Spoilers ahead…

Some films are so abstracted that they exist fully only in their makers’ heads, and if we are to engage with them at all, it isn’t to know what happens next but to dive in for the experience – something like accepting a dare to stare at a lava lamp unblinkingly for a couple of hours. X: Past Is Present is one of those lava lamps, all right – but not because of its conceit, which is fairly straightforward. We meet a man named K (Rajat Kapoor) in a nightclub, and his interactions with a twentysomething (Aditi Chengappa) provide a springboard for memories of women from the past. For instance, K stumbles into this girl changing clothes – and we’re whisked into a flashback that shows him as a youngster spying on the woman in the window across the street. Did I mention he’s filming her? K is a filmmaker.

Few things are more masturbatory in nature than filmmakers making films about filmmakers – but when some of the filmmakers are film critics as well, you have a veritable circle jerk. Here’s the list of (eleven) directors of X: Past Is Present – Abhinav Shiv Tiwari, Anu Menon, Hemant Gaba, Nalan Kumarasamy, Pratim D. Gupta, Q, Raja Sen, Rajshree Ojha, Sandeep Mohan, Sudhish Kamath, and Suparn Verma. And they’re getting off – as they’re wont to, as they should – on the films they’ve watched. (And we are endlessly reminded of the films we’ve watched.) If the basic premise is reminiscent of Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women, Fellini’s 8½ rears its head when we discover K has a writing block. If K’s marriage (to Radhika Apte) takes us back to Basu Bhattacharya’s tales of independent-minded urban couples drowning in the rough seas of modern-day relationships, K’s flat-sharing with a woman he never meets brings to mind Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Asha Jaoar Majhe (and also Wong Kar-wai). And think of the last time we had a leading man named K. It was in Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking, which was also probably the last time something this trippy, this gonzo, this self-indulgent graced our screens.

As the title suggests, X: Past Is Present is also about time. The film opens on the face of a Patek Philippe watch, and goes on to include an hourglass, an invisible Rolex – even a reference to time travel. Why? Because there are 24 hours in a day. Guess how many frames per second the typical film is made of. And on and on it goes. Eleven heads thrown back, eleven eyes closed, eleven hands moving in a blur. But what about the audience’s satisfaction? The trouble with X is that nothing sticks. Each flashback is directed by a different filmmaker, shot by a different cinematographer – the film is wild mix of moods, tones, textures. It’s interesting, certainly. But look past the style, and there’s little substance. (And no, in this case, style alone isn’t substance.) Women come and go, sometimes behaving like they’re in an Indian television soap, sometimes like they’re in a Euro art film – and this genre-mixing never descends from the head to the heart. No one is around long enough to make an impression, or make us care. It’s all high concept. K’s women are as much abstractions as K’s film, or even K himself, who, in flashbacks is shot mostly from the back and is seen fully only as a younger man (Anshuman Jha). You could play a drinking game with the possible interpretations.

The directors try to flesh out the various episodes with tenuous connections. We hear one woman talking about an abortion, and later, speaking of Bollywood films, K says that the hero and heroine tend to stare at each other intensely, “as if we’re about to kill a baby.” But this is claptrap lyricism, and there’s a lot of it. God’s a screenwriter… Day-to-day objects can become agents of romantic connection… K naam nahin hai; it’s a mask. And, my favourite, a new addition to the Farhan & Zoya Book of Hinglish-isms, “Main motherhood experience karna chahti hoon.” Because, you know, we’re too cool for “Main maa banna chahti hoon.” We say things like “fuck” and “pussy” on screen. After a while, I began to feel bad about panning Roy, which for all its solipsism at least looked good on screen and had some good music. Fine actresses like Huma Qureshi and Swara Bhaskar are stranded in nothing parts, mouthing off-camera lines and modelling an impressive range of innerwear. Some of the episodes are unwatchable, like the one about the hot ER doctor who says she likes Rushdie. Is this just bad filmmaking that reflects the director’s prowess, or is this deliberately bad filmmaking that reflects K’s prowess as he films her? Keep a towel handy as you ponder over that.

KEY:

• The Man Who Loved Women = see here
• 8½ = see here
• Asha Jaoar Majhe = see here
• No Smoking = see here
• K naam nahin hai = K is not a name.
• “Main motherhood experience karna chahti hoon.” = I want to experience motherhood.
• “Main maa banna chahti hoon.” = I want to become a mother.
• Roy = 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.

Thoughts on stars, those people who keep making us go to the theatres even if, sometimes, we wish better sense had prevailed.

Why is Vedalam, Ajith’s Deepavali release, doing such boffo business at the Tamil Nadu box office? A lot of people have asked me this question, including a Delhi-based journalist who’s doing a story on the film and wanted to know: The movie is a disaster – in storytelling, acting, aesthetics and music. How has this masala genre as the template for heroism and mythmaking survived in the 20th century…? I don’t know if I have the answer. If we knew why films worked, there would be no flops. But yes, the extent of Vedalam’s success is surprising, given that it has terrible comedy, a romantic track that appears to exist simply because you cannot have a film without a heroine (the hero barely looks at her in that way), and the villains have basically been instructed to act like gorillas after the zookeeper forgot their feed. And yet, something keeps us watching, and that something, I think, is the star. He’s the feed bag for the otherwise starved audience.

Let’s extend that culinary metaphor. The thing that makes a star a star is that secret (or sometimes, not-so-secret) sauce he or she spices up the screen with. With Vijay and Shahid Kapoor, it’s the way they move. Many actors are good dancers, but when they dance, you hear them say, “I can execute these steps.” With these two, you hear, “Look at me be.” They don’t dance. They… flow. And watching this can sometimes be enough. No one seemed to like R…  Rajkumar, but the exuberance of the song sequences left me with a high I couldn’t shake off for days. I don’t trust people who say they enjoy films only if there’s a “script,” or if it “makes sense.” With a certain kind of movie, yes, we expect all that – but there are films that engage us in other ways. When a star is in his element, when Vijay cuts loose the way he does in the Karigalan number in Vettaikaaran, it’s like the sun has been replaced by a disco ball. Suddenly we realise how gloom-dispelling, how life-sustaining this stuff is, that trashy pleasures are a big, big part of why we go to the movies.

But what about other aspects of performance, you ask? But a star is not required to be the on-screen answer to a multivitamin tablet, an A-Z repository of talent. That’s an actor’s job. It’s the actor who’s obligated to demonstrate his prowess at several levels. He must laugh. He must cry. He must do everything Kamal Haasan can do. Now there’s an interesting case – an actor who’s also a star. And also a writer canny enough to give his fans the actor-star they come to see. His latest film, Thoongavanam, has an unconvincing moment where the tough cop he plays breaks down. See Kamal as just an actor, and you’ll find this to be uncharacteristic behaviour for a character toughened by years of service – but as a star, you can’t be too subtle. Your fans expect these emotionally charged moments where they can say, “Wow, what a great actor he is!” That’s what’s in the feed bag. My favourite Kamal Haasan moment in recent years is when his effeminate dancer in Vishwaroopam transforms, in a heartbeat, into a raging warrior. You’ve seen the actor thus far. Now we see the star. But wait, wasn’t the actor a false front as per the script – in other words, weren’t we always watching the star? Or is the measure of this star how far out on a limb he goes as an actor?

You could tie yourself up in knots deconstructing this scene, as also the one in Enthiran, where Evil Rajinikanth sniffs out and captures Good Rajinikanth, who’s in hiding as part of the former’s army. But what’s happening on screen is just the appetiser. For the main course, dig deeper. Evil Rajinikanth is the persona that we saw early on in the actor’s career, the thrilling bad guy who was gradually replaced – due to the compulsions of, yes, stardom – by the duller do-gooder Rajinikanth, and here’s the revenge. Idhu eppidi irukku? These are quintessential star moments, which allow us to go beyond the script and “converse” with star personas that have evolved over the years. Does Ajith, who’s being compared to Rajinikanth after Vedalam’s success, have this kind of stardom yet? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s easier to look back on a star than to comment on him mid-creation. But with the shades of grey he’s able to accommodate in his characters, he’s at least a bracing change from other bland heroes whose stardom is a trap, confining them in cocoons of cloying virtue.

But sometimes, we become moralists and insist on virtue. When I posted a review of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, a friend commented, “I don’t understand how a convicted murderer still gets to be leading man.” It’s terrible and perhaps points to a huge character flaw in me, but maybe some of us find it easier to separate the real and make-believe worlds, the way we do with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? Because on screen, Salman Khan is a star – his USP is an endearing brattishness, abetted, no doubt, by his off-screen status of an unattached man who still lives with his parents. He’s the boy who never grew up. And Shah Rukh? He was a zillion-watt star in the Kabhi Khushi Khabhie Gham days, when he resurrected the s-s-s-swooning romantic hero for the Internet generation. You weren’t sure if he was going to carve your name in blood or carve you up. Then there’s Aamir, who’s single-handedly positioned himself as the biggest star-brand since Amitabh Bachchan. Quality, hard work, reliability – these may sound like jottings from a 1923 Boy Scout’s manual, but Aamir Khan has fashioned these resolutely unglamorous traits into a survival kit for stardom.

What about heroines? Sridevi was once called the female Bachchan (and later, I think Madhuri Dixit was too) – no further acknowledgement of stardom is necessary. But as much as I enjoy some of their performances, they put too much of themselves out there. I preferred Rekha, who had more mystique. She was the thing you saw when you peered into a deep well on a moonless night. As for today’s actresses, they may be stars in terms of box-office value (Nayanthara, who’s apparently installed a hit-manufacturing unit in her backyard), and there are certainly some good performers, but they aren’t unique enough, the sauce isn’t special enough. Then again, you may differ. Because tastes differ. I’ve never understood the Hema Malini phenomenon, for instance. Very limited performer. A dazzler in her Johny Mera Naam days, but not so much later. And yet, she kept shining. What, I keep wondering, was the secret sauce? Her innate Indianness, perhaps? Sometimes, even this unknowability is the stamp of a star.

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.

Why should everyone, including Aamir Khan, say the most perfectly worded, politically correct, lawyer-vetted things in public, even if they may think otherwise privately?

Before Aamir Khan, there was Kamal Haasan. Frustrated by forces that were preventing the release of his mega-budget production Vishwarooopam in Tamil Nadu, the actor said he was contemplating leaving the state, the country even, and settling down someplace more secular. The announcement was picked up by some sections of the media – not all, understandably. After all, this was but a Tamil actor, a Tamil movie. When even the devastating floods in Tamil Nadu have received but a drizzle of national coverage, how can the release of a film that will be seen mostly by south Indians be of national importance? This isn’t cynicism. This is truth. Because when Aamir Khan made a similar statement – about insecurity, about fear, about his wife wondering if they should leave the country and settle elsewhere – the entire nation, media channels everywhere, reacted as if the actor had ripped up the tricolour and used it as confetti in a song sequence in one of his films.

But this isn’t about how one artist’s anguish is deemed more important than another’s. This is about something much less exciting. This is about garden-variety freedom of expression – for if we examine the context, there isn’t really much opportunity for outrage. One, these statements came during a freewheeling discussion at an awards ceremony. It wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t an address. It wasn’t inflammatory rhetoric. Two, Aamir Khan is not a politician. He is not a Harvard-educated intellectual. He is not a political op-ed columnist. He is an artist, a concerned citizen, a Muslim married to a Hindu, a father, a human being – and some combination of all this came out in what he said. Three, he said other things as well. For instance, when political columnist Tavleen Singh asked a question about the Paris attacks and Islam, he replied, “A person who is holding a Quran and killing people, he may feel [he] is doing an Islamic act, but as a Muslim I don’t feel he is doing an Islamic act… He is a terrorist and we should recognise him as a terrorist. My problem is not just with the ISIS, but it is with that kind of thinking… This extreme thinking is what I worry about.”

Don’t we all worry about extremism, especially in these times, when every day deposits before us new horrors? There is certainly more fear today, in the common man, than there was even a decade ago. Not all of this is connected to (or can be blamed on) the government, of course, but given that we hear the voices of incensed fringe elements (which some claim are not really “fringe” anymore but mainstream) more than the Prime Minister’s, what is the average Indian supposed to think? Of course, the Prime Minister may be pursuing his development agenda – that may well be his first priority. But that’s also, to the average Indian, a fairly abstract idea. When we hear about increased GDP, we register something vaguely, but news of the Dadri lynching or of writers being shot dead turns us stone cold. Because this is concrete. This could happen to us. And we need someone at the top, a parental figure, to assure us that this was wrong, that this will not happen to us.

Barack Obama keeps assuring the American people. Expert followers of politics and foreign issues and economic development may have complaints about Obama’s tenure, but the average American, when faced with an incomprehensible tragedy, knows that his President will reach out and talk to him. The rest of the stuff is abstract, playing out in the corridors of power. This is what is concrete. This is what affects people at the ground level. This is what is important. And when the average Indian does not get this from his elected representatives, he turns confused, insecure, angry. He begins to wonder which the bigger instance of intolerance is: the Dadri lynching, or the half-hearted acknowledgements by the powers that be. He begins to speak out. This isn’t an attack on the government. This isn’t being unpatriotic. This is simply people giving vent to something they’re feeling very strongly about.

Of course, a celebrity like Aamir Khan is not exactly an “average Indian,” and it’s only to be expected that the media (and social media) picks up and picks apart whatever he says, despite the fact that it may be the exact thing you or I might say in an unguarded moment. But in a mature society, such a statement would give rise to debate. Some people will agree. Some people will disagree. Some people will term you heroic. Others will call you moronic. There can be no resolution to these things, but at least, we will have, on the table, various points of view. What use is democracy if this doesn’t happen? And if, instead, the Twitterati just take offence and begin lashing out, how does it help, except perhaps to give media channels something sensationally juicy to milk? Some people have pointed to the blockbuster success of the Aamir Khan starrer pk as a symbol of Indian tolerance. Look, we’re a Hindu-majority nation and we’re watching a movie in which a Muslim actor satirises our religion. But pk is make-believe. pk is entertainment. pk is a sugar-coated pill, and we could choose to suck on the sugar even if we spat out the pill. Would we have endorsed the same film to such an extent had it not made us laugh, had it been a dead-serious drama about Hindu godmen?

I do not speak as a committed Aamir Khan fan, though I certainly like some of his films and admire his commitment to deliver quality mainstream cinema. I speak as someone who’s tired of the expectation that everyone should say the most perfectly worded, politically correct, lawyer-vetted things in public, even if they may think otherwise privately. Despite his stardom, his clout, his riches, Aamir Khan is still a citizen of this country – an Indian who may not be “average” in any way, but still knows and feels the things the average Indian does. Why shouldn’t he speak out? Why should a film star speak only about films? When we applaud Aamir Khan’s focus on casteism and female infanticide on his television show, why not accord him the right to express what he feels about other issues far-removed from cinema? Why turn intolerant about someone else’s feelings on intolerance?

