On Kahaani and the dhokebaaz flashback

I’ve written a few times about the trickiness of book-to-film adaptations, including problems that arise from basic differences in the mediums – the written word vs the visual representation. One example is Ira Levin’s superb thriller A Kiss Before Dying (see this post) where the method of the suspense hinges on the fact that Levin’s medium does not require him to show us his murderer’s face (whereas a conventional narrative film doesn’t have this luxury). Another is Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani, which overturns all the reader’s assumptions by making a key revelation about its narrator-protagonist on the very last page (it’s hard to see how this book could be faithfully filmed).

Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani isn’t an adaptation of a book, but watching the film it struck me that one of its major plot-holes derives from a limitation of visual suspense – and that the effect would have been very different if presented in the form of a written story.

(Spoiler Alert – avoid reading on if you haven’t seen the film and are planning to go for it)

In general, I thought Kahaani was a gripping, skilfully constructed movie with many strong points – good pacing, attention to detail, an eye for character. It makes excellent use of Kolkata as a setting (one that has clearly been underutilised by Hindi cinema) and contains good performances, not just by Vidya Balan (whose role is trickier than it might at first appear) but also by Parambrata Chatterjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who play two very different sorts of men who become involved with the central character’s quest. The relationship between Balan’s character Vidya Bagchi and her “saarthi”, the bashful policeman Rana (played by Chatterjee), includes some very charming, not-quite-romantic-but-who-knows interplay. And no one who sees the film will ever forget Bob Biswas, a pudgy, unfit hitman who is a tangle of contradictions: a life-insurance agent moonlighting as a killer; a sweet-looking Bengali babu who sometimes resembles a creepy bogeyman from a Hollywood slasher series (looked at up close, his face appears almost to be crumbling; when he isn’t busy making house visits, one imagines he lives alone with his long-dead, stuffed mother in some forgotten cranny of this old city).

There is little to fault in the creation of mood, but as the narrative builds towards an increasingly complicated climax with revelations and counter-revelations, plot-holes emerge – the sorts of things a compliant viewer is presumably expected to gloss over (or perhaps not notice in all the confusion). Midway through, there is an instance of visual cheating in the railway-platform scene that heralds the Intermission (anyone who watched the trailers will have seen it beforehand) – not only is this scene misleading, it’s also inconsistent with Kahaani’s overall tone. (As the wife pointed out, it belongs more in a Dabangg action sequence.) But the biggest glitch - in a movie that makes recurring use of the phrase “system error” - involves dishonest flashbacks.

When Vidya arrives in Kolkata from London in search of her husband Arnab, she goes to the police station and passes around a photo of the two of them together, taken on their wedding day; as she talks and reminisces, short flashbacks show her memory of him. In one, we see the photo being clicked; a later one shows her persuading him to go to Kolkata for his assignment. The flashbacks are presented in such a way – they are bookended by close-ups of Vidya looking contemplative and misty-eyed – that it’s reasonable to see them as genuine recollections. (If these scenes had been framed differently, it may have been possible to think these weren’t her memories but the mental images of the people who are hearing her story.)

Late in the film, we discover that though the broad outline of Vidya’s story was true (at some point in the past, she was married and pregnant, and her husband did leave London for Kolkata, never to return), the photograph she has been passing around is a doctored one – the man in it (let’s call him M) isn’t her husband but another man whom she is now on the trail of (and whom she doesn’t exactly harbour positive feelings for). This disclosure raises an obvious question: when we are shown Vidya’s memories, why is M playing the role of her husband in them? And the obvious answer is: to blindside the viewer at the cost of the film’s internal credibility.

More than 60 years ago Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright got some flak for a flashback scene that turned out to be a complete lie. Defenders of the film argued that the device was a legitimate one in the given context – being a visual representation of a murderer’s version of events – but the scene continued to make some viewers uncomfortable even decades later when narrative experimentation in cinema had become more common; it felt like a forced way of creating a barrier between the viewer and the story.

The lying flashbacks in Kahaani are even more problematic because they aren’t just a visualisation of a lie being told by one person to another – they are expressions of a character’s interiority. The only way they can be justified is by assuming that Vidya Bagchi is delusional (or that she has so thoroughly internalised her made-up story that she can no longer distinguish it from her reality) – but nothing else in the film supports this reading.

