A Mixed-Up Tape

Meri Pyari Bindu’s attempt to merge our nostalgia for old Hindi songs with 1990s adolescence and a Calcutta childhood feels well-intentioned but muddled.

Abhimanyu Roy (urf Abhi urf Bubla) is slain by Bindu Shankar Narayanan the very first time he meets her. Bindu is perched on a pile of old boxes in the ramshackle room on the terrace of the old North Calcutta house her Tamil parents have just moved into. Abhimanyu has been sent to greet the new neighbours with a plate of keema samosas made by his mother. The year is 1983, and they are approximately six years old.

Meri Pyari Bindu traces the Bubla-Bindu relationship over the next two-and-a-half decades, as the six-year-olds grow into Ayushmann Khurana and Parineeti Chopra: he an MBA who effortlessly manages a shift to bestselling writer and she an aspiring singer. The enduring question is the same one asked in a growing number of Hindi film romances over the years, most recently in Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil: Can the best friend who is obliging sidekick, perpetual partner-in-crime and dependable shoulder-to-cry-on cross over into boyfriend territory?

What is meant to set Meri Pyari Bindu (MPB) apart, I suppose, is the nostalgia trip it launches us on. The centrepiece of that nostalgia is a surefire one for almost any one who likely to walk into a cinema hall to watch MPB: Hindi film songs from the 1950s to the 1980s. From the forever seductive ‘Aaiye meherbaan’, sung by Asha Bhonsle for Madhubala’s nightclub singer in the 1958 Howrah Bridge, to Mithun’s tragic romancing of his guitar in the action-packed ‘Yaad aa raha hai tera pyaar’, sung by Bappi Lahiri in the 1982 Disco Dancer, these songs are the soundtrack to a lot of our lives. It is thus perfectly believable that they should be the soundtrack to Bubla’s and Bindu’s, on the romantic fixture of '90s adolescence: the personally-recorded audio cassette, or mixtape.

As someone of the same generation as the film’s protagonists (who spent some of my childhood in Calcutta), I also enjoyed other components of the film’s nostalgia trip: the Ambassador as a space of romance; dumbcharades, powercuts and fests; postcards and STD booths; email addresses like muqaddarkasikandar1977@hotmail.com. But the present -- the grand old North Calcutta house filled with even older furniture, the perfectly-cast crew of overenthusiastic family members who assemble at a moment’s notice to greet the prodigal nephew – feels a tad too picture-perfect, in exactly the Bollywood way we’ve seen in other recent Bengal-set films, eg. Piku, Barfi, Te3n. And really, must there be two Durga Puja moments bookending the film just because we’re in Bengal?

Still, there are some Calcutta scenes where the dialogue is spot-on: like the father of a prospective arranged match for Bubla who insists that his daughter loves books. “Rabindranath is her favourite, of course. Then Satyajit Ray. Then Edin Blyton [sic],” he says before declaring reassuringly, “You come a close fourth,” and proceeding to read aloud a particularly steamy scene from one of Bubla’s novels. Suprotim Sengupta’s script does the dynamic between Bubla’s Bengali parents with a light touch, punctuated by predictable bouts of irritation but never without affection. “I can’t do natural overacting like you,” says his exasperated father to his mother. The one time the parents are allowed to break into Bangla, it is again his father berating his mother for not treating Bubla like an adult: “Jotheshto bodo hoyechhe, ja bhalo bujhbe tai korbe! (He’s grown-up enough, he’ll do what he thinks is right!)”

But the film wants to transcend Bengaliness. So it whisks us away first to Goa and then to Bombay, mentions Bangalore several times, makes the backdrop a ‘national’ one of Hindi film songs and Bigg Boss, and turns the Bengali-Calcuttan hero into a writer of Hindi sex-horror novels. And yet the sweetly bhadra Bubla, with his sweetly bhadra parents, seems absolutely wrong as a writer of abhadra pulp fiction with titles like Chudail ki Choli. Still, I suppose one should appreciate having a cross-community romance where the linguistic or cultural differences don’t seem to matter to anyone (unlike a Two States or a Vicky Donor).

Bindu is weighed down by greater ambition and a much heavier family narrative than Bubla: her army-man father is alcoholic and sour-faced (and of course he is played by Prakash Belawadi, who is becoming a fixture for those characteristics in Hindi movies, from Madras Cafe to Talwar); she gets along much better with her mother, but doesn’t get enough time with her. Parineeti tries zealously, but mostly there isn’t enough in the script to bring her character’s ambition or angst fully to life – and her repeated engagement-breaking just feels like Shuddh Desi Romance redux. The one time Bindu truly moves us is a superb scene where she calls Bubla from an STD booth. One wishes the rest of their romance had that intensity.

As for Bubla, he may seem the more loving one with Bindu, but his comic girlfriend interlude shows us that he’s quite capable of treating a romantic partner badly. Between that and the fact that he channels his romantic angst into a book (rather than losing his marbles — think Ranbir Kapoor in Ae Dil or Rockstar), this might be among the more well-rounded tragic heroes we’ve seen in a popular Hindi film. That’s a win.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 May 2017.

Picture This -- Rinse and repeat

Yesterday's BLInk column: 

The experience of viewing a film a second time ought to be a tidier, more predictable, