PK as a reworked Bawarchi, Aamir as oracle, other thoughts

For anyone who has been left fatigued by Aamir Khan’s messiah persona in films like 3 Idiots and Taare Zameen Par as well as in television’s Satyamev Jayate, the obvious joke about his role in PK is that this is inspired casting because in most of his recent films (notable exception: Talaash) he has played an extraterrestrial or an automaton or God Incarnate anyway, the only problem was the film itself didn't know it. (Here is a post demonstrating that Aamir’s intense character in Dhobi Ghat was really a Na’vi.) PK is different. It knows.

But jokes aside, I thought Aamir was quite good in this film, and that the first half had some lovely things in it, especially in the 45 or 50 minutes leading up to the interval. Its best bits, when “PK” tells his story to Jaggu (Anushka Sharma), do what good science-fiction writing does so well (and no, I’m not saying this film is sci-fi ): making the familiar very unfamiliar, providing a fresh look at things we take for granted (so that you may end up asking ‘what really IS so strange about a man pairing a formal shirt with a flouncy skirt?’ or ‘why shouldn’t cars dance?’). For PK, everything has to be learnt from scratch, and his childlike perspective on our vulnerable little world – our pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan put it – makes this part of the film very engaging. Plus there is the sweetness of the idea that an alien newly landed on Earth, and unused to verbal communication, might end up speaking exclusively in Bhojpuri because that is the language of the only person he succeeded in “transmitting” from. (Midway through the story, I was expecting that PK would tap into Jaggu’s linguistic reserves as well, thus allowing Aamir to spend the second half of the film moving between Bhojpuri, urbanite English and Hindi. Done well, that could have been light commentary on how our perceptions of and attitudes to people change depending on language and accent.)

In this post Baradwaj Rangan mentions the connection between Hirani’s and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinemas. For me, PK had very clear echoes of Bawarchi, in which Rajesh Khanna’s Raghu – the all-purpose cook and problem-solver, a version of the natkhat spiritual guide Krishna – shows a squabbling family the road back to love. That film announced its allegorical intentions from the outset, opening with a shot of a stage curtain that parts to reveal the inaptly named house “Shanti Nivas” – much like PK begins with a view of the cosmos, eventually homing in on our tiny planet, clouds parting to reveal the "stage". In one of the most self-consciously beautiful shots in Bawarchi (a film that does not, generally speaking, contain visual flourishes), Raghu walks out of the mist, from a sylvan Vrindavan-like setting – this is a still image that looks like a painting – towards the camera, on his way to the Sharma family’s house (in PK, the alien emerges from a cloud too, or from a spaceship hidden in one).

The bawarchi spends much of the story marveling at the Sharmas’ pettiness, at the little things that create gulfs between them, and the household with its disparate character types (the brothers played by AK Hangal, Kali Banerjee and Asrani don’t even seem like they could belong to one family) can without much trouble be seen as a symbol for a multicultural nation. (“Iss naatak ka sthaan hai Bharat” says Amitabh Bachchan’s voiceover just before the curtain opens in that first scene.) Raghu unites them (much as PK shows Indians of different religions that they are children of one God) but then there is a further union to be effected: Jaya Bhaduri is in love with a man who is not approved of by the family (in the same way that the Pakistani Sarfaraz in PK is an automatic figure of suspicion for conservative Indians). In Bawarchi, this boyfriend, woodenly played by a non-entity, is one of the film’s weak links; in PK, Sarfaraz is played by Sushant Singh Rajput who is a fine young actor, but cast here in a thankless, cipher-like role. In both films the protagonist’s final task is to bring the lovers together. Then he walks back into the mist, in search of other houses that need his intervention (or other planets with semi-intelligent life on them).