One can argue that, given the premise, there wasn't much else that could have been done. Much of the tension in Kahaani comes from the viewer’s ambivalence about Vidya; as seasoned viewers of suspense films, we are constantly aware that her version of events might only be a kahaani, a made-up story. (In discussions before the film released, I heard all sorts of theories, including the one that she is really a terrorist carrying around bombs for a huge attack during Durga Puja week.) But much of the film's emotional effectiveness comes from the way in which it makes us empathise with the character. As the narrative develops, as we get to know her better and appreciate her resourcefulness, persistence and the gentleness of her relationship with Rana (and with Bishnu, the kid who provides “running hot water”), we start rooting for her.

Not showing those flashbacks would have been a barrier to this empathy – it would have had the effect of making her a remote figure, giving us little sense of her inner world and her past. And showing them in such a way that we don’t get to see the husband’s face would have given the game away immediately.

For anyone who has seen the film, I’d be interested in knowing what you think about these scenes. Did you see them as deal-breakers or as minor flaws that you were happy not to dwell on? (I didn’t think they were deal-breakers myself, but they made Kahaani a less-than-convincing thriller for me – I thought its strengths lay elsewhere.) Also: was there any way these scenes could have been done differently without radically affecting the viewer’s connect with Vidya? Inputs welcome.

Karadi's new audio-books

Just a little something about Karadi Tales’ beautifully produced “Will You Read with Me?” series of audio-books for children. Vidya Balan, Sanjay Dutt and Rahul Dravid are among the celebrities who have lent their voices to the series, and going by the books I’ve listened to so far (now there’s an odd phrase!), all of them had a gala time doing the readings. Balan relates the tale of a little lizard who loses his tail and goes about looking for a new one before discovering that there’s really nothing to worry about; Jaaved Jaffri describes the adventures of a “wannabe yogi” named Hathaman, who journeys to Tibet to acquire super-powers. Each book has a cutesy first-person introduction – for example, before starting a story about a cap-seller and monkeys, Sanjay Dutt describes having his cap pulled off his head by a monkey during a shoot. (Of course, this is just as invented as the main story, but it provides a nice personal touch.)

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy have contributed a catchy title song for the series, which plays on each CD before the main narrative begins, and there are entertaining background arrangements as each story is told. Best of all, the books are great as print publications too – well worth preserving even if the CD wears out. (The contributing authors include Anushka Ravishankar and Shobha Viswanath, and the illustrations are by Christine Kastl, Malavika P C, Chetan Sharma and others.) If these don’t get your indolent, brain-dead, junk-food-and-video-game-addicted monster child interested in stories and storytelling, nothing will. Nothing!

[Also see these posts about German children’s books and illustrators: 1, 2, 3]

Notes on Ishqiya

Abhishek Chaubey’s (or should that be Vishal Bhardwaj’s?) Ishqiya is set in the dark heart of a Gorakhpur populated by gun-runners, small-time and big-time hoodlums, double-crossers and avenging angels. The film’s leading men Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) are crooks too, but they are fleeing a sadistic boss (some things stay constant across cultures and settings), and in this landscape they are practically innocents abroad – a bit like R2D2 and C3PO fumbling their way through the desert in Star Wars. Then Krishna (Vidya Balan), a widow with an enigmatic past, invites them into her house, but the lighting and framing makes her look like a spider at the entrance of her web, and this is no reassurance that Babban and Khalu are any safer than they were on the road. Is Krishna pari or tawaif, or a combination of both, or something much more lethal?

At any rate, things are equally dangerous inside and outside. This is a place where crime, betrayal and violent recrimination are taken for granted. Thakurs and Pandeys are determinedly assembling their little armies and gun-stacks to resolve feuds that have been raging for generations; minions must dig their own graves if they fall out of favour; when a businessman calls his wife to say he needs money, her first, almost matter-of-fact response is, “Kidnap ho gaye kya?” Everyone is debauched, and ostentatiously religious too (a man with a fondness for S&M meets his whip-wielding mistress in a room with a large Radha-Krishna poster on the wall). From a salty little exchange between Babban and a street-smart young boy, we gather that children in the region are taught how to use rifles before they are toilet trained; later, a hilarious scene gives us visual confirmation of this.