That, more than wanting to move out of India, may be Aamir Khan’s crime. He was honest about his feelings – from the conversation, these just seem to be feelings born out of emotion, not opinions formed through cold calculation – perhaps forgetting for a moment that there’s a social-media contingent out there watching and waiting like an eagle, ready to swoop down in a flash upon sighting something to prey on. It’s as if we have Facebook and Twitter accounts not to debate and argue, but to mock and maim. Nothing sums up this whole ridiculous “controversy” better than a sad little joke floating around, where a doctor says, “There is pollution in the city. Therefore your lungs…” And Anupam Kher cuts in angrily, “How dare you! This city has given you job, name, fame. How can you call it polluted? You traitor!!!” Moral of the story? Do not speak your mind in public. Be diplomatic, wave, sign autographs, keep smiling.

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…

About fifteen minutes into Tamasha, the new film from Imtiaz Ali, I’d got my money’s worth. We’re in Corsica, France – the first of many places we run into Ved (Ranbir Kapoor). Others include a future trip to Tokyo, Japan, and a back-in-time excursion to Simla, Flashback – yes, written that way, as though Simla were a territory in a larger province in the past, named after a narrative technique. But for now, Corsica. Ali’s characters like to take long journeys, but for the first time in one of his films, we feel we’re on vacation. The locales, glazed with buttery-yellow light, look good enough to gobble up. (The eye-balming cinematography is by Ravi Varman.) Ved is on vacation too. He works in an unremarkable job in India – he’s a product manager. An on-loop montage shows us his routine – wake up, brush teeth, eat cereal, wear tie, stop at traffic light on way to work, keep elevator door open for others, smile politely at colleagues, and deliver numbing PowerPoint presentations. Who wouldn’t want a break?

At first, Ved is like all vacationers. He’s just physically in a different place. Then he runs into Tara (Deepika Padukone), and something – we’re never told what, exactly – happens. He becomes another person, mentally in a different place, on a vacation from himself. Ved is frequently shot in front of mirrors, connoting the split between the person he is at heart and the person he’s been forced to become by the ways of the world (someplace between dil and duniya, as the film puts it), but note that his name has a reflection too: Dev. It’s another man’s name. And in Tara’s company, Ved becomes that other man – only, he calls himself Don, after the movie. Why use real names, he reasons. Then they’d discover common friends, that it’s a small world after all. Why not stay in this larger world, with its infinite capacity for imagination? Let’s be strangers, let’s part as strangers. Tara plays along and becomes Mona. Soon, AR Rahman’s instrumental track Parade de la Bastille begins to play over a colourful celebration around Ved and Tara – sorry, Don and Mona. They talk. They hang out with no agenda, certainly no getting-to-know-you stuff. The instrumental segues smoothly to the song Matargashti, where the irrepressible Mohit Chauhan seems to be holidaying too. The energy is infectious. The locals join in. The next time you find yourself at the end of a bad day, watch this stretch of Tamasha instead of pouring yourself a stiff drink. You’ll end up with twice the high.

It’s a number of things, but let’s begin with the performances. Ranbir and Deepika do the most difficult kind of acting. There’s no industrial-strength emoting needed. The plot hasn’t really kicked in yet, so they aren’t required to slip into character arcs or do things actors are usually called upon to do to take the story forward. They’re just required to bask, to be. This kind of “performance” is a combination of personal charisma, mutual chemistry, surrendering to the moment, and praying that the director knows what the hell he is doing – and the leads pull it off beautifully, as if unaware that a camera is watching them. Just the way all this comes together – actor to actor, scene to song, normalcy to choreography (nothing elaborate, just the illusion that limbs are on vacation) – is so seamless, so breathtakingly alive (more about Aarti Bajaj’s editing later), that the film could have ended right here and I’d have walked home happily.

But vacations come with a return ticket. After this dream beginning, it’s time for reality, for Don and Mona to become Ved and Tara again. But the parting-as-strangers clause of their pact proves difficult for Tara. On the way to the airport, Deepika shows us what Tara is feeling, a messy mix of “Shit, I should probably stay back and spend more time with this amazing guy,” and “What an idiot you are Tara, how could you fall so hard for a man who won’t even tell you his name?” and “Christ, how can something that lasted for such a short while and was so much fun now hurt this much?” Tamasha is the first Imtiaz Ali movie in which we see the woman pining for the man, and a small problem is that we know nothing about this woman except that she pines for this man.

Women have pined for men earlier in Imtiaz Ali’s films, most famously in Rockstar. Heer pined for Jordan to such an extent that, in his absence, she began to droop like a plant that doesn’t get much sun anymore. But we only sensed this pining. We did not see it because we did not spend too much time with her, and the story was told entirely from the man’s point of view. But the first half of Tamasha is almost completely Tara’s story – how, after her return to India, she wills herself back into Ved’s arms (she finds him after a while); how she forces herself to believe that this is going to work; how she discovers that she doesn’t want Ved, she wants Don. She wants the free spirit who howled at the moon, not this product manager who, after meeting her many years later, smiles as if meeting someone who sat in the cubicle opposite his years ago. (He hands her his business card.) They start going out, after revealing their real identities. One evening, she invites him up. He leans in to kiss her, then remembers something. He’s got to put his phone on silent. Later, he says “I love you” as though informing her she’s got something on her chin. She’s devastated.

What does she do when not pining? Tamasha seems to want to tell us both sides of this love story, but only Ved is developed as a character. Tara works better as a romantic construct, a deux ex machina – as her name suggests, someone sent from the heavens to guide this earthbound man. We don’t get to know her the way we get to know Ved. Her career is a blur, something in the tea industry. (Hey, all the better to wake up Ved.) Her family is a blur, barely glimpsed in a scene. Her boyfriend is  a blur, one of those blandly good-looking men Ali likes to cast opposite his heroines. But every time she goes chasing after Ved – at one point, she becomes like Jordan in Rockstar, desperate to have Ved back in her life – we find ourselves wanting to know more about her. We’re told that she came to Corsica because her favourite comic, as a kid, was Asterix in Corsica – but why is she alone? Doesn’t she have friends? What about that boyfriend? You can see Ved holidaying all by himself – but Tara? In a very funny scene, Don accidentally looks down Mona’s blouse and glimpses her “husn ki vaadiyan.” She blushes and instinctively begins to button up, but then she pauses. She smiles and takes off her shirt. We keep wanting to know the woman who blushed and paused, which is presumably the woman Mona is when back in India. It’s a credit to Deepika’s performance that these questions don’t loom larger. She takes a chalk outline and teases out a character. The movie-star radiance helps – she’s lit in a soft light that emphasises Tara’s ethereality. And then we think about Corsica, how she travelled light when Ved carried this huge backpack around all the time. Maybe the point is that he’s the one with all the baggage, the one with the story worth getting into.

For a while, I had a tough time accepting that Ved could transform into Don, that Don could transform back into Ved. These states are polar extremes, and unless, say, hit by trauma, people usually exist somewhere along the middle. But if this facet of Ved comes across more as conceit than character, it’s because it could be no other way in Imtiaz Ali’s intensely romantic world. Maybe logically speaking, a man who has it in him to talk to mountains (Don does that) and crawl on all fours to lakes in order to lap up the water wouldn’t, when back in his natural environment, clamp himself down to this extent, brown-nosing his boss (a very funny Vivek Mushran) and not do a single thing that’s fun. But emotionally speaking, we get what Ali is after. Ved is like Rockstar’s Heer. He doesn’t get the things he wants. He begins to droop like a plant that doesn’t get much sun anymore.

And what lights him up? Stories. As a child, Ved spent hours at the feet of an eccentric raconteur (Piyush Mishra). This man – the classic unreliable narrator – keeps mixing up his characters. He talks about Ram and Sita one day. The next day, he’s in Troy, with Helen and Paris. When Ved protests, he says, “Kahaani kahaani hoti hai… Bas mazaa lo kahaani ka.” Don’t think too much. Just enjoy the story in front of you. This is true of Tamasha as well, and maybe of Imtiaz Ali’s work in general, less head fodder than feasts for the heart.