Bawarchi has the intimate, TV-drama feel of much of Hrishi-da’s post-1960s work, and needless to say it isn’t anywhere near as technically sophisticated as PK. But even in its weakest moments – when it fails to find a balance between big-picture lecture-baazi and telling a small-canvas story – it has nothing quite as heavy-handed as the Live TV show scene in the climax of Hirani’s film, where Tapasvi Maharaj (Saurabh Shukla) is exposed as a charlatan. This was one of the most tedious and stretched out sequences I have seen in a major film in a long while – it got so bad after a while that I was feeling embarrassed on behalf of the writers and director.

My problem wasn’t with the implausibility or lack of “realism”: the nitpicking questions like “how could they do all this on a Live show, shifting the cameras to Jaggu and bringing her romantic past into it?” Because it’s understood that the film is now in a symbolic, courtroom-like space where everyone gets involved, positions and counter-positions are furiously debated, and souls may be at stake. (Of all things, the framework reminded me of the climactic scene – the trial in Heaven – in Powell-Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death.) But the sequence is astonishingly static, has no regard for storytelling economy – there are far too many flashbacks and reaction shots – and invests too much time and dramatic energy in the supposed suspense around what really happened when Jaggu and her boyfriend were supposed to get married. Watching it, I keep wondering how an overwritten, over-performed scene like this even made it out of the editing room in this form, at a level where people like Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and “Mr Perfectionist” himself were involved. How could no one notice that the scene was sucking the life out of the movie? Even knowing that the film was trying to simplify a delicate subject for a mass audience (with the Parikshit Sahni character being a stand-in for the gullible Godman-junkie whose eyes need to be prised open), it could have been so much sharper.

And don’t get me started on the forced romantic track near the end. Or on poor, poor Sushant Singh Rajput, who does the crestfallen, St Bernard-caught-in-the-headlights expression so well even in his good roles, it can take a while to realise how poorly done by he is in this one.

****

While trying not to fall into the critic’s trap of reviewing the film he was hoping to see rather than the one the filmmakers set out to make, I’ll say this: given the available raw material and at least some of what is actually on screen, including Aamir’s strangely affecting performance, this film could have done other things. The whimsical, montage-like, tourist-guide-to-this-weird-planet tone of the first half could have been sustained. Yet, after those early scenes with the alien’s-eye view, it settles down into handling a Single Important Issue, and in doing this it becomes leaden and treats the audience as dolts. (Which, to be fair, many people in this country are when it comes to religion. And this returns us to the old question “Is it okay for a narrative film to occasionally discard subtleties like the Show, Don’t Tell principle and instead turn into a public-service show?” My instinctive answer is “No”, but I do sometimes wonder.)

Much like Chetan Bhagat, who has self-consciously moved from being “just” a storyteller to being a writer who Sets Out to Make a Difference and Herald Change, Aamir now has a clearly defined image. In an email exchange, a friend who is something of an insider in the film industry made this observation about the difference between PK / 3 Idiots and Rajkumar Hirani’s Munnabhai films: that the relatable, human qualities of Munnabhai and the detached, nearly omniscient status of PK and Rancho are offshoots of the personalities and approaches of the lead actors – Sanjay Dutt being a malleable, non-cerebral performer who won't ask many big, weighty questions like “What is the ultimate purpose of this scene?” and Aamir being a control freak who will try to ensure that everything he does is Meaningful in a clearly observable, quantifiable sense. With Munnabhai, we are invested in his own personal growth and we don't feel like the film is preaching at us through him; with the Aamir roles, it is hard to escape the sense that we are being talked down to. No wonder PK starts to slacken (at least for those of us who think we are already knowledgeable about the hazards of Godmen etc) around the point that the protagonist goes from being a wide-eyed outsider learning new things to being the smug know-it-all spreading the message of peace and oneness.

[Related posts: Sagan's inquisitive alien, new ways of looking at the world, a book about Aamir]

Out of the well and into the ocean: a superficial book on Aamir Khan

Confronted with a book whose subject matter he has strong opinions on, the honest reviewer should show his hand, or at least try to examine his own biases. So let me touch on a passage in Christina Daniels’ I’ll do it My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan where it is said of the 1990 film Dil that “it excelled in the use of light-hearted comedy”, that it was “a complete entertainer” and “a path-breaking film”.

