DVR Diary: DEVI (1960)

In its native country, Satyajit Ray's 1960 film provoked considerable controversy when it was interpreted as an attack on religion. It took an intervention from founding father Jawaharlal Nehru, who urged people to see Devi before judging it, to assure the film a wide, global audience. Viewers outside India could just as well take it as an attack on superstition, but Devi may seem to them more like a psychological horror film about the breakdown of a woman's sense of self. The woman, Daya (Sharmila Tagore), is the young bride of Uma (Soumitra Chatterjee), scion of a respectable Bengali family who seeks a western-influenced higher education in 19th century India. While he takes classes in Calcutta and imbibes high culture, Daya moves in with the in-laws: father Kalinkar (Chhabi Biswas), brother-in-law (Purnendu Mukherjee) and his wife (Karuna Banerjee) and little son (Arpan Chowdhury). The old man worships Kali, more as a mother figure than as the destroyer westerners will think of. He has a man singing devotional songs that have a strong sentimental "mammy" quality on the steps of the estate. Before long, he's had a vision showing him that Daya is an incarnation of Kali. He installs her on a pedestal, where she becomes the confused but ultimately passive object of neighborhood devotion. For what it's worth, she'd already become the idol of her nephew, creating jealousy in the boy's mother, who sees her husband as a loser compared to his younger brother, Daya's husband. To the boy, Daya may be a second, better mother, and all the men in the household arguably see her as a mother figure, even though she hasn't yet had a child herself.

The situation escalates when an old man from the countryside brings his sick grandson to Daya, hoping that Kali (or "Ma") will heal the boy, his only remaining relative. When the miracle happens, through no special effort of Daya's, the cult spreads as Ray shows us long lines of pilgrims trooping in to pay homage. When Uma hears of this, however, he's scandalized. Returning home, he's determined to take Daya away from what he sees as craziness. By now, however, a seed, not of belief, but of existential doubt has taken root in Daya's mind. She can't be sure that she's not Kali, and so fears leaving her place at the shrine. Back there, the crisis comes when Khoka, the nephew, falls sick. His mom wants a real doctor to treat the boy, but he hesitates in the presence of the supposed god. Finally, with Khoka pleading for his Auntie, she entrusts her son to Daya -- but the family soon learns that "Kali" has taken Khoka for good. While the father wonders what sins he's being punished for, the dead boy's mother rages against the "witch" who "killed" Khoka. Of course, Uma is only more determined to rescue Daya from this meltdown, but by now, at the end, she just wants to run away from everything and everyone.

There's an irony in the background that Ray certainly must have appreciated. While poor Uma identifies Britain and the west with progress, in sharp contrast to the the superstition that ensnares Daya, their story plays out during the Victorian era, a time when English women were placed on pedestals and idolized, in a different fashion, to the detriment of their autonomy and agency. The Indian story differs in detail and intensity, but a universal point can be made about the treatment of women. Not even progressive Uma, after all, considers educating Daya as an option; she's an idol to him as well, in a way. Daya is trapped in a role that leaves little room for individuality or self-definition in an extreme instance of the social construction (or destruction) of identity. Angry Hindus may have seen Devi as a direct attack on their faith, but the wider world of cinema could just as easily see it as a tragic commentary on an emotional neediness among men that consumes and destroys women everywhere. The specifics of religion are just details that Ray deploys through visuals and especially with sound to tell his particular tale.

SINGAPORE (1960)

While the "Bollywood" practice of integrating songs into practically every genre of film has deep Indian cultural roots, it's not really much different in that respect from the melodramas of the Anglo-American stage. Not too long ago, in the long view, American producers could stick musical numbers in the middle of the grim antislavery drama Uncle Tom's Cabin in a way that would be as jarring to American audiences now as Bollywood melodramas often are at first glance. At some point, the English-language tradition evolved toward unity in tone in any given work, while the melodramatic tradition survived for a time in singing cowboy films. And yet, watching Shakti Shamanta's Singapore, I could imagine it becoming a model for American musical thrillers -- films where, say, Gene Kelly might get involved in international intrigue or noirish crime and still do his expected song and dance routines. Singapore itself looks more like Dean Martin and Lou Costello teaming up to solve a mystery in an exotic land. Shammi Kapoor, its Dean, is Shayam, a playboy businessman who travels to Singapore to investigate the disappearance of the manager of his rubber plantation. Agha, a comic who reportedly modeled himself on Bob Hope but strikes me as a Costello type, albeit without so much infantile whining, is Chachoo, one of Shayam's Singapore office flunkies who becomes the hero's sidekick and guide to the island city-state in its last days of British rule.

On the plane to Singapore Shayam meets cute with Maria Wango (Maria Menado), who has femme fatale written all over her. On the island, he'll be torn between Maria and the Indian dancer Lata (Padmini), but his main concern is tracking down his friend and  manager, whose disappearance seems linked to rumors of a buried treasure on the plantation. Lata's uncle is involved in the shady dealings, as is a mysterious gang boss, a female with a slouch hat, sunglasses and a scarf to cover her nose and mouth. While even the simplest viewer probably will recognize this as Maria Wango at first glance, the film teases us awhile by letting circumstantial evidence appear to incriminate Chachoo's secretary and love interest, Chu Chin Chu. Relying on disguises and sheer bluster, Shayam infiltrates the criminal gang in order to rescue his manager and a growing list of captives, and finally ends up clinging for his life to the side of a helicopter while Maria tries to pry him off.

 Chachoo finds a crucial clue in a gimmicked bottle of Vat 69.

It's always entertaining to see other countries' movie characters play tourist just as Americans did in this era. Singapore, largely shot on location, serves as a charming, albeit monochromatic travelogue of the place at a turning point in its history. Kapoor and his leading ladies, and a gaggle of amateurish chorus girls, perform a number of numbers at various local attractions, usually with crowds of spectators looking on. Our tour of Singapore covers some cultural attractions and a lot of consumer showcases, including some sort of shopping arcade with an array of brand-name products that isn't quite as amazing as Kapoor's rhapsodies make it out to be. What these numbers lack in sharp choreography they make up for in picturesque interest.

In disguise, Shayam is the Mullah of Rock-n-Rullah!

It's also fun to observe other cultures' stereotypes of other cultures. Exhibit A in Singapore is Shayam's lengthy imposture as a Pathan (aka Pashtun) thug who boasts, in order to infiltrate the kidnap gang, that it's his destiny to murder nine people and he still has three to kill. Kapoor's blustery performance would be equivalent, I suppose, to an American character making himself up as a Native American and threatening to scalp-um everybody who crosses him. I don't know if Indian cinema can still get away with that sort of thing, especially at a time when Pashtun bloodthirstiness probably seems far from funny to most people.

