The main plot-mover in Avinash Das’s excellent new film Anaarkali of Aarah is an incident that begins as a show of buffoonery but grows into something dark and nasty, even as we go from chuckling to shifting uneasily in our seats. Anaarkali (Swara Bhaskar), the star of a small-town troupe, is singing and dancing for her admiring audience when Dharmender (Sanjay Mishra), a very drunk and very smitten vice-chancellor, clambers onto the stage. At first he behaves like any number of over-enthusiastic men at this sort of show, briefly making a spectacle of themselves before staggering back into the audience. But he doesn’t back off: he goes from begging for Anaarkali’s personal attentions – in the manner of a pitiful, Devdas-like swain – to pawing and assaulting her.
Much of the scene’s effectiveness comes from how it toys with our perceptions: this flailing middle-aged man, barely in control of his movements, doesn’t fit our general ideas of what a menacing sexual predator might look like (Mishra, wonderful actor though he is, has a screen personality that seems better suited to playing savants or eccentric sidekicks); and Anaarkali, who has just performed a raunchy song in a garish costume, all gyrations and winks at her mostly male fans, doesn’t - initially at least - look like an imperiled woman.
Yet that is the very point, and it’s what makes the scene so discomfiting. In the space of a few seconds, the power equations shift: we see that Anaarkali, so assured when she is performing of her own will, embracing both her art and her sexuality, has suddenly had that control wrested from her (Bhaskar shifts gears from fiery self-possession to vulnerability with consummate ease); and that Dharmender, a man with political connections in Aarah, is a very real threat to her autonomy and livelihood.
It is one of many fine moments in a story about social hegemonies and the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which sexual oppression plays out. After last year’s Pink, which affirmed the “No means No” mantra in the context of a young urban woman being sexually harassed – with the film underlining that it doesn’t matter how she dresses or how hard she parties – Anaarkali of Aarah tackles the theme in a different setting. But in the process, we are reminded that ideas about “loose” or “available” women transcend the rural-urban and class divides. In the south Delhi of Pink, these perceptions might be directed at an office-going girl who lives away from her parents in a PG accommodation and goes out with boys late at night; in the Aarah of Das’s film, it might be a woman in a “not very respectable” profession that invites the male gaze and seems to hold out a promise of more than just looking.
And in both these stories, the woman says: yes, I’ll do this and this and this if I choose to, but that doesn’t mean you can assume I’ll do this as well.
Pink was a good film, but I thought Anarkali of Aarah was sharper and more focused overall, largely because it keeps its lens fixed throughout on a compelling woman protagonist. Bhaskar’s performance and Anaarkali’s centrality to the narrative (the film’s men, though well written and acted, orbit around her) make this a more overtly “lady-oriented” film (as censor-board chief Pahlaj Nihalani would reproachfully say) than Pink, with its grandstanding male lawyers and male judge, was. The first scene – a tragedy from Anaarkali’s childhood – prepares us to meet someone whose life will be tinged with melancholia, but this doesn’t happen. Instead of being crippled or dispirited by the past, she derives strength from memories of her mother – a woman who probably had less agency and fewer choices than Anaarkali does, but who managed to retain her dignity and self-worth even in a tough situation.
After a very taut first half – including a tense, masterfully staged scene where Anaarkali, accompanied by her partner Rangeela (Pankaj Tripathi), goes to meet Dharmender – the film slackens a little. To a degree, this has to do with the protagonist’s shift to a new setting and the need to lie low for a bit. (I was reminded of the post-interval change in tone of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat, which has a comparable narrative arc.) But the pace picks up again as the story moves back to Aarah (you have to go home to stare down old demons) and towards a stirring climactic scene where what might seem on the surface to be “just” a lowbrow dance performance becomes an exhilarating reclamation of sexuality and choice.*** And the buildup to this Big Moment is paved with some lovely scenes in a minor key, such as a brief meeting between Anaarkali and Rangeela at the courthouse when the affection between them is palpable despite everything that has happened.
It could be pointed out that like the young women in Pink, Anaarkali too eventually needs a man to help her pull off a final coup (which has the feel of a deus ex machina). But the assistance in this case feels more incidental; one gets a stronger sense that events have flown from the force of her own personality, her upbringing, her unwillingness to keel over in a situation where many of us would think that was the safest, most practical option.
I don’t know how much this film has been directly influenced by real-life events, but it seems particularly topical in the current climate. An early scene is reminiscent – in its depiction of how “fun and games” can cross a line and become lethal – of the recent shooting of a dancer at a wedding party near Bathinda. (And again, lest you think that this sort of thing happens only in “backward” places, remember Jessica Lal.) But on a broader note, there is also the ongoing farce of the “anti-Romeo” squads in Uttar Pradesh which infantilize young women who have boyfriends, telling them they need to be careful “for their own good”, even if that means staying shut up at home until their parents find a socially approved groom. This suppressing of female sexuality (or requiring that no such thing should exist) goes hand in hand with the assumption that women who don’t fit the good-girl mould are fair game and shouldn’t complain about harassment. Against this background, how satisfying it is to see a scene - even if it feels a bit like wish-fulfillment - where a woman looks a powerful man in the eye and tell him that whether he thinks of her as a randi or something “a little less than” a randi (a reference to an earlier dialogue) or as a housewife, he mustn’t touch her without permission.