How to say this politely: I disagree. Dil was among a handful of movies that had me fleeing, at the age of 14, from Hindi cinema (and I stayed away for over a decade). I remember it now as a tacky, cliché-filled romance featuring defiant lovers and bickering parents, all of whom lived in a state of comical hyper-intensity. Aamir Khan’s nostrils flared continually, Madhuri Dixit endured one of the most impressive sartorial crises of her career, and there were Anand-Milind songs that might loosely be described as tuneful (in the sense that I could hum them today if someone held a gun to my head and told me to) but not memorable in any proper sense of the word.

This is, of course, just a difference of opinion about a single film, but more generally I’ll do it My Way reads like a motivational book built around a pre-formulated thesis. The myth-making begins with the first chapter, which has vignettes from Aamir’s childhood, including an anecdote about the 12-year-old practising alone on a tennis court, turning down an offer to hit with another boy on the grounds that it would spoil his game. Such an incident, at such a young age, can be interpreted in many ways (and one doesn’t have to read deep meaning into it), but Daniels uses it to buttress a narrative about the perfectionism that Aamir would later become associated with. “Aamir focussed on his goal, be that tennis, chess, the Rubik’s Cube (sic), clearly showing the beginnings of his later single-minded pursuit of excellence.”

She then examines his career via approximately 20 movies, beginning with Qayamat se Qayamat Tak and the under-seen Raakh, and a theme emerges: nearly each of these films is “unique” or “significant”, and a step forward in Aamir’s relentless evolution as an actor who has done innovative/offbeat things while continuing to be a popular mainstream star. Naturally, this means that every film has to be discussed in portentous terms. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw QSQT being described as “the unusual story of a great love cut short”. (The story was hackneyed enough in the 16th century when Shakespeare plagiarised plot elements from Ovid for Romeo and Juliet, but even in the context of the action-dominated Hindi cinema of the 1980s it wasn’t all that radical. Narcissistic-tragic-young-love had already been a tradition in recent hits like Ek Duje ke Liye and Sohni Mahiwal.)

In the past decade or so, Aamir’s movie choices have entailed an increased self-consciousness about doing “message-oriented” cinema (or introducing speech-making into even light films). Little wonder then that things get more fraught in the sections about the recent movies. One telling passage goes: “His projects at this time like The Rising and Rang de Basanti were not just films. They were driven forward by powerful themes that made them milestones in their genres.”

Apart from there being no obvious link between the second sentence and the first, the phrasing "not just films" reveals a distinct attitude: what Aamir does is more important and transcendent than mere movie-making. The implication is almost that one must admire The Rising and Rang de Basanti for the heft of their themes and ambitions, irrespective of their cinematic worth. In this view of things, a film like 3 Idiots becomes most “significant” at precisely the point where I personally would find it most tedious: when Aamir’s character turns into the voice of conscience and catharsis, speaking nobly against a flawed education system.

But by now, it’s clear that this book is a worshipful tribute to Aamir Khan, and one can argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with such a venture – if Daniels honestly sees his career as an unbroken series of triumphs, well-judged image makeovers and inspirational films that have altered the landscape of Hindi cinema, so be it. But one would expect such a thesis to be backed by rigorous analyses of the films themselves – or at least by the personal gushing of an unapologetic fan. Instead, the author’s own voice is absent from large swathes of the book; in its place are quotes from old newspaper reports and magazine articles, and long transcripts of the inputs she got from Aamir’s colleagues. The latter make up the bulk of the text, and while some of them are informative, too many of them say the same things over and over again, in increasingly florid language.