Ved listens to these stories and his imagination runs wild. One moment, he’s in his Catholic school, watching a procession of choir boys singing Joy to the World. The next, his mind has transformed this procession into Samyukta’s retinue during her swayamvar, as she searches for Prithviraj, varmala in hand. This kind of childhood, Ali says, is a serpent, and if we are to grow up, if we are to become responsible adults, we need to leave this Eden, we need to crush these temptations underfoot. And this is the trauma that turns us into automatons. Tamasha literalises this at the beginning, through a stage show about a robot on a treadmill. That’s what Ved has become. But when Tara enters his life, things begin to change, the way things changed for Jordan when he met Heer in Rockstar. In that film, being away from the woman made the man go mad. Here, being with her makes him go wild. He becomes the lovelorn characters from the stories he heard as a child. The film quotations change too. He’s no longer “cool,” like the titular character from Don. He becomes melodramatic, someone who recites  Koi paththar se na maare from Laila Majnu, a vastly different kind of seventies movie. The stories from Ved’s childhood are presented in grainy visuals, and finally we see Ved himself embalmed in one of these visuals – he’s written his own legendary love story. With some help, of course. As in other films by Ali, destiny plays a part. After Tara rejects Ved’s proposal, he misplaces the ring, but his friends find it. Later, in a peevish fit, he gives it away, but the recipient returns it. The gods have spoken. Ved is meant to be with Tara.

Ranbir isn’t as convincing in the breakdowns where his inner Majnu keeps bursting out – there’s something studied about the way he alternately holds back and lets loose. But he’s otherwise fantastic. Or maybe we should say the character is fantastic – at least to those who love Imtiaz Ali’s heroes. Ali writes for men the kind of stories Barbara Cartland wrote for women, except that his stories have a steel core of angst – they’re Snarlequin Romances. If you’re logical-minded, you’ll probably look at his heroes and say, “Oh, grow up!” But you need to be a romantic like Ali – or like Jordan, or like Veer Singh from Love Aaj Kal – to really enter his world. And what a world that is – even auto-rickshaw drivers wear their hearts on their khaki sleeves. We meet one such man, as Ved hops into his vehicle. The song he hums? Tu meri zindagi hai, from Aashiqui. But this character isn’t just about another film quotation. He’s like Ved. He wanted to be one thing (a musician). He ended up being another (an auto-rickshaw driver). And in one of those amazing amalgamations of Imtiaz Ali’s writing and Aarti Bajaj’s editing, we slip between a song the man imagines he’s singing (in the stage inside his head, he’s a star), the same song as he sings it in real life, and Ved’s flashback that shows us how he was forced out from what he wanted to be and how he ended up what he is.

The film is full of these trancelike transitions. Through Ved’s imagination, we see a pining Sita, embroidering Ram’s name on a swatch of cloth – CUT TO Tara pining for Ved, even before we’ve been introduced to her as a character. The song segues are equally amazing. (Rahman’s music works beautifully with Ali’s visuals.) Ali is one of the rare modern-day filmmakers – along with Sanjay Leela Bhansali, another singular-minded director who’s a bit of an acquired taste, and whose films aren’t head movies but heart movies – who respects the value a song can add to a situation. We see Tara walking out of the airport in Kolkata, her hometown, and we cut to the song Heer to badi sad hai somewhere in Punjab. The song situation itself isn’t new. A chorus is commentating on something – we’ve seen this in Zanjeer, for instance, where street performers sang Deewane hain deewanon ko and made the leads (and the audience) realise what their feelings were. But I cannot recall another film in which this sort of commentating happened in a completely different location. Ali seems to be asking: But why should the fact that Tara is in Kolkata prevent the song from unfolding in Punjab? After all, wasn’t that where Heer was from?

There aren’t many other mainstream filmmakers whose films lend themselves to such readings – and re-readings. (Re-watching Ali’s films is like a turn of a kaleidoscope – you see them slightly differently.) If only he wasn’t such a chronic over-explainer. It isn’t enough that he sets up the film’s theme at the beginning, with that robot on a treadmill. At a later point, Ali has Ved narrate the same story, at length, to his father. And hasn’t the point about Ved being a natural-born storyteller already been made – in Corsica, where he entertains a gathering of strangers, and through the series of stories he tells rapt listeners on the sides of the streets back home? The over-explaining spills over to the songs too. Tu koi aur hai, a number goes, over a despondent Ved. You are someone else. And we need to be told this? But past these prosaic bits, there’s always some poetry around the corner. Ali creates an intense, immersive experience, a lot of which is surely autobiographical – don’t tell me it’s a coincidence that Ved ends up in show business. (Sometimes, the audience finds it autobiographical too. A young boy weak in maths being forced into engineering, and then gradually worming his way to a more creative career? I know at least one viewer who was nodding vehemently.) The last scene shows Ved and Tara as they were in Corsica – just basking, just being. They have headphones on, and they’re dancing to a song we don’t hear. That’s Ali, really. He makes movies out of the music inside his head.

KEY:

• Tamasha = spectacle

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

Rain or shine, the connection between Chennai residents and cinema is an unbreakable one.

Imagine there’s a death in the family. Some people weep and wail. Some people realise that there are practical things that need to get done. They get busy making calls, getting a photo ready in order to put out an obituary notice in the newspapers, coordinating with the crematorium. Then there are those who, after a while, find it difficult to be around visitors to whom the same things have to be said, from whom the same platitudes have to be received –and they flee the scene. Chennai residents, at some point during the last week, have found themselves being all three kinds of people. Sometimes, we wallowed in our sorrow, talked incessantly about the power dying on us, about cold and lifeless mobile phones. Other times, we went out and volunteered – within the neighbourhood (doing grocery runs for those unable to step out, for instance) and without (surely by now you’ve seen astounding pictures of relief and rescue by ordinary citizens).

And on Friday, when it all became too much, some of us slipped into a movie hall and watched one of the new releases. “Wait!,”  you’re saying. “There were new releases in the middle of the rains of the century?” I wondered about that too when I looked up theatre listings, more out of habit than actually expecting to find a list of new films. But there they were, a whole lot of them, including the new Pixar animated feature (The Good Dinosaur) and In the Heart of the Sea, a man-versus-whale drama based on an a true-life adventure on which Moby Dick was based. Plus, something called Angry Indian Goddesses, which, apparently, was not about a cluster of ticked-off deities congregated over Chennai skies, determined to hose the city down. Someone outside the city may have wondered: Who’d see these films? Who’d wade through knee-deep water from the earlier rains, clutching an umbrella in preparation for forthcoming rains, and make it to the theatre? Even for the steamy new instalment in the Hate Story series, whose trailer was surely downloaded from the fantasies of a fifteen-year-old stuck in an all-boys convent.

I must admit I, too, was a bit judgmental, earlier, about films being released in the middle of all the horrible things that were happening, and when I put out a note on Facebook about this, a few friends called the decision to release these films “insensitive.” But people did not have power supply for days and wanted to be someplace where they could imagine they were back in front of a TV set again, someplace with air-conditioning, noise, life. People were sick of being boxed in by the four walls at home. They wanted to get out. People just wanted glimpses of a Chennai, at least on screen, that wasn’t filled with dark skies and downpours. And through some combination of these reasons, a lot of these people – the lucky ones, those who weren’t left marooned – converged at a local multiplex playing a new Tamil film called Urumeen.

The theatre was at least half full. It was as if it was just another day in the city, just another Friday. The movie wasn’t much good, but the experience hammered home the truth that rain or shine, the connection between Chennai residents and cinema is an unbreakable one. Viewers nudged each other and passed comments about whatever was happening on screen. They whistled and cheered when a scene featured a clip of the actor Ajith – a sure sign of some kind of normalcy. The energy was infectious. I left the theatre with at least a little gloom dispelled. Isn’t that what entertainment is about?