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*** The
climactic scene can also be viewed as a comment on the subject-gaze
relationship. Earlier in the film, Dharmender crudely broke the Fourth
Wall by encroaching on Anaarkali’s performance; now, as he sits next to
his wife and daughter, she pays him back in the same coin, stepping off
the stage, dancing around him and fracturing his personal, domestic space
[Did a shorter version of this review for Cricinfo]
To begin with an admission that will seem astounding to regular readers of this site: I was more stirred by the opening scene of M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, set at the Wankhede Stadium during the 2011 World Cup final, than I had been by the actual match five years earlier.
The main reason for this is that my love affair with cricket ended a decade ago, occasioned partly by Tendulkar’s decline, partly by the ugly, fair-weather displays of nationalism-jingoism associated with the sport (one example being the crowd assault on Dhoni’s Ranchi house after the 2007 World Cup failure). Besides, even when I was a compulsive cricket fan, I was more into individual players than teams, and not patriotically invested in India’s victories.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I was one of the very few people in the country who didn’t much care when Dhoni, the real Dhoni, hit that winning six on April 2, 2011. And so, I was unprepared for my reaction – the adrenaline rush, the growing anticipation – when I saw Sushant Singh Rajput as Dhoni in the dressing room, deciding he will go in at number five, then padding up and heading out into the deafening arena. Call it the power of a tense, tightly constructed scene that uses camerawork, space and sound effectively or a sudden burst of nostalgia for a once-adored sport.
In other words, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story begins on a rabble-rousing note. But after this World Cup scene (which Neeraj Pandey’s film will of course return to at the end), the narrative back-tracks to a quiet afternoon in July 1981 and MSD’s birth in a Ranchi hospital ward as his father Paan Singh Dhoni (Anupam Kher), a hardworking lower-middle-class man, waits nervously outside. A series of well-constructed vignettes follow: the child Mahi being coerced by a coach to leave football for cricket and take up wicket-keeping (though he prefers batting); the support of his friends as it becomes evident that he has special talent and drive; the misgivings of his father, who has sensibly conservative ideas about what constitutes a secure future; repeated frustrations followed by a job in the Railways and the possibility of Mahendra becoming a “bada aadmi” in this profession (“Ticket-collector se badi cheez kya ho sakti hai?” as Paan Singh puts it).
Rajput starts playing Dhoni from age 16 onwards, and these early scenes have a slightly off-kilter quality – like the actor’s head has been digitally superimposed on a slim teen body – but that doesn’t matter after a while, because this is a fine performance. He captures not just Dhoni’s boyish exuberance and the enigmatic smile that stops just short of being cocky, but also something of the placid, Buddha-like inscrutability that emerges in moments of stress; a sense that he is calling on inner reserves only he knows about. This is a convincing portrait of a young man who can be impetuous but is also grounded enough to buy snacks for his friends as a sort of “celebration” after not being selected for a team – because he never wants to forget this day of failure (and, by implication, because such a day is what will bring him nearer to his eventual goal).
The film’s first half, with its depiction of the rhythms of small-town life, is a reminder that director Pandey has a feel for place and period (see his recreation of 1980s Delhi in the con-job film Special 26). There are many engaging little moments such as an early encounter, in a Bihar-Punjab match, between Dhoni and his future teammate Yuvraj Singh (played here by Herri Tangri as a regal kid whose very presence leaves most people awestruck). The cricket scenes are shot with panache and wit, even when they centre on a deadpan hero. Meanwhile, the stage also gradually shifts to show us officials in the sport’s higher echelons in Mumbai and Delhi, pulling strings and deciding the fate of thousands of struggling youngsters around the country.
In the second half, a tonal unevenness sets in, and to a degree this is understandable given the arc of MSD’s life. It seemed natural that the early scenes would have the texture of a gritty, understated small-town story about aspiration, the sort that Hindi cinema often does so well now (in another such film, the 2013 Kai Po Che!, Rajput played a character whose cricketing dreams don’t pan out). But once Dhoni gets his chance in the Indian team, he rises to stardom fairly quickly, and as more glamorous locations take over – plush hotel rooms, advertising studios where he says cheesy lines while endorsing a range of products – the film’s look and pace alters as well; it becomes glossier, more languid. In one scene a gaping old-time acquaintance visits him in one of those swanky hotel rooms and hesitantly tells him while leaving that the woman who showed him in should have been more decently dressed – here is a view of two Indias in opposition, and of a young man who crossed the wobbling bridge.
The real problem is that around this time, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story also becomes slacker, more random, and whimsical in its decisions about what to show and what to leave out (there isn’t even a scene that shows the circumstances that led to MSD becoming captain) – and when this happens, one recalls that this is largely an “authorized” project, with the real-life Dhoni and his associates having been consulted and kept abreast of the script.
