On Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly - power struggles, mindgames and innocence sidelined

One of my favourite Anurag Kashyap-directed scenes (and one that is a lot of fun to watch and discuss with students) is the chase through the slum in Black Friday. The scene begins in a purposeful, no-nonsense vein – Imtiaz Ghavate may have been involved in the Bombay blasts. He must be apprehended. Senior cops, shouting instructions, and their minions, who will do most of the running, gather to make enquiries. Everyone looks very determined – but then, as Imtiaz keeps eluding the police's welcoming arms and everyone starts tiring, the tone becomes almost comical. There are many stops and starts, the cops-and-robbers theme is deglamorised, we see how mundane and chancy such pursuits can be. A flabby policeman bleats “Imtiaz, ruk ja yaar” (and there is a contrast with Amitabh delivering fiery dialogues from a nearby TV). By the end of the scene, trapped as we are with the characters in Dharavi’s labyrinths, we have lost sight of the Big Picture, the fact that this is part of an investigation into a major terrorist attack. What matters are the little details: what we learn about Imtiaz and these cops and the world they are stumbling around in – a slum so congested that a large pipeline running through it performs the function of an arterial road.

And then he is finally caught, smacked hard by a senior officer – this is as much a bucket of cold water for the viewer, who has been enjoying the circus – and the next scene, an interrogation in a menacingly lit room, returns us to that larger picture and to the razor-sharp focus that is the need of the hour.

Something comparable happens over the course of Kashyap’s powerful new film Ugly. The serious situation that demands our attention is established early on – a little girl has vanished, probably been kidnapped – but then the narrative enters a warren of side-lanes to examine the shadowy back-stories and inner lives of the many people involved. And the thing that matters (or the thing that we thought mattered) is lost sight of and returned to, very unsettlingly, only in the film’s final moments.

When a struggling actor named Rahul (Rahul Bhat) and his small-time casting agent Chaitanya (the excellent Vineet Kumar Singh) realise that Rahul’s daughter Kali has disappeared from his car, they begin a frantic search. A suspicious man is encountered, a chase ends with a gruesome accident… but all this fast-paced action is immediately followed by a protracted scene in The Police Station Where Time Stood Still. Rahul and Chaitanya find themselves being interrogated by cops who are more interested in cracking gratuitous jokes than in recognising the urgency of the situation. They ask what “casting” means, discuss the real names of famous actors, make judgemental noises about talaaq causing problems by breaking up society’s moral fabric, and dwell on frivolities (how is it that Rahul’s daughter’s phone displays a photo of him when he calls her? How does that phone-camera work?).

At first this scene looks like one of those extended Kashyap setpieces that sometimes invite accusations of self-indulgence. After it had gone on for a bit, I thought “Okay, can we get on with the story now?” But later, after seeing the whole film, I felt that the scene’s meandering on was part of the point. We are aware that time could be running out for the little girl, and already the need to find her is being eclipsed by mind-games and irrelevancies. In this case, the game of one-upmanship involves policemen using their position to toy with people who are otherwise more privileged than them, people who can afford to buy shiny pink phones for their children, and who need to be pulled down a peg or two. (“Mere saab tum dono se bahut zyaada padhe likhe hain,” Inspector Jadhav tells Rahul and Chaitanya.) But this isn’t the only such game that will be played here. 

Much of Ugly is about a power struggle between two men who knew each other in college and whose lives have taken very different turns since then. One is Rahul, the other is police chief Shoumik (Ronit Roy), who is married to Rahul’s ex-wife Shalini (Tejaswini Kolhapure), and information about them comes to us in layers. When we first meet Shoumik, he is intoning that women must be kept in their place, and we see that he maintains an iron hand over his depressive wife, tapping her phone calls, even supervising how many litres of petrol she has in her car. His resentment about her falling for Rahul in their college days manifests itself in withering coldness. “Tera first choice bhaag gaya,” he tells Shalini when he hears of Rahul escaping custody, and he also implies that she came to him “second-hand”. (There is a close connection between this character and the part played by Roy in Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan – another hard-edged, controlling alpha-male who may once have had a sensitive side but has now settled into a regimented view of social norms and gender roles.) Rahul, on the other hand, comes across as a nicer guy at first, because we see him as a concerned father, the underdog, and a contrast to the autocratic Shoumik. But still waters run deep, it turns out that the man who is now a failed actor may have had the cards in his favour in the distant past, and that he may not have been a likable winner at the time. Our feelings about these people, and the others around them, keep shifting, which adds to the sense of paranoia, the suspense about who is conning or double-crossing whom.

Ugly is, on one level, a police procedural, a view of investigators trying to get their work done while also dealing with a perplexing new world of technology, and learning on the job. But it is more effective in its depiction of wasted lives, and the lengths people will go to so they can break out of their private traps. There are affecting touches, such as a scene where the dowdy Shalini mentions a glamorous red dress she had bought thinking she would wear it at one of Rahul’s premieres when he became a star, but there are also flashes of humour when you don’t expect them: a hood wearing a “Prem Rogue” T-shirt; the priceless expression on Shoumik’s face when he hears the lyrics of “Tu Mujhe Nichod De”, a song performed in a sleazy video by Rahul’s girlfriend.

One easy way of describing this film is to say that it is about innocence lost and forgotten in a world where being hardened and competitive is everything: fending for yourself, battling or nurturing your personal demons, looking for small and big ways of getting back at someone who has wounded you. It leads up to a last scene that is calculated for maximum visceral effect, confronting us with exactly what we don’t want to see (even if we know beforehand that this will be a dark film). Kashyap often deals in excesses, and often overreaches, but I thought that final unflinching scene was absolutely necessary. It is almost as if the viewer is being told, “Remember what all this was originally about? It didn’t really matter all that much to the characters in the story – they were too caught up in themselves and in their adult games. But does it matter to you?"

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P.S. The Inspector Jadhav character in this film (played by Girish Kulkarni) reminded me just a little of one of the most memorable characters in Indian English fiction of the past year, the fat, seething policeman Ram Manohar Pande in Shovon Chowdhury’s novel The Competent Authority, haunted by the thought that rich, English-speaking people are laughing at him behind his back, and determined that the laughter must stop. Consider this a plug for the book.

Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)

Last month I wrote about a film – Lessons in Forgetting – that centres on a protective father and his free-spirited daughter, the latter’s personality colliding with stereotypical ideas about the “good Indian girl”. Coincidentally, a few days ago, while watching the anthology film Bombay Talkies, it struck me that all four short movies in it touch on the relationship between fathers and their children, as well as on changing perceptions of masculinity and “male roles”. And a buried theme is a man’s ability – or inability – to tell stories and to deal with different types of narratives.

In fact, the very first scene in Bombay Talkies – in the short film directed by Karan Johar – has a young man angrily confronting his intolerant father who can’t accept, or perhaps even comprehend, that his son is gay. (The film’s title “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” comes from one of the great Hindi-film songs, a rendition of which is beautifully used here, but it can also at a stretch be translated as “This is a queer tale”.) Later, in Zoya Akhtar’s short film, another middle-class father – more sensitive on the face of it, but also a man who has clear ideas about what a son should grow up to be – slaps his little boy when he sees him dressed in a girl’s clothes.

