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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On A Kiss Before Dying, complexities of book-to-film adaptation, and the world of noir

I’ve been thinking about books, especially in the crime and suspense genres, which are highly resistant to being filmed – or at least resistant to being filmed faithfully. In other words, it may be possible to turn the basic plot into an excellent movie, but the nature and method of its suspense would be unlike that of the book, because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema.

Consider one of the best crime novels I know of: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which was filmed twice in America (in 1956 and 1991) and loosely adapted by Bollywood for Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar. In each case, the film had to make significant departures from the source material; to understand why, here’s a plot outline of Levin’s novel.

(Note: no major spoilers – most of what I’m about to reveal is contained in the first dozen or so pages, and I’m not giving away the central twist.)

A young man, a gold-digger, has been romancing a girl named Dorothy, the daughter of a rich entrepreneur. For reasons I won’t get into here, he decides to kill her, and the first third of the book (approx. 90 pages) is about the carrying out of his scheme. Throughout this segment, we are privy to the furious ticking of his mind – his anxiety when things don’t go as planned, his careful anticipation of glitches, even his self-congratulatory smugness. The narrative is in the third person, but we are as close to his inner state as it’s possible to get; the writing is so taut and intense that even as the reader condemns him morally, it’s hard not to feel personally invested – even implicated – in his actions.

But here’s the rub: we only get a bare-bones description of this man (he’s blond, blue-eyed, very handsome), and most crucially we never learn his name. He is referred to simply as “he”, and though that might sound forced or gimmicky, it works here because Levin so masterfully ties us to his protagonist’s consciousness. (After the first few pages, “he” becomes as precise a pronoun as “I” would be in a first-person narrative; the word can only possibly refer to one person. Some readers might not even realise that they don’t know “his” name until quite late in the story.)

Levin’s reasons for doing this become apparent in the next part of the book, as Dorothy’s sister Ellen starts making private enquiries about the men her sister may have been involved with at the time of her death. She encounters a few of them, and of course she learns their names. But the reader is flummoxed: we are now seeing things through Ellen’s eyes and it’s possible that the killer is one of the men she meets, but we have no way of knowing who it is. Because of the shift in perspective, the person we knew so intimately in the first section of the book is now a stranger to us.

This, then, is the set-up for the novel’s major twist. Like all of Levin’s books, A Kiss Before Dying is made up of several ingeniously constructed moments of suspense – but the revelation of the killer’s identity is the pièce de résistance. 

Given this summary, I’m sure you can see why A Kiss Before Dying is so difficult to film exactly as it was written. A movie (at least a movie that uses a conventional narrative structure**) would have to show us the murderer’s face right at the beginning – which means that when Ellen begins sleuthing, the viewer wouldn’t be in the dark about his identity. The film would have to generate suspense using other methods, perhaps by changing the story’s focus or chronology, or by keeping us initially uncertain about the man’s intentions. (The book dives straight into his psyche by opening on this classic pulp-fiction note: “His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him...”)

I wrote in this post about another Levin book I love, The Boys From Brazil. His best work creates an almost tangible sense of paranoia, which transcends conventional ideas about “suspense” writing. I can read The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying over and over and discover something new each time, long after their major plot secrets have been revealed; these books are lessons in how to construct a story by putting together little details, and I think any budding writer – even one with “literary” rather than “genre” aspirations – can learn from them.

But there’s something else to be said about A Kiss Before Dying: in addition to being an excellent suspense novel, this is also a fine entry in the tradition of American noir literature of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

One of the essential themes of noir is the discontent that can lead people into a life of crime – the gnawing sense that the world is an inherently unjust place and that there’s a better life to be had, if only you can reach out and seize the moment. (Eventually, of course, even minor transgressions lead into mazes and cul de sacs, and the best-laid plans unravel.) The killer in A Kiss Before Dying is first and foremost a social menace and an opportunist, but he is also a small-town lad obsessed with a giant copper-manufacturing corporation that is making much more money than it knows what to do with – and there is a sense in which his story can be read as subtle social commentary.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Shah Rukh Khan character Ajay in Baazigar. Such were the imperatives of mainstream Hindi cinema in the early 1990s that this psychotic “hero” had to be given an elaborate back-story to partly justify his murderous acts. (As a boy, he watched his family being driven to ruin by the businessman whose daughters he now targets. As an adult, he earns a quasi-heroic death scene in his adoring mother’s arms; any Hindi-movie leading man who passes thus can automatically be considered redeemed on some level.) The protagonist of A Kiss Before Dying doesn’t have a dramatic revenge motive of this sort, and there is no attempt to turn him into a sympathetic character – but Levin does permit the reader to think about the personal circumstances and ambitions of an intelligent young boy from a family that’s struggling to make ends meet; a boy who has little interest in the mundane jobs he has to hold down, and who comes to believe that he deserves better. Where might his sense of the unfairness of things lead him? It's a classic noir question.