There are also two romantic interludes – first with a girl named Priyanka (Disha Patani), who dies in a car accident, then with the cricket-indifferent Sakshi (Kiara Advani) who becomes Dhoni’s wife – that feel much too generic given how this film has so far unfolded. This section includes an exotic-location song sequence, superfluous flashback inserts, and embarrassingly forced attempts to generate pathos (wondering about their future together, Priyanka dolefully repeats the line “Bahut time hai naa hamaaray paas?” as if she were aware of her impending fate). Briefly glimpsed in these scenes is the suggestion that a man who is so assertive as batsman and captain might be defensive-passive when it comes to relationships, but the film doesn’t take this idea anywhere. The two-woman trope is handled better than the one in the recent, utterly lackluster Mohammed Azharuddin biopic Azhar, but that isn’t saying much. (The goofy climactic scene of that movie had the “wronged” Azhar being vindicated when his two wives walk into the courtroom side by side to support him and provide the ultimate character certificate!)
These sequences notwithstanding, the film builds unerringly towards that World Cup win, which is presented here as the culmination of a remarkable career (never mind that real-life sport doesn’t usually provide such tidy or definitive endings – MSD did, after all, also captain India in its 2015 loss, but there isn’t space here for such troughs). Ending with real footage of the post-match celebrations is a guaranteed way of having the audience out of their seats and applauding; as mentioned above, I was one of those viewers.
And yet, in the final analysis, I thought the film worked best when it did the small moment well. In one notable scene, a subdued MSD explains why he is so frustrated by his railway job – not because he considers it below him (“Kaam chhota nahin lagta,” he says), but because it doesn’t allow him to give cricket enough time and attention. This nuanced scene comes as a refreshing counterpoint to a shoe-polish ad that the real Dhoni did a long time ago, where he turned to the camera and said, “I decided not to be ordinary. I chose to shine.” A good, smooth line for the product, but also one that condescendingly implied that people in some professions can be dismissed as “ordinary” and that real winners can simply choose to reach the very top through hard work and perseverance.
M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story is a bumpy film, very stimulating in its good parts, oddly inert at other times, but in its better moments – like that “Kaam chhota nahin lagta” scene – it ducks the grand, overarching narratives and gives us a ground-level story about a young man following a calling with the knowledge that things might not work out perfectly, but that he has to at least give it a shot, he can’t die wondering. That’s a compelling tale in itself, and a more inspirational one in some ways than the one hinted at in the film’s more triumphal scenes – the ones about a blazing star who was so good and so determined that he was destined to reach the top no matter what, and who might well have had that World Cup-winning six inscribed on his horoscope chart.
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[Some old cricket-related posts are here, including this one about my obsession with the sport between 1996 and 2006]
[Did a version of this piece for my Mint Lounge column]
In an early scene in Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar, CDI officer Ashwin (Irrfan Khan) jokingly calls a colleague Sherlock Holmes, in response to an inference made by the other man. Ashwin then hums a thriller-style tune to stress the gap between the exploits of Conan Doyle’s super-detective and the humdrum procedures followed by this team as it tries to crack a double-murder case. The scene, with its gentle dig at the sort of cliffhanger-filled mystery that Talvar itself is not going to be, is akin in some ways to the moment during the chase sequence in Black Friday where we hear florid filmi dialogue from an old Bachchan movie about cops and robbers, even as we see unfit policemen and their exhausted quarry fumbling through a slum.
And yet, there was a point during Talvar when I was thinking of Irrfan’s character as a Super-Detective Lite, if that makes any sense – not a Holmes, but something comparable if you factor in the nature of this film. In a narrative that is often documentary-like, Ashwin, initially at least, is a bit of an outlier. Though based on a real person (CBI officer Arun Kumar) he feels like a fictional character introduced to help us make sense of a messy case and untangle knots created by incompetent policemen and self-serving bureaucrats. Ashwin drily comments on the many investigative goof-ups and almost literally takes a policeman’s pants off in one scene; his mission is to clean up the rust that has gathered on Justice’s sword. To a degree, he is a movie archetype: the crusader who untiringly pursues the truth, even while battling personal crisis (an impending separation from his wife, played by Tabu; there’s something self-indulgent but also witty about this Vishal Bhardwaj-produced film using Bhardwaj’s Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as a domestic sideshow to a story about blood and betrayal, servants and masters, and overvaulting ambition!). Irrfan brings deadpan humour and, yes, style to the film, telling a cop “Next time you’re at a murder scene where the killer has considerately left behind a big bloody handprint as a clue, try to preserve it.” Who expects a government-employed Indian detective to show commitment and comic timing? And who better than one of our best, most wryly charismatic actors to play the part?
So there is a touch of wish-fulfilment in the way Ashwin is written and performed, and fantasy-as-nourishment has always been one of cinema’s functions. When done well, it can, temporarily at least, make the real world a more bearable, even a more comprehensible place (which is one reason why I’m bemused by the snobbery directed at “escapism”, or by the idea that watching such a film or reading such a book entails leaving your brain elsewhere. No, it doesn’t – you need to engage, just as you do for the overtly serious stuff).