There is some ambiguity in this child’s obsession with “Sheila”, the Katrina Kaif character in the Tees Maar Khan item number: does it entail a straight crush on Kaif, expressed through joyful imitation (I’m thinking now of my own childhood dalliances with Parveen Babi or Sridevi songs), or does it reflect gender identification, a biological imperative to “be” a girl? Whatever the case, Akhtar’s film ends with an idyllic scene where the boy gets to perform “Sheila ki Jawani” in front of a small, initially bemused but eventually appreciative audience. Beyond this, his future is uncertain; it’s hard to see him pursuing his dancing ambitions in the long run without a serious conflict with his dad.

Watching that scene, I couldn’t help think that exactly a hundred years ago Dadasaheb Phalke was making films where male actors performed in drag (because respectable women weren’t supposed to act in these shady motion-picture things) - and this led to reflections on gender roles and the creative impulse. In a world that encourages easy classifications, artists, performers or creative people are supposed to be particularly sensitive, and “sensitivity” in turn – broadly defined – is a trait associated more with women than with men. But think of gender characteristics and behaviour as existing along a continuing line (rather than clearly demarcated), and there may be something to the idea that when a man performs on stage, or briefly turns storyteller for his child or for a group of people in his train compartment (which are things that happen in Bombay Talkies), he is tapping into his existing “feminine” side. Or that he is temporarily made more introspective, placed at a remove from the aggression that society often demands of men. (Those men in Phalke’s films – some of them might have felt embarrassed in women’s clothes, but the more dedicated actors among them may have felt briefly liberated from gender expectations. In addition to having a grand time preening about the set, or just reveling in the experience of being “someone else”.)

Bombay Talkies has a number of characters who are performers or mimics or tellers of tales, or people who (channeling Eliot) prepare a face each morning before going out to deal with the world. In Johar’s film, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) and her husband are living a lie of sorts; one can easily see the little boy in Akhtar’s film growing up to do the same thing; in Dibakar Banerjee’s film, Purandar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) dreams of getting rich through emu-farming (though the bird is clearly taking more than it gives) while his mundane real-world existence requires that he heads out to find a building-watchman job where (as he himself puts it) you aren’t required to do much more than stand at attention for hours on end. 

Purandar has other dimensions: he is a loving father who unselfconsciously does household work alongside his wife and is apparently comfortable in female presence, hanging about with the women of his chawl as they exchange a salty joke or two. Perhaps these traits are inseparable from his qualities as an actor who brings all his integrity to a bit-part role, and as a storyteller who puts on a silent performance for his little girl at the end. (Banerjee – who is of course a storyteller himself – has said that his own experience with fatherhood informed his treatment of this narrative.)

Finally, in Anurag Kashyap’s film about a son who travels to Bombay to try and meet his father’s favourite film star, I think one can suggest that movie-love has turned both the protagonist Vijay and his father into raconteurs – people who have a feel for the spoken word, for parody, dramatic flow and the right pauses. They are amateur performers, and I’d think this would make them more attentive people and strengthen the bond between them. If violence and intolerance are failures of the imagination, perhaps the problem with the fathers in Johar’s and Akhtar’s films is that never having developed a taste for fantasy and role-playing, they lack the empathy that comes with it.

*****

Sidenote: In reviews and in casual discussions with friends, I have heard Kashyap’s film being described as disappointingly simple – and indeed, on the face of it, there is something pedestrian about the story of a young man trying to get a darshan of Amitabh Bachchan (who eventually “blesses” us viewers with a cameo appearance and underlines His divinity by doing unto a murabba what Lord Rama did unto the berry offered him by Shabari). It might seem even more trite if you recall all the behind-the-scenes talk about Kashyap’s real-life reconciliation with Bachchan, and how gratified he seemed by it. But given this director’s sly sense of humour and the awareness in his earlier work of the subtle ways in which worship and irreverence mingle (see his superb short film Pramod Bhai 23, for example), I think the story invites more than a face-value reading.

Vineet Kumar is very good as Vijay, but also consider the casting in light of the small part Kumar played in Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. There he was Sardar Singh’s eldest son Danish, the heir apparent, with the dialogue at one point likening him to the Vijay played by Bachchan in Trishul – the clear hero of that film, whose smouldering presence made younger brother Shashi Kapoor seem effete in comparison. (Indeed there is an oft-circulated joke that Shashi Kapoor was one of Bachchan’s most convincing heroines. In Trishul, when the two men have a fight scene where they get to land an equal number of punches on each other – the obligatory ego-salve for male stars of the time – you don’t for a minute buy into it.)

But Gangs of Wasseypur’s depiction of life as the banana peel on which the fondest cinematic fantasies may slip included a sequence of events where the limp-wristed younger brother Faisal becomes - to his own surprise - the film's protagonist. “Jab aankh khuli to dekha ki hum Shashi Kapoor hai. Bachchan toh koi aur hai,” Faisal says in an earlier moment of drug-addled self-pity, but this “second lead” ends up as the kingpin after his elder brother is casually bumped off. Watch GoW, then see Vijay’s father in Bombay Talkies mimic Dilip Kumar while telling his story about his own encounter with that thespian decades earlier, and consider the eventual fate of the murabba that Bachchan so self-importantly bites into; I think Kashyap’s film is more than a straight-faced, rose-tinted view of supplicants trying to collect stardust in a glass jar.

Our films, our selves: thoughts on the upcoming Bombay Talkies

[From my new cinema column for DNA newspaper. The e-paper version is here]

The enthusiastic if somewhat diffused celebrations around the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema found a new focal point last month, with the unveiling of the trailer for Bombay Talkies. This is an anthology film made up of short movies – each around 25 minutes in length – by four of our best-known directors; Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee were each given choice of subject and treatment, as long as it had something to do with cinema. So Kashyap’s film, for instance, is about a man from Allahabad on a mission to meet his hero Amitabh Bachchan.

While a celebratory project can be expected to run along such lines, it is worth noting that much of modern cinema is about cinema anyway. It feels like we have been living in an age of meta-film for a while, where movies constantly reference other movies (and in some cases are impossible to properly appreciate unless you are familiar with those reference points). Even remakes, while updating a story, miss no opportunity to make nudge-wink allusions to our cinematic past. I haven’t seen the new Himmatwala yet, but I wasn’t surprised to hear the dialogue where the hero tells the heroine how to bandage his wound: “Yeh 1983 hai, yaar. Pallu phaado aur baandh do.” The patronising tone is almost enough to make one feel defensive about the terrible 1980s.

As it happens, two of the four directors in the Bombay Talkies project have already made feature-length films that can be viewed as tributes to cinema. Anurag Kashyap’s epic from last year, Gangs of Wasseypur, was – to me at least – less noteworthy as a straight-faced depiction of gang wars in Dhanbad, and more stimulating as a commentary on how people interact with their popular culture, even modelling their own personalities and relationships on what they see in movies. (In one of that film’s many witty little touches, the sole character who is uninterested in cinema is played by a real-life director, Tigmanshu Dhulia. Naturally, this grinch is also the story’s primary villain.) Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance, on the other hand, was explicitly about the workings of the movie industry – a sympathetic yet hard-edged tale about the fortunes of two aspiring actors, neither of whom are to the manor of a filmi khandaan born. The multiple cameos in that film by real-life actors and directors might easily have become tiresome, but they were marvellously done. Two of the most delightful, in fact, were by Akhtar’s Bombay Talkies co-directors: Karan Johar played himself as someone darker and more intriguing than you’d ever think from watching his actual movies, while Kashyap played a writer whose artistic cravings are rudely snuffed out by money-minded producers. Such are the ways in which an industry comments on its own underpinnings.