Where the dragon bears down on the lambs

Martin Amis once wrote with admiration about another fine practitioner of popular fiction, Thomas Harris – specifically about Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs: “Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities. But Harris maintains human decorum too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.”

That last sentence applies to parts of A Kiss Before Dying too. There are moments of unexpected poignancy here: in a casual description of the things packed by a giddily romantic, gullible young woman for a honeymoon she will never go on; or in the betrayal felt by another lady, a loner, who discovers that her emotions have been toyed with. Even some of the throwaway passages are revealing: when a girl, a side-character, ends a mostly subdued letter to a murder victim’s father with a frivolous reference to the current fashion trends in her college, we get a glimpse into the inner world of a student who wants desperately to fit in.

Levin was just 23 years old when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying. This is credible if you look at the confidence and audacity of the book’s structure, and the many risks he takes; only a (very precocious) young writer with nothing to lose would try some of the things he does here. But when you consider the real feeling expressed here for the lonely-hearts and misfits who make up the victims (and occasionally the wrongdoers) of the noir world, it’s staggering to think that this book could come from such a young person. At 23, even as he wrote a bloody good page-turner where our point of identification is largely with the killer, he also found a way to evoke sympathy for the lambs that get preyed on by dragons.

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** One avant-garde approach to filming the first section of A Kiss Before Dying would be to let the killer’s eyes be the camera – so that we see everything from his viewpoint and never get to see his face at all. Something like this was done in the 1940s Hollywood film Lady in the Lake, but needless to say it’s a gimmicky technique, and if it isn’t well-executed it can easily become laughable or just monotonous.

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Important note: if you plan to read A Kiss Before Dying, do avoid reading about it on Wikipedia or even the plot summaries on Amazon.com – some of these rather foolishly give the killer’s name away. And if you do buy it, I'd recommend this lovely-looking Pegasus edition, available on Flipkart.

[Some related posts: Noir's arc - an anthology of American noir writing; Levin’s The Boys From Brazil; Thomas Harris, monster-maker]

They also served: Navin Nischol, Farley Granger

The past month has seen the deaths of many film performers, most famously Elizabeth Taylor, who was everyone’s idea of what a Movie Star should be: someone who is the natural centre of every frame she appears in. Stories about Taylor’s screen presence – right from the time she was a little girl, in films like National Velvet – are the stuff of legend, and her most high-profile film as an adult, the bloated, forever-in-the-making Cleopatra, often seemed to be more about the actress and the media carnival surrounding her than about the Egyptian queen.
 
But two honourable “sideshow performers” also left us recently: one was Navin Nischol, who had a short stint as a leading man in the early 1970s – even playing the inconspicuous hero in the film Parwana, where Amitabh Bachchan had the (more interesting) negative role. [The poster on the left tells a story: Amitabh - looking nothing like he did in Parwana - occupies centrestage, and there is even space for Shatrughan Sinha, who made a guest appearance in the film. But Nischol, the hero, is missing.] The other was the American Farley Granger, a good-looking man (with somewhat exotic and effete features by classical Hollywood standards) and a competent actor if well-cast and directed, but best remembered today for films that didn’t rest on his shoulders.

The “Best Farley Granger Film” (defined as a judicious balance between the importance of his role, the quality of his performance and the overall quality of the film itself) is probably Nicholas Ray’s film noir They Live By Night, about a couple on the run from the law. And Granger did play lead in a couple of other notable movies, such as Luchino Visconti’s Senso. But the two best-known films he appeared in were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and in both he was an effective second fiddle. In Rope (famous for Hitchcock’s use of long unbroken takes), he was the more passive of two young men who commit a murder “for kicks”, and in Strangers on a Train he was the limp-wristed Guy Haines (just your regular Guy) – the perfect foil and chump for the film’s charismatic bad boy Bruno. In my view, both films benefit from his casting: Strangers on a Train is particularly disturbing and effective because the villain is more interesting than the hero, and because Granger isn’t the strong Hollywood leading man who takes control of proceedings and compels the viewer to root for him.

It’s harder to make something out of Nischol’s older movies. To be honest, I don’t even remember most of them well: apart from Parwana, there was the atmospheric Dhund – where Danny Denzongpa stole the show as a sadistic, wheelchair-bound murder victim(!) – and the Ramsay Brothers’ quasi-horror movie Hotel. By the 1980s, it was more typical for Nischol to be cast in a 10-minute part as "Doctor" in a star-studded film like The Burning Train (a.k.a. The Turning Brain). 

Still, he did have one intriguing late-career role in Nagesh Kukunoor’s amusing but trite Bollywood Calling, about an American actor coming to India and getting involved with an assembly-line Bollywood production. Here, he played an ageing, megalomaniacal superstar named Manu Kapoor, pointedly addressed only as Manu-ji by the fawners around him, and there was something poignant about this casting – for Manu was exactly the kind of star that Nischol never became in real life (and the kind of star that the man who played a supporting role in Parwana DID become).