Without wanting to underestimate the true fan’s resilience, I imagine that some of these quotes would try the patience (or tickle the funny bone) of even Aamir’s biggest devotees. Indra Kumar must have felt that the line “I saw Aamir turning from a larva to a beautiful butterfly” wasn’t adequate to express the full scope of his feelings, so he continues: “He can transform himself into a beautiful evening or a brilliant sunset with clouds of magnificent colours. He has the capacity to be the moon shimmering in the water below. He is such a powerhouse of talent that he can transform his personality into all these things and look beautiful [...] now he has acquired the capacity to create a spectrum of his own. That is his evolution.”

“He’s not swimming in the well,” says director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, channelling Master Yoda and Paulo Coelho, “He is out there in the ocean ... Aamir does not belong to a particular time and space. When we look back 20 years from now, he would have defined this era [...] Sixty years from today, when you look back, it will not even matter that he was in this era. He will become even bigger.”

Other transcripts are tediously long-winded, with no attempt made to render them crisp, or to even make them seem truly personal or relevant to the subject. Thus, after rambling on for eight pages, Raja Hindustani’s director Dharmesh Darshan says, “The only other actor in consideration for Aamir Khan’s role was Shahrukh Khan. But I had finalised on Aamir Khan. Of course, it would be a pleasure to work with Shahrukh Khan also.” That last sentence reads like part of a more general PR exercise, accidentally included in this book.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that Daniels herself can’t resist sun imagery in the mysterious final sentences, “For him, today’s peak becomes tomorrow’s sunset. Aamir Khan follows the eternal sunrise.” I’ll do it My Way is a good-looking book: well-produced, neatly structured, with a nice collection of photographs (but, it has to be said, some sloppy editing. At one point Mann is translated as “heart”. Um, no, that’s Dil). It passes muster as a history lite of one of the major movie careers of the last quarter-century. But it is best read – or rather, flipped through – by someone who already deifies Aamir Khan and who prefers mixed metaphors to in-depth analysis.

[Did a version of this review for Business Standard]

Spectrum of an individual butterfly

Presenting the most giggle-inducing passage I have read in a book this past month. Christina Daniels’ I’ll do it My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan contains this rhapsodic quote by Indra Kumar, director of the 1990 film Dil:

In Dil, I saw Aamir turning from a larva to a beautiful butterfly. But today, he can transform himself into a beautiful evening or a brilliant sunset with clouds of magnificent colours. He has the capacity to be the moon shimmering in the water below. He is such a powerhouse of talent that he can transform his personality into all these things and look beautiful. If in the beginning, Aamir was just an individual butterfly and his beauty limited, now he has acquired the capacity to create a spectrum of his own. That is his evolution.

I thought Karan Johar loved SRK and Herzog loved Klaus Kinski (remember “From the moment I saw him, I knew it was my destiny to make films and his to act in them”?), but this takes the director-star relationship into a hitherto unimagined dimension. I will never think of Dil the same way again (not that I ever really thought about it before).
[Coming soon: a review of the book]

P.S. I watched Dhobi Ghat recently. Aamir's determinedly faux-intense gaze, pursed lips and pointy ears reminded me of something but I didn't know what it was until a few days ago. Then I figured it out and felt happy again. See.

Analyse this (and a quick note on 3 Idiots)