“Taught how to use rifles before they are toilet-trained”?! What sort of lame attempt is that to translate this film’s dialogue? (You’re spending too much time in Select Citywalk, Jabberwock.) Actually, it’s pointless, in a post written in English, to try to convey the rustic, bawdy vigour of Vishal Bhardwaj’s script; it has to be experienced firsthand, and as spoken by these actors. How to express the precise way, for example, in which Arshad Warsi (in a performance that’s every bit as good as his career-defining Circuit) says he has a bad case of acidity, pronouncing it so it sounds a bit like “STD”? Or his “May-ter [matter] kya hai?” when something seems to be wrong. Or the cheerful lewdness of his banter with the young boy whom he asks to show him the local red-light area. I admired the way Ishqiya throws us full-heartedly into this milieu, providing no safety nets for the big-city multiplex viewer who isn’t intimately familiar with the cadences of speech in rural Uttar Pradesh. (Bhardwaj’s Omkara did this too, but there the informed viewer at least had the bulwark of knowing that the film was based on the Othello template – which made the story and character arcs easier to follow. In this one, we're more adrift.)

Though I liked Ishqiya a good deal, I felt a sense of dissatisfaction at the end, a sense that I hadn’t spent enough time with the three principal characters; that I needed to know them better and see how their strange inter-relationships play out. And no, this doesn’t mean I wanted the film to be longer (two hours is a comfortable running time) – I just thought it became more convoluted than it needed to be, investing too much time and attention on side-characters who weren’t nearly as interesting as the three leads. The romantic-triangle-that-isn’t-quite-a-romantic-triangle between Babban, Krishna and Khalujaan is the most compelling thing about this film (along with the great score); everything around it is embellishment, or should have been.

I’m not a fan of most of Vidya Balan’s early work, but she’s made some sensible career choices in recent times, and she can be quite good when she isn’t darting her eyes about in that self-conscious, coquettish way. I remember thinking, when I drifted off while watching Eklavya (as described in this post), that she’d make a very convincing psychopath if given half a chance. Well, she doesn’t quite play a psycho in Ishqiya, but her potential for darkness is certainly tapped: Hindi cinema has waited many decades for a convincing portrait of the sari-clad small-town widow as femme fatale, and now at last we have one. There’s a stretch in the film when you can see that Krishna is cynically manipulating both men in line with their different personalities – tugging at Khalu’s heartstrings with one hand (he’s a middle-aged romantic who loves old Hindi songs and has soft-focus daydreams where he and Krishna are doing nothing more scandalous than getting married) and at the sex-starved Babban’s pyjama-strings with the other hand. We aren’t sure about her motives, and for once the trace of something manipulative behind the familiar Balan smile is completely appropriate to the role. Earlier, when she played goody-goody heroines, I was the only one – on or off the screen – who could see the menace lurking behind that smile, and it drove people around me crazy. Now I feel vindicated.

P.S. The shot of Babban and Khalu sitting glumly in a grave they’ve just dug for themselves reminded me of this publicity still from Manorama Six Feet Under – another fine rural noir.

On Paa, a time-eating grasshopper and an old fox

Watched Paa a few weeks ago and liked it overall. Made my peace early on with the fact that it isn’t a “Progeria film” – that the medical condition is mostly incidental to the Parent Trap-style story about a child reuniting his estranged parents (and, in this case, validating his own sense of self by getting them to do the “round and round” of the saat pheras). The film makes the very deliberate decision to race though the first 12 years of Auro’s life, not lingering on the complications he and his mother would have faced during this period: his adjustment problems in school, how his classmates would initially have reacted to him. And it’s notable that when it does have to confront the implications of Progeria full-on (in Auro’s prolonged death scene, complete with Dogme-style handheld-camera close-ups as he fades away), the tone of the scene is inconsistent with the rest of the movie.