Though star power has been central to cinema’s mass popularity almost from the beginning, the movies could scarcely get by without their side-heroes: the comic foils whose double takes could make the lead comedian look even funnier; the supporting actors who tried to be stars but fell back into stock character roles; the players who managed leading parts in B-movies but never quite crossed over to the mainstream. Granger and Nischol are among the countless performers who shone for a brief period (even developing small cult followings along the way) and then faded, or turned to smaller roles or television shows. Their careers are a reminder of the inscrutable nature of movie stardom – how, for reasons beyond our full understanding, one personality might light a spark with an audience in a particular place and time while another simply doesn’t.

Susanna’s Seven Husbands, from short story to novella to script

[Did a version of this piece for Open magazine. Enjoyed writing it - it was like reviewing three stages of the same work]

Asked to write a film in the late 1940s, the novelist Graham Greene could only proffer a couple of lines he had once casually scribbled on an envelope flap: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”

It was the bare outline of a story, having little to do with what producer Alexander Korda wanted – a thriller set in post-war, Allied-occupied Vienna – but Greene developed the premise, first into a novella and then a screenplay. That single-sentence scrawl begat one of the most visually distinctive films ever made – Carol Reed’s classic noir The Third Man, about an American pulp writer discovering that his supposedly dead friend Harry Lime was involved in a penicillin racket.

This back-story is a reminder that a full-length film can develop, incrementally, from a throwaway idea, so that the final product bears only a minor resemblance to the core text. Something comparable happened with Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest movie Saat Khoon Maaf, which was inspired by Ruskin Bond’s five-page short story “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”. Bhardwaj chanced upon the story a few years ago, requested Bond to expand it into a novella, and then developed a screenplay with his friend and associate Matthew Robbins. Now that the film is out, Penguin India has published the original story, the novella and the final screenplay (printed in a mix of Roman and Devanagari lettering) in a single book – an excellent idea, since reading them together provides a good insight into the conversion of a story into a filmable script, and what might be gained and lost along the way.

What makes this collaboration interesting is that Bond and Bhardwaj are unusual bedfellows. The former’s work is droll and genteel in the old-fashioned English way, evoking a bygone way of life, while the latter’s best films are set in the contemporary Indian hinterland, peopled by rough-speaking characters. The two men do share a penchant for dark humour (“I see Vishal Bhardwaj as the Hitchcock of Indian cinema, a master of the macabre,” Bond has said), but their personal styles are very different – Bond’s prose is marked by its seemingly effortless simplicity while Bhardwaj’s films tend to be dense and baroque, with layered use of colour and music. A few years ago he took Bond’s gentle children’s story “The Blue Umbrella”, gave it the texture of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, and shifted the narrative focus, providing Pankaj Kapoor with one of his best roles as a greedy Himachali shopkeeper. (A post about that film here.)

The original “Susanna’s Seven Husbands” is one of those concise, anecdotal tales that Bond does so well, with an unnamed narrator learning – through hearsay – about the life of Lady Susanna, an inveterate husband-collector (and probable husband-murderer) who lived in Old Delhi around a century ago. In the novella, Bond expands and modernizes the story, and gives us a new point of entry – a young narrator named Arun who lives next door to Susanna’s vast Meerut estate, forms a close friendship with her and tracks her conjugal adventures over the years with a mix of fascination, alarm and slight jealousy.

Reading this longer, commissioned version of Susanna’s Seven Husbands, one almost gets the sense of a storyteller writing an elaborate personal letter for a filmmaker friend – which is what Bond was doing in a way. He indulges himself, making a few filmi references: one of Susanna’s husbands is described as having a “Jackie Shroff-type moustache and the long legs of an Amitabh Bachchan” (a tongue-in-cheek attempt by the author to influence casting?), a minor character is named Shah Rukh, and there is a mention of Bhardwaj’s film Maqbool. The writing is somewhat hurried in places – as if done on a tight deadline – but all the Bond virtues are in place, notably the clarity and the graceful humour. More atypically, there’s even a bit of sex – nothing explicit, but candid enough. (“He started off by being tender and passionate, but his brain would not send the right message to his loins, and he found himself as ineffective as before.”)

The screenplay that follows retains some plot details – the idiosyncrasies of Susanna’s spouses and the manner of their untimely deaths, in which a “goonga” jockey and a middle-aged maidservant play their parts – but the changes are a pointer to the sort of film Bhardwaj wanted to make. Thus, one of the husbands, the Prince of Purkazi, becomes a well-known poet named Wasiullah Khan (facilitating the introduction of romantic Urdu couplets into the script) and a South American diplomat morphs into a Russian attaché who supplies comic relief by goofily speaking Hindi, using lines like “Mere paas ma hai” and singing “Awaara Hoon” at a piano.