Still, whatever stereotyping Singapore is up to should be taken no more seriously than anything else in the picture. It's a shaggy dog of a movie, overlong by U.S. standards as Bollywood films often are, veering wildly from almost noirish moments to a goofy number with Chachoo wearing a bald cap and pretending to be a fakir.In the end, it exists only to entertain, and though it may try an American's patience it most likely will entertain, in some way or other, intentionally or not, anyone willing to give it a try.

AMRAPALI (1966)

I'm not familiar enough with vintage "Bollywood" cinema to have any idea whether Lekh Tandon's historical epic is typical of its time or exceptional. Wikipedia reports that Amrapali "wasn't a commercial success" but later "started being seen as a classic." It's certainly a lavish film, reminiscent for an American viewer of Cecil B. DeMille's work, yet with a culturally distinct Buddhist spin at the end that makes me reluctant to describe the story as a tragedy. In many respects that's exactly what Amrapali is: a tale of star-crossed lovers who were contemporaries of Siddhartha Gautama. In those days, the republic of Vaishali is menaced by the kingdom of Magadha and its aggressive ruler, Ajaat Shatru (Sunil Dutt, left in the screencap below). His army is state-of-the-art for its time, including war elephants, but the first major battle with Vaishali proves inconclusive at best. In fact, the king goes missing, leading the Vaishali people to proclaim victory.

Ajaat Shatru has been wounded and has gotten himself lost in a delirium. He finds himself in the care of Amrapali (Vyjayanthimala), a patriotic Vashali woman who has mistaken him for a soldier of her own country. Losing his well-known beard helps him stay incognito in the heart of the enemy camp, but a network of his own spies recognizes him and allows him to maintain contact with home, all unbeknownst to Amrapali, who starts falling hard for the unknown soldier after he rescues her from a falling, burning effigy of himself during a victory celebration.

Amrapali is moving up in the world. She's appointed the state courtesan, which apparently amounts to the entertainer-in-chief of the republic, after winning a dance-off with a rival whose misperformance of a traditional dance she publicly criticizes. She gets a statue made of herself by a soldier-sculptor who's been crushing on her the whole picture, and when she commissions a statue of her new soldier boyfriend, the sculptor recognizes him as the evil emperor and sculpts him as such. Realizing now how she's been tricked, Amrapali slices the statue in half and repudiates Ajaat Shatru, but refuses to denounce him. That gets her in trouble when the Vaishali authorities announce that they've captured the enemy leader in their midst. It's actually a lookalike the Magadha spies have provided in case of an emergency, but poor Amrapali doesn't know that. As far as she knows, the man she loved is dead, and she's in prison for treason.

Ajaat Shatru had already tarried too long in Vaishali and didn't get to say goodbye to his beloved dying mother, so he's already in a funk when he learns of Amrapali's arrest. That drives him berserk, and at this point Amrapali diverges from the path a western counterpart would have taken. In short, the Magadha monarch brings a mighty host down on Vaishali and utterly destroys it, sparing Amrapali but slaughtering virtually everyone else. He doesn't really comprehend why his beloved isn't happy to be liberated, and at this point you might expect the story to go fully tragic, western style, with Amrapali killing the king and then maybe herself. Again, no. Instead, Amrapali ditches Ajaat Shatru and heads into the forest, where mass chanting indicates that the Buddha is preaching. He's filmed in something like the old Jesus style, visible only from a distance. The noise of the chanting allows Ajaat Shatru to track Amrapali down, but when he hears the typical Buddhist message -- desire leads to fear, which leads to suffering -- he breaks his sword in a gesture of apparent renunciation. And that's it. The resolution isn't the couple living happily ever after, because Buddhism doesn't believe in that the way we do, nor the couple killing each other, for what would that prove? The only hope for either person in the tragedy, as for everyone according to Buddhism, lies in renunciation. The ending is a hopeful note, presumably, for its native audience -- though Buddhism has always been a bigger thing further east than in its native country -- while for many a westerner, Amrapali simply skids to a halt.

While Sunil Dutt was a legendary star in his own right, Amrapali is pretty much a one-woman show -- or a two-woman show if you give credit where due to the Marni Nixon of India, Lata Mangeshkar, who does Vyjayanthimala's singing. Surprisingly, Amrapali is the only character who gets to sing in the picture, and the film actually makes a fairly subtle transition to musical mode. The first "number" of any sort is the big victory celebration, which features a lot of festive dancing until the effigy collapses. Later comes the big dance-off for the Courtesanship, highlighting the star's putative versatility as a dancer, which I as an outsider to traditional Indian dance am not qualified to judge. Finally we get Amrapali expressing her moods privately in songs that are not public performances, but rather just the sort of numbers we expect in Hollywood musicals. These intrusions may make the film more campy than it really is in some eyes, but their main effect is to make the title character, appropriately enough, the absolute center of the picture. She's far from the only attraction, however, Dutt does a good job portraying the wild swings of Ajaat Shatru's personality, and the film's production design is mostly more impressive than you might expect from a 1960s India film. The big exception to that is the work of the film's armorers. While the battles scenes have the numbers (and elephants) to impress, and the director and editor Pran Mehra do a fine job reducing the final battle to an impressionistic montage, the armor and weapons often look suspect, and Ajaat Shatru breaks his sword far too easily at the end. Overall, taking cultural differences into account, Amrapali is an entertaining example of what the world's largest film industry was capable of fifty years go.

INTERROGATION (Visaranai, 2015)

The poor are always in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's the message of the mononymous Tamil filmmaker Vetrimaaran, who adapted a novel based on author M. Chandrakumar's personal ordeal at the hands of corrupt police. Chandrakumar's ordeal took place sometime in the 1980s, but Vetrimaaran updates the story to the present cellphone age and adds to the story, having the author's analog make a timely exit to avoid the worse fate suffered by his friends. The actual main character of the film is Pandi (Dinesh Ravi), a Tamil shop clerk working in Andhra Pradesh, a Telugu-language state neighboring his Tamil Nadu home. Pandi and his Tamil buddies, some of whom can barely speak Telugu, are poor, despised objects of suspicion, as Tamil criminals have been committing robberies, possibly to raise money for the Tamil Tiger terrorists of Sri Lanka. Pandi has a glancing encounter with the real robbers, but is shortly arrested in a sweep of Tamils while the actual perpetrators apparently get away.