Of the four short films, the one I’m most looking forward to is Dibakar Banerjee’s updating of Satyajit Ray’s story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, about a small-time actor and dreamer who is hired to play a tiny part in a film. (It is a pleasing coincidence that Ray’s story was first published in 1963, Indian cinema’s half-centenary year, though I doubt he had that in mind while writing it.) I met Banerjee last year during one of the script sessions, and learnt that his alterations included making the protagonist younger (the original Patol is 52), putting in a little subplot about emu-farming, and shifting the setting to contemporary Mumbai. But what I thought most interesting was his stated intention to bring elements of non-fiction filmmaking into fiction, to “explore the method of serendipity of documentaries within the format of a pre-written story”. 

Part of the idea was to work with an actor who might relate to Patol Babu’s struggles – someone whose own emotional trajectory resembled that of the character. It seems appropriate then that the role is being played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, a short, dark-complexioned, “non-hero type” who has gone from being a bit-part player to one of our most respected performers, and a poster boy for the heart-warming (if illusory) idea that if you have talent, you can make it big no matter what. The last I heard, Banerjee and his collaborators were plumbing Siddiqui’s own background for cues to the updated Patol, though I don’t know how much of this has made it into the final film.

What Banerjee probably realised was that the line between fiction and non-fiction can become very blurred in a context where cinema is commenting on cinema. Two of the best documentaries I have recently seen are not part of the 100-year celebrations, but they could easily have been. Faiza Khan’s affectionate Supermen of Malegaon chronicles the struggles of small-town filmmakers as they make a superhero movie on a tiny budget with basic computer technology; this is a story about people fighting the odds (the plural “supermen” in the title refers to director Nasir Shaikh and his team in Malegaon), trying to highlight their daily problems – poverty, pollution, apathy – while also indulging their passion for filmmaking.

Even more compelling is Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran, about the world of underground video parlours. The lead character here – he is a real person, but one instinctively thinks of him as a “character” – is a colourful young man named Sagai, and as he addresses the camera, holding forth about his life, analysing his own personality, we see that (like the people in Gangs of Wasseypur) he is partly a construct of the movies he loves. As he and his friends argue passionately about the relative merits of Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan and other heroes, it is obvious that they are already performers themselves – the cockiness, the braggadocio, the smart one-liners come easily to them. If they watch Bombay Talkies, they are likely to see their own movie-obsessions mirrored in it.

Screen savers - 10 trailblazers of the new cinema

[Doing the blog-as-storehouse thing again. This is an extended version of my piece on “young experimenters of the new Hindi cinema” for the 5th anniversary issue of Vogue India – short, snappy profiles of 10 people across categories]

The Actor: Nawazudin Siddiqui

At the time of writing this, Nawazuddin Siddiqui has his cell-phone numbers on his official website, much like a struggling actor piecing together a portfolio – it belies the fact that this grounded, soft-spoken man is becoming one of our most celebrated performers. As Khan in Kahaani – the intelligence bureau officer willing to be amoral in pursuit of a greater good – he was a stick of dynamite, smouldering and exploding in turn. As the sensitive Faizal, destined for a life of crime, he brought kinetic energy to Gangs of Wasseypur (in addition to looking as sensual as the young James Dean in the first part of the film).

For a long time, recognition eluded Nawaz because he wasn’t “hero material”. “Lamba hona chahiye, gora-chitta hona chahiye, aur woh toh main nahin bann sakta. (I can't become tall and fair-skinned.) When you send in a portfolio photo to someone, you can do a bit of colour correcting, but when you are physically present in front of the agent they reject you straight away.” But perseverance has paid off (“luck always plays a part, but it was also important that I didn’t let myself get depressed or negative”) and he isn’t interested in being a “star” anyway. An actor should play completely different roles, he says – there should be no residue of the body language and gestures he used for his last character. “That’s what makes the process exciting to me. When I see big stars who repeat mannerisms in role after role, I wonder how they never get bored.”

His own enthusiasm is very visible when he discusses the intricacies of Method acting (“it gets mocked in India because we don’t have a tradition of layered characters in our cinema”) or reels off the colourful titles (Miss Lovely, Haraamkhor, Great Indian Circus) of the many films he has due for release. Though he is swamped with projects, don’t expect this chameleon-like performer to repeat himself anytime soon.


The Casting Director: Nandini Shrikent

Before she was offered the job of casting director on Lakshya, Nandini Shrikent had learnt set decoration and worked briefly as an assistant director. “I loved being on sets, but couldn’t handle it physically.” Her current work has its own rewards. She gets to read scripts early, discusses them at length, and sees diverse interpretations of a scene at auditions. “Some actors come in complete character – costume, mood, vibe in place.” Her scouting methods include speaking to talent agents, monitoring an ever-growing database and watching lots of theatre: “It’s so much fun to spot an exciting new actor and imagine the roles he might be suited to.”

Since many “big” movies are launched expressly for stars, Shrikent usually finds it more challenging to work on lower-budget or independent films. “A big-bonanza film can work against you because there can be politics involved – different camps and cliques, making it difficult to cast a particular person.” But there are exceptions. “One of my most fun assignments was for Aamir Khan’s Talaash, because the script had so many finely etched characters.”

What is tough – and saddening – is being inundated by calls from struggling actors. “Thousands of people arrive in Mumbai with beaten-up attaché cases and a heart full of dreams, but it isn’t possible to engage with everyone.” However, this has made her more sensitive to day players who are vulnerable to being exploited. “It’s important to ensure that they are paid promptly and fairly.” And it’s hugely satisfying for her when any role has been cast well – even if the character is a deliveryman who appears for just a few seconds. “So much hinges on intuition – you only know if something has worked when you see the final film.”
 
The Music Director: Sneha Khanwalkar

Listen to Sneha Khanwalkar’s compositions and one imagines she has been an inveterate traveller all her life. Her incredibly varied scores – drawing on musical idioms from around the country – have defined the mood of such films as Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Gangs of Wasseypur (which includes the 1940s-style folk ballad “Ik Bagal”, the hippie-reggae tune “I am a Hunter” and much else besides). Her MTV show Sound Trippin also involves travelling to understand indigenous forms of music. It’s surprising then to learn that until the age of 21, Sneha was very much “the girl from a middle-class family, who never got to go out by herself”. Her mother’s relatives taught classical music in Indore, but her self-education began when she “became cocky” and set out to discover the world and its melodies.

Since then, with the encouragement of such directors as Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap, she has connected with local musicians and employed singers who have no link with the Mumbai film industry – people who have, indeed, never even been to a city. “The relationship between people and their music changes with each state,” she observes. There have been priceless encounters such as the one with the septuagenarian Des Raj Lachkani, who sang “Jugni” for OLLO. “His voice is incredible – it’s like he has an equaliser in his vocal box – but I was concerned that he would have trouble singing the whole song at one go. Thankfully, he nailed it at the actual recording”. With innovators like Sneha at the helm, such voices will continue to reach larger audiences and few will accuse Hindi-film music of being one-dimensional, insular or unimaginative.

 
The Wild Card: Qaushiq Mukherjee (Q)

How do you define “alternative” or counter-culture in a country like India? It’s difficult, admits Qaushiq Mukherjee, a.k.a. Q. “The western form of counter-culture works because life is much more homogeneous there. Here, cultural shifts and clashes are entirely natural.” For him, therefore, going against the grain means experimenting with form rather than content – as he did with the Radha-Krishna relationship in Love in India. “The strength of the story lies in the telling. I am trying to find my own language.”