In the original story, the narrator briefly likens Susanna to the husband-devouring Black Widow spider, and Bond jokingly expands on this in the novella (“It was some time since she’d dined off a fat, juicy male. Now she was thinking of moving her web elsewhere…”). However, the Susanna of the screenplay isn’t so much a spider as a chameleon, adapting herself to each new husband’s background and circumstances – she becomes a vodka-drinking “Anna” (and reads Anna Karenina) for the Russian Vronsky, she says namaaz when she’s married to the Muslim poet, and she sings a line of Rabindrasangeet for her Bengali husband. She’s a blank slate for these men – in one case, almost literally (one of the script's more romantic scenes has Wasiullah “writing” his name on her outstretched palm). And in the process she turns into a more sympathetic figure, which is one of the problems with this story’s makeover.

There are essentially two ways of handling the tale of a woman who bumps off a line of husbands: either be lightheartedly amoral about it or provide a properly worked out explanation for her psychosis. Bond takes the first approach in both his versions, helped by the fact that the original story was set in the time of the Raj – as he pointed out during a recent discussion in Delhi, distance lends a certain enchantment to sordid events: “Perhaps we find murder in colonial times easier to accept than murder in contemporary India!” In any case, the tone of his writing is influenced by the black humour of such classic British films as Kind Hearts and Coronets**, which didn’t much bother with conventional morality. The closest he comes to providing an “explanation” for Susanna’s impulses is a passage where she says she can’t help what she’s doing because after being married for a while she feels “the sudden hatred that practically every wife sometimes feels for her husband just because he is her husband”.

As psychoanalysis goes, this isn’t particularly deep or useful (at least not as a justification for multiple murders), and perhaps we should take it as a sign that Susanna has unfathomable depths and that her story is best read as a wickedly funny comment on gender equations. However, Hindi cinema doesn’t have a well-developed tradition of truly irreverent black comedy, and the screenplay tries for an uneasy middle ground; it retains the darkly comic aspects of the narrative but also resorts to sentimental explanations.

Bhardwaj and Robbins make the husbands more outright unpleasant, which has the effect of making Susanna likable in comparison. (One of the novella’s more flippant chapters – about a spouse who must be dispensed with simply because he is obsessed with his cellphone – has been dropped altogether, and replaced with an episode involving a shady policeman who gets his just desserts.) Another key difference is that Arun becomes a member of the servant class, an underprivileged boy on whom Susanna “Saaheb” bestows great kindness. To an extent, this was a practical consideration – Bhardwaj had to make his sutradhaar an active part of the story rather than someone whose life intersects with Susanna’s at irregular intervals – but it also performs the function of thickly emphasizing her compassionate side – something that was done in a few quick lines in the novella. (“She was kind to children and animals…kind even to odd creatures and freaks like the dwarf…her cruelty was reserved for another species of human.”)

On the whole, the script is at its least engaging when it tries to persuade us that Susanna “sacche pyaar ke talaash mein hai” (she’s searching for true love), and the resolution – with our heroine discovering the perfect “seventh husband” as well as personal salvation – is weak too, introducing ethical considerations and the concept of redemption into a story that could have done without them. Happily, though, this is one of those books where even the flaws are revealing and worth the reader’s time – especially if you’re interested in the complexities of story-to-film adaptation, and the nature of collaboration between artists with different sensibilities.

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** During his Delhi conversation with Bhardwaj and Mahmood Farooqi, Ruskin Bond also mentioned Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry as an influence on his darker writing - which was pleasing, for the film is a personal favourite.

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.

Reality and fantasy in Unfaithfully Yours

Just watched Preston Sturges’ 1948 film Unfaithfully Yours, about a famous symphony conductor who, believing he has been cuckolded, plots revenge on his wife and her lover. There’s so much to say about this brilliant black comedy that I don’t know where to begin. For anyone familiar with Sturges’ other films as a writer-director (The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story among them), it won’t comes as a surprise that this one is full of sharp, witty dialogue. But I was unprepared for how dark some of it was. (“I thought of killing you, my dear,” the lead character tells his wife at one point, without losing anything of his elegant bearing, “I cut your throat with a razor. Your head nearly came off”.) I also thought it notable how the film manages to continually transcend genre, moving from screwball comedy to a shadowiness characteristic of film noir, with a bit of surrealism and slapstick thrown in. And oh, it’s also a frenzied musical that makes splendid use of classical music to reflect mood and comment on the action.

The story has Sir Alfred De Carter (played by Rex Harrison, more than 15 years before his best-known screen performance) coming to believe that his beautiful (and much younger) wife Daphne (Linda Darnell) is cheating on him with his secretary. De Carter has an important concert the same night, and his rage turns it into the performance of a lifetime. But his rapt audience has no idea what’s going on inside his head. Over the course of three symphonies, he imagines different ways of dealing with his situation: the first and third scenarios involve murder, while the second (set to a sombre, dignified score) involves a mere parting of ways (which gives him the opportunity to play the wounded yet stoical husband who is still concerned about his wife’s financial welfare).