When I saw the extensive pre-publicity, I suspected that the main purpose for this film’s existence was the gimmick of getting Senior B to play Junior B’s son. “Is there a medical condition that would allow us to do this plausibly?” one could imagine R Balki asking his writers, “Go forth and research!” The project threatened to be an embarrassment, but thankfully that’s turned out not to be the case. This is a well-made, nicely written movie, and Bachchan Sr’s performance, aided by the great makeup, makes it possible to forget for long stretches about who’s doing the role. Apart from the incongruity of Auro being a six-footer (not a Progeria symptom as far as I know), I came away thinking that there’s no particular reason why this kid shouldn’t have been played by the 67-year-old superstar.

The film’s most poignant subtext (though it isn’t explicitly stated) is that Vidya Balan’s character, almost from the moment that she becomes a mother, must cope with the knowledge that her child’s life will run along a different time-scale from her own; that he will pass through every physical stage of his life and eventually die – of old age – at a time when she herself is a relatively young woman. The last thing any parent wants is to outlive their child, but she is preparing for this from the time of his birth. It's a desperately tragic situation, but the film does also suggest that this knowledge brings a greater intensity to their relationship; they have to make the most of whatever time there is. (For this reason, the recurring split-second shot of the Cambridge grasshopper clock – or the “time eater” – is an apt visual symbol. And the flashback scene that goes with the song “Udhi Udhi Ittefaq Se”, where the grasshopper makes its first appearance, is a fine example of condensed storytelling.)

On a personal note now: as Abhilasha and I came out of the hall, our conversation was less animated than it normally is when we’re talking about a film we’ve both liked – and without getting maudlin about it, we both knew why. You don’t have to be the parent of a Progeria-afflicted child to be able to empathise with the broad situation that the Vidya character is in.

If you’ve seen the Foxie posts on this blog, you might have guessed where this is heading.

Our canine kid is one-and-a-half human years now, and assuming she has a reasonably full dog-life she’ll probably leave us around the time we are in our mid-40s. But things will start to happen before then. Another five years and she’ll be older, relatively speaking, than us.

For a long time now, the highlight of my daily routine has been taking Foxie down to the local park in the evening and throwing a tennis ball around for her: marveling at the concentration in her darting eyes and the way she follows my hand movements like a goalkeeper when I feign throwing the ball in one direction, then throw it in the other; watching her paw the ground impatiently or even jump up to snatch the ball out of my hand when she thinks I’m taking too long over the throwing business. Clouds of dust rise as she tears after it (and she really does tear – she’s a bloody energetic dog). Sometimes when it rolls away in the distance she pretends not to be interested, but then when I jog across to pick it up she stealthily races up behind me, gets to it first, looks up at me as if to say “You old slow-coach!”, and then bounds away with it.

At these times I feel like a middle-aged daddy huffing and puffing away, unable to keep up, but a time will come when she isn’t the energetic adolescent pup she is now. Her reflexes will be less quick than mine. That will be difficult to deal with, especially because it’ll be a reminder that her clock is ticking away.

For solace, I think about others who have articulated similar feelings. In his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (which I blogged about here) the actor Rupert Everett reflected on his years in the company of a beloved dog. “As he gets older you become younger, so that in the end he is a grandfather and you are a thoughtless child. In denial of his great age you force him to do things, to keep going and he looks at you with the eyes of an elder, sitting in the shade of the village oak...but he still obeys instructions...” And Arthur C Clarke’s beautiful, heartfelt short story “Dog Star” is about a man who must accept a prestigious research position on an observatory on the Moon, at the cost of leaving behind his beloved dog – the living being he is closest to. “The choice was simple. I could stay on Earth and abandon my career. Or I could go to the Moon – and abandon her... After all, she was only a dog. In a dozen years she would be dead, while I should be reaching the peak of my profession. No sane man would have hesitated over the matter, yet I did hesitate, and if by now you do not understand why, no further words of mine can help.”