The ploy of introducing a fictional figure to tackle a real-life problem has been around for a while. It has been used even in the context of such great evils as Nazism (as in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator or Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), but let’s stick with the personal-crime context for now, and return to Sherlock Holmes. Two films – the 1965 A Study in Terror and the 1979 Christopher Plummer-James Mason-starrer Murder by Decree – pitted Holmes against the notorious Whitechapel killer known as Jack the Ripper. Both ended with the super-detective unmasking the murderer, even if he had to stare down a royal conspiracy, and the soundtrack was appropriately stirring (Ashwin would have enjoyed humming it). You can be immersed in, even moved by, those films without forgetting that in the prosaic real world the Ripper is still the unidentified subject of debate, speculation and even mythologizing – while Sherlock Holmes exists only on the printed page (or the Kindle).
The wish-fulfilment elements in Talvar are much more muted though; the film is ultimately grounded by the politics and blemishes of the Aarushi Talwar saga. Near the end, there is a long, discomfiting sequence where a number of mostly middle-aged men, divided into two groups with opposing views about the case, sit together at a table and argue, trade accusations, banter, joke…all at the same time. Every now and again, when the mood becomes too frivolous, one of them admonishes the others – come on guys, let’s remember what this is about – but the levity never leaves the table; how can it, when you have a group of oversized boys given the chance to play with the words “dharm-pracharak asana” (a grand-sounding term for the missionary position)? In any case this is a club made up of people who are pragmatic about the workings of the world, aware that they will have to deal with each other in other situations in the years ahead, and that bridges must never be completely burnt no matter how fierce a disagreement gets.
Shortly after that sequence, Talvar ends by returning to the person whom everyone seems to have lost sight of in their spin-doctoring games and recriminations: the victim. But a case can be made that the film is too subtle or even perfunctory in doing this – the closing scene felt like a token, half-hearted exercise in sentimentality, included to belatedly give an audience something to get a little moist-eyed about as they shuffle out. Ultimately, for all of Irrfan’s super-detective-like panache in the early scenes, Talvar's real tone resides in its cold, cynical understanding that in a case like this the victims quickly become abstractions, a circus of voyeurism and self-interest takes over…and even a Holmes might turn in despair to his morphine, the same way Ashwin keeps turning to his own addiction, the video games on his phone.
P.S. The interviews I have read about Talvar being a “Rashomon-like” film, showing two or three different scenarios without taking a position on guilt or innocence, are a little misleading: this film definitely does take a position, almost to the degree that Avirook Sen’s recent book does. And it makes clever use of humour to present some of the farcical aspects of the case made against the Talwars. One of the biggest laughs – when Ashwin is sarcastically relating what needed to have happened, in limited time, on the morning after the murder for the prosecution’s version to be true, and we see the dead girl’s mother telling her husband “Come, hurry, we have to start the rona-dhona now” – reminded me of the hilarious “magic bullet” scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK.
-- What a goofily ungrammatical-sounding title. Reminds me of the famous promotional tagline for The Birds, which got pedants all worked up: “The birds is coming” (with the “B” deliberately in lower-case).
-- As must already have been noted hundreds of times elsewhere, Tanu Weds Manu Returns is a triumph for Kangana Ranaut as well as for an ensemble of supporting performers, including Deepak Dobriyal, Swara Bhaskar, Eijaz Khan and Jimmy Shergill reprising their roles from the first film. This is one of those rare times where I wished a sequel would expand into a full-fledged franchise, so we can keep revisiting these performers in these roles, not necessarily to see where they will end up (chances are this lot will keep going round in circles, creating new complications for themselves), but to eavesdrop on conversations, observe shifting equations, and see more of those crowded family functions where the less predictable facets of small-town Indian life may be revealed.
-- This film belongs to the tradition of what Stanley Cavell called “the comedy of remarriage” – a reference to the many wonderful screwball comedies in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood where married couples broke up and explored other possibilities as a necessary prelude to the realisation that they couldn’t do without each other in the long run. (And this was something that most people around them could usually see before they could. Though in some cases there was also a subconscious little waltz going on, centred on the thrill of waiting it out, playing the game without quite acknowledging it.)
Classics in that subgenre include His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story and My Favorite Wife. Cary Grant was a vital force in all of those films, and I think this had a lot to do with one of his most distinctive qualities as an actor, which David Thomson drew attention to in a once-infamous essay: Grant’s ability to tap into the light and dark shades of his personality simultaneously, never allowing one to drown out the other. That quality was particularly effective in films like His Girl Friday, where, despite the generally manic tone, you always got a sense of an internal conflict: the man battling with himself, both drawn to and put off by (or intimidated by) the woman; the playing out of that conflict, up to the realisation that one feeling carries more weight than the other.
In contrast, the Manu of Tanu Weds Manu Returns
is bland, hard to read, and something of a non-entity, both at the
script level and in R Madhavan’s pleasant but workmanlike performance. And this may have been deliberate. Both Tanu Weds Manu and its sequel
often toy with the complexities of gender equations in a
seemingly conservative society: how women can be the ones to take
initiatives or assert themselves in contexts where you wouldn’t always
expect it. But I wonder if the current discourse about empowering and
giving more agency to women characters in our cinema is about to lead to
a situation where the men in some films have almost no agency or personality. (See the Rajkummar Rao character in Queen, for instance.) Manu is a cipher here; the viewer gets very little sense of what is going on in his head.