Once the concert is over, he tries to put his ideas into action but real life isn’t as obliging as his fantasy world was; things don’t unfold quite as conveniently. In the imaginary world, when he writes out a 100,000-dollar cheque for his wife (whom he intends to divorce), he does it with a flourish that turns him into a grandly tragic figure, betraying both his deep hurt and his determination to conceal it. But when he sits down to replicate the gesture in the real world, it turns out his fountain pen is out of ink. In fantasy-land, a gramophone player conveniently transforms his recorded voice into his wife's when he adjusts the dial from 33 rpm to 78 rpm; in the real world, the thing becomes a monster machine that refuses to cooperate despite the words “so simple it operates itself” printed everywhere in the instruction manual.

I enjoyed the shifts in this film’s tone. It starts off as a lightweight comedy of manners – and the rapid-fire banter starts to get mildly tiresome after a while – but then the concert begins and we enter the fantasy segment in the film’s midsection. Sir Alfred strikes a pose to commence his conducting and there is a remarkably fluid camera movement that begins with a medium shot and draws towards him, taking us right into the depths of his left eye and – literally – into his mind. The next 30 minutes are intense and claustrophobic, but after the concert finishes the film comes out of its reverie and we’re headed for something resembling a happy ending.

Throughout these changes of mood, Sturges’ dialogue never loses its sting. Much of the pleasure of watching Unfaithfully Yours comes from listening to his rich dialogue, whether it’s in the form of lengthy exchanges or brief, tossed-off remarks. (“It sounds like a talking dog!” exclaims Daphne when she picks up the phone and can’t make sense of the sounds – her husband gasping and stifling a sneeze – on the other end.) But at a more serious level, I saw it as the story of an artist who appears self-assured, even arrogant and supercilious on the surface, but who turns out to be deeply insecure inside – and who must use his art as a form of catharsis, to help him deal with subconscious fears. On the surface, the “dream segment” of the film is the long symphony sequence containing Sir Alfred’s fantasies, but one also gets the impression that he's never more himself than when he loses himself in that world. He’s truly alive when he’s conducting (Harrison performs these scenes marvelously well), his arms making frenzied movements in the air. Like Walter Mitty he’s in control of his interior life - little wonder that reality doesn't quite measure up.

P.S. There was a remake in 1984 with Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski – both charismatic actors, but the film wasn’t anywhere near as gripping as the original.

P.P.S. Unrelated to anything: my DVD has a nice 12-minute video introduction to the film by Terry Jones, formerly of Monty Python - it was shot in Jones’s house and towards the end there’s a great impromptu moment where his black cat appears and sidles on to the sofa next to him. Very cosy little scene.

Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (and a sidenote on homosexual Nazis in 1940s films)

Watched my DVD of Jules Dassin’s prison film Brute Force last week (and before you ask, I had no idea then that Madhur Bhandarkar’s latest exercise in social awareness, Jail, was about to be released). This is a very gripping movie, right up there with I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke in its genre. It’s widely seen as a commentary on the brutality of prison life and the need to make conditions more humane, but personally this wasn’t the aspect of the film I found most interesting. For starters, it’s difficult as an Indian viewer in 2009 to properly appreciate the reformist aspects of a 1947 movie set in Westgate Penitentiary, or to fully understand the context: there’s the disconnect that one frequently experiences while watching an old film about a social issue that has become either obsolete or changed in vital ways over time.

Secondly, I didn’t think the reformist stuff was the main strength of the film anyway; the characters are a little too simply drawn for that. There’s one all-out bad guy – the sadistic, upwardly mobile prison warden Captain Munsey, as smooth and repellent as a silkworm. He’s superbly played by Hume Cronyn, but the character is written as a caricature and a symbol: he’s so deplorable that the film pointedly associates him with both homosexuality (gasp!) and Nazism (he listens to Wagner records while beating up prisoners with a rubber truncheon that isn't just a rubber truncheon!).

In the opposite corner are six prisoners led by the handsome, brooding Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster). They share a cell and plan a breakout together, but they all seem more victims of circumstance than hardened criminals – ill-suited to any sort of jail, much less an overcrowded, unhygienic one supervised by Gay Hitler. The other authority figures are weak foils for the single-minded Munsey, who believes in ruling with an iron thumb, though there IS a benevolent doctor who briefly stands up to him and generally serves as a sutradhaar figure at the end.