Having worked on documentaries for years, he set out to make a feature film that would shock. The controversial Gandu – still officially unreleased in India – drew attention for its explicit sexuality (much of which features Q’s real-life girlfriend Rii), but there’s more to it than that: it’s a full-blown assault on the senses, mashing up and regurgitating conventional narrative language, forcing you to rethink everything you knew about “non-mainstream” cinema. The film has been widely watched on the internet and Q would love to show it “as it should be seen, inside a theatre. However, a stupid relic of a law from the colonial past is haunting the system, and making it impossible to distribute in India, while we are showing the film around the world”.

It’s no surprise that Q’s influences include the English street artist Banksy, the legendary Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka and rap-rave musicians Die Antwoord – all known for subverting norms in their fields. Ask if regular Hindi cinema appeals to his sensibilities and he replies with a terse “No”. Do his family members refer to his film by its title? “Hesitantly.”

The Documentary Maker: Faiza Ahmed Khan

In under an hour, Faiza Ahmed Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon captures a micro-universe about small-town filmmakers trying to make a Superman film on a tiny budget – with very basic computer technology and a bashful and emaciated leading man. The result is a story about people fighting the odds (the plural “supermen” in the title of Khan’s film refers to director Nasir Shaikh and his team), following their love for pure filmmaking and commenting on their daily hardships: poverty and pollution among them. (Superman has to fly upwards because the cell-phone reception in Malegaon is bad; the villain is obsessed with dirt and filth.)

Khan has always been fascinated by Iranian cinema, “in which the line between fiction and fact is blurry. That’s the space I wanted to be in”. Documentaries are not widely seen because a formal distribution set-up is lacking, but with companies like Magic Lantern Foundation and PVR providing new screening initiatives, she is optimistic that the medium will have a mainstream future. Her next film is set in Golibar, a Bombay slum that is being demolished by a builder in connivance with the government and the police. “The country is currently going through the Great Indian Clearance Sale, with the government out to sell everything they can. Someone has to talk about these things.”

The Scriptwriter: Juhi Chaturvedi

Writing always played a role in Juhi Chaturvedi’s life, even if it took the form of long, expressive emails sent to friends. “I’m from Lucknow, where everyone is steeped in the storytelling culture,” she points out. Working in advertising – including the Titan series with Aamir Khan – she learnt how to tell stories in 30 seconds, and then got a chance to pen the dialogues for Shoojit Sircar’s still-unreleased film Shoebite. Then came Vicky Donor, which became one of the year’s sleeper hits. The idea for a film about a sperm donor “just happened”, but more important was the execution: Chaturvedi and Sircar took a premise that was a magnet for crude, fratboy humour and fashioned from it a charming, life-affirming story, as well as a commentary on Delhi’s sub-cultures. “The subject is such a sensitive one, I was very conscious of not making it cheap,” she says, “The process of sperm donation instantly evokes certain imagery, but we didn’t go there at all.” Even the character of Dr Chaddha – who might in other hands have become a leering old man – is a likably obsessive professional who sees all people as “sperrrm” types.

Chaturvedi has no plans to give up her advertising career, but is currently working on another screenplay. “I normally write at night, and plan to concentrate on one movie at a time.” Dr Chaddha would call her a “busy sperrrm”.

The Film Editor: Namrata Rao

Cliché has it that the editor’s job is thankless: it is invisible, most viewers don’t even understand it, and there is always danger of conflict with directors or actors who don’t want a shot to be cut. But Namrata Rao enjoys working with opinionated people who have differing views. “My job is to add value to the director’s vision – to be a facilitator and a sort of psychologist, and to show that I’m as concerned about his baby as he is. For Shanghai, Dibakar [Banerjee] was clear that the film should have a closed, claustrophobic feel to it, with very few establishing shots; there are many scenes where you have the characters shot in close-up or medium-shot at most, so it had to be put together very tightly.”

When Rao discusses a film, her language is that of a good critic; clearly she spends time thinking about the characters (and how the viewer should relate to them), the setup and shot composition. It helps to be involved with a project from the very beginning, she says, but she came in late on Kahaani and that was useful too – she wasn’t emotionally invested in the making of the film and could look at the footage with a more detached eye. Thus, a beautifully shot crowd sequence, with the sun rising over a river, was dropped because “it held up the narrative – and this was a suspense film where the viewer mustn’t get a breather, which would give them time to think about all the plot possibilities”. The biggest-budget project she has worked on is the soon-to-be-released Yash Raj Films film. Compared to some of her earlier assignments, this is a more conventional film in the way it is shot, with an emphasis on dialogue and held shots – it doesn’t require frenetic editing. But it’s good to have different challenges, she says: “I can’t cut breathlessly all the time.”

For now, Rao’s acting aspirations – she did theatre in Delhi – are on the backburner. However, she did a short, very effective part in LSD as a loudmouth salesgirl – and one is glad that she didn’t edit herself out!


The Cinematographer: Nikos Andritsakis

Having directed six short films, Nikos Andritsakis became interested in cinematography during his time at the London Film School. “I was trying to understand how light and composition affect storytelling.” A Mumbai trip – to shoot a bike commercial – and a meeting with director Dibakar Banerjee led to the Love, Sex and Dhokha and Shanghai assignments. The challenge in the former, shot through CCTVs and handheld cameras, was “to simulate the un-staged randomness of real life – which is difficult because a filmmaker’s eye is always aware of technique even when it is trying not to be”. But the claustrophobic, noirish look of Shanghai was another matter. When he first came to Mumbai, Nikos says, he was impressed by the colourful night-time atmosphere in the streets. “This film was an opportunity to look back at my virgin, romanticised impressions and mould them into a cynical and threatening shape that would serve this story.”

With improved technology, he admits that today’s lensmen have much greater control over their images. “But this control has not always made films look better – sometimes roughness is part of the beauty of art.” He hopes to work on more Indian films because “there is a rapid transformation going on – it’s an exciting space”.

The Director: Anusha Rizvi

When Peepli Live was released, writer-director Anusha Rizvi was cagey about the label “Comedy” because she felt that would mislead audiences. But her film about farmer suicides and media excesses is very much a dark satire on the human condition – it has you chuckling and feeling squeamish at the same time. And it reflects a very particular sensibility. As Rizvi rhetorically asks, “How else do we deal with everything that’s going wrong around us? We have a headless government, and look at the crises in Chhatisgarh, in the north-east; at times it feels similar to the dying days of the Mughal Empire, when everything was getting decentralised. There are so many issues that one becomes numb to them.”

How do filmmakers living and working in the metropolises go about chronicling the many Indias hidden from their view? Rizvi believes it is possible, but you need a supportive and conscientious production team. Shooting in a village, she was adamant that her crew shouldn’t become as intrusive as the journalists depicted in the story. “We didn’t want to interrupt the villagers’ daily lives or usurp their space,” she says, recalling an incident where she stopped a light boy from chopping off a tree’s branch to set up his equipment.

Rizvi – who studied history and worked in journalism before entering the film world – is now working on Afeem, based on Amitav Ghosh’s sprawling historical novel about opium trade, Sea of Poppies. This may appear a very different sort of project, but as she points out, like Peepli Live it is a story about migration and its psychological and social effects. Ultimately, the human spirit is her subject.