The most entertaining put-down I’ve read recently was a long blog comment directed at all those annoying people who ask movie reviewers the question, “Why can't you just enjoy the movie for what it is? Why do you have to analyse it?” Do read the full comment on Aishwarya’s blog.
The “don’t analyse, just enjoy” line is very familiar; I hear it whenever I try to discuss a hugely popular film using any sentences more complicated than “This movie rocks from beginning to end!” Take Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, a film I enjoyed a lot on the whole. It’s full of some really good bits and the first half in particular was outstanding. But watching the second half, I couldn’t help wondering why so many good Hindi films take the trouble to establish a nuanced thought process and then simply cop out of it at crucial times. Why does it feel like five different writers were sitting in a room, each trying to tug the film in a different direction?
For an example of what I’m talking about, consider a superb 20-minute stretch close to the film’s midway point: the scene where the three heroes (fun-loving students at an engineering college) make a public spectacle of their colleague Chatura, a teacher’s pet who learns everything by rote. The sequence begins by placing us, the viewer, in a position of identification with the three leads. When one of them plays a phone gag on Chatura while another switches around the words in a Hindi speech he has to recite (“balatkaar” for “chamatkaar”, etc), we approve of the prank; after all, Chatura is such a smug little toady. We then laugh our heads off at him as he makes the unintentionally ribald speech (it’s one of the great paisa-vasool/taali-maar scenes you’ll ever see). But then – in the scene that follows – the film briefly turns the tables on us by allowing us to see his anger and humiliation; to see him as a victim of a flawed educational system.
Taken together, the whole 20-minute section is a brilliantly sustained sequence of moral complexity – one of the best I've seen in a mainstream Hindi movie. It builds up in such a way that when Chatura denounces the “three idiots” on the rooftop, he's also denouncing us in a sense. (At any rate, anyone who has been through the formal-education grind in India - and done even moderately well in school or college - should find it very difficult to take any sort of higher moral ground against Chatura. To varying degrees, we've all done what he does.) But this train of thought is never really followed through. Instead, the film makes the predictable, feel-good, mass-audience-pleasing decision to let Chatura remain a buffoon and a comic foil, as if he were personally the villain of the piece instead of a tiny cog in a giant broken wheel.
This also leads to a disconnect between the film's (over)stated “message” and what actually happens at the end (something I felt was a problem in Taare Zameen Par as well). 3 Idiots spends over two-and-a-half hours preaching about how personal satisfaction and following your dreams are more important than “success” as society defines it (status, bank balance, size of car, etc). But in the last 10 minutes it can’t resist giving the audience the very superficial thrill of seeing that the Aamir character has ended up in a position where he can make the pompous Chatura grovel. (And besides, isn't his Ladakh lake bigger than the rich NRI’s indoor swimming pool?)
There are a few other examples of loose writing. Like the Javed Jaffrey sub-plot, thrown in only because they couldn't find another way to justify the Aamir character cutting himself off from everyone after college. And the lazy handling of the "10 years after" scenario, with Kareena improbably on the verge of getting married to the same moron she was engaged to a decade earlier (you get the impression the writers stuck with the fellow only because he was such a soft target for humour).
When I spoke to a friend about these little short-cuts, he said, “Well, yes, but we expect our Hindi films to be wishy-washy about these little things, right?” I know what he meant, but I’m starting to wish that our default expectation mode about basic internal consistency in our movies didn't always have to be set low – especially when the film is so good in many other ways, as 3 Idiots undoubtedly is.
P.S. Another gripe I have with the "don't be so analytical" complaint is that most people use it in a manipulative, selective way. The thought process goes something like this: "Whoa, you didn't love the film I loved?! *Hmm, rationalise, rationalise* That can only mean you're over-analytical/you think too much." It's the same thing as people telling you to be "objective" about a movie when what they really mean is "Agree with my [subjective] view of it."

P.P.S. Some related thoughts on analysing and enjoying in this old post about Om Shanti Om.

Notes on Taare Zameen Par

The comments section here turned into a part-discussion of Taare Zameen Par, so thought I’d move some of that to a separate post. I wasn’t planning to blog about the film, because I didn't have to review it officially (that’s usually the pretext to write an expanded piece for the blog) and things have been very rushed lately. Also, if a film has been extensively written about (as TZP has), I prefer not to add my two bits unless I badly want to make some points that I haven’t seen made elsewhere.

The other thing is, I wasn't as hugely taken with the film as most people I know were, but at the same time I wasn’t comfortable writing something that would over-stress its weaknesses. Because for the most part, those weaknesses (the occasional preachiness, the shift in tone in the second half, Aamir Khan’s star persona briefly threatening to dominate proceedings) were almost unavoidable given what this film was trying to accomplish. “Message movies” that reach out to a mass audience can’t afford to be too understated – they sometimes have to spell things out – and Aamir probably needed to be in the film to draw that large audience in the first place.