For me, the strengths of Brute Force lay not in the message-mongering or the use of characters as symbols for ideologies but (clichéd though it sounds) in the sheer skilfulness of its storytelling: its low-key, mostly realist treatment of daily life in a claustrophobic, cut-off setting; the relationships amongst the prisoners (including the veteran Gallagher, who runs the in-house newspaper and who reminded me of Morgan Freeman’s stoical Red in The Shawshank Redemption); and the beautiful black-and-white photography with the many little nods to Expressionism (there’s a wonderful opening shot of the prison drawbridge in the rain, and a great silhouette of a suicide in his cell, his distinctive glasses dangling prominently from his nose). Other fine touches include the poster of a woman’s face in the cell where the break-out is planned; more a mask, an abstraction, than a real woman, this photograph is very different from the large Rita Hayworth poster that plays such a key role in The Shawshank Redemption. But it represents different things to each of the residents of Cell 17, reminding them of the girls waiting for them back home and of the circumstances that led them to prison.

In one of his first films, Burt Lancaster is a great physical presence – as he was throughout his career – but he also gives a surprisingly solid performance, many years before he started making conscious efforts to become a Serious Actor. In one of the many (slightly melodramatic) flashback scenes that give us background information on the prisoners, there’s a wonderfully performed moment where Joe’s girlfriend, an invalid, wonders aloud if people are good to her because they feel sorry for her. “I’m not 'people'. I’m Joe Collins, one guy” says Joe tersely, before quickly kissing her and getting up to leave. It’s the sort of tough-talk you expect from noir heroes of the time, but Lancaster brings a low-key realism to it, and that little moment tells us more about Joe than lines of exposition could: particularly his fierce individualism, which might end up hindering the getaway.

Jules Dassin is a director whom I always associate with the best qualities of film noir, though he worked in other genres too. My favourites among his films, Rififi and Night and the City, are taut, economical movies with hardly a superfluous shot in them. I’d place Brute Force just half a rung beneath them.

P.S. Another pleasing little connection I discovered between two very different types of movies: around the same time that Hume Cronyn was playing the fascist Munsey, he was co-writing the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rope, the two young murderer-protagonists of which are also associated with both Nazism (through their espousal of Nietzsche’s Superman theory) and homosexuality. John Dall, who plays Brandon in Rope, strongly resembles Cronyn in this film - both physically and in his slightly effete way of talking. I had a vision of Cronyn (as screenwriter-cum-actor) performing scenes for the younger actor during rehearsals.

Film classics: Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street

Richard Widmark must be among the most atypical leading men in 1950s American cinema. He isn’t associated with a distinct screen persona and there’s nothing “starry” or especially charismatic about him: thin lips, a pallid face, slicked-back hair and a distracted expression that’s sometimes punctuated by a cocky grin, as if he unexpectedly remembered that funny things can happen in the world. But he was very effective in a certain kind of role in film noirs of the early 1950s – as a guy who was basically a heel or a loser (with maybe the odd redeeming quality) but whom you couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for. I think in particular of his con-artist-turned-victim Harry Fabian in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (a film with a grim ending that comes like a blow to the viewer’s solar plexus).

A Widmark film I saw recently was Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, about New York lowlifes becoming inadvertently involved in a Communist plot that could be hazardous to American security. Fuller’s movies were known for their sparse, direct quality (Martin Scorsese once said that having worked as a reporter, Fuller knew “how to tell a story, how to cut right to the quick of it...He has to hook you with the headline, with the prose”) and Pickup on South Street is among the best of them. It’s only 80 minutes long and within that running time it tells a story very compactly, with dark humour and well-etched characters.

The tone is set by a beautifully taut, economical opening scene in a crowded New York subway train. The elements of this scene include a pretty woman holding a purse, clinging to a handrail; two men – one young, the other middle-aged – watching her discreetly from a corner of the carriage; and a third man – the Richard Widmark character – slowly making his way through the crowd until he’s standing right next to the woman, the two of them swaying gently with the movement of the train but never really making eye contact. The newcomer takes out a paper and pretends to read it but in close-up we see his fingers opening the woman’s purse and taking out something from it. The two men watching from a distance see this and are instantly on alert. When the train stops at a station, Widmark dashes out and the two men try to follow him but the doors close on them.

“What’s going on?” the younger man asks, “I’m not sure,” says his older partner.

At this point, the viewer isn’t sure either: there are many ways in which the scene and the relationship between its four players can be interpreted. It’s only a few minutes later, as the various plot strands reveal themselves, that we understand exactly what happened. Candy (played by the lovely Jean Peters, who really should have been cast in more films of this type) was carrying a strip of microfilm that her former boyfriend Joey had instructed her to pass to one of his contacts. She doesn’t know that Joey is a Communist sympathiser and that the film contains government secrets being sold to the “Reds”, but the two men watching her in the train are Federal agents who have been tipped off. And the Widmark character, Skip McCoy, is a small-time pickpocket who just happens to choose Candy as his next victim and ends up in possession of the microfilm. Like another chance encounter on a train in another early 1950s film, this incident will have snowballing consequences for all concerned.