P.S. As I wrote in my ancient Sandy post, it can be a lonesome business being closer to an animal than you are to most humans. People often give you strange looks if you express your real feelings, so you end up making light of things – shrugging and saying things jokingly as if they don’t really matter, when they actually matter a great deal. Just the other day I was exchanging empathy notes with a friend who’s in a similar position. She and her husband treat their human child and their dog as equals (with the caveat that the human kid, aged ten, is relatively independent now, spends most of his time playing video games and is already heading for a life-stage where parents won’t be very important to his scheme of things, while the dog will be completely dependent on them till the end of his life). But it’s very difficult for them to share these thoughts even with close friends - unless the friends also happen to feel the same way - because the typical reactions are derisive laughter or criticism. Defensiveness ends up being your default mode. Halfway through writing this post, I was already thinking about trolls who would decide to feel “offended” because I’m drawing a connection between a Progeria-suffering human being and an animal. Well, tough.

Eklavya: the royal bored

I’ve blogged before about my habit of drifting off into an alternate universe when a film becomes very dull – so that, even as the visuals continue to unfold before my glazed eyes, I impose my own mini-scripts on top of them. I’m no scriptwriter, but this little exercise is usually more purposeful than the original film could be.

This is what happened with Eklavya: The Royal Guard, a film that exists for little purpose other than to present a series of self-consciously beautiful images and more varieties of plump pigeons than you’d ever have thought could exist in Rajasthan. (As if to put the seal on his obsession with these birds, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra also shows us a pigeon-filled scene from one of his earlier films, Parinda.)

Anyway, I watched as one gloomy conversation followed another, as Boman Irani fumed and looked intense, Jackie Shroff snarled and looked intense and Amitabh’s eyes grew increasingly blood-shot and he looked intense. Then, midway through the film, Vidya Balan walked into a room with a large golden oval-shaped object protruding from her forehead. This was the moment I had been waiting for. “She’s wearing a microphone!” I exclaimed to my long-suffering girlfriend, “It’s a bug planted by the policeman so he can listen in on her conversations with Saif and solve all the murders.” I was very pleased by this development because the mystery angle of the film had been going nowhere.

The girlfriend tried to explain that the microphone was one of those tikka things that new brides wear, but this made no sense. Over the next several minutes I watched fascinated as the thing bobbed about menacingly, making Ms Balan look like a Star Trek alien with bad make-up. (The Boman Irani character was a Klingon anyway, so it fit the theme.) And in a powerful climax, Saif ran howling from the mansion, blood streaming from his head, after a kissing attempt was thwarted by the point at the end of the golden globe.

These developments changed the tone of Eklavya for me and made it much more tolerable than it might otherwise have been. “Nice film,” I said, as we emerged blinking into the sunlight outside the hall, “though I didn’t understand why Amitabh didn’t simply beam that evil Jackie Shroff back to his home planet.” It seemed the only question worth asking.

P.S. Apologies to all the little boys around the country who are besotted with Vidya Balan because “she’s the kind of girl you can take home to your mother” (what, your mother’s a lesbian with bad taste? I have to ask whenever I hear this phrase), but each of those pigeons has a wider gamut of facial expressions than this girl does.

Thoughts on the Munnabhais

There’s a scene in Munnabhai MBBS that nicely captures the tone of that wonderful movie (and its even better sequel). Munna’s principled father, played by Sunil Dutt, has just discovered (in the most embarrassing circumstances) that his son was only pretending to be a successful doctor all these years – he’s really a wastrel, a small-time goon. This is the sort of premise that Hindi cinema loves getting its chomps into and true to form, there is high drama, betrayal, recrimination. The eyes of both father and son are brimming with tears when, suddenly, one of Munna’s sidekicks (sent by the irrepressible Circuit) bursts in and frantically shouts “Doctor, doctor, naye patient ke liye bed mangaana hai!” (or something to that effect. You get the drift). Naturally Munna doesn’t respond; the game is long over.

It’s a superb little moment that not only diffuses the scene’s tension but also acknowledges one of life’s more inconvenient truths: that despite the human tendency to romanticise drama and personal tragedy, these things never have the full stage to themselves; comedy is always peeking impishly from behind the curtain, waiting to join the players. We feel most self-important in our sadder moments, but step on the outside just briefly and one sees that, viewed from a wider perspective, there’s always something intrinsically funny about the situation. Writer-director Rajkumar Hirani’s achievement here (and in other scenes in the two Munnabhai films) is to convey this gently, without being either cynical or didactic about it. We laugh heartily when the sidekick appears and says his line, we giggle at his earnestly unconvincing act and at the confused look on his face when no one pays him any attention. But that doesn’t stop us from feeling the weight of the situation between Munna and his father. (Sunil Dutt looks even more distressed when we cut back to him, because the interjection is a reminder of his son’s many similar deceits over the years – and a reminder that others were in on the charade too.)