So here’s how I’m going to explain this away: While it is important to understand tragedy, to do the best we can to help, it’s equally important to remind ourselves that life goes on. Does that sound trite? Maybe the sentiment is trite – but I know what the atmosphere was like in that theatre that Friday. Everyone was happy to be transported to a different reality for a few hours, which is surely why entertainment is often called “escape.” And when you’re trapped, when the airport is flooded, when the trains won’t leave because the tracks are under water, how many other options are available for escape? Relatively inexpensive options at that. I know some are going to frown at this frivolity, wasting time and money on a movie when that time and money could have been better used elsewhere. But I suppose it all boils down to individual architecture, how people are built. When power was restored, at least some TV sets were tuning into channels that air film songs and comedy tracks. Enough of rain coverage, some people seemed to be saying. Let’s laugh.

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…

Angry Indian Goddesses. Not since Dulhan Wahi Jo Piya Man Bhaye has a film’s title so briskly summed up its appeal, its audience. Chew on those three words. The first one is an emotion that makes the subject sound important enough to be debated, written about in op-ed columns. You don’t have to feel sheepish about wanting to watch it. You know, it may be about women, but it’s not exactly ‘Sex and the City’… The posters may make it look like Cosmopolitan, but it’s actually The Caravan. The second word is a geographical indicator. Angry Americans are passé – way back, in 1976’s Network, we saw them screaming, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” But angry Indians? Hmmm… you can see the international-film-festival tickets selling themselves faster than one can get off the yoga mat and say nah-muss-tay. And finally, “goddesses.” So the film may be serious and issuey and have more hot buttons than a microwave someone forgot to turn off, but at least it has many pretty women. Hetero girlfriends and wives of the world, please note. This is a movie you can drag your men to without hearing them whine endlessly about it.

None of this is meant as a diss to the director Pan Nalin. I’d rather see a film made with this kind of focus than something that pretends to be all things for all people. (And let’s not forget that, for these niche films, marketing focus is as important as narrative focus.) And I must say I enjoyed quite a bit of Angry Indian Goddesses, which begins with a pre-credits sequence as action-packed as the ones in the James Bond movies. We get a montage of six women being taunted or heckled or insulted by men, and in a subsequent montage, we see these women explode. They say, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” The choice of music is intriguing. It’s Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, a piece that’s climax upon climax. These women storm the king’s hall, male domain. They strike back. You can practically smell the burning bras. And then, like subsiding tsunami waves, they retreat into a calming cocoon of sisterhood. The story gets going when they land up for a few days at Frieda’s (Sarah-Jane Dias) house in Goa. You can practically smell the scented candles.

The structure and the narrative contrivances of Angry Indian Goddesses reminded me of both François Ozon’s 8 Women (a gathering of women, murder) and Terrence McNally’s play Love! Valour! Compassion!  (a gathering of gay men, a ton of dysfunction) – but the film looks and feels new. It’s the cast, mainly. You can sense these actresses (along with Dias, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Anushka Manchanda, Sandhya Mridul, Amrit Maghera, Rajshri Deshpande, Pavleen Gujral) savouring the feeling of slipping into parts that Indian filmmakers, with the exception of Zoya Akhtar, rarely write for Indian actresses. As in Akhtar’s recent films, the characters are painted in the broadest of strokes. It’s the wartime rationing approach – one underlying issue or dysfunction per woman. A musician keeps running into rejection emails. A trophy housewife resents being a “commodity.” None of this cuts very deep, but shallow pleasures are not to be underestimated. Despite the smoke-spewing title, this is a fun film. The musician, we learn from her boyfriend, has attempted suicide earlier – that’s why he’s worried when she doesn’t pick up his calls, that’s why he rushes down to Goa. She’s annoyed by his solicitousness, but after he leaves, she smiles a kind of sheepish post-coital smile and tells her girlfriends, “He’s cute, na?”

The film is strongest when it isn’t making a point, when it’s just hanging out with these women. The funniest scene comes when they ogle at a shirtless neighbour who’s washing his car – it’s gratuitous nudity with the polarities reversed, revenge for Mandakini in Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Sridevi in Kaate nahin katte, Raveena Tandon in Tip tip barsa paani… There’s even a she-wolf whistle at the end of the “show.” And the filmmaking is fantastic, from the cinematography (the light is just right) to the boho-Pepperfry production design to the sound that makes voices slightly echoey indoors, in the large rooms. We feel we’re in there, a fly on the wall at a pyjama party. Nalin creates an ideal, insular world – a womb, really – where women can heal through talks and tears and therapeutic hugs. Only one woman recoils from an embrace, and she’s the domestic help. Maybe she’s uncomfortable with physical intimacy. Or maybe where she comes from, they don’t do these things. There aren’t many others from her class, and the film isn’t apologetic about this. Again, a matter of focus – even if this could cause the film to be titled, in some quarters, as Angry Indian Upper-Class Goddesses.

Nalin seems to be in a little ivory tower of his own as well, one where complex problems get resolved easily, quickly. One of the women is a high-flying corporate type, always barking into a cell phone– by the end of the film, she has embraced her inner tree-hugging hippie. If only. Another woman, a British citizen, is an aspiring actress, and she’s made to rehearse “main tumhare bachche ki maa banne wali hoon”-type lines. There are many jokes to be made about Bollywood, but this isn’t one of them – unless a time machine is involved. But I laughed when the actress’s accent is mocked. Nalin’s business card (Samsara, Valley of Flowers) says Serious and Arty Filmmaker, but at some point he should listen to his inner clown – humour comes naturally to him.

The serious parts of Angry Indian Goddesses are the weakest. These characters simply don’t have the heft to represent anything more than diaphanous divas who are pleasant to be around, and they’re asked to transform (collectively) into the Indian Woman Who Picks Up A Gun And Blows The Balls Off Patriarchy. The film gets afflicted with about-itis. There’s a discussion about homosexuality and Section 377. There’s another about how we worship Lakshmi only when she’s a goddess, not when she’s a woman. But I suppose the film could not have been any other way, for even the number of women seems representative of something larger. (Seven wonders? Seven colours of the rainbow? Seven forms of Durga?) At the end, we get one of those Agatha Christie scenes where Poirot declares one of the people in the room is the murderer. I laughed out disbelievingly at the plot device, but what followed brought a small lump to the throat. It’s ridiculously idealistic, but if movies are wish-fulfilment, then this is a good wish to fulfil.

KEY:

• Dulhan Wahi Jo Piya Man Bhaye = 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.

So what is the long-drawn Salman Khan trial all about? Baradwaj Rangan wonders.

The Salman Khan trial isn’t just about an actor who may or may not have done the things he’s been accused of, the things he’s now been acquitted of. (Whoever was driving that car has, by now, become as mysterious an entity as whoever fired the bullet that killed Kennedy.) It’s about other things, like our all-consuming fascination for celebrity trials, and how we, otherwise, barely bother to read and react to the news item about the beggar down the road who was mowed down by a car driven by someone who isn’t in the movies we go to see or in the test matches we watch on TV.

The Salman Khan trial is about our social media selves, how we decide someone is guilty, as though we have all the facts, as though those facts established guilt beyond reasonable doubt. It’s about who can come up with the wittiest cracks about a very relieved man returning home to his very worried family. The Salman Khan trial, then, is at least a little about schadenfreude. You have all this money, all these women, all this fame. Now let’s see you in a ratty little courtroom. Let’s see you sweat as you realise your fate lies in the hands of a man who’s one of us. It’s about the perverse satisfaction of seeing someone so larger-than-life being cut down to size, a seventy-mm personality shrunk to the dimensions of a television screen, sharing airtime with commoners he has nothing in common with.

