insistence on serving us orange juice when we’ve graduated to Patiala pegs – but once we hop on board, it’s like a vacation to someplace where the sun is always shining, where everyone’s so bloody nice. An India far removed from today’s newspaper headlines. You’d have to invent a genre to define Barjatya’s cinema: it’s the attending-a-family-function genre. It’s lovely to meet everyone, all dressed up. We discover a surprising tolerance for certain traditions. And after a while, we start looking at the watch. But as Barjatya’s films don’t come along all that often, we don’t mind.

Even the films he references – or at least reminds us of – are refreshingly Indian. Prem Ratan Dhan Payo is about a commoner (Salman Khan’s Prem) who takes the place of a royal (Salman Khan’s Vijay Singh) – but instead of The Prince and the Pauper or The Corsican Brothers, we think Raja Aur Runk and Ram Aur Shyam. There’s a hall-of-mirrors climax – but instead of Orson Welles and The Lady from Shanghai, we think of Mughal-e-Azam and its sheesh mahal. All departments of filmmaking unite in preserving that orange-juice innocence – from the choreography that resuscitates the puppet dance from Chori Chori to the production design that references Madhubani art. And at least for a while, we think of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s innocent cinema, with genial, play-acting outsiders fixing up broken families. Prem, who’s really a stage actor, transforms a bunch of scowling palace dwellers to kids who giggle and hide under tables. He gives them, as the title suggests, the gift of love. Prem even cooks – he’s a bawarchi.

But there’s more. The film opens in Ayodhya (that’s where Prem is from), with images of Ram temples and the Hanuman Chaleesa, and it frequently frames its leading man against the sun, as if hinting at a suryavanshi – when the villain (Neil Nitin Mukesh) makes his move, clouds gather and block out the light. The heroine is called Maithili, which is another name for Sita. (With her swanlike neck, her ability to race through corridors in high heels, and her general air of princessy entitlement, Sonam Kapoor is well cast as Vijay Singh’s fiancée.) And we realise that, after Hum Saath Saath Hain, Barjatya has once again turned to the Ramayana – but in a more glancing fashion. Where that film retold a very similar story of banishment and return, this one merely makes its hero an embodiment of the avatar. Hence the irresistibly catchy opening number (from Himesh Reshammiya) that unfolds during Ram Leela – only, it goes Prem leela. The film is about Prem’s leela.

The traditional Barjatya preoccupation with… tradition is intact, but the royal setting makes it more relevant. After all, these people are even more tradition-bound than the average Indian, their lives governed by unsmiling protocol. (“You think traditions are funny?” Vijay Singh scowls, when asked about the exotic rituals that surround him. That could be Barjatya talking.) And Vijay Singh’s impending coronation lends itself to Barjatya’s penchant for setting his films in the midst of ceremonial bustle. (If you recall, Hum Saath Saath Hain dealt with 25th-wedding-anniversary festivities, and Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! was labelled a wedding video.) Other Barjatya staples are visible too –the way he lets his scripts breathe, or the way entire chunks of narrative play out through song. There’s a football match here (it was cricket in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!) that packs in battle-of-the-sexes comedy, song and dance, as well as drama involving an estranged sibling. (Most filmmakers have trouble just finding a place for their songs.)

And yet, he’s not the man who made Maine Pyar Kiya – and it’s not just because, with Vivah, he’s become a better filmmaker. (The cinematography is no longer just about colour and bling, but also space and air and light.) At that point, he liked charged conflict. Alok Nath’s refusal to accept Salman Khan’s hard-earned money, the “rupyon ka mol” scene, is one of the great sinus-clearing dramatic scenes of the 1980s. And let’s not forget that Barjatya introduced the trope of the boy determined not to elope but ask the girl’s father for her hand, something Aditya Chopra reused to great effect many years later, in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. But the history-making success of Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! made Barjatya a safer filmmaker – he’s more timid now, he follows a formula. Prem Ratan Dhan Payo reintroduces Maine Pyar Kiya’s Mohnish Bahl-like villain and action climax (the film features the first instance of murder in the Barjatya oeuvre), but the rest of the film follows the format established by Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! All conflict is relegated to the last half-hour, and whatever’s there earlier is underplayed, without the elemental magnitude we usually find in melodramas with these plot points. The mantra is: Never let things get too unpleasant, ugly. Never let audiences forget they’re having a good time, that they’re… attending a family function.