The Mentor: Anurag Kashyap

One of our edgiest filmmakers, Anurag Kashyap overcame a long dark night-time of the soul – when his film Paanch was held up by the censors – and emerged from it stronger, wiser and ready to provide guidance to other writer-directors. Remarkably, he has settled into this avuncular role while losing none of his boyish enthusiasm for cinema. “I take a lot of time deciding who to encourage,” he says, “People like Vikramaditya [Motwane] and Rajkumar [Gupta] had worked with me for a long time. With others whom I haven’t had a long association with, I still need time to see their short films and scripts. And I prefer working with people who don’t know how to flatter you – people who haven’t yet learnt the industry tricks.” When he produces a film, he makes it clear he won’t step in for a quick-fix job. “I also give them less money than they need, to see if they have the courage to get it done on that budget, without stars etc.”

One of his protégés, Vasan Bala, showed exactly that initiative. “I initially rejected his script for Peddlers,” Kashyap admits, “but he went out and made the film anyway, and I was happy to be proven wrong.” Other acclaimed films to have received his backing include Motane’s Udaan and Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan – offbeat projects, but he believes the future lies in the coexistence of independent films with mainstream Bollywood. “There is room for both, and I will encourage both. Bollywood is very important and mustn’t go away – we need our songs and dances and our uniqueness – but the mainstream has to be redefined.”

Post abhi baaki hai...some more Wasseypur rambling

[Warning: none of this will make any sense if you haven't seen Gangs of Wasseypur, and possibly even if you have]

Looking at my GoW post again, I realised it came across as more negative than intended, perhaps giving the impression that I didn’t like the film – which is very far from the truth. Part of the reason is that the post wasn’t a consolidated “review”, it was a specific attempt to discuss some things that didn’t work for me – and so, the tone necessarily leant in a particular direction. (I could have written a piece twice as long gushing about the many things I loved in the film, but that wasn’t the intention here.)

It’s always a good thing when a movie can provoke impassioned, well-articulated conversations, and GoW has certainly been doing this. I’m not about to quote all my email chats with friends on the subject, but here’s an example of a discussion of a relatively minor plot point. My friend Shougat has written three separate pieces about GoW for Tehelka. In the last of these, he notes:

An arresting image, Kashyap should be told, is not the same as an idea. For instance, in GoW1, a consigliere (one of two, like everything in this film) of the Khan family crime syndicate self-flagellates in the manner of Shia Muslims to punish himself for his lust. There are other scenes of collective Shia self-flagellation in GoW1, and in GoW2 the same character once again cracks the lash against his back, his face set in stoic denial, while listening to Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Huma Qureshi’s extended post-nuptial frolicking. This must mean something, you think, must reflect something about this man’s character, or perhaps make some general point. But, no, Kashyap just likes the sight and sound of a man whipping himself.

My response to the above passage:

Actually, I think Farhan's self-flagellating was intended to make a point about his character (whether it's made convincingly is another matter). His inability to control his sexual drives in the first film plays a big part in defining Faisal's life trajectory, and one gets the impression that from this point onwards Farhan is on a relentless, self-conscious mission to detach himself from the material world in the face of his baser instincts. (His role as the sutradhaar lusting after successive generations of clan women reminded me oddly of Vyasa's ambiguous role in the Mahabharata.) Perhaps there is some sort of moral point intended in the fact that, all those namaazes and self-flagellations later, he is essentially the sole survivor at the end (and looking after Mohsina and her child the same way Vyasa was lingering about at the epic’s end as preceptor for the heir-apparent Parikshit after the Pandavas f***ed off to Heaven). Or perhaps nothing moral is intended.

To which Shougat tersely replied:

Sounds plausible to me... except that two scenes of the chap whipping himself followed by a last scene in Bombay is very little on which to hang an elaborate but interesting analysis.

Indeed, so rushed is the pace of GoW and so hard is it to take anything in it at face value that at times it feels like the only way to discuss the film is through subtextual analysis, playful speculation and guesswork. Which might simply mean that we need the evolution of a new mode of criticism to deal with a new type of cinema.

[Speaking of the Pandavas - and subtextual analysis - did Faisal’s ganja addiction remind anyone else of Yudhisthira’s gambling? Did Perpendicular’s activities put you in mind of Bheema’s appetite for random, cruel violence? No? Well, then.]

****

The fun thing about discussing this film is that nearly every intelligent viewer I know has expressed some ambivalence about their reactions, and wondered if they misread the tone of a crucial scene. On my post and elsewhere, the possibility has been raised that even Faisal’s big emotional moment near the end may have been an inside joke – another meta-reference to how the hero of a “typical” mainstream Hindi movie might be expected to behave in a certain situation. It has also been suggested that the characters of GoW – or at least the characters of GoW 2 – are not meant to have the interiority and roundedness that so many reviewers have been seeking; they are meant to be nothing more than hollow constructs of the movies they watch.

At risk of getting “meta” and self-indulgent myself, I want to again clarify something about my main objection to the film. I can’t do better than to simply quote a poster named Ami, who (in the comments thread of this blog) articulated my position better than I did. Here goes (bold marks mine):

I don’t think he is criticizing the film for its tragicomedic humour but for the fact that it cannot decide whether it wants the viewers to be emotionally invested in its characters and view them as real people or whether it wants to present its characters more as archetypical composites of popular culture living in a cardboard universe that is playfully derivative of gangster films and masala movies.

[...] He’s objecting to the uneven emotional engagement that the film provokes – not the fact that it is both serious and playful but the fact that it is both emotionally superficial and emotionally deep.

To reiterate: I respect any work that recognises the possibility of playfulness/levity in a tragic moment, and vice versa. (The scene where Faisal stumbles back to wear his shoes is one of a few scenes in GoW where I thought this was done quite nicely.) But I also think that in the really successful examples of such juxtapositions, those apparently contradictory moods are integrated within a given context. And in GoW, there were too many cases of the film simply telling us “This is how you're supposed to feel about these characters” in one scene and then “Now you have to feel this way” in the next scene.

Anyway, like I said in the earlier post, I look forward to watching the whole 6-hour shebang a second time and quite possibly changing my mind about it completely. Maybe a second viewing will reveal that the entire story is a ganja dream along the lines of the hallucinatory opium den scenes in Once Upon a Time in America.

Mind the gaps: conflicting thoughts on Gangs of Wasseypur

Much of the conversation around Anurag Kashyap’s multi-generational gangland epic Gangs of Wasseypur has centred on authenticity (or its absence). Some of the negative criticism has been based on pre-release publicity that appeared to flag GoW as a grittily realistic film with its roots firmly in the hinterland. I’ll avoid getting into that particular argument because I know nothing about the real Wasseypur, about its violent history and about when its young people first discovered the special pleasures of sunglasses – but also because “authenticity” and “realism” in cinema are always ambiguous things. I find it more useful to consider another level of reality – the one involving the creation of an internally consistent world. Given that GoW is a family epic involving layers of personal tragedy, I was perplexed by its wildly shifting tone, which made it difficult (for me at least) to feel strongly invested in its people.

In what is essentially a single five-and-a-half-hour film (released in two parts), it’s strange how little attempt there is at sustained character development. Partly, that’s because of the sheer size of the canvas – perhaps as big as any Hindi film has ever had. The narrative, with its panoply of characters, spans six decades, and the use of a voiceover (by Piyush Mishra’s sutradhaar Farhan) facilitates a speedy recording of events: courtships are hurriedly conducted, children are born, they grow up and we learn all the essential things about them in a few minutes (or seconds); vignettes flash by in the time it takes for a revolver to be cocked. Colourful characters (like an adolescent thug with a speech impediment and the nickname Perpendicular) hold the screen briefly and then exit, the main purpose of their existence being to amuse the viewer. Which in itself is fine (the totla Perpendicular’s mangling of cuss words - bhen tod - provides a superb laugh-out-loud moment), but it can become problematic if they divide the film’s running time among themselves in such a way that one doesn’t get to spend enough time with the principal characters.