-- Delightful though it is on many levels, I’m not sure TWM Returns works too well as a remarriage-comedy in the sense that Cavell used the term. One problem being that I was less than convinced by the Tanu-Manu romance in the first film: first a dreamy-eyed NRI falls in love with a sleeping girl, then the girl (who turns out to be a madcap whenever she is awake) falls gradually in love with the idea of someone being so much in love with her. If you find that unconvincing, it isn’t so easy to invest in the sequel’s conviction that these two people have to get back together, so what if a vulnerable young college-goer gets caught up in their courtship dance.
The opening of this film pointedly contrasts the noisy camaraderie of a large middle-class Indian wedding (I can’t get “Sun Sahiba Sun” out of my head now) with cold and gloomy England, where Tanu – who draws so much of her energy from being around people – only has pigeons and raccoons for company. If you were truly deeply moved by the Tanu-Manu romance in the first film, you’re supposed to be shaken by what they have turned into, by this dark winter of the soul (which can only be healed by a return to sunny, clamorous India). But the quarreling couple we see in the asylum scene is pretty much how I would have expected the two people from the first film to wind up a few years after their wedding. (My wife is bipolar, Manu tells the doctors, and we are invited to read this as a manifestation of his resentment rather than as a balanced diagnosis. But one thing that neither film has ever addressed full-on – though Kangana’s performance screams it out in nearly every scene – is that Tanu is a bit of a nut, and possibly dangerous too. Her expressions during the bonfire scene in the first film still make me shiver.)
-- Though the supporting cast, and most of the dialogue, in TWM Returns is so sharp that the pace is never allowed to flag for long, it comes close a few times: notably in the exasperating scene where Datto’s brother gives a little lecture to his family and community about the need to value women. Again, a byproduct of the New Indian Cinema where the need to be self-consciously progressive and socially responsible is sometimes prioritised over narrative flow or internal credibility. (But since Anand L Rai is the director who got so much flak for Raanjhanaa, I won’t go on about this. Perhaps he just felt the need to spell things out.)
-- There is also a nod to the great cinematic theme of obsessive remaking, casting a lookalike in the mould of your idealised love – a theme that has anchored films as otherwise disparate as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, V Shantaram’s Navrang and Yash Chopra’s Lamhe. Tanu Weds Manu Returns briefly flirts with the idea, as in the scene where Manu scrutinises Datto when she tries on the earrings he has given her; in a different sort of film, this might have been close to the creepy scene in Vertigo where Scottie waits for Judy to emerge from the bathroom, made up as Madeleine. But again, Manu is such a blank slate that you can’t ascribe many such motivations to him. And the film, being essentially lighthearted in tone, isn’t trying to go down that particular vortex; it remains a sidenote.
(But I’ll still use this opportunity to link to this terrific Adam Gopnik story about death, replacement, love, pet fish and Hitchcock’s blondes. Read.)
-- Having begun this post by mentioning pedants, let me be one myself. People, stop calling Tanu Weds Manu the “prequel” to this film. (This means you too, Wikipedia.) A prequel is a specific sort of sequel – it isn’t a synonym for “precursor” or “predecessor”. Look it up. Yes, I know we are living in a world where “anyways” will soon replace “anyway” in the OED, but let’s beat back the gathering ravens for as long as we can.
With Dibakar Banerjee’s much-awaited Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! releasing this Friday, here is a write-up that came out of my marathon Q&A sessions with the filmmaker two years ago (some of this made it – in a slightly altered form – into this l-o-o-n-n-n-g profile I did for Caravan). This was a few months after the release of Shanghai, and Dibakar was getting ready to work on his short film for Bombay Talkies. He speaks here about the Byomkesh film, which was a gleam in his eye at the time, as well as other projects swimming about in his head.
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“Just today,” Dibakar says, “I passed a typical Bombay street-fashion shop – not high fashion, just Rs 150 for a T-shirt. And they had put the clothes on mannequins that had monster faces. It triggered a thought in my head.”
Such images frequently lead to ideas for him: the genesis of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! lies in two newspaper photos of the “super chor” Bunty, one in which he is sitting on a car in a yellow jacket (an image Dibakar replicated in the film) and another of the large stash of loot he had stolen from various places – a strangely moving pictorial representation of an underprivileged man trying to pull 
himself into a different world by obsessively accumulating others' things. “This glimpse today of the Frankenstein in the T-shirt hit me in the same way as when I saw those Bunty photos. To me, it was alien – if you use it intelligently, you can use it to talk about any notion of alienation, whether it’s UP-wallahs living in Mumbai, or Muslims in India, or Kashmiri refugees in Delhi.”
Ideology is never the starting point for a film, he says. “Your guiding belief is the sauce in which you cook again and again and again, or it’s a fucking frying pan that you never wash – you cook everything there.” Meaning, the distinct, underlying flavour will remain no matter what he does; the challenge now is to find new dishes, or modes of presentation. “After Shanghai I feel like I’ve said what I had to say about the things that are happening around us – the new liberalised economy and all that – and now I have to start afresh.”