For the cops the top priority is closing the case. Catching the actual culprits doesn't matter so much. The main idea is to get Pandi and his pals to "accept" the charges against them. The interrogation process consists of repeated beatings, their only security being the cops' desire to have living suspects confess in court. When the prisoners start a hunger strike, the cops use psychological warfare. They pretend to give in and treat the prisoners to a hearty meal before they return to headquarters to sign their release forms and receive compensation for their inconvenience. Of course, once the hunger strike is broken it's back to the beatings. Finally, cajoled by promises of light sentences and aid finding jobs afterward, the Tamils agree to confess, only to double-cross the cops by protesting to the judge, with timely help from a Tamil translator. Fortunately they've found a judge with integrity who doesn't take crap from the cops, but Pandi and friends soon learn that they've escaped from the frying pan directly into the fire.

Their translator was a policeman from Tamil Nadu who's in Andhra Pradesh investigating a corrupt Tamil politician. Eager to repay his favor, Pandi's crew help this policeman, Muthuvel (Samuthirakani), snatch the politician and take him back to Tamil Nadu. They end up at a Tamil police station, where our earnest protagonists go to work on a clean-up detail to further repay Muthuvel for his benevolence. To their horror, they see the politician getting treated much as they were in Andhra Pradesh. Pandi has a cellphone and, having been given one by a sympathetic policewoman in Andhra Pradesh to call his boss and ask for help, he pays it forward by giving the politician his phone. If anything, that makes things worse for everyone. The politician is tortured to death (without Muthuvel's okay) as part of a high-stakes party intrigue, and a cover-up is hastily arranged to make him look like a suicide. But what about these dumb dudes who've been wandering through the building cleaning stuff? Did they see something or hear something they shouldn't? No one's certain, but why take chances? As Pandi and his buddies realize that they're being set up for death, they argue over whether to try to run for it, until events leave them no more choices....

You won't see many more blatant exposes of official injustice than Visaranai. It's a no-holds-barred assault on our compassion that has no time for western stoicism. If anything distinguishes Asian film in general from American cinema it's Asians' willingness to suffer abjectly and vocally. To some western ears these Tamils may seem like big babies given how they scream and cry all the time, but films like these almost certainly present pain more honestly than Hollywood or Europe often do. Few films I've seen convey the terror of unjust confinement as convincingly and compellingly as Visaranai does. At the same time, I think the actors did a decent job of crafting distinctive personalities for the hapless Tamils, Dinesh Ravi especially, so that the characters become more than objects of our vicarious masochism. If they were nothing but victims, nothing but receptacles for torture, we might not feel for them as much as I expect any viewer will.

NEERJA (2016)

Watched cold, with no knowledge of Indian history, Ram Madhvani's film is an intense thriller with a highly sympathetic heroine and vicious villains, but for Indians, presumably, Neerja is no thriller at all. Its outcome would be known to everyone but those ignorant of their own history. Neerja Bhanot is a national heroine, a 22 year old model and stewardess who died rescuing hundreds of hostages from her hijacked jetliner in 1986. Inevitably, Neerja will be a different experience depending on whether you know the title character's story or not. If not, as was my case, the climax comes as a gut punch. But I imagine it was still a gut punch for Indian audiences earlier this year, since Sonam Kapoor gives such a vibrant and appealing performance in the title role that people probably were rooting for her to make it even when they knew better.

For Indian moviegoers there had to be great pathos every time Neerja's father asks, "Who's my brave girl?" and one of the ironies of the story, on film at least, is that she hardly feels brave before the crisis comes. In a flashback subplot, we learn that she ran away from the husband her parents arranged for her to marry. Hubby was quite the jerk, apparently, verbally and perhaps physically abusive, and Neerja's doting parents have the good sense to tell her she made the right decision. The film finds her in a happy place, the life of the party before she boards her final flight, though her mother would rather she stuck to modeling than fly in planes that could crash -- or who knows what else might happen?

Neerja's flight stops in Karachi, Pakistan, on the way to Frankfurt. In Karachi, a terrorist cell in fake uniforms storms the plane. These are oldschool terrorists from the good old days, Palestinian nationalists (and quite secular for all I know) loyal to Abu Nidal. Their object is to force the release of comrades held in a Cypriot prison. They're not the best-trained or best-briefed hijackers. They don't know that the cockpit is in an upper compartment of the plane, and in the initial confusion Neerja is able to warn the pilots that a hijack is under way, enabling them to escape through a hatch in the cockpit ceiling.

A waiting game begins. The terrorists demand that the pilots return to the plane, or that new pilots be sent. When a young Hindu man makes the mistake of identifying himself as an American citizen, the hijackers kill him right in front of Neerja to show negotiators on the tarmac that they mean business. Ordered to collect the passengers' passports, Neerja tells her crew to hide all the American passports, kicking them under the seats when necessary when their captors aren't looking. The hijackers rightly find it hard to believe that there are no other Americans on the plane, but Neerja's best intentions only move the British passengers to the front of the peril line.

We and Neerja can see that the terrorists are starting to crack. They're confused and frustrated, having expected to fly where they wanted, but their anger and anxiety only make them more dangerous. All it takes is for the lights to go out for hell to break loose. While all the terrorists are heinous villains, Neerja's writers and actors do a fine job individualizing them, making some more hateful or simply more crazy than others. Madhvani effectively creates a claustrophobic, impatient atmosphere of constantly ratcheting tension as the terrorists lose control and Neerja plans an exit strategy for the passengers. The climax is exhilarating terror as all the minor characters we've been introduced to Airport-style seem equally in mortal peril, while some make a stand against their tormentors United 93-style and Neerja shepherds as many people as possible out the emergency exits. From what little I've read the filmmakers have made Neerja's sacrifice even more heroic than the impressive reality, but I can understand the artistic need for dramatic license to keep the audience guessing when the end will come, or hoping against reason that she might escape. What comes after inevitably seems anticlimactic, but given how strongly the film has emphasized Neerja's bond with her parents, I suppose it's only right that they, and particularly her mother (Shabana Azmi), have the final words. My final word is that Neerja is a strong Indian contribution to the modern terrorist genre anchored by Sonam Kapoor's charismatic performance, and a sad reminder that this sort of thing has been going on longer than Americans may suppose.