Consequently Gangs of Wasseypur can be a confounding film to watch. There are so many brilliant things in it (and regardless of everything I say here, I look forward to watching Part I and Part II back to back on DVD at some point). There are the performances, notably by Manoj Bajpai, Richa Chadda, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and especially the film’s co-writer Zeishan Qadri in an (ahem) author-backed part as the imperturbable Definite. There is Sneha Khanwalkar’s versatile music score, ranging from the 1940s-style ballad “Ik Bagal” (written by the multitalented Mishra) to the reggae-hippie song “I am a Hunter” (which incorporates elements from Trinidadian music with what sounds – to my ears – like a hint of the classic children’s song “Nani teri morni”).

In Part II the music becomes noisily contrapuntal, and by this point the film in general is defined by constantly clashing tones. Many of the darkest scenes are treated with humour, occasionally to the point of inappropriateness (so that it’s common to find audience members laughing during moments of extreme violence, as they would during a Tom and Jerry cartoon). Admittedly, some of the little touches of levity are well done. When a sleeping (and probably ganja-addled) Faisal Khan is told that his father has been killed, he jumps off the charpoy and dashes down a stairway and out of the frame, looking very much the purposeful hero about to assume a responsibility – but a second later he scampers back awkwardly because he has forgotten to put on his shoes. It’s a nice touch – a pointer to the mundane things that can interfere with the playing out of the dramatic “scenes” in our lives, and the kind of shot one wouldn’t see in the Bachchan-starrer Trishul, which Faisal is so obsessed with. (More about that in this post.)

A notable thing about GoW is how its characters are influenced by cinema, and there is explicit commentary on this in one of the rare quiet scenes in Part II where the ancient Ramadhir Singh (looking increasingly like the old Don Ciccio, destined to be cleanly gutted by De Niro’s Vito Corleone near the end of The Godfather Part II) mulls that one reason he has stayed alive for so long is “kyonke main cinema nahin dekhta” – he has never been swayed by the flair and the heroics he sees onscreen, played out over the decades by generations of movie stars from Dilip Kumar through “Bachchan Amitabh” to Salman Khan. Elsewhere, there is much evidence of personalities and relationships shaped by celluloid dreams, such as when Mohsina (Huma Qureshi) sees that Faisal has come to her house to ask for her hand in marriage, and reacts by pirouetting dreamily in slow-motion the way Madhuri Dixit might have done in a less self-conscious film of an earlier age. These scenes are notable as meta-commentary about a people’s connection with their cinema, but it also means that most of the characters in Gangs of Wasseypur are about as fleshed out as movie-star posters.

The strongest emotional response I had to any killing in the film was when the imperial, dignified Shahid Khan is assassinated in Varanasi relatively early in Part I. And after watching Part II, just because of that “main cinema nahin dekhta” scene, I came away feeling like Ramadhir Singh was the character I knew best in the entire film. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both these moments involve members of the old guard – people whose heyday takes place very early in this epic story. This could be tied to the idea that there was a certain intrinsic honour in the earlier generations, even a rationale for violence, and that the younger lot – culminating in the amoral Perpendicular and the opportunistic Definite – have lost that grounding; nihilism has set in.

Caught between these two worlds is the Faisal Khan character, who might be called GoW's protagonist. The role is well-performed and Faisal’s initial trajectory recalls Michael Corleone in The Godfather – the innocent sucked into a vortex of crime. Indeed he even has a scene late in the second part where he cries in his wife’s arms about how he didn’t want to have anything to do with this violent life. Yet there’s something random about this scene: it comes out of nowhere, feels psychologically improbable given how far gone Faisal is by this point (besides, if he was initially unwilling, it was probably because he was immersed in ganja, not because of any moral compulsions) and I thought it existed only to give us a reason to feel sorry for Faisal in light of what will happen later. In any case this pathos-filled moment is soon rendered meaningless: the grim bloodbath that Faisal engages in at the end doesn’t suggest someone who was ever a reluctant participant – this is killing for the fun of it, pure bloodlust combined with a boy’s fantasy of cornering his mortal enemy in a no-escape position and emptying round after round into his body.

The outlandish, cartoon violence of that final sequence – blood rendered shinily aesthetic, so that Ramadhir Singh’s ravaged corpse looks like it is studded with rubies – is a reminder that the film has stopped taking any of these killings seriously. Earlier, when the young widow Shama is shot dead in the Khan clan's house, the voiceover quickly tells us that this has come as a big shock to everyone because it’s the first time ever that a woman has been killed thus during the gang wars; cut to a very brief shot of Faisal sitting by himself, looking despondent, and then everyone gets back to the business of revenge and the business of business. A little while later, Faisal’s mother – a key character – is gunned down in the market, and this again is glossed over. And once you have heard faux-maudlin versions of Hindi-film songs like “Teri Meherbaniyan” being played alongside what are mean to be genuinely sad scenes (a family weeping over a young son’s body), it’s hard to take any of the emotions at face value. Gangs of Wasseypur encourages the viewer to chuckle at its violence and at the mourning that follows it, but also wants us to feel strongly enough about the main characters that there is a sense of genuine tragedy in the last act (and the last scene, which returns us to the plaintive “Ik Bagal”). Possibly this is my failing, but – much as I enjoyed many things about this epic film – I couldn’t muster both feelings at once.

Movies as mirrors, and new-age hitmen

[From my Business Standard column. Will extend some of these thoughts into a longer piece sometime; for now I only had the time/energy to meet the column’s word-length]

In Vikram Chandra’s superb novel Sacred Games, there is a passage where a group of Mumbai gangsters watch the film Deewaar (for probably the umpteenth time) and get tearful because they can identify with Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man Vijay, driven by circumstances to a life outside the law. Though the point isn’t underlined, one realises that some of these young thugs have modelled themselves on this onscreen anti-hero, right down to the swagger and the one-liners. (“Main aaj bhi phenke huye paise nahin uthaata.”) But it’s also worth remembering that Vijay himself was loosely based on a real-life underworld figure, Haji Mastan.

Here and elsewhere, Chandra’s book shows a sharp understanding of the symbiotic relationship between cinema and life – how they can be mirrors facing each other, producing countless reflections and counter-reflections, so that (in this context) a generation of criminals might get behaviourial cues from what they have seen in movies. A review I once read of the 1995 film Heat – in which Al Pacino played a cop and Robert De Niro a criminal – made a similar point. Speculating on the research the actors might have done, the reviewer observed that Pacino and De Niro had been playing such characters in iconic films since the 1970s: if they went out on the streets to observe real-life cops and gangsters, it’s likely that those cops and gangsters would have modelled their own personalities on roles played by these very actors 20 years earlier.