Shanghai was a very personal film in its own way – in bringing us close to the inner compulsions of four or five different people – but it was also of course a Big Issue film, set in an allegorical Bharat Nagar, with a very wide canvas including depictions of chief ministers and other people at various levels on the power hierarchy. I get the impression that Dibakar wants to make his canvases a little more intimate, while still playing out the ideas and themes that interest him – including the oldest of them all, the nature of good and evil. “I’m trying to figure out what conscience is, exactly. What happens when you don’t have it? How do you begin not to have it? What does the environment do to us that we lose the ability to distinguish between taking someone’s pencil and taking someone’s life? I’m trying to get closer to the spaces between people, to figure these things out.”
And he knows well that genre fiction can provide a very effective framework to examine such ideas. His next feature-length project – still at an early stage in script development – will be about Byomkesh Bakshi, the popular Bengali detective created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay in the 1930s. Dibakar’s adaptation, “a melange – not a triptych – of two or three different Byomkesh stories”, will be a period film set in 1940s Calcutta. “I have NO ancestral Bengali component in my life, but I have a deep literary and mythical knowledge of Calcutta – this film is about that mythological space, about that space in my imagination.”
The Byomkesh world of detective thrillers and romantic noir allows him to cut to the essence of human behaviour and its implications. “Neither you nor I have a reference for what happened in 1940s Calcutta beyond surface details, so what will bind us is the core human transactions. I’m trying to move away from social subtext and come to a deeper understanding of human transactions and behaviour.” He wants to provide an experience that is more sensory than reflective. “When you hear about the Pandavas walking up the mountain at the end, you’re aware of a deep sense of pathos – it is visceral. My aim is to make a film where you’re feeling continuously, so you go back feeling purged. Most of my films so far leave you feeling reflective – Shanghai was definitely like that, it was meant to be cool and detached – but I want to try and change that.”
Meanwhile other ideas keep coalescing in his head. When he mentions that he is interested in male chauvinism and in the deep mythological bifurcation between male and female dominance in society – in the suppressed history of a shift from the mother goddess to the patriarchal sky pantheon – I’m reminded of observations he made on his LSD commentary track about how male bravado can give way to over-sentimentality in romantic relationships – and how both things, in different ways, can become pretexts for control over women. But listening to some of his other plans, it’s hard to suppress a chuckle just thinking of the reactions of the woolly-headed viewers who have him slotted as a poster boy for self-consciously “serious” cinema. “I want to do a film about personal combat – martial arts. That would be about craft, choreography, visual rhythm, about the use of the human anatomy and the space around it. Something close to installation.”
The horror genre is very close to his heart too – “that is the most moralistic tale you can tell – you can really preach when you’re doing horror!” – and he has developed an interest in T.E.D. Kline’s short story “Nadelman’s God”, about a monster that emerges out of a goth-rock song written by an advertising executive. “I want to do an Indian version of this with a guy in Bombay,” he says, adding – with a straight face – “The title will be Narayan Murthy ka Paaltu Raakshas.”
“That’s the name you came up with?”
“Yes – it’s from Nadelman’s God,” he says a little impatiently, with emphasis, as if this is something very obvious; as if the comical juxtaposition of a banal word like “paaltu” and an imperial one like “raakshas” flows naturally from that English title rather than from the imp inside his own head.
[Much more about Dibakar, the way his mind works, and his future plans in the Caravan story, which is here]
(A history lesson for all you little teenagers and 21-year-olds. You’re welcome)
For people of my generation, it can be unsettling to find that new movies set in the 1980s or even the 1990s are now officially “period films”. Take Sharat Katariya’s charming (and surprisingly low-profile, given its many fine qualities) Dum Lagaa ke Haisha. Set in the mid-90s in Haridwar, with a callow young protagonist who idolises Kumar Sanu(!) and manages an audio-cassette store for his father (the CD era is about to knock forcefully on their door), this film has obvious nostalgia value for anyone above a certain age – and obvious knock-their-eyes-out-of-their-sockets value for anyone below that age. All the usual signifiers are here. Rotary phones, red Ambassadors, rickety grey scooters, a reference to Vinod Khanna as the epitome of male hotness.
The tiny moment that left me nearly moist-eyed though was when Prem (Ayushmann Khurana) struggles to remove a videocassette from its tight cover – he has to yank the thing out – and then does something that people of my generation so unconsciously did hundreds of times in the old days. He flips open the little lid at the rear of the cassette and blows at the visible strip of film to clear away dust particles and other lethal, real-or-imaginary microscopic things. (This keeps the player’s “head” safe, we would tell ourselves.) Then he puts the cassette in. If he is anything like I was, he is holding his breath for the few seconds until the TV screen lights up. (Please, please let it not be covered by “snow”, which could mean the VCR has packed up again and needs to be serviced.)
The scene lasts barely a few seconds but I felt sentimental because I wondered if any of the young people in the hall would even know what it meant. Or would they dismiss Prem’s gesture as a character quirk? (“Hey, there’s a guy who likes to whisper randomly at rectangular plastic objects. It’s probably a religious thing.”)
However, there’s another reason why Dum Lagaa ke Haisha took me disappearing down the foggy ruins of time. Its story about a self-absorbed man who is pushed into an arranged marriage and is then indifferent to his wife because she is an overweight “saand” (at least, that is what the plot seems to be about at first – it takes a right turn in the second half and becomes much more about the insecurities of Prem, intimidated by a woman who is smarter and more poised than him) reminded me of another film that haunted my younger self.