While this may make for great box-office, it’s not consistently arresting cinema. We look at the actors – indie names like Deepak Dobriyal (in the Laxmikant Berde part), Sanjay Mishra, Swara Bhaskar – and think they’ve been cast for a reason. But they’re just filling out chalk-outline parts. It’s like hiring Arnold Schwarzenegger to lift your laptop bag. Only Anupam Kher, as the faithful family retainer, gets something to do. And of course, Salman Khan. If nothing else, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo makes a compelling case for his stardom. The post-Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! Barjatya hero is so virtuous, he’s a saint – you need star charisma to poke a few holes in that halo. (When Shahid Kapoor played the protagonist in Vivah, he was a snooze.) Salman is still smiling that Barjatya smile, that half-smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes, the smile of restraint and benevolent goodness as opposed to the hearty smile of someone who really enjoys living – but he goes past the saintliness and keeps us watching. (He infuses both characters with bits of personality – they do seem different.) And like Bajrangi Bhaijaan, this film leaves us with extra-textual notes about the actor. Prem is repeatedly called “Dilwale,” which is the oddest coincidence of an actor’s film referencing an upcoming film of his rival’s since Vijay’s Puli kept name-dropping Ajith’s Vedalam. Two, Armaan Kohli, who plays one of the bad guys here, was involved in a hit-and-run case the same year as Salman Khan was. Imagine a family-friendly film managing to accommodate both of them. Suddenly, the Barjatya universe seems to have darkened a bit, no?

KEY:

• Prem Ratan Dhan Payo = the treasure of love; a spin on this bhajan
• Patiala pegs = see here
• Raja Aur Runk = see here
• Ram Aur Shyam = see here
• The Lady from Shanghai = see clip here
• Mughal-e-Azam = see here
• sheesh mahal = glass palace
• the puppet dance from Chori Chori = see here
• Madhubani art = see here
• bawarchi = cook; also, this movie
• Hanuman Chaleesa = see here
• suryavanshi = see here
• Hum Saath Saath Hain = see here
• Ramayana = see here
• Ram Leela = see here
• Prem leela = see here
• leela = [a god’s] play; see here
• Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! = see here
• Maine Pyar Kiya = see here
• Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge = see here
• Bajrangi Bhaijaan = see here
• Puli = see here
• Vedalam = see here
• hit-and-run case = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

A quick trip through the nine moods – nava rasas – of the Indian film song.

Which song would you pick as a depiction of Śṛungāram (Love)? There are hundreds. Abhi na jaao chhod kar, for instance. He’s saying don’t leave me yet, the heart hasn’t had its fill of you. She protests. It’s late. The stars are out. If I don’t leave now, I never will. Tune, lyrics, star charisma – everything fuses together to explain why we, in our movies, love the musical interlude. But Abhi na jaao is still a fairly straightforward love song. Consider, on the other hand, Dhoondho dhoondho re sajana from Gunga Jumna. It’s about love, yes, but also something else. Those days, you couldn’t show sex on screen, so here’s the next best thing – the implication of sex. It’s the morning after the wedding night. The heroine’s earring is caught on the hero’s kurta. She’s looking for it, singing about it, dancing around it. It’s a marvellous example of communication through non-verbal (i.e. non-dialogue) means – between characters, between characters and audience.

That’s what a musical interlude is about, though the American critic Pauline Kael might have disagreed. Her idea of a musical was something like Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, where the numbers are mounted as stage performances, commenting on the action, instead of having people on the streets, say, burst into song. She wrote, “Cabaret violates the wholesome approach of big musicals… It violates the pseudo-naturalistic tradition – the Oklahoma!-South Pacific-West Side Story tradition, which requires that the songs appear to grow organically out of the story.” But we revel in this “pseudo-naturalistic tradition” – when done right, our songs grow organically from the script. Take Yeh dosti (Sholay) and Sar jo tera chakraye (Pyaasa). These songs come about because it’s time – in the script – to establish these characters, who they are, what they do. Yeh dosti even introduces the coin toss, which will go on to become a major narrative device. The mood in these songs? Hāsyam (Laughter).