 

Anurag Kashyap’s epic Gangs of Wasseypur – about multi-generational gang wars in the Jharkhand hinterland – understands this relationship very well. It contains many references to B-movies with titles like Kasam Paida Karne Waale Ki; a lead character, Faizal, is a version of The Godfather’s Michael Corleone (he wouldn't have seen that film, but he is mesmerised by Bachchan’s beedi-chomping, devil-may-care stance in movies like Trishul. There is even what seems like a visual gag, when someone mentions Amitabh in Zanjeer and Faizal bolts up from a reclining position in exactly the way Bachchan’s nightmare-afflicted Vijay did in his first appearance in that film). And as you’d expect, given its story, setting and pop-cultural references, Gangs of Wasseypur is rife with displays of uber-machismo: burly gangsters gun each other down, gleefully stab people on the streets and make proclamations about badla and izzat.

Yet a different tone is revealed in other scenes, such as the one where the protagonist Sardar Khan is sexually objectified – as he struts about in a loin-cloth, we see him through the entranced eyes of the woman who will become his second wife - and the one where Faizal is presented as a sensitive, new-age man, wiping tears from his eyes when a woman he has a crush on speaks to him harshly. And in this vein, the film also has a moment that runs against the grain of every gangster/killer portrayal one expects from the cinema of violence. In one of its wittiest and most sinister scenes, a character named Shahid Khan – proud, well-built, scourge of his enemies – is assassinated by a bespectacled, dhoti-clad wisp of a man with an almost melancholy expression on his face – someone who might easily have been the village master-ji in a film of earlier vintage.

This gunrunner-cum-hired gun can be seen as a cinematic cousin of another memorable meek hitman from a few months ago – Bob Biswas in Kahaani. Pudgy and unfit, Bob is a tangle of contradictions: a life-insurance agent moonlighting as an executioner; a sweet-looking Bengali babu who resembles a creepy bogeyman from a slasher-film series; a seemingly omniscient killer who is vanquished not by human adversaries but by the Kolkata traffic, which bows to no man. Looked at up close, his face appears almost to be crumbling, like one of his city’s decrepit havelis.
Watching these two improbable hitmen, one wonders if our cinema has had its fill of the flamboyant, big-talking bad guys. Don’t be too surprised to see an effetely polite serial killer on our screens in the near future. Conversely, given how life draws from film, be very wary of the harmless-looking, jhola-carrying chap you meet on a lonely road late at night.

[A somewhat related post: on the terrific documentary Videokaaran, with a protagonist who is a construct of the films he loves]

Putting the "act" in action: Black Friday, Sword of Doom

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations or (less often) comic setpieces. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where “understatement” rules the moment. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when the acting nominations are read out at the Oscars. Watch enough of them and you'll see definite patterns emerging (and that’s without taking into account the Motion Picture Academy’s fondness for certain types of roles – physically or mentally disadvantaged characters, for instance – rather than the performances in them).

One thing that is usually not associated with acting chops is the high-voltage action sequence: fight scenes or chases are usually perceived as fillers or tempo-raisers, and that's what they often are (and in many of them, stuntmen substitute for the actors anyway). But every once in a while, an action scene does afford opportunities for fine performances as well as for character development within a narrative.

Recently I watched the Extras on a DVD of Anurag Kashyap’s masterful film Black Friday, about the investigation that followed the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Among the movie’s highlights is the superbly choreographed and shot sequence where a group of cops pursue a suspect, Imtiaz Ghavate, through a slum area. “Anurag told me he wanted a performance from me in this chase scene,” says the actor Pranay Narayan – who plays Ghavate – in the “Making of” documentary, and a performance it certainly is. Over the course of this long scene, Imtiaz goes from being a menacing bhai figure (the first time we see him he is shot from a low camera angle, looming above us, looking blasé and in control) to a snivelling wreck being bullied around by the police; by the end it’s almost possible to feel sorry for him.

The scene begins on a purposefully energetic note, as you’d expect, but gradually becomes something of a comic routine, as the policemen and their quarry move in circles and get worn out. One hysterically funny shot has an unfit cop calling out “Imtiaz, ruk ja” as both men pant breathlessly – by this point they are lurching rather than running, and the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up. It’s a fine depiction of the banality of police-work, humanising both cop and criminal – a considerable achievement given that this is a story about terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. It’s also a significant step away from the traditional depiction of cops and robbers in Hindi cinema. And the performances help make it compulsively believable.

Good acting is even rarer in full-blooded fight sequences. In her book Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me (which I reviewed here), Jessica Hines observes that in Bombay to Goa, made before he settled into the Angry Young Man image, Amitabh Bachchan seemed awkward during much of the film and then came alive in the fight sequences at the end. I’m not sure about this specific example (the fights in Bombay to Goa aren’t so much properly worked out action scenes as vignettes of various people knocking each other about in speeded-up motion), but not many people would disagree that Bachchan was extremely convincing in his really well-staged fight sequences in films like Sholay and Kaala Patthar.

One of my favourite “action performances” in this vein is by the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in the climactic scene of the 1966 film Sword of Doom. Nakadai plays a sadistic swordsman named Ryunosuke who spends much of the story killing and plundering. At the end, as he sits alone in a geisha-house, he is visited by the ghosts of his victims as well as by real people who want him dead; turning completely psychotic, he slashes wildly at these phantoms over the course of an extraordinary, bloody 10-minute sequence.

Jaw-dropping in its length and persistence, this scene is the perfect apocalyptic finish to a story about a cruel and violent man facing his demons - it’s almost Shakespearean in its suggestion of the past haunting the present, and Nakadai (who would play King Lear for Kurosawa years later) is outstanding in the way he seems to be simultaneously a sentient person and a zombie. At times his movements become so mechanical one gets the impression that his arm is being driven by his “evil” sword. His eyes are hollow and lifeless, he flails unthinkingly at the air, but then he comes alive again and seems briefly conscious of what is going on around him; and then again he retreats into his own private world, while his arm continues slashing away.

Nothing in this sequence (or in the Black Friday one) would make it to those smooth Oscar acting clips, but these performances are integral to the films’ effectiveness. They are reminders that some action scenes require a little more from a performer than a grunted, expressionless “I’ll be back.”

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

Books into films: the ToI literary carnival

The schedule for the Times of India Literary Carnival (December 2-4 at Mehboob Studios, Mumbai) is out – here’s the link. I’m participating in a session about book-to-film adaptation on the 4th evening, with Sooni Taraporewala (the screenwriter of Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, and director of Little Zizou), director Anurag Kashyap, writer S Hussain Zaidi (who wrote the book on which Kashyap’s Black Friday was based) and the multifaceted Anuvab Pal (with whom I was also on a panel at Kala Ghoda earlier this year).

One thing I like about the programme is that it allots an hour and a half to each session, instead of the usual hour. More latitude for elaborate discussion and hopefully for audience participation too. Do drop by if you’re around.

Notes on Luck by Chance (and Bollywood’s crumbling fourth wall)

[A shorter version of this appears in the Sunday Business Standard]

Meta-films – or movies that self-consciously comment on the movie-making process, thus breaking the fourth wall between the film and its audience – date back at least to 1924’s Sherlock Jr, with Buster Keaton as a theatre projectionist who walks right into a film screen and becomes part of the plot. In the decades since, the genre has included abstract movies (such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, about a screenwriter reluctantly bending to the demands of commerce and endangering his marriage in the process) as well as relatively straight narratives about the industry and its denizens (e.g., Billy Wilder’s superbly written and acted Sunset Boulevard, about a once-famous star living with her memories, Miss Havisham-like, in a decrepit mansion).