I have spoken, oh gawping teen readers, about the character-building ritual of blowing into a videotape’s rear end. Let me now introduce you to a thing called Chitrahaar that we used to watch on Wednesday and Friday nights. It provided the soundtrack of my childhood, pre-dating the Kumar Sanu-Sadhna Sargam one you hear so much of in Dum Lagaa ke Haisha. In the mid-80s this soundtrack included the yowling number “Teri Meherbaniyan”, sung by a dog to Jackie Shroff (or vice versa), which I wrote about here, as well as Anil Kapoor screeching “Zindagi Har Kadam Ek Nayi Jung Hai” to himself. And it included a hypnotic, droning song called “Bhala Hai Bura Hai”, which was telecast so often that its lyrics nestled into the minds of every little Indian boy and girl and gave us moral conditioning and good value system for decades to come. They began:
“Bhala Hai, Bura Hai, Jaisa bhi Hai
Mera Pati Mera Devtaa Hai
(Good, Bad, Whatever,
My husband is my flying spaghetti monster and I will worship It and feed It samosas and beer)”
Thus spake Naseeb Apna Apna.
It wasn’t just the song, but the power of the accompanying visuals. Displaying acres of wifely stoicism was a dark-complexioned woman who didn’t fit the Hindi-cinema ideal of beauty (not even the one established by south Indian heroines like Rekha and Sridevi). The film did everything it could to make her look ludicrous anyway. She sticks her tongue out (when she isn’t singing) and makes other strange expressions for no clear reason. 
Most important of all, trailing her head at a distance of several metres is an astonishing upright chhoti that ends in a ribbon; the sort of accessory that would have made Hanuman very envious as he set about using his tail as a wick to set Lanka afire.
Also visible in the scene (though he tries his best to stay out of sight) is Rishi Kapoor, doing his famous double-takes and managing somehow to look mortified, cocky, sheepish, contented, despairing, self-important, despicable and helpless all at the same time, all in the same frame.
In fact, Kapoor tweeted a few days ago that Dum Lagaa ke Haisha was like an updated version of his 1980s film. (You only have my word for it, but I made the connection before he did.) He would have good reason to remember Naseeb Apna Apna – it was possibly the hardest thing he ever had to do, a role that would have any actor yearning for a more lightweight assignment, such as playing Hamlet and Falstaff on the same night. Because apart from anything else, this film is highly confused about its own characters: it feels for them while simultaneously making fun of them (or passing judgement on them). And Kapoor’s Kishen is often on the receiving end of this double-headed treatment.
Take the early scenes where he is being bullied by his authoritarian father. Kishen should be the sympathetic underdog here, since he is saying nothing more unreasonable than: what, you want me to marry a girl I haven’t even seen? And yet, and yet... look at the shirt they made poor Rishi wear:
(Talk about subliminal messages. Beware, India's sons and daughters, the film is saying here. If you argue with your Mogambo-like dad or wag your finger at your poor long-suffering mother over something as trivial as your choice of life-partner, even your clothes will publicly denounce you.)
Ten years before Amrish Puri played the patriarch whose permission must be sought in DDLJ, here he is as a fiercer, more rustic version of that patriarch, the boy’s father this time, who threatens to break his son’s legs if he tries to leave home. “I’ll staple you to that horse’s back if I have to,” he growls (or words to that effect), so the next scene has Kishen in bridegroom’s garb riding along sulkily on his way to wed the “plain-looking” Chandu (Radhika). At this point you think Naseeb Apna Apna has set itself up so that one of two things will happen: 1) The parents eventually see the error of their ways, recognise that times are changing, or 2) Tradition is upheld and glorified; young man finds love with papa-certified girl, starts wearing placid white shirts with "सुन्दर सुशील बेटा" printed on them.
But no, the film mixes and mashes both these ideas while sticking to its larger agenda: to gratuitously make fun of Chandu and her Hanuman-ji chotti. At the same time it introduces another, fairer-skinned heroine – Farha – who gets to be not just Kishen’s wife of choice, but the film’s Christ figure too. Summary of what follows: Wife 1 is happy to abase herself by playing maid to Wife 2 if this means she can get to live in the same house as her (their) husband. And Wife 2 is happy to sacrifice her very life if it means that husband and Wife 1 may find happiness with each other. (Meanwhile Kishen continues to look miserable – look at the rough hand fate has dealt him!)
This also means that the similarities between Naseeb Apna Apna and Dum Lagaa ke Haisha are only skin-deep. In the new film everyone is likable, and the big message of the present day – that Indian men need the right sort of education – is in plain sight. Prem’s father meekly accepts his culpability when his daughter-in-law Sandhya gives him a lecture about not having taught his son to respect women. (Her wisdom, and the father’s sensitivity, are tellingly set against the values of the khaki-shorts-wearing brigade Prem is involved with, bent on producing a species of men who have no need for a female presence in their lives.) Back at Sandhya’s home, when her mother tries to feed her the usual line about a woman’s place being with her husband, aurat ki destiny etc, the educated girl coolly shuts the door in the mother’s face and that’s that. Not much room here for real social conflict.