The most interesting character in Pickup on South Street– and the key to its theme of national interest overriding personal well-being – is a “pickpocket stoolie” named Moe, who provides the police with tips about various small-time criminals. Moe is played by the wonderful Thelma Ritter, who was one of the best characters actors of the time, particularly well known for her straight-talking or downright acerbic characters in films like Rear Window (as Jimmy Stewart’s nurse whose many memorable lines include “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get out of their own house and look in for a change” and “He better get that trunk out of there before it starts to leak”). She never turns down a chance to make a quick buck by ratting on acquaintances, but beneath the hard-edged exterior we see a vulnerable side: she’s a poor woman and her great ambition is to die with enough money to be buried in a decent place. She and Skip are kindred spirits in a sense – Skip lives in a dingy waterfront shack (he doesn’t have a fridge, so he lowers a crate of beer into the water to keep it cool) – and they understand each other. “Moe’s all right, she’s gotta eat,” says Skip philosophically when he learns that Moe took 50 dollars from the cops for information about him.

“Some people peddle lamb chops or apples, I peddle information,” Moe says cynically at one point, but she draws the line at some things: even she won’t have anything to do with selling information to the big bad Communists. And this is where Pickup on South Street allows its social message to take centrestage. For me, the film was slightly marred by a (relatively) happy, feel-good ending that seemed incongruous. To an extent I can understand the reason for it: in another noir film there would have been no redemption for the characters played by Widmark, Ritter and Peters, but in this one, when there’s a huge external enemy to be stared down in the form of – gasp! – evil Reds, it’s possible for pickpockets and informers to become heroes. (Remember, this is 1953.)

Early in the film, Skip cocks his eyebrows at an agent who tells him that if he refuses to turn over the microfilm he’ll be as guilty as the traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb. “Are you waving the flag at me?” Skip asks amusedly, and goes on to make an offhand comment about patriotic eyewash. This suggests that he’s so busy trying to make ends meet, to survive as an individual in a cutthroat world, that he has no time for lofty nationalistic concerns. But Skip does come around in the end, and it might be said that his decision, which in the context of the story is for the “greater good”, isn’t necessarily good for the film itself. The last couple of minutes left me with a vaguely dissatisfied feeling, as if a rude beam of sunlight had been granted entry into a place where it had no business intruding. Commie-hatred trumps the noir mood. No complaints about the rest of the film though.

P.S. More on that opening scene in the train: in an interview that’s one of the special features on my DVD, Samuel Fuller talks about his fascination with the subway as a location for a dramatic scene. “People are a million miles away from each other when they’re on a crowded subway train,” he says, “Even when they are pressed up against each other so close that their noses are practically touching, they are careful not to make eye contact or to intrude on each other’s privacy.”

The special features also include the text of an interview with Richard Widmark, who calls Fuller “the Grandma Moses of filmmaking...he was very good at a lean, tough approach” and mentions that the films they made in those days were treated as “assignments”, with very little indepth discussion about the art or craft involved. “I was under contract and in those days I was making four, five pictures a year. I finished one on Saturday, started another on Monday. They gave you your next script and you do it or you go on suspension...We just did it. No talk, no discussions about motivation, no baloney. Just do it.” It’s amazing how many high-quality movies were produced under these carefully controlled conditions.

[A few earlier posts on old films: The Killing, Eraserhead, Fearless Vampire Killers, Swing Time, The Talk of the Town, Nanook of the North, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Paths of Glory, Duck Soup, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria, Trouble in Paradise]

Phillum noir: Manorama Six Feet Under

Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under is another in a line of very interesting, relatively low-profile films that haven’t done too well on commercial release but which seem likely to acquire cult followings on DVD. Other notable recent movies of this type include Sriram Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar and Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (posts on these here and here). These are films made by directors who are unafraid to play auteur, bring very personal visions to the big screen, and who are serious movie buffs themselves – as much students as practitioners (much the same way as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and the other “kids with beards” were in the late 1960s, and the French New Wave directors a decade earlier). They know a lot about other cinemas and about a variety of filmmaking styles and genres, but are secure enough about their own talents to be able to openly acknowledge their influences and to build on them. (Raghavan actually played a couple of minutes from the early 1970s film Parwaana to show how its plot inspires his protagonist, but this didn’t at all make Johnny Gaddaar seem jaded or derivative.)

Manorama Six Feet Under works with the template of Roman Polanski’s superb “neo-noir” film Chinatown, but it uses that template selectively and intelligently. Chinatown, about a private eye investigating corruption in the Los Angeles water department while also trying to figure out the motivations of the woman who has hired him, was an uncompromisingly cynical view of human nature that didn’t give the viewer a shard of hope, let alone a silver lining. Manorama doesn’t end on a comparably bleak note (in fact, it’s possible to argue that the last few minutes are a bit of a cop-out), but otherwise its tone is very similar to Polanski’s film. At the same time, one never gets the impression that the plot of an American movie has been arbitrarily picked up and moved to an Indian setting with incongruous results - the shift to a small desert town in Rajasthan here is done just as convincingly as the placing of Othello in the Uttar Pradesh heartland in Omkara.