Besides, though I was annoyed by a couple of things (the caricaturing of Ishaan’s father, the validation of Ishaan after he wins a competition at the end), there was nothing that seriously put me off. Given the film's subject and the way mainstream Hindi cinema has handled these things in the past, it was restrained and tasteful. Darsheel Saffry was superb, as was the music and the way it was used. And on the whole, Aamir and Amole Gupte managed to sensitively convey their empathy and concern for children, without rubbing it into the viewer’s face. (Clarification: if I was reviewing TZP officially, I wouldn’t refrain from stating my view that it played like a public-service documentary in places – but as things stand, I can afford to suspend the critical faculties and appreciate it for its good intentions and other pluses.)

One thing I found interesting was the association of dyslexia (which is a specific learning disability that can be appropriately dealt with) with symptoms that could arise from general introversion/shyness. The first half of the film, seen mostly from Ishaan’s perspective (his imagination-driven interior life being more compelling than most things in the real world around him), isn’t really about a dyslexic kid at all, despite the scene where he tells his teacher “The letters are dancing”. It’s a much more generalised story that would be recognisable to just about anyone who ever felt isolated as a child or had problems with the staidness of formal education.

And I wonder if this could be problematic – whether it might end up providing false hope to parents whose children are reticent or distanced for reasons other than a tangible medical condition. After watching this film, the uninformed (and overambitious) parents of any child who happens to be a loner or deeply sensitive might think he has dyslexia, and when they find out he doesn't, it could be even more confusing for them and worse for the kid. (As if we introverts don’t have enough to deal with already, both as children and as adults!)

[Tasteless humour alert]

Watching the first half of Taare Zameen Par and noting how often something occurred that either my wife or I could relate to from our own childhoods, I drifted into another of my short reveries, where I imagined the following murmurs rising from different parts of the hall:

“I used to be fascinated by the way gobs of paint ran into each other on a palette! I must have been dyslexic too!”

“I failed Math when I was nine! Now I know why!”

“I would get up late and spend my time staring out of the window at flowers and birds! I must be dyslexic!”

And so on. Like the famous scene in Spartacus where the rebellion leader’s loyal men stand up one by one announcing “I am Spartacus!” when the Romans ask them to give up their chief. In my reverie, everyone in the theatre shouted “I was dyslexic!” so that the chorus rang through the building and out on the street, each voice trying to drown out the others. (Ironic, considering that one of the film’s points is that dyslexics see things differently and aren’t part of the competing herds.)

P.S. Remember Dawkins’ suggestion that atheists were the new gays – coming out of the closet, bringing their beliefs (or disbeliefs) into the open? In India, if you looked at newspaper supplements in the days just before and after TZP’s release, it was possible to wonder the same thing about people who had dyslexia as children. Or people who thought they had dyslexia as children. They were tumbling out of closets everywhere, hardly a day passing without some minor celebrity (a TV actor, a sports personality) spilling the beans about his own traumatic and misunderstood childhood. I wonder how many of these cases were simply people who...just weren’t that good at Math. (No disrespect meant to those who genuinely struggled with dyslexia, etc etc.)

For better, for verse

I don’t know whether it’s a sign of approaching senility or psychosis or both, but I’ve developed this habit of conjuring up improbable parallel scenarios while I’m watching a film (even one that I’m enjoying). Remember those campy scenes from old TV serials where a character’s drifting off into fantasy/dream would be accompanied by a spooky ululating sound and animated visuals of concentric circles? Well, I’m just like that in a movie theatre these days (minus the sound and the animated circles).