UMRIKA (2015)

Indiana Jones is trapped on a rope bridge, with Mola Ram's minions closing from either end. His drastic solution is to cut the bridge in half and hang on for dear life. "Prepare to meet Kali ... in Hell," the hero tells Mola Ram -- at which point the audience in an Indian city starts throwing food and garbage at the screen. "Don't hurt Brother Amrish!" they yell, referring to the actor known elsewhere as Om Puri, who plays the villain in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's just one of India's many conflicted encounters with American culture in Prashant Nair's film, which follows one village family from the 1970s -- it starts with Indira Gandhi's state of emergency -- through the 1980s. It's an era of promise that sees the village get electricity at long last, but that leads to the protagonist's father getting accidentally electrocuted. Still, a spirit of optimism prevailed, stoked by village scion Udai's journey to Umrika to make his fortune for his family. After a period of silence, letters begin arriving regularly, liberally illustrated with photos of the glamour and weirdness of American life. But after Udai's dad dies, as mentioned above, Udai's brother Ramakant (Suraj Sharma) discovers a guilty secret. Udai has actually written nothing since leaving; his father and uncle have been forging the letters and illustrating them with magazine clippings. Ramakant now embarks on a quest of his own to find out what became of his brother, targeting the fixer who was supposed to arrange for Udai's passage to Umrika.

If you're looking for an Indian's adventures in the U.S., find another film. Umrika is more about the idea of America in Indian minds and their identification of it with modernity, progress and a certain arrogant eccentricity. Nair is smart enough not to make his characters total marks for American culture. The heckling of Indy and some characters' skeptical discussion of the concept of Groundhog Day remind us that the Indians aren't total simpletons, though a certain naivete is necessary to fuel the drama. Ramakant's coming of age is fraught with disillusionments, but they aren't as melodramatic as a synopsis might suggest.  Nothing horrible has happened to Udai, it turns out, but that only underscores Ramakant's sense of disappointment while fueling his resolve to push forward where Udai fell short. Ramakant's determination finally creates a sense of real danger as he enters the Indian underworld and finally embarks on an uncertain journey to Umrika. If the film has been largely satiric, and sometimes sentimental, it closes on what seems to me a darker note as Ramakant and a shipping container full of would-be immigrants are loaded onto a freighter for the long voyage. Meanwhile, his mother and his village will continue to believe a myth, watching with adoration a videotape the brothers filmed together against a patently-fake Times Square backdrop, supposedly made in New York. Perhaps a sequel with an adequate budget will follow Ramakant to the U.S., but it's more likely that Prashant Nair has made his point already.

DETECTIVE BYOMKESH BAKSHY! (2015)

Byomkesh Bakshi is a contemporary of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He was born in 1932 in the mind of Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. Like many successful character creators, Bandyopadhyay tired of his creation relatively early but eventually resumed writing about his private detective or "seeker after truth." He was working on another Bakshi story when he died in 1970. The detective came to cinematic life in 1967, with no less a figure than Satyajit Ray, India's most acclaimed director worldwide, helming his inaugural appearance. In the last decade Bakshi has become a Bengali cinematic and TV mainstay. Less common are Hindi-language Bakshi films. Dibakar Bannerjee's film -- he changed the English spelling of the detective's last name because he felt "y" was a more dynamic looking letter than "i" -- is the first Hindi-language feature film about the detective to my knowledge, though he had appeared on Hindi TV in the 1990s. If my association of Bakshi/Bakshy with Spade and Marlowe is an attempt to place the Bengali sleuth in the pulp tradition, Bannerjee's movie is even more of an attempt, down to the gratuitous exclamation point. While several of Bandyopadhyay's novels have been translated into English, I'm just discovering Bakshy with this movie so I haven't had a chance to compare the film with the books, though the movie makes me very interested in trying the originals. I could believe that Bannerjee, who freely adapted the first novel, filtered it through his experience of Inglourious Basterds or Captain America: The First Avenger or some nostalgia for 1940s India that the 46 year old auteur never knew personally. I don't know yet whether Bandyopadhyay should be considered a pulp writer, but Bannerjee definitely made a pulp movie that is great fun to watch.

 Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! convincingly recreates 1940s Calcutta, often using authentic locations

Bannerjee has moved Bakshy's first big case forward to 1943, at a time when Japan was bombing Calcutta (now Kolkata) where the story is set, and where nationalists, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders, were agitating for independence from the British Empire. The story starts in indisputably pulpy fashion when hooded killers interrupt a drug deal. Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) takes on an apparently unrelated case: Ajit Bannerjee (Anand Tiwari) wants to know where his father, a chemist, has disappeared to -- and he doesn't want to hear any theories about his dad being a criminal. When we first see Ajit, he says that Byomkesh looks like someone you'd like to punch in the face, and before the scene is over he's done just that. Like any private eye worth his salt, Bakshy takes a beating over the course of the convoluted story. Despite Ajit's feelings, Byomkesh learns from fellow tenants at the father's boarding house that the chemist apparently was blackmailing his boss, a factory owner involved with a Bengali nationalist party who faces a schism led by his own son. When Bakshi and his new friend Dr. Guha (Neeraj Kabi), the man who runs the boarding house, find the chemist's body, the factory owner becomes the prime suspect in an apparent murder. But when he drops dead, apparently poisoned, in Byomkesh's presence, after gasping out the last words "young gang," or something like that, all bets are off.

 

Above, Bakshy makes a disgusting discovery.

Below, Byomkesh turns to mysteriously enhanced betel leaves in an attempt to visualize the mystery.

Byomkesh soon learns that he's been manipulated with false leads by Dr. Guha himself, but it may be for a higher good. Guha shares the nationalist aspirations of most Bengalis, and is willing to collaborate with the Japanese to win independence from Britain. Seeing Byomkesh as a potential protege -- he impressed Bakshy earlier with a Holmsean dismantling of a cover story the young detective tried on him -- the doctor invites Byomkesh to collaborate, but our hero can see only carnage and mass destruction resulting from Guha's scheme. Instead, he tries to thwart the impending Japanese attack, though he learns eventually that something more sinister than an invasion is actually planed.

 

Say what you will about her acting; you will remember Swastika Mukherjee's name.