The Salman Khan trial is about how these trials go on and on. A child born the year the driver of the Toyota Land Cruiser caused the accident – then again, maybe the Land Cruiser drove itself – is today a teenager. That’s a lot of time, a lot of newsprint, a lot of airwaves devoted to whether or not a very rich man is going to end up in jail. And in that kind of time, things change. Salman Khan is no longer the womaniser of Saajan, the prankster of Andaz Apna Apna, the lover of Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya. He’s the innocent of Bajrangi Bhaijaan who, while trying to help a lost little girl return to her home in Pakistan, meets army patrollers at the border and asks them permission to enter the country – this man, we are constantly being told, would never do anything against the law. Heck, he’s so innocent, even sweet old Sooraj Barjatya, upholder of Indian values that Indians didn’t even know they were supposed to value, likes to work with him.

The Salman Khan trial is about perceptions, about how Salman Khan is a good person, how he’s no longer the abuser of girlfriends, the stalker of exes, the beefed-up gym rat with severe anger-management issues. It’s about how he’s helped and mentored practically everyone who’s a who in Bollywood today, how the industry wouldn’t exist without him. The Salman Khan trial, consequently, is about Bollywood’s clannishess, how it closes ranks around its own, how actors and filmmakers who climb onto social-media platforms and denounce other forms of wrongdoing, by other people, has only this to say about their Bhai (a double-faced bit of colloquialism that denotes both brother and gangster) – that he’s a good person, and that this verdict is a sign that good things happen to good people.

The Salman Khan trial is about movie audiences who know, in some corner of their minds, that the tickets they’re buying are for a film whose hero may have done something very villainous – and yet they buy those tickets, over Rs. 100-crore worth of tickets (in the case of Dabanng), over Rs. 200-crore worth of tickets (in the case of Kick), over Rs. 300-crore worth of tickets (in the case of Bajrangi Bhaijaan). So the Salman Khan trial is about how we cease to care about things a civilised society expects us to care about, how we only care about entertainment, whether we’re getting our money’s worth. The Salman Khan trial is about Bhai’s fans, those fever-crazed people who camped outside his house waiting for a glimpse as their hero returned from court. By fans, I refer also to an adoring national media, for whom this was the biggest story of the day, maybe even the year, given their instant and committed response, something that wasn’t evident during the polls in Tripura or the floods in some state down south.

What the Salman Khan trial isn’t about is what it was really supposed to be about: justice, truth, all those things that say there’s no difference between the man who’s forced to sleep on a pavement and the man who lives in a house fifty stories above that pavement. From the 2002 charge of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” to the 2007 chemical analysis report suggesting that the actor was drunk at the time of the accident to the 2015 verdict that he could not be convicted on the basis of evidence produced in the 2002 case – what a roller-coaster it’s been, the story of how Salman Khan got out of it. But did Salman Khan really do it? That may be the one thing we haven’t been told by the Salman Khan trial.

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.

Am on a break now, but that doesn’t mean you are. So please keep adding your comments and keep the discussion going until I manage to write the review :-)

Am on a break now, but that doesn’t mean you are. So please keep adding your comments and keep the discussion going until I manage to write the review :-)

Spoilers ahead…

Bejoy Nambiar likes slo-mo songs. His most sensational use of the technique came in the Khoya khoya chand sequence in Shaitaan. Guns were blazing. People were fleeing. The sequence had all the makings of a white-knuckle thriller, but the slo-mo made it something else. The most important aspect of a chase, time, was slowed down and, suddenly, there was a new element in the mix: mood. Instead of worrying about who will live, who will die, we were now being asked to savour the stretch, marvel at how something so horrible could also be so beautiful. Nambiar’s new film, Wazir, opens with a slo-mo song. It opens with mood. The frames are snapshots from the life of a couple – Anti-Terrorist Squad officer Danish (Farhan Akhtar) and Ruhana (Aditi Rao Hydari). As is inevitable in a film that clocks in at a mere 100-something minutes, many years of togetherness are compressed into this song  – their wedding, the birth of their daughter – but the slo-mo makes us savour this togetherness, which is emphasised by the lyrics. Tere bin… marna nahin… jeena nahin tere bin. You may have heard a Foreigner song along the same lines: I don’t want to live without you.

The sequence is filled with the usual happy-family images – making silly faces for the camera, for instance – but also some unusual ones. I liked the touch that Ruhana is a dancer, and that she continues being a dancer after becoming a mother. (In other words, she isn’t reduced to knotting Danish’s tie as he leaves for work and asking her daughter to hurry up for school.) The usual happy-family image we get in these situations is that of the parents watching the child in a school play, but here, Danish and his daughter watch Ruhana on stage. The touch transforms Ruhana from “wife” and “mother” back to “woman” – at some level, she’s still the person for whom Danish began to memorize poetry, everything from Ghalib to Shakespeare. But after all this sunshine, there’s bound to be a tempest – it’s a big one. The child is killed. Danish blames himself. Ruhana blames him too. The lyrics of the song take on a new meaning. Earlier, it was about them. Now, it’s about their daughter. They don’t want to live without her.

At heart, Wazir is a domestic drama – there’s even some couples therapy. It’s also a sort of Badlapur where the father is afflicted with PTSD after the death of a child and looks for ways to heal. After Ruhana moves out, Danish finds a friend in Pandit Omkarnath Dhar (Amitabh Bachchan), another father with a tragic past. With Panditji too, we get flashes of togetherness – he speaks lovingly of his wife, of the song she loved, Aao huzoor tumko sitaaron mein le chaloon. He’d accept this invitation and join her in the heavens, but he’s still got something to do. Like Danish, he wants revenge. His target is a politician named Izaad Qureshi (Manav Kaul), in whose eyes he sensed guilt. It’s clearly not evidence that will hold up in court, but when Danish goes to interrogate Qureshi, he senses something is wrong. The man, in a former life, was supposedly a pashmina craftsman – you’d think he’d have delicate hands, but his handshake is like that of a mildly mad Bruce Banner. Maybe there’s a villain hulking underneath? At least, this is how Danish buys into Panditji’s plans. Or maybe, like the Varun Dhawan character in Badlapur, he just needs an outlet for all his rage. He feels a kinship with this fellow-sufferer: Yeh ladaai aapki thi. Ab hamaari hai.

Slowly, we slip into a different zone, and a sillier movie. Panditji is a chess player and the game is all over the place – in Panditji’s garden (a big ornamental chess piece), in Panditji’s shot glasses (which have miniature chess pieces inside them), and especially in Panditji’s lines (“Shatranj hota to haathi ghode daudte, kutte nahin!”). I half-expected a scene in which Panditji, while flipping channels, stumbles into Tabu singing Rook rook rook. Now, the game makes sense in a film like Sleuth, where two men are constantly trying to out-manoeuvre each other, but here, they’re both on the same side. This certainly does not warrant the wall-to-wall chess imagery. It’s a metaphor for something – only, no one seems to know what. (Maybe someone’s addicted to pawn?) And this weighs down the thriller portions, which seem half-hearted, something to get done with so that we get back to Danish and Ruhana. (After all, the film ends with a shot of them.)