For instance, in the first half of Fanaa there was some very ordinary shayiri going on between the Aamir Khan and Kajol characters and it occurred to me that an excellent comedy could be made with the dialogue written entirely in Urdu verse. The poetry would have to be mediocre of course, but the characters would recite it with immense feeling and take themselves very seriously indeed. (After all, the film didn’t have to know that it was a comedy.) Lovers would speak in shayiri to each other all the time, even when saying prosaic things like “pass the cabbage please”. Evil terrorists would give their minions instructions over the radio in rhyme, and governments would use it to apprise each other of deteriorating political relations: things will get verse before they get better.

(Minor spoiler alert) In the second half of the film, when a wounded Aamir Khan escapes the Indian Army, crosses over the Kashmir border into Poland** and finds himself at the doorstep of the woman he deserted many years ago, I imagined a Death and the Maiden situation, where Kajol and her father (Rishi Kapoor) keep him tied up and torture him until he confesses to genocide. (I was also hoping for a dhishum dhishum fight at the end, with the portly Kapoor beating the crap out of Aamir and then sitting on him for good measure, thus proving the superiority of the early 1980s over the present day.)

Back to reality: I thought Fanaa was passable. The first half was quite dull but things tightened up after the intermission (though you have to be able to assimilate a major change in the film’s tone, along with the usual suspension of disbelief – and please, please don’t try to understand any of the characters’ motivations or get into conundrums of logic). There were a couple of idiotic scenes towards the end, but the second half also contained the film’s best vignettes (including the Antakshri one which Uma mentions here, and a few reminders that Aamir Khan, for all his posturing, is quite a good actor). It was more interesting, better acted and directed than the romantic slush early on.

Aamir and Kajol, as has been noted elsewhere, have no chemistry. I have a small theory about this: I think both of them are just too cerebral as actors. (Aamir has a well-honed reputation for perfectionism anyway, but this is just as true of Kajol – despite the pre-release publicity which hyped up the contrast between her and Aamir’s styles of working.) This doesn’t necessarily mean that they think harder about their roles than their contemporaries, but that the intelligence is always on display; like Sanjeev Kumar of yore, they have “I’m a Serious Actor and You Better Not Forget It” stamped on their foreheads. Put too much of that intensity together in one frame and it’s overkill. I think this is one reason why Kajol worked so well with Shah Rukh Khan, and why Aamir worked well with Juhi Chawla – those pairs complemented each other very nicely. (Watching Fanaa, I kept wishing Shah Rukh would bound in through the door and jump around on a piano for five minutes.)

Bottomline – I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend Fanaa to anyone (except my mother, who is the least discriminating movie-watcher alive), but it has its moments.

Quick notes:

Lots of in-film advertising, including a Radio Mirchi promotion (Aamir wears a plastic mirchi around his neck). When Kajol went to open the fridge in one scene, I was kind of hoping Ajay Devgan would pop out and sing the Kelvinator song.

Killing off Jaspal Bhatti is a definite no-no and should be made illegal.

Child actors should not be forced into unreasonable and unnatural acts like saying good things about Rahul Dravid.

“Fan-aa” is not, as I belatedly learnt, a version of “Fun comes”. Nor is “panah” the refreshing summer mango drink. (As the ToI food reviewer would say, pun comes.)

**where much of the film was shot

Charters and Caldicott in Bollywood?

[Wrote this for the April issue of Cricinfo magazine, now on the stands. Had a very broad brief – anything to do with the depiction of cricket in movies – and so I decided to focus on two cricket-mad characters from a cherished Hitchcock film. More than anything, it feels good to see my name in a magazine I’ve fervently read for years – and many of whose writers (both staff and outside contributors) have long been personal favourites. Also thanks to Rahul, for allowing me to keep extending my deadline, and for some very kind words at the end of it all.]