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, mainstream Hindi cinema has seen a lot of indulgent self-referencing and in-joking in recent times: rival actors make “friendly appearances” in each other’s films, movies are titled after songs from earlier films, you get the impression that everyone is part of one big happy family that squabbles and makes up with equal aplomb. This reached its high watermark in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om, which spoofed the phenomenon while simultaneously participating in it (and parts of which were impossible to understand without reference to Shah Rukh Khan’s career), and in the more recent Rab ne Bana Di Jodi, with its refrain made up of movie titles: “Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke, Phir Milenge, Chalte Chalte”.

While this sort of back-patting and nudge-winking can be very enjoyable (especially if you’ve grown up with Bollywood and have a basic affection for it), I never expected that a mainstream film loaded with big-name cameos would attempt to thoughtfully engage with the workings of the industry. So I was pleasantly surprised by Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a solidly performed and directed film that uses the intersecting fortunes of two wannabe actors, Sona (Konkana Sensharma) and Vikram (Farhan Akhtar), to examine what it takes to survive in this big bad world if you aren’t to the filmi-khandaan born. (Luck? Talent? A combination of both? In what proportion?)

The cast list includes celebrities in tiny appearances as themselves (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar, Kareena Kapoor, Abhishek Bachchan, many others) as well as actors like Hrithik Roshan and Dimple Kapadia in fleshed-out parts, playing...not quite themselves, but people who can, in a certain light, be seen as variations on themselves. (This means that there’s always the danger of reading too much between the lines: in one scene, when Dimple’s character Neena Walia – a still-beautiful former star – seethed about entering the industry at age 16 without any family backing and having to do unsavoury things for producers, I overheard someone in the hall confidently saying, “Yes, that’s her true story – Raj Kapoor exploited her badly.”) There are also hilarious short roles for, among others, Anurag Kashyap, cleverly cast as a writer trying to exceed his brief by incorporating arty “film-festival” bits into a script rather than quietly acquiescing to a commercial-minded producer. All this creates an assortment of scenes where you’re aware that the line between fiction and reality is being blurred, only you’re never quite sure to what extent, and that’s part of the fun. (At times I was reminded of how Silsila – a meta-film of another kind, which played on public perceptions of the Amitabh-Jaya-Rekha relationship - made audiences feel uncomfortable by confronting them directly with their appetite for gossip.)

Luck by Chance could very easily have played it safe. Given the line-up of stars she had at her disposal, how tempting it might have been for Akhtar (and how much more audience-friendly it might have made her film, if the success of Om Shanti Om is anything to go by) to turn this into a hug-fest – a threadbare plot embellished with celebs waving at the viewer, assuring us that all is well in their world. Like the awards-ceremony scene and the “Deewangi” song sequence in OSO. But the best scenes in Luck by Chance – and many of the performances, notably those by Isha Sharvani (as Neena Walia’s bored daughter Nikki, in the grooming to be a starlet), Rishi Kapoor (as a producer named Romy Rolly), Kapadia and Roshan – have an edge to them, a disturbingly off-kilter quality.

A small example of the ambiguities that are set up by this film, and its complex use of self-referencing: when Sona is bluntly told by her producer that she will always be relegated to side roles, that no big hero would want to work opposite her, it’s a commentary on the industry’s attitude to someone who defies the Bollywood standard for what a heroine should look like (as the real-life Konkana Sensharma does), even if she happens to be one of the best actors in the country (as Sensharma is). But what adds irony to this scene is the viewer’s knowledge that Sensharma – Aparna Sen’s daughter – comes from a filmi background in real life, and that this undoubtedly made it easier for her to get that initial footing than it would be for the luckless Sona (and even then, she's basically seen as a non-mainstream actress, though that's mostly by choice).

At any rate, Madhur Bhandarkar no longer need worry about making a movie titled “Film Industry”. It’s been done now, and done with more nuance than he would have managed. Bhandarkar’s “topical” films (at least the ones I’ve seen – Page 3 and Corporate) set up their high-pulpit moralising by drawing a clear line between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, who may as well belong to two different species – so you rarely get a sense of the slow, almost subliminal process by which well-meaning and idealistic people can get corrupted; how you can get subsumed into a system without even realising it. Also, the protagonists in his films – the people who provide an entry point for the viewer – are innocents abroad (the Konkana character in Page 3, the Bipasha character in Corporate) who manage against the odds to retain their integrity, whereas the two leads in Luck by Chance are people who gradually learn about making concessions. Akhtar’s film has a better understanding of the subtly escalating nature of compromise in a world where only the fittest survive. There are few safety nets here and this is a more interesting landscape of people: just when you think you’ve got a “fix” on a character’s greed or hypocrisy, he does something that allows you to see the shades (e.g., Rolly introspecting about the humiliation he puts himself through when he kowtows before the star-sons whom he saw in short pants when they were growing up).

This is not to say Luck by Chance is an unqualified masterpiece – I thought it had many high points and a few low points (such as the scenes depicting the shooting of the movie that Vikram lands the lead role in, and his off-screen romance with Nikki), but the highs are so bloody good that it almost doesn’t matter. Some other things I liked:

– Kapadia’s character Neena is described as “a crocodile in a chiffon sari” at one point, but watching her lord it over her starlet-daughter Nikki, I was reminded more of a large black spider wrapping its victim in a beautiful silk shroud before sucking out its life-juices. (I chuckled at the scene where Neena interrupts her daughter playing Little Miss Muffet alongside a giant spider prop for a photo shoot, and thwacks the unfortunate arachnid away with her hand.) Also enjoyed her foul-mouthed outburst after reading a magazine article about an affair between Vikram and her daughter.

– The lovely little vignette with Zafar Khan (Hrithik Roshan) sitting inside his car, making faces at urchins who are pressed against the window; the pan shot that takes us into the car, removing the children from the frame and leaving us with a Zafar grimacing at his own reflection. (“I think of Zafar Khan as someone other than myself – a persona that I’m responsible for safeguarding,” he says, echoing words that Shah Rukh Khan has apparently used in real-life interviews.) He’s a boy-in-a-bubble here, much like Nikki Walia in her sterilely pretty pink room.

- Some of the fleeting appearances are very effective. I never thought I would apply the word “sinister” to anything involving Karan Johar, but the set-up and composition of the party scene where he appears is just that. Here, Johar looks something like a Dracula figure at a gathering especially held for creatures of the night – very different from the politely effete, eloquent host we know from that well-lit TV talk-show. The scene towards the end where Vikram – on the road to stardom – meets Shah Rukh Khan has a similar effect: on the surface there’s nothing menacing about it (an informal pub setting, SRK in jeans and a loose shirt casually inviting the newcomer over to his table for a chat and some tips, mostly in the form of platitudes about staying grounded) but I felt a brief chill when SRK rolled his eyes and hissed “It’s insane” in response to Vikram wondering what a superstar’s life must be like; for a few seconds, it reminded me of Laurence Olivier’s Crassus, drunk on power, giving political instruction to the youthful Julius Caesar in Spartacus.

Incidentally Shah Rukh tells Vikram never to lose sight of the people who knew him when he was a struggler – “they are the only ones who will always be honest with you”. Now I hear that SRK’s latest film Billu (also known as Billu Barber or Billu Chief Hair Executive Officer, if you prefer) casts him as a superstar who renews acquaintance with a small-town barber who knew him before he was a star. Is this to be the next step in the evolution of the Bollywood meta-movie, I wonder: a film containing a mini-trailer for another film due to be released a few weeks later? And is it ever again going to be possible for Shah Rukh to play a role where the fourth wall is firmly in place?