Throw in a traditional femme fatale -- the singing movie star Anguri Devi (the insensitively named Swastika Mukherjee) -- as well as a good girl, the factory owner's daughter ( Divya Menon) and the killer gang from the prologue and you have a combustible pulp mix that's sure to explode in exuberant fashion. I'll spare you too many spoiler details in the hope that people will give Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! a try on Netflix. Bannerjee has put together a nifty period piece (albeit with some stridently anachronistic hip-hop music on the soundtrack) that should appeal to fans worldwide of pulp or hard-boiled fiction. For those not initiated into the mysteries of genre the film is made worthwhile by the terrifically charismatic performances of Sushant Singh Rajput and Neeraj Kabi as hero and villain. Netflix exaggerates slightly in saying that Dr. Guha has a plan for world domination, but you could believe this man has something like that in him. Bakshy may not quite by Calcutta's Sherlock Holmes, but Guha is a full-on Moriarty, and Neeraj Kabi makes the most of such a mighty role. Someone hire that man as a Bond villain! Meanwhile Sushant Singh Rajput succeeds in making Bakshy ingenious yet fallible, a novice with obvious great potential bolstered with courage and conscience. The climactic showdown in which Bakshy tries to make Guha believe an awesome bluff is thrilling tense despite an initial absence of action -- the scene soon deteriorates into Tarantinian mayhem, albeit carried out with demonic brio by Neeraj Kabi -- thanks entirely to the two actors' charisma and commitment to their roles.  

 Neeraj Kabi as the multitalented Dr. Guha.

Bakshy! gives new life to pulp/noir tropes that may be near exhaustion in their original U.S. context, and serves as a reminder for those who need it that Indian cinema isn't all Bollywood song and dance. The film's ending promises a sequel, or at least hopes to create demand for one. It succeeded with me, at least.

MARDAANI (2014): "This is India!"

Female empowerment, Indian style. Here's a 2014 release that has a Seventiesish vibe in its pulp action and righteous indignation. Rani Mukerji stars as a Mumbai supercop for whom the war against human trafficking gets personal when a street urchin she'd befriended gets swept into the vile trade. Officer Shivani plows through official inertia to wage war on "Walt" (Tahir Raj Bhasin), the trafficking kingpin. With Shivani Indian heroines catch up to their western counterparts. She can outrun a motorcycle, though admittedly it's going slow on a sidewalk. She can get out of seemingly unbreakable bonds. Her adventures remind me of American pulp fiction or "golden age" comics. Some of the plot devices are so old that even within the film characters comment on how unlikely it is in the 21st century for a street criminal to have all his clothes hand-tailored, so that Shivani can track him by checking the tag on his shirt. There's even a climactic fight scene in which she throws her gun away so she can prove a point to Walt's erstwhile captives by beating the crap out of him with her bare hands. It's all quite corny and the plight of Shivani's involuntarily tarted up little protege (Priyanka Sharma) is milked for all its melodramatic pathos, but director Pradeep Sarkar plows ahead with such guileless enthusiasm that much can be forgiven. You can't help enjoying an early scene in which Shivani bitch-slaps some jerk whom I take to be a Hindu nationalist for vandalizing a shop that dared hold a Valentine's Day sale. He's India's answer to the Klan or the Daesh, though only a vandal, and he deserves what he gets from our heroine.

While bigots get beaten down for comedy relief, Mardaani taps something darker in Indian society at its climax. Shivani has defeated Walt and in the process has exposed a powerful politician whose kink is raping prostitutes. She has challenged Walt to hand-to-hand combat, as mentioned above, and humiliated him. But he doesn't care and isn't worried. "This is India," he reminds her, and that means his political and business connections will see to it that he serves little if any time. Her answer? Yes, this is India, but that means she doesn't necessarily have to arrest him to get him off the streets. Is she going to murder him, then? No, but they are: the girls he's tortured and exploited. Technically it won't be murder. Since this is India, the law there says it isn't murder is someone is killed in a demonstration involving a certain number of people or more. There just happens to be a quorum present, so as Shivani discreetly walks away the film's upbeat girl-power theme song plays over a lynching, the death of a thousand kicks from high-heeled shoes.

Mardaani's over-the-top final act alone makes the film worth seeing for fans of global pop cinema. Mukerji brings badass authority to her lead performance, and that's all the film really needs. I haven't watched as much Indian cinema as I probably should have by now, so I don't know how extraordinary or transgressive such a female role would be there. But it certainly can't hurt anywhere for people to see women kicking ass on the big screen. Just maybe it might make some men think twice before acting out their fantasies.

DVR Diary: ZANJEER (1973)

Prakash Mehra's contribution to the global tough-cop genre of the 1970s made lead actor Amitabh Bachchan a star in India. The wider recognition of Indian cinema gave Bachchan enough celebrity worldwide that he was cast in this year's The Great Gatsby as a Jewish-American gangster. The thought might scandalize his core audience for a number of reasons. In Zanjeer Bachchan plays an incorruptible hero, a cop with a Batman-style origin. His parents are killed before his eyes amid the fireworks of a Diwali celebration; the only thing he can remember about the killer is the bracelet ("zanjeer") he wears. As an adult Vijay Khanna remains tormented by his loss. He suffers nightmares of a white stallion rampaging across a greenish nightscape. He takes his grief out on the criminal element; we learn that he's been bounced from precinct to precinct for getting too tough on crime and vice. His tactics work, however. This is illustrated by Vijay's encounter with a vice boss, Sher Khan (Pran) on his new beat. With few preliminaries, Vijay orders this rather vainglorious, nearly cartoonish figure to cease and desist. Sher Khan respects Vijay's fearlessness, and respects the officer even more after they fight each other (without weapons) to a standstill. Such is the criminal's respect for the fighting lawman that when Vijay orders him again to shut down his gambling dens and other related establishments, Sher Khan complies immediately and takes up a new career as a grease monkey. Better still, Vijay has made a friend for life and Zanjeer has acquired some reliable comedy relief -- or at least that's how I saw it.

Teja (Ajit, another mononymous performer) proves a tougher nut to crack. This vaguely Tony Cliftonish figure is a real hardcore crime boss, unimpressed by anyone's courage or prowess with fists. He deals with Vijay by having him framed for taking bribes and put in prison. Teja underestimates Vijay's resilience, however -- and now that our hero is off the force, he doesn't have to answer to anyone for how he deals with Teja. Actually, that's not quite true. He has to answer to his beloved, Mala the singing knife-sharpener (Jaya Badhuri, the future Mrs. Bachchan), who wants to settle down to a secure, peaceful existence. It's a tempting idea, but Vijay couldn't live with himself if he chose that path -- not after his long-awaited encounter with the mystery man who'd been tipping him off about crimes by telephone throughout the picture. This Indian Christian, Mr. DiSilva, has pretended to be a wino to get information about criminals ever since his sons died while celebrating Christmas with rotgut bootleg hooch courtesy of Teja's gang. Bootlegging was a big criminal business in India back then; Vijay's poor dead father had gotten into trouble in the first place by getting involved with the bootleg counterfeit medicine trade. And wouldn't you know? Everything's connected, as Vijay learns on another fireworks-lit Diwali night as he and Sher Khan storm Teja's headquarters, only to be distracted by a conspicuous piece of the gangster's jewelry....