The opening scene is assured, compact and immediately sets the mood. A brief glimpse of a large elevated water tank standing alone in the middle of the desert is followed by a tracking shot that includes ants scurrying over the parched ground, a group of children huddled together near a small fire, and finally an overhead view of junior engineer Satyaveer Randhawa (Abhay Deol) exiting the door of a Public Works Department site office and walking unhurriedly to his new motorcycle. In voiceover, Satyaveer tells us that his own life is as arid and uneventful as his hometown Lakhot. The place goes unnoticed by the outside world for most of the year, he says, making news only in the height of summer when hundreds of people die because of the extreme heat, and in the height of winter, when an equal number die because of the cold.

This sequence is the first of many reminders that film noir doesn’t have to be all about dark shadows or smoky black-and-white cinematography. The nighttime here (noir being French for “black”) is principally the nighttime of the soul and, as we’ll soon see, some very dark transactions can occur in the Rajasthani desert in blinding sunlight. The film’s trajectory is from small transgressions to increasingly serious crimes, and no one is innocent. For starters, it’s implied that Satyaveer’s new bike was purchased with ill-begotten money. He has been suspended by the department for taking a “commission” (everyone does it, but he was silly enough to get caught) and now he’s sitting at home with his wife and their little son, waiting for the result of the inquiry – and waiting also for the muse to strike so he can write another pulp detective novel, which is what he does in his spare time.

But a junior engineer taking bribes is a minor, almost feeble misdeed compared to other things that are going on in the area. Things start to escalate when a woman who says she’s the wife of a powerful local minister asks Satyaveer to play detective himself and bring evidence that her husband is cheating. By the time he discovers she was faking her identity, he’s already caught in a labyrinth of deception and counter-deception that resembles not only the plot of Chinatown but briefly nods at Antonioni’s Blow-Up as well. (Some shots also reminded me of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with the severed ear in the ground and the suggestion of a tranquil surface hiding unsavoury things.) Circumscribed small-town lives, corrupt politicians and cops, social workers with their own agendas, femme fatales, chuckling goons who enjoy bantering nearly as much as breaking people’s fingers – all these elements soon come together with deadly results.

This is a confident, accomplished film. My one reservation (not counting a couple of minor, ignorable loopholes in the plot) is that it’s self-consciously slow-paced in places – occasionally suffering from what I’ve come to think of as a hangover from the made-for-Doordarshan features of the early 1980s: characters enunciating sentences more solemnly than strictly required, and with many Significant Pauses. Also, the big fish/little fish/small pond imagery is slightly overdone (it requires suspension of disbelief too; I kept wondering why so many people would have large aquariums in a town that has serious water-supply problems). But the script and performances are good throughout. Abhay Deol is proving to be one of the more interesting actors of his generation and his performance as Satyaveer is the least starry you could possibly imagine from a Deol. He’s the picture of the small-town everyman, getting by from one day to the next, convinced that he is meant for better things but not sure where the break is coming from – and eventually, not driven enough to worry too much about it. Gul Panag is good as his wife and the ubiquitous Vinay Pathak has a grand old time as his brother-in-law, a foul-mouthed cop whose personal motto “Zaraa si saavdhani, zindagi bhar aasani” (“A little precaution makes life easy”) derives from a condom ad jingle but soon acquires more sinister connotations for Satyaveer.

One thing I liked was the film's refusal to neatly tie up all its loose ends - it leaves us in the dark about a couple of plot details. Without disclosing too much, there’s an unnerving late scene when a peripheral character (about whom we know almost nothing) bursts into morbid laughter and it's left to the viewer to fill in the gaps. There’s also a question mark around the background and motivations of a woman named Sheetal (Raima Sen), who becomes Satyaveer’s confidante when his wife is out of town. All this adds to the ambiguity and discomfort that are so vital to this genre; we come away with the sense that there’s more going on than has been revealed to us – though, equally importantly, what has been revealed is sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of a viewer who’s watching the film as a straightforward detective yarn.

P.S. DVDs of many Hindi films have started including special features now, which is a welcome (and overdue) trend, and one that is particularly well-suited to films like Manorama Six Feet Under. There’s a “making of” feature (which I haven’t seen yet) on this DVD, as well as a few deleted scenes, at least two of which I thought should have been left in the film. Also, I like the imagination and flair shown in the film’s publicity material – for instance, the poster of four of the main characters standing inside what looks like a miniature model of the town, with serrated boundaries; the publicity still (not a scene from the film) of Satyaveer being lowered, head first, into a grave; and best of all, the poster that’s broken up to look like a jigsaw puzzle of photographs.