Wazir is co-written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who, as he did in Mission: Kashmir, paints a Kashmiri backdrop. Panditji is one of many who fled the valley, and Qureshi belongs to the People’s Party of Kashmir. (The film gets some unexpected topicality with the recent demise of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.) But the emotional beats were stronger in Mission: Kashmir, as the whole film dealt with the effects of war on an individual. Here, it’s just flavouring – Dal Lake Tadka. The leads almost make us buy it all. Farhan Akhtar plays a more sombre variation of the guy-next-door-if-you-forget-he’s-from-a-film-family character he’s made his own, except that he may want to work on his drunken scenes – you almost hear the hic! As for Bachchan, he keeps mixing it up – one part gruff-hamminess (you feel, between chess games, he’s still teaching a visually impaired Rani Mukerji) and one part restraint (watch him gaze at nothing in particular and shed a tear for the past). These two could probably make you watch a movie in which they did nothing but… play chess.

KEY:

• Shaitaan = see here

Copyright ©2016 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Why watch Chauranga when a lot of what it’s about – pig-herding, love across caste lines, the constant tensions between Dalits and the people who won’t treat them as equals, the young boy who decides enough is enough – was already seen in Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi drama Fandry? One reason could be the mood the director, Bikas Ranjan Mishra, conjures up. The film weaves a quiet, hypnotic spell. If Fandry was a volcano, Chauranga is an idyllic picnic spot that invites us to spend some ninety minutes with these characters. It doesn’t set out to grab us by the collar till we choke with indignation at what is still the reality in rural India. It just tells a story, which begins when Bajrangi (Riddhi Sen), a Dalit boy who’s studying in the city, returns home because his school has closed down for a few days. The reason for the school-closing is right out of a short story. The principal’s daughter is getting married. The guests need a place to stay, after all.

You’d think Bajrangi, with his books, is destined for a different life – but this is a film with a few surprises. One of them is that for some people, no matter what steps they take, there’s no guarantee that they will rise. Whatever happens to them, it’s just a matter of dumb luck – sometimes, it’s just being able to run fast enough to catch a train. This shot echoes an earlier one where a boy (Bajrangi’s brother Santu, played by Soham Maitra) attempted to board a moving vehicle but kept failing. There’s another effective echo. Early on, when Bajrangi falls at the feet of the upper-caste Dhaval (Sanjay Suri), the village headman, the latter moves backwards so that Bajrangi’s hands don’t actually touch his feet. But later, when he suspects Bajrangi of wrongdoing, his feet land squarely on the lad. Concepts like untouchability do not matter when you’re in the mood for a little oppression. Or a little extra-marital sex. Dhaval keeps trysting with Dhaniya (Tannishtha Chatterjee), mother of Bajrangi and Santu. But this isn’t just a Dalit thing. It’s a woman thing too. Dhaval’s wife (Arpita Pal) ends up equally exploited. Or maybe it’s worse. The man who exploits her is an old, blind priest (a ghoulish Dhritiman Chatterjee).

That the priest is blind is probably some sort of symbolism. Here’s another, having to do with the film’s title. Bajrangi whips out a pen that writes in four colours. Colour is varna, which also refers to caste. And when Bajrangi says he’ll write Santu’s love letter (to an upper-caste girl) in red, Santu replies, “Lekin woh to khoon ka rang hota hai na?” But none of these Drama 101 devices derail the movie. The director has a firm hold on the proceedings – and the volume knob. Someone dies of snakebite. The body is dropped unceremoniously into a lake. You expect a furore around the missing person. But… nothing. Sometimes, at picnics, people wander off. It’s like that. You’d think Dhaval’s wife might throw a tantrum or two about his infidelity. Again, nothing. The only time the film gets dramatic is towards the end. It has to do with that love letter. It also has to do with Udaan. Only, this flight to freedom doesn’t come with a crescendo on the soundtrack. Who knows what lies ahead?

With better casting, Chauranga may have been a vastly better movie. Suri isn’t bad, but there’s something missing. It probably has to do with the innate gentleness and goodness the actor always projects. Dhaval may be the first feudal chieftain in Hindi cinema who’d rather be watching Aastha TV. But casting, sometimes, is a question of who’s producing the film (Suri is a co-producer), and I was glad Chauranga got made – if only as a show-reel for the director. He gives us tradition, superstition, caste wars – everything that Benegal gave us in the 1970s. He gives us Katrina Kaif, Salman Khan, and a discussion about breast development in the most scholarly possible language – if sex education began airing on Doordarshan’s news channels, this is how it would be. And he sprinkles a bit of magic over all this. Water from a hand pump dries up, as if in punishment. And there’s a snake, which hasn’t been good news for humans ever since the first two encountered one. It all comes together – a little in the heart, a little in the head. You leave the theatre not educated, not whipped into righteous fury, but with the feeling that you’ve closed a book you rather liked.

KEY:

• chauranga = four-coloured

Copyright ©2016 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

In the innocuously titled Chalk N Duster, director Jayant Gilatar sets out to add a new villain to the pantheon. Gabbar Singh. Mogambo. Dr. Dang. And now, Kamini (Divya Dutta). Don’t be fooled by the fact that she’s the headmistress of a high school. In her quest to make the school “No. 1,” she increases fees.  She tells weeping teachers that their children can no longer study for free. She wants upmarket teachers, so she removes the chairs from the teachers’ tables inside class – now they have to stand throughout, and maybe some of them will leave, exhausted. She even changes their assignments. The Hindi teacher, a portly middle-aged man who’s second to none in his understanding of Tulsidas, is now blowing the whistle, sweating it out in PT class. And what does Kamini do when all this hell is being unleashed? She sits in her room, applying lipstick, while an assistant helps her choose a dress from an online portal. But even that comes second to her most heinous deed. (I hope you’re covering the eyes of your children if they are under 13.) She cancels the complimentary refreshments. A cup of tea will now cost… Rs. 7. No wonder one of the teachers remarks, upon seeing her, “Lo, aa gayi Hitler.” I kept waiting for Kamini to install a pit of lava into which she’d lower teachers who asked for more chalk.

“In India, 90% of children don’t complete school,” we’re told, at the beginning. This sobering fact did not merit this silly, preachy film, which could have been called Black N White. Kamini is the devil. All the teachers are angels, paragons of commitment, patience and everything else the Gita tells you about teachers. (It doesn’t say anything about teachers? According to this movie, it should.) I left the theatre imagining that the maths teacher who used to pinch us and the chemistry teacher with an unerring aim with the duster when she caught one of us talking were figments of my imagination. Juhi Chawla plays Jyoti. Shabana Azmi plays Vidya. See those names? Light. Education. There are more symbols in this film than in the periodic table. Richa Chadda plays a TV journalist, and the scene in which her Gujarati identity comes to the fore begins with her munching on dhoklas.

For a while, things are Hunky N Dory. Vidya teaches mathematics through song, with students rising in time to sing the chorus, which goes, “BODMAS… BODMAS… BODMAS.” Jyoti, meanwhile, smiles sweetly and says, “Hamein to garv hona chahiye that we’re in this noble profession,” though she really may be doing this job only to get out of the house, where her husband (Sameer Soni), a computer salesman, keeps saying things like, “I am the hard drive. You are the motherboard. And our son is the processor.” But soon, Kamini strikes. Vidya is sacked. Jyoti is so shocked when she gets the news, in Chemistry lab, that she drops her test tube in her hand. It falls to the floor and breaks, having served its purpose as this film’s approximation of a pooja ki thali.

The situation is grave. Vidya is the family’s breadwinner. Her husband (Girish Karnad) is in a wheelchair, and her daughter is still studying. Come to think of it, all teachers are in grave situations. Another one is raising her child all by herself, after the death of her husband. Surely not implausible situations on their own – but Gilatar seeks to mount such a sympathetic case for the plight of teachers today that he keeps piling on the misfortunes. His earnestness is downright hilarious. You begin to wonder if, along with Chemistry and Biology, there’s an hour for Tragedy. Even so, the subject is such that I misted up once, when Jyoti speaks of how we respect and reward the soldiers who protect the nation, but forget the teachers who educate its children. Aren’t we all guilty of having moved on, with very little time to remember our teachers? But they deserve more than this shrill drama, which – bizarrely, in its last half-hour – morphs into a Kaun Banega Crorepati-type show, with a quizmaster (“and above all guest appearance” Rishi Kapoor) testing Jyoti and Vidya about their capabilities. Sample question: “Identify the male dancer in this video.” I suppose this knowledge will help in the maths classes, when it’s time to teach ek… do… teen… cha cha cha?