Turner Classic Movies's presentation of Zanjeer did not inspire confidence. An already gamey print proved itself mismastered during the opening credits, when cast and crew information repeatedly went missing beneath the bottom of the letterboxed screen. Meanwhile, Robert Osborne had said that Zanjeer was not like contemporary musical "Bollywood" movies. If he meant to imply that there were no musical numbers, he was proven wrong once Mala started advertising her skills with song. Later, Sher Khan gets a big number as he tries to cheer up and motivate our hero, and there are other numbers in between, though nothing as elaborate as the Bollywood label now implies. I wonder whether Osborne bothered looking at the film before introducing it. I hold none of it against the film; the musical aspect of Indian films isn't exotic, but merely old-fashioned. Melodrama was a universal art form before movies; many an English-language stage play would intererrupt its action for specialty musical numbers, and the conventions of Bollywood might not seem so outlandish to Americans if more of us remembered all the singing cowboy movies made here from the Thirties through the early Fifties. Zanjeer differs from those films only in its refusal to put Bachchan over as a musical performer like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. Vijay is a fighter, not a singer, and Bachchan's dynamic brawling must have put him over as much as his good looks. His fighting style is somewhere between martial arts and professional wrestling, and while that makes Zanjeer hard to take seriously in comparison to other countries' tough-cop pictures you can still see what Bachchan brought to the project that captivated audiences. The picture is crude and simplistic, but its energy kept me watching despite the problematic presentation, though for most outside India Zanjeer will probably prove less a classic than a historical curiosity. Fortunately, I like historical curiosities, so I'm glad I had to see this one.

DVR Diary: THE EVIL WITHIN (1970)

Always a weaker rival to Turner Classic Movies, the Fox Movie Channel more or less gave up on the competition earlier this year when it began showing contemporary movies with commercials in prime time. From early morning to mid-afternoon, however, FMC still shows the old stuff commercial-free, and if anything they've delved deeper into their library than before to broadcast obscure oddities. For example, here's a Filipino-directed crime melodrama shot in India and starring one of the subcontinent's biggest stars, the late Dev Anand, alongside future blaxploitation actor and S.W.A.T. star Rod Perry, who sings the picture's title song. Directed by Lamberto V. Avellana, The Evil Within's first reel promises more craziness than the picture ultimately delivers. We follow a stocky fellow known only as "The Fat Man" on a series of fatal rounds. Without preliminaries, we open with him stabbing someone. In short order he leaves a trail of bloody bodies in his wake. He may be an implausible fighter but he's a charismatic attacker, often screaming before he strikes. If he's the antagonist we may be on to something -- but eight minutes into the picture, he's shot in the back and killed in perfunctory manner by the minions of Hakim, a more ordinary figure who now settles into the primary villain role. The Fat Man was a Syndicate enforcer and his death signals a power play for control of the opium racket. That brings in Anand (playing "Dev") and Perry (playing "Rob"), the latter having survived a rare non-fatal encounter with the Fat Man during that brief, glorious rampage. One powerful clan runs the drug trade, buying the opium from the mountain tribes and shipping it out to the wider world. The clan is riven by family feuds, and for a while it looks like our heroes will play the Red Harvest game of playing criminals against each other. The crooks need little prodding in this direction, their rivalries ultimately complicated by a lesbian love triangle that leaves Dev himself in a shotgun-toting rage by the end of the show.

It's hard to keep track of the villains in this one; just as Hakim abruptly eliminated the Fat Man, so he, too, is dispatched with little ceremony midway through the picture, after cajoling Dev's girlfriend of the moment into betraying him by promising her money so she can go to England. Without a strong core villain or a coherent menace of some kind it's hard to hold interest in this sort of story, and it doesn't help that Avellana brings very little energy to the action. In his defense, Fox Movie ran the movie "formatted to fit your screen," possibly subverting his compositions, but the story itself moves sluggishly. If this English-language picture was intended to put Anand over globally, it didn't work. The actor was fluent in English, earning a college degree in English lit, but his delivery is blandly urbane, almost more philosophical than witty, and he was probably too old for his action-romance role by this time. This film is Perry's on-screen debut and he provides little more than -- excuse the expression -- color. His presence may have made the film more marketable during the Seventies, but IMDB doesn't indicate if the film was ever released in American theaters. One interesting aspect of his role is the throwaway acknowledgment that Rob is a Muslim; challenged to swear an oath on his presumed Christian faith, he tells a tribesman that he's of the faith that "looks to the desert."  More colorful are the locations used, especially the luxurious fortress where the film's final act takes place, but Avellana never manages to make the action live up to the setting. All the materials are here for an exotic, eccentric spectacle, and it isn't hard to envision a Bollywood director, a blaxploitation specialist or any number of other Filipino filmmakers making more of it than this crew does. Still, the fact that The Evil Within played on American cable television is remarkable, and it reminds us that Fox Movie Channel is still worth watching -- or at least its schedule is, on the chance of discovering something as extraordinary as it is obscure.

THE MUSIC ROOM (Jalsaghar, 1958)

My impression had been that Satyajit Ray was the "serious" Indian director, the one who didn't stuff his movies with gratuitous musical numbers and had the respect of the global arthouse crowd. So of course both of his films that I've seen -- this one and The Chess Players -- have extensive musical interludes. Neither, however, fits the stereotype of a "Bollywood" product. The performances are (presumably) authentic to the period of each film and relevant to each film's story. That's more true of Jalsaghar, which Ray made between the second and third films of his fame-making "Apu" trilogy. Like Chess Players, Music Room is a gently satiric story of aristocracy in decline. But while Chess Players is a period piece in which its protagonists game away while Britain consolidates its power over India, Music Room is set in the modern day and sees its hero succumb to modernity and his own indolence. But with his demise, Ray seems to say, an older, admirable culture passes from the scene.

Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) is a zamindar, a Bengali feudal landlord whose land and revenues are slowly being washed away by floods and storms. Despite his declining fortunes, Roy still insists on playing his traditional role as a patron of the arts, which means hiring the leading musicians and dancers to perform for the leading men of the community in his music room as well as setting off lots of fireworks during popular festivals. An amateur musician himself, he imparts his love of Indian music to his son while his wife laments his impractical ways. Roy works himself into a rivalry with a local upstart, the businessman Mahim Ganguli (Gangapada Bose), who's building an ostentatious modern home on land acquired from the zamindar, with a music room of his own. Roy is determined to outbid Ganguli for the best talent even if he bankrupts himself, but breaks down when his wife and son are killed by a cyclone returning from a trip to relatives.