Quite cricket

"England's on the brink," whispers Charters to Caldicott. "We must get in touch with London immediately." It's an early scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, and this is talk loaded with all kinds of possibilities – after all it's 1938, with the spectre of war looming over Europe, and this is an espionage story involving coded messages and unlikely spies. Stranded in a train station somewhere in Germany with numerous other passengers, the two Brits talk furtively about the need for "news of the latest developments". A suspenseful 10 minutes or so later comes the kicker: the information they are so desperate for is the score from the Oval Test match.

As played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in one of Hitchcock's most compact early films, Charters and Caldicott became so popular that they featured in a number of other movies in the 1940s and early 1950s, mostly comedies or thrillers set on trains. Each time they were the archetypal conservative Englishmen abroad: keeping their own counsel, perplexed by the manners and customs prevalent in other countries, perennially discussing their beloved sport, even using cubes of sugar to explain fielding positions to each other (and drawing frosty glances from fellow passengers who wish to use said cubes to sweeten their tea).

Nor was cricket a mere sidenote in these films: occasionally, it supplied an important plot turn. In The Lady Vanishes, for instance, the young heroine, trying to convince the authorities that an old lady has mysteriously disappeared, approaches Charters and Caldicott: surely they remember seeing dear Mrs Froy? But the two men don't want to risk the possibility that the train will be delayed – they have to get back to London in time for the final day's play, dash it – and so they deny any knowledge of a missing person, further complicating the plot.

Even in the 1930s, when cricket was still very much an English sport, there was something incongruous and mirth-inducing about the magnificent obsession of Charters and Caldicott – as indicated by their status as comic relief in film after film. On long train journeys through the Continent they would naturally suffer foreigners who barely knew of the game, let alone understood why it would rouse such passion. But even the other British characters in these movies regarded them with bemusement. ("I don't see how something like cricket can make you forget seeing people!" exclaims the heroine disdainfully. "Oh you don't, do you?" sulks Charters, "Well, there's obviously nothing more to be said.") They were misfits everywhere they went.

Whimsical though the idea might be, I can't shake the feeling that Charters and Caldicott would have been more at home in cricket-themed Indian movies – movies like Dev Anand's gloriously kitschy Awwal Number, Ashutosh Gowrikar's ambitious Lagaan (two films that have very little in common, notwithstanding that Aamir Khan finishes a crucial match with a sixer in each) or Nagesh Kukunoor's graceful Iqbal. There would of course be teething problems in such a leap across time and space; initially they would be very much the insular Englishmen – "oh I say, must we watch the Natives besmirch the good old game now?" – and Bollywood's cinematic idiom would be a mystery greater than any Hitchcock ever filmed. But nobler sentiments would eventually prevail.

They would instantly relate to the unselfconscious reverence shown to the game by Bollywood, appreciate how much hinges on the outcome of the match in Lagaan, and how much it matters to everyone watching. They would approve of Iqbal, a film that literalises the notion of cricket-as-religion – in scenes involving the little shrine where the protagonist puts up photos torn from magazines; Iqbal bowing his head and closing his eyes in prayer before beginning his bowling run-up; the unexpected second chance for salvation given to the embittered former cricketer played by Naseeruddin Shah.

One thing they wouldn't understand would be Indian cinema's persistent, self-conscious need to present cricket as a metaphor for Something Bigger: as in "A story above cricket", Iqbal's slightly pretentious catchphrase which forgets that sport is never just about bats and balls anyway; the reason it's so compelling in the first place is because it's grand human drama presented with such immediacy. But Charters and Caldicott never needed any such justification anyhow: they were the breathing antitheses to C L R James's famous line "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" The only thing they knew or cared about was cricket itself; it would never have occurred to them to use it as a symbol for, say, England keeping Germany at bay during the War (and what did those blasted Germans care about the game anyway?). Their love for the sport was pure and untrammeled; in spirit, in all the things that matter most, they were no different from the glaze-eyed masses watching in reverential silence as Aamir Khan takes guard with everything at stake.

On an Indian train, Charters and Caldicott would never have faced the ignominy of a blank stare when they asked someone for the latest score. In Bollywood, they would have fit right in.