Prem himself – before he makes a serious effort to improve his attitude – comes close to being a worm in some scenes, but never in the way that the forever-entitled Kishen is. Basically: Dum Lagaa ke Haisha is steeped in political correctness and social progressiveness and general feel-goodness; Naseeb Apna Apna wouldn’t know what any of those things were if they were brought to it on a large silver tray carried by a gharelu, pallu-covered bahu with eyes cast downward.
Well, apart from the very special, tearful sort of feel-goodness that comes from watching a Noble Soul make the Ultimate Sacrifice in the Last Scene – we loved that sort of thing in the 80s. And with that observation, this post comes to...
[Did this for The Daily O]
The best thing I can find to say of the new film Dolly ki Doli – about a con-woman using marriage as her playground and decamping with valuables midway through each suhaag raat after drugging the groom-of-the-moment – is that it has the sense to be only an hour and 40 minutes long. This is a definite point in its favour. If they had chipped away another hour and a half, it may even have been a good film.
What is this movie about, I kept wondering, and why does it exist? Some observations that may or may not answer those questions:
It could be a sort of fable (though the thought and energy required to interpret it in those terms probably isn’t worth it) – an allegory about the Revenge of the Dowry Givers; a satire on the socially sanctioned assessment and bartering of young women, their subsequent shackling into married life where they are treated as inflatable sex dolls by husbands and as slaves and jewellery banks by parents-in-law; an exercise in wish-fulfillment that takes women’s empowerment into a new dimension.
If this is the case, the central character is meant to be a blank slate on which men (and their overbearing parents) can scrawl their own fantasies or ideals. “Dolly” is different things to different people – a gharelu ladki, a seductress, and so on – and you’d think such a tabula-rasa role would be well suited to Sonam Kapoor, who is as synthetic and vacant here as anything I have seen her in so far (with the exception of Dilli 6, where she had a few good moments). That isn’t how it works though. Kapoor is passable in the scenes where Dolly is carrying out her charades (because, think about it, what standards do we use to judge her performance in those bits? Anything goes. Every gesture and expression, however broad or unconvincing, can be explained away as being part of an act), but when Dolly is with her own people, being “herself”, there is no sense of a person with any inner life. Instead she mechanically drones lines that might sound meaningful on paper (“I would rather be in an actual jail than in your shaadi ka jail”) but have little overall relevance to this hodgepodge of a film, which doesn’t stay focused on any one thought for more than a few seconds.
But here’s another theory. The pastiche-like feel of the film, the wild tonal shifts, the problems in logic, the lack of continuity, scenes such as the one involving a misplaced dadi, the non-sequiturish incomprehensibleness of the note left behind by Dolly at the end (why do I do what I do, she says, pronouncing Hindi words with the diligence of a child in elocution class. Well, why does a sabzi-wallah sell sabzi and not alcohol?)… all this can be easily explained if one assumes that Dolly ki Doli isn’t a film but the sum of a series of auditions where actors like Rajkummar Rao, Varun Sharma and Pulkit Samrat were asked to try out a few different things – look, here is a role you could be playing in a big-budget film we may or may not be planning, so:
“Speak in a Sonepat accent.”
“Put on a moustache and try to look grown-up and policeman-like.”
“Be sleazy.”
“Look avuncular.”
“Bumble.”
“Do pelvic dance.”
“Say ‘dadi!’ and slap your forehead while looking surprised and sad.”
“And Sonam, no, you don’t have to pronounce ‘वे ’ as ‘Vay’ just because it’s written like that – ‘woh’ will do nicely. Oh well. Whatever.”
And then all those audition clips were thrown together.
Ultimately though, I have decided that this film is best seen in meta terms, as yet another self-examination by the movie industry. What better way to comment on certain feudal-patriarchal traditions in our society than to reference another major feudal-patriarchal tradition, the star system? So here is a savvy con-woman getting the better of a host of men who are clearly out of their depth in her company – and as if to echo this, we have a privileged, glamorous, second-generation actress in the lead role, surrounded by “plainer” actors from more low-key milieus. (“Itni lambi ladkiyan hoti hain?” asks a boy’s mother amusingly, and one is reminded that as a physical specimen of lambaai and gorapan, Sonam Kapoor bears roughly the same relationship to actors like Rajkummar as the elven-queen Galadriel does to the Dwarf Lords in Tolkien.**) No wonder then that when all these non-starry men can’t track down or tame Dolly (she is always out of reach), it needs a cameo appearance by a mainstream star (Saif Ali Khan) to help apprehend her.
And no wonder too that the final, “money shot” cameo – even though it’s only a photograph – is by Salman Khan. Forget all those platitudes about shaadi as a jail, or the “serious” angle of a woman, let down in love, avenging herself on other men. THIS is what the film has been building up to all along: Salman as the ultimate ideal of malehood, the prem rattan, the superstar capable of turning even our opportunistic heroine into a bag of mush. Poor Saif. Despite that grand, star-cameo entrance, even he turned out second best in the end. And as for the film’s ostensible leading man Rajkummar… at least he got an item number.
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** No offence intended to Lady Galadriel or her followers
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]
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.