Heartbroken, Roy closes his music room and vegetates as his fortune further deteriorates, until Ganguli shows up to announce his hiring of an acclaimed dancer for his performance space. Aroused by the once-deferential Ganguli's newfound condescension, Roy orders his retainers to take the last of his savings, money reserved for local temples, to hire the same dancer for his own refurbished music room. After her performance, he has one last triumph over Ganguli, insisting on his seignurial right to make the first offering of coins to her. Having reaffirmed himself, and having nothing left but furniture to auction off, he decides to die in the saddle as his mighty ancestors might have....

Ray regards Roy with affectionate ambivalence. The zamindar is undeniably a hopeless spendthrift and what the Russians might call a superfluous man. He is literally framed as a museum piece, often gazing into a full-length mirror surrounded by portraits of his ancestors, as if he were no more than a figment of art or, worse, a piece of furniture himself. Roy simply seems unfit for the modern world, but what does that say for the modern world? It's hard to say, mainly because Ray never lets us really see things from Ganguli's perspective. The businessman is little more than a foil for Roy, motivated by ambition and some resentment of Roy's past condescension toward him. But Ray seems to want to say that Ganguli is some sort of philistine compared to Roy, someone who patronizes the arts only to show off his wealth, while Roy is shown as a sincere music lover. The musicians and dancers make money no matter who pays them, of course, but Ray wants us to be as impressed with Roy's devotion to music as we are bound to be by the virtuoso performers the director puts on screen. To that extent, Jalsaghar is like the parable of the widow's mite. Ganguli may well prove as reliable a patron of the arts as Roy was, but the moral of the story seems to be, in part, that Roy's love is greater because he gave everything he had. And if the Indian aristocracy is to pass away anyway, then what a way to go....

Jalsaghar reminded me more than anything else of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, another story of an aristocrat attempting to cope with changing times. While Roy never learns the famously paradoxical lesson of that film and the novel that inspired it -- if we want things to stay as they are, then everything has to change -- and ends up more like Gerald O'Hara from Gone With The Wind than like Burt Lancaster's Sicilian grandee, Ray's and Visconti's films have a similar elegiac tone of regret for what goes when aristocracy passes away. If that sounds reactionary, bear in mind that Visconti was a Marxist, while I don't know about Ray's politics, and that in both films aristocracy is supplanted not by egalitarian democracy but by bourgeois boors. That overthrow leaves an implicit question mark hanging over the end of The Music Room. Will a world of Gangulis who no longer have Roys to emulate still have time and resources to dedicate to art for art's sake? Depending on your feeling for Indian music and dance -- and anyone's feelings aside, the virtuosity of all the performers is indisputable -- Ray makes that a question worth asking and an occasion for regretting the demise of someone who might otherwise seem like no great loss. In a film intended as a tribute to art, that's a small triumph of art itself.

SEPTEMBER 11 (11'9"01, 2002)

Has it been nine years already? Was it that long ago that Alain Brigand's portmanteau production premiered around the world. Maybe it doesn't seem that long ago to me, as an American, because it didn't premiere in my country until the summer of 2003. I remember that there was some concern that certain episodes might offend overly sensitive Americans, or that some were downright anti-American. I've had the DVD for awhile but haven't gotten around to watching it until this oppressively commemorative weekend. The anthology's reputation promised an antidote to the monotony of mood prevailing during the extended observance of what the vulgar call the "ten year anniversary" of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. I dimly remembered what the various segments were about from the reviews I read, but I wasn't sure what attitude I might encounter. I ended up being surprised at the prevalence of irreverence over solemnity or stridency. Brigand promised his eleven directors "complete freedom of expression" as long as their segments wrapped up in eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame of film. It wasn't nine minutes, eleven seconds and one frame because this was a European project and they put the day before the month, sensibly enough, and that gave the directors more time to work with. As for complete freedom of expression, judge for yourselves.

Brigand opens provocatively with a segment by an Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf, which sets the irreverent tone that keeps creeping into the proceedings. Her episode is a kind of thematic sequel to her movie Blackboards, since it focuses on a teacher desperate to impart knowledge to people mainly concerned with survival. It takes place in an Iranian refugee camp for Afghans where the children help make bricks in biblical fashion until a teacher lures them into a makeshift classroom. The day, of course, is September 11, 2001, and the teacher wants to tell her students that something of global importance has happened. But they know already: two people fell down a deep well, and one or both may be dead. She's clearly freaked out and expecting nuclear war ("You can't stop atom bombs with bricks," she tells the workers) but her explanation of what's happened in New York, and her insistence on a moment of silence only inspires a childish debate on whether God actually kills people and why he might be crazy enough to do so. Finally, to get them to at least visualize the enormity of the event, she takes them to the base of a tall brick-kiln smokestack and hopes they can imagine it falling. Whether they do remains uncertain.

How many heavyweight French directors turned Brigand down, do you imagine, before he finally recruited Claude Lelouch? He had his moment in the sun with A Man and a Woman back in the Sixties, but I doubt anyone would automatically think of him representing his country in this sort of project. Nor does he do his nation much credit with a gimmicky segment about the stormy romance of two French deaf-mutes living in New York and apparently breaking up on the dread day. In a gambit that makes his episode a bookend to another we'll see later, Lelouch films without sound to emphasize his characters' obliviousness to the awful events playing out on a nearby TV screen. He aims at empathy with the bereaved by teasing a lover's regret at wishing her beloved gone without realizing that he may well be very gone -- but the sooty reappearance of the beloved, who's apparently had a very eventful day, allows for a cheap, happyish ending. This may be the lamest segment of the film.

But it has competition from Egypt's Youssef Chahine, the only director narcissist enough to put himself in his segment. He's just returned from New York as the disaster happens, and is pressed by a female reporter to comment on it at a press conference. He begs off, needing time to think, and goes to Lebanon, where he meets the ghost of an American soldier killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The ghost, who proves to have once been the fiance of the reporter, asks for empathy for his and other Americans' suffering, while the director is torn between his humanist instinct and his desire to reprimand an American for his insensitivity toward the victims of American violence. Still, he finally feels compelled to visit the soldier's grave at Arlington, where he meets the reporter again, as well as the soldier's father and the ghost of a suicide bomber who chides Chahine for showing sympathy to an enemy. Sometimes you try to do the right thing and you just can't win, and that pretty much describes Chahine's segment. But his heart was in the right place.