KEY:

• BODMAS = see here

Copyright ©2016 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

In August 1990, when Iraqi forces took over Kuwait, Ranjit Katyal (Akshay Kumar) discovered that he had to get out with his wife Amrita (a lipstick-happy Nimrat Kaur) and little daughter. But instead of buying three one-way tickets – a matter of loose change for this business tycoon; he’d just have to sell, oh, the second hand of the thick gold watch on his wrist – he chose to stick around and help the other Indians similarly stranded, some 1,70,000 of them. What made this man an unlikely messiah? Maybe it has something to do with the moment Ranjit saw his driver gunned down in front of him. Maybe it’s about the long, slow drive past a series of horrors – he just cannot stop crying. Maybe it’s the realisation that the dinar he worshipped now possesses “mitti ka value.” Maybe it’s that he did not know the people who worked under him, and now that these anonymous faces have names he knows, he cannot just stand by and do nothing. Maybe it’s the knowledge that, with his money and his cutthroat negotiating skills, he’s the only one around who can do anything. (The dinner-time scene where he bluffs the puffed-up Iraqi officer, played by Inaamulhaq, is a cracker.) Or maybe it’s, as Ranjit says, “Chot lagti hai to aadmi  ‘maa maa’ hi chillaata hai sabse pehle.” He’d begun to think of himself as Kuwaiti. Now, he sees Raj Kapoor was right: phir bhi dil hai Hindustani.

Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift is a remarkable blend of two styles of moviemaking. If the refusal to spoon-feed us a single answer for Ranjit’s transformation is the sign of a certain type of cerebral thriller, there’s also that fantastic line of dialogue that Kader Khan would have been proud to put his name on – inside the cool Hollywoodian exterior throbs a Bollywoodian heart. The film keeps serving up typical situations, the kind we’d find in our masala movies – and what is the central story if not “hero saves the day”? – but there’s always something a little… atypical.

There’s an early song, reminiscent of Khaled’s Didi. At first, it’s just an item song. Shapely dancers baring acres of creamy flesh. Well-heeled patrons clutching glasses of wine. A band of musicians with a lead singer who kicks off the song, until the hero sashays in and begins to sing himself. It appears that Bollywood has set up shop – it’s business as usual. Except that it’s not. Menon keeps cutting away to the lead singer who’s at first amused that Ranjit has taken over, but gradually he sits down with a sigh – another victim of Ranjit’s takeover tendencies. And we recall the snatch of conversation just before the song, about a business deal in which Ranjit screwed over a friend. Ranjit stays in character through the song as well. Now he’s screwing the singer over.

Time and again, we get masala-movie situations that simmer with less spice. The scene where Ranjit goes to inform his driver’s wife that her husband is no more – there are no wails; there aren’t even any words. The scene where the sympathetic Indian government official (the excellent Kumud Mishra; he looks such a part of the system that you suspect he even learnt his ABCs from dusty files) addresses civil aviation pilots who refuse to fly into a war zone (to bring those Indians back home) – you expect rousing oratory, a stirring call to action; you get, instead, a short speech urging them to introspect and do what they think is right.

And the action scene? You brace yourself for choreographed stunt-work, a paisa-vasool sop for fans who know Akshay Kumar as Rowdy Rathore; but there’s just some scrambling with sand and stones, the way we’d fight if we summoned up the guts, and the bad guys are dismissed not by the leading man but the extras, whose sheer numbers suggest a slightly different story, that it’s not just the hero who saves the day. Airlift may revolve around the actions of Ranjit Katyal (and the star power of Akshay Kumar, who gives a controlled, charismatic performance), but it makes space for many smaller heroes: that Indian government official; the supermarket owner who looks after feeding the Indians corralled into a camp; the Muslim who saves a Kuwaiti widow; those pilots. As the end credits inform us, Ranjit himself is a composite of two real-life heroes, men who did super things but were not exactly supermen.

Menon is a first-rate filmmaker. I keep thinking of a crane shot that goes down-up instead of the more conventional up-down. (The terrific cinematography is by Priya Seth.) The latter takes us from the general to the specific – it’s the classic establishing shot. But here, we see the actions of a few, and when the camera goes up, we see the multitudes that lie beyond. The shot is pure narrative – that’s a story being told there. I don’t recall much of Menon’s earlier film Barah Aana, but I looked back at my review and here’s what I found: tightly narrated… Another film would have [tickled] our most subversive wish-fulfillment fantasies… Menon [lets] his leads breathe… opting for character over contrivance, detail over plot dynamics… wryly observed… doesn’t bludgeon us with its thesis points…

All of which applies, to some degree, to Airlift as well. With just a few well-chosen faces (Purab Kohli, Prakash Belawadi) and a few sharp brush strokes, Menon helps us know the individuals in this mass of Indians. And with a few well-chosen artefacts, he brings alive an era, most amusingly in the form of a young Sachin Tendulkar, who gets this assessment from a disgruntled Indian in Amman: “Kisi ko bhi Indian team mein daal dete hain.” Ek do teen, too, makes an appearance. Ranjit is irked when his driver listens to the chartbuster, but later, he discovers Iraqi soldiers jumping with glee when the song begins to play. It’s a live demo of India’s soft power long before liberalisation, long before anyone thought to yoke together the terms “India” and “soft power.” Somewhere, Manoj Kumar is jotting down notes for a new movie: Purab Aur Middle East.

If there’s a niggle, it’s that the film doesn’t quite live up to its marketing. Or its name, for that matter. The scenes with planes add up to a mere couple of minutes – Biding Time Till The Airlift might have made a better title. Wiki up “1990 airlift of Indians from Kuwait” and you’ll find this remarkable story, of the largest civilian evacuation in history: “A total of 170,000 people were evacuated to Mumbai – a distance of 4,117 km, by operating 488 flights in association with Indian Airlines, from 13 August to 11 October 1990 – lasting 59 days.” How thrilling that sounds. It’s understandable, even inevitable, that this complex chain of events is smoothed down into a mainstream-friendly narrative, but the resulting film has neither the nail-biting tension of the similarly themed Argo nor the historical heft of Schindler’s List, which is evoked not only in the Schindler-like capitalist who discovers selflessness, but also in the mousy, manager who makes a list of people who need to be saved (the equivalent of the Ben Kingsley character) and the enemy that the hero is forced to be friends with (the Ralph Fiennes character). Other reminders: scenes of Kuwaitis being rounded up and massacred by Iraqis, like Jews under the Nazis; and the Indian camp, an approximation of a Jewish ghetto.

But Schindler’s List carried a charge of danger. Will he get caught? That is never a question in Airlift, which, after the urgent initial portions, begins to plod towards a wholly expected ending. Even the scenes with the Kuwaiti widow, who’s described as a “time bomb,” don’t really detonate. But none of this takes away from the fact that this is a fine film, a fine example of how it’s possible to incorporate Western understatement into a very Indian movie, and, more importantly, a fine model for how our aging heroes can continue playing the action hero. At least until a time we begin to wonder if the film should really be called… Facelift.

KEY:

• Chot lagti hai to aadmi  ‘maa maa’ hi chillaata hai sabse pehle = When we’re hurt, we cry for our mother.

Copyright ©2016 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.