Good comedy is notoriously difficult to do on its own terms (nearly all writers and actors will tell you it’s tougher than good drama), but it takes special talent and guts to mix comedy with situations that have traditionally been treated as sacrosanct (a parent’s sense of betrayal, for instance). This is especially true of an Indian film intended for a mass audience, since ours is a society that has many sacred cows, gets self-righteous easily and doesn’t have a particularly developed sense of humour (at least not when it comes to laughing at yourself, which is where all humour begins).

One of those sacred cows is Mahatma Gandhi (never mind all the talk about India having forgotten the man’s principles; that’s a different story) and Hirani’s decision to have an actor playing Gandhiji in Lagey Raho Munnabhai (even if only as a figment of Munna’s imagination) could so easily have gone wrong. Sure, depicting Gandhi onscreen isn’t as provocative as, say, showing (and hence quantifying) the suffering of Jesus, or drawing the Invisible Pink Unicorn. But if someone had told me beforehand that a Hindi film was going to have a drunken goon slurring “Hi, Bapu! How are you?” at Gandhiji, I would have been concerned for the safety of those associated with the film. However, Lagey Raho Munnabhai pulls it off, and pulls it off with such good taste that it’s hard to imagine anyone being offended. Just as importantly, it doesn’t hinder the movie’s comic tone at all: Hirani is naturally, and unselfconsciously, respectful towards his subject, which means he doesn’t have to put on a show of exaggerated reverence for the benefit of others.

In simple Crit-speak (and I know I’m hardly the first to be saying this), Lagey Raho Munnabhai is a must-watch. Though it incorporates elements from films as varied as IQ, Good Morning Vietnam and even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it’s an original in all the ways that matter. It’s also more assured than the first film was, and that’s saying something. Special mention to Arshad Warsi, whose Circuit is better developed (and has more screen time) than in Munnabhai MBBS. (Hirani credits Warsi with adding elements to the character that weren’t in the original script and it shows onscreen: it isn’t often that one sees a performance created so well from the ground up.)

P.S. Was somewhat put off by Vidya Balan, who’s good to look at but way too affected for my taste. (At one point I became obsessed with counting the number of times she brushes her hair back [approx. 47], and ended up missing some of the dialogue.) She showed a lot of promise in Parineeta but she looks set at this point to become a one-dimensional actress - will have to wait and see her future roles, I guess.

A quickie on Parineeta

Watched Parineeta yesterday, thought it was excellent on the whole. It’s been some time since I’ve seen a Hindi film that I could sink into without constantly having to look up to check on my disbelief, hanging from the ceiling (Dil Chahta Hai was probably the last). Which is not to say Parineeta wasn’t melodramatic, even florid, at times. But it managed mostly to be believable, given the contours of the world it was set in.

Won’t write at length about it, mainly because most of what I wanted to say has already been said - in this review. Some inevitable quibbles though: the wall scene was, as has been widely reported, ridiculous (I’d have liked to be a fly on the - err - wall during the scriptwriters’ meeting where it was decided to make that the climax). Sanjay Dutt was miscast. And as another friend pointed out, it was irritating to hear little Bengali phrases interspersed through the film, when it’s understood that the Hindi dialogue is cinematic licence, and that these characters are really meant to be speaking Bengali anyway.

But there was plenty that was wonderful. As Amit says, the unfussy establishment of a milieu with well-defined characters; this is very difficult to do, even when the script is good, but the film made it look easy. Saif was excellent, Vidya Balan was very good too, the music was lovely and there were hardly any shots that seemed extraneous.

Note: I’m not going to bring Sarat Chandra’s novel into this, I thought the film succeeded on its own terms. Also, I’m not in a position to talk about the issues many Bengali friends have with the film’s depiction of various customs. Feel free to weigh in with those.