Bosnian director Denis Tanovic (of No Man's Land fame) contributes a trifle that takes the news from New York to a small town that holds a vigil on the 11th of each month to remember the Srebrenica massacre. It focuses on the friendship of a wheelchair-bound man and a young woman who lost loved ones in the massacre. It's one of several episodes that implicitly deny the centrality of the attacks on America by emphasizing the preoccupations, rational and irrational, of other peoples and nations. In this case, there's a call to cancel the monthly vigil because of the atrocities in America, but the protagonists insist on carrying on as usual to honor both their own losses and those of the Americans. The episode is well-meaning and unobjectionable but is also probably the least memorable of all the segments.

The goofiest segment by a wide margin comes from Burkina Faso and director Idrissa Ouedraogo. It has the naive absurdity of an Our Gang short, as a group of young protagonists become convinced that Osama bin Laden is hiding in their town and hope to collect the $25,000,000 bounty by capturing the terrorist leader. The kids seem to have some visual basis for their suspicion, but their target, whoever he may be, proves slippery, altering his itinerary whenever they plan an ambush. The boys rush about hoping to nab him with spears and machetes, only to see him disappear into an airport, where a guard insists firmly that bin Laden is not in the country. But as far as they're concerned, their chance at fame and fortune is flying away. Hope springs eternal, however, since President Bush may visit the country soon. Surely he'd be worth a large ransom, wouldn't he?... I'm not sure what point Ouedraogo wanted to make with that apparition of bin Laden, but I found this episode charmingly silly and admired its inclusion in the anthology.

A couple of the directors are ringers insofar as they don't actually represent their nation's reaction to or reflections on the terror attacks. One of these is the U.K.'s Ken Loach, who uses his time to commemorate the events of September 11, 1973 -- the day when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Marxist government of Chile. Narrated by a Chilean exile in London, this is a mostly documentary segment with stark, dramatic footage of the Chilean upheaval, perpetrated with American encouragement, climaxing with black and white footage of a burning building, the presidential palace blasted by bombs from a seditious air force. This is the sort of segment Americans were probably expected to bristle at, but Loach's point is not to suggest that the U.S. deserved what it got because of its role in the Chilean coup. Instead, we should take its closing lines at face value; the Chileans will empathize with Americans every September 11, and hope that Americans will someday reciprocate.

If Claude Lelouch can get away with a silent segment, then Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will try to top him with a mostly sightless segment. He confronts us with a black screen as he builds a tower of found sounds from September 11, from the noise of explosions and crashes to the angry words of call-in ranters. Every so often the screen will flicker to life with footage of people jumping from the twin towers, and it will roar to life with footage of the towers falling -- only then the screen goes silent. The screen finally lightens so Inarritu can close with the textual question, in Arabic and English, "Does the light of God guide or blind us?" His is probably the sort of segment most people would have expected from this film. It's the only one that confronts the attacks directly or tries to convey the horror of them without a mediating personal or national perspective. As such, apart from the technical gimmickry, it's one of the least imaginative segments, though it may well have the purest raw power.

Israeli director Amos Gitai takes a "welcome to our world" stance, showing us a car bombing in his own country that gets upstaged by the news from New York to the chagrin of a pushy TV reporter. In a hard-boiled segment shot in a single take, Gitai illustrates the terrible normality of violence in Israel by showing reporters, first responders, police and bystanders all jostling for space and attention in the absence of the awe Americans felt during their own admittedly much larger disaster. The overall effect is blackly comic, though I'm not sure if Gitai really meant it that way.

The other ringer in the picture is Mira Nair, who while officially representing India contributes what's really the first of two American episodes. Based on true events, it follows an Indian Muslim family's trauma as their son goes missing on September 11 and becomes a terror suspect. His family is questioned by the FBI and increasingly shunned by their New York neighbors until the truth is recovered from the Ground Zero wreckage. The son, a onetime police cadet, had volunteered on the spot to aid rescue efforts and had fallen with the towers, dying a hero. This is the one segment I can envision being expanded into a feature film and improved by the expansion. As it is, Nair's segment is no great exercise in style, but the story has a truthful simplicity that's impossible to botch.

The official American episode comes from Sean Penn, who directs arguably the most crassly audacious segment of all. It is likely to offend, not because it makes any provocative political statement of the sort you might expect from Penn, but because it commits a twofold atrocity. It uses the destruction of the towers as a sight gag, and it compels us to look at Ernest Borgnine, admittedly then still a spring chicken of 85 years, in his underwear.  The mighty Borgnine plays a slightly senile widower who talks to his dead wife regularly and seems to live mostly in his own little skyscraper-shadowed world where he can't get a potted plant to grow. In a daringly obscene bit of magical realism, the fall of the first tower allows a strong ray of sunlight to shine into Borgnine's bedroom (the historic pall of smoke notwithstanding) and not only wake him but bring his potted plant to fully blooming life. The old man is overjoyed at the miracle and tries to share his joy with his beloved wife, but in a moment of illumination, if you will, he tearfully acknowledges that she simply isn't there. You may not believe what you've seen -- that is, you may not believe that Penn actually conceived and directed such an outlandish anecdote, but the episode has a primitive power in its preposterous play for pathos like something out of classic silent film.

The elder statesman of the creative team was Japan's Shohei Imamura, and that earns him the chance to top the Penn segment. In his final cinematic work, the great man tops the project with a dollop of "WTF???" in the form of a period piece set at the end of World War II. His protagonist is a demobilized Japanese soldier who's Kafkaesque reaction to the horrors of war is to become a snake. That is, he crawls about on his belly, never uses his hands, swallows rats and tries to bite people. It's all very interesting in a demented way, but its relevance to the overall project is tenuous or tangential at best. The problem isn't that it doesn't refer to the 2001 attacks directly, but that Imamura imposes relevance simply by inserting a sentence in which an officer declares the Japanese aggression a "holy war" and closing his segment, and the film, with the bald statement (pay attention, Muslims!) that "there is no such thing as a holy war." Thanks for clearing that up, Imamura-san!

So did you expect something besides a mixed bag? Had every segment been as sensitive and appropriate as some may yet think correct, had the whole film been about heroism or resilience or whatever the official theme of the decade is, it would have been intolerable. Instead, it's as wild and erratic an anthology film as you'll probably ever see, and that, the faults of individual episodes notwithstanding, is a good thing. Does it do justice to the event? I'm not sure. Does it honor people's losses? That doesn't matter. September 11 succeeds as a cinematic event and a collective, kaleidoscopic portrait of a moment in history, and it should have been part of somebody's television schedule during the commemorative weekend. Of course, you can watch it whenever you want if you can find a copy, and its historical value alone makes it worth your effort.