A few weeks ago, I got a letter saying that the students of Davidson College, North Carolina, USA, were in Chennai for their Semester Abroad program. This included a series of lectures for a course titled Cognition of the Performing Arts, India. (I guess Indian Performing Arts didn’t sound forbidding enough for a college course costing tens of thousands.) The organisers asked me to present something about (their words) “creating mood through music and songs in Indian films.” I decided to take the navarasa route – showing them songs that conformed to the nine dominant emotions of Indian art, especially dance. To my mind, it was as good an accordion approach as any.

Whenever faced with a non-Indian audience, I am in two minds. Should I ease them into Indian cinema, with examples that are somewhat like the films they are used to? Or should I kick them into the deep end, with hardcore mainstream-cinema clips, to impress on them how thoroughly different our cinema, our culture is? I did the latter with a German media delegation, who wanted a whistle-stop tour of Indian cinema. I showed them clips from Benegal, Raj Kapoor, Ray, and also our amman (goddess) movies and snake-worship films (Vellikizhamai Viratham). The latter made them sit up. They’ve seen some form of Benegal/Ray/Kapoor – either the films themselves or the style of filmmaking – but they’ve never seen a cobra performing action-hero moves to save the husband of a snake-worshipper from a glass of poisoned milk. They laughed at first. At some level, it is ridiculous. But then we got talking about traditions and myths and cultural symbols, and it grew into a great discussion.

But songs pose a bigger challenge than kung-fu cobras. The musical is practically extinct in Hollywood, and modern-day viewers find it odd that an orchestra erupts out of nowhere and the singers are perfectly in sync and everyone knows the steps. Audiences find it difficult to wrap their mind around the fact that though this isn’t “natural,” it’s still “real” within the context of the film. Take Tu bin bataye (Rang De Basanti). I picked this as an example of Śāntam (Peace), because it’s a tranquil interlude at this point in the screenplay, before the students begin to wage war. I love the placement of this song. Madhavan has just proposed to Soha Ali Khan. The friends are crazy-happy. This beautiful tune comes on, making us smile with them – and we carry this emotion into the second half, only to have it destroyed, bit by agonising bit. Take this song away, and you have a very different movie.

I had a lot of fun “researching” for this talk, which, in my line of work, means spending hours with YouTube. For Kāruṇyam (Compassion), I picked O duniya ke rakhwale (Baiju Bawra). Bharat Bhushan. Glycerine. Enough said. For Raudram (Fury), I chose Jee karda (Badlapur), which also illustrates the “promotional music video” aspect of our songs. It gives us a glimpse into what the film is about – the mood, the characters, the newspaper headline that gives away a bit of plot. For Bhayānakam (Horror), I picked Jhoom jhoom dhalti raat (Kohraa), a terrific instance of mood-creation through song. Waheeda Rehman’s terror is depicted through the piercing deliberateness of the composition, and through visuals that contrast her smallness with the enormity of the malevolent mansion. It helped that the film is a remake of Rebecca, so you can see how prose like that can be moulded to the Indian format of prose-poetry, with songs doing some of the storytelling.

For Veeram (Heroism), instead of showing songs about valour, I opted for Tattad tattad (Goliyon ki Ras-Leela Ram Leela) and Dil cheez kya hai (Umrao Jaan) – the former a hero-introduction song, the latter a heroine-introduction song. This is, after all, a unique Indian tradition, to have the hero/heroine make their first appearance in a song sequence. Adbhutam (Wonder) was easy. I chose the title song of Chaudhvin Ka Chand, where Guru Dutt gazes in wonderment at (the sleeping) Waheeda Rehman, something that people might find creepy today – as these students did. Another Guru Dutt song – Yeh mehlon (Pyaasa) – raised its hand as an instant candidate for Bībhatsam (Disgust). What is this number if not an expression of disgust for the world we are trapped in? For Bhakti (Devotion), I chose Illaadadondrum illai, the magnificent TR Mahalingam prayer from Thiruvilayadal. You may have noticed that this is the only non-Hindi number in the playlist. With reason. It’s the only one I could find with subtitles – so I’m going to end with one of my favourite rants. Increasing numbers of non-Indians are beginning to look at Indian cinema. Ignore subtitles at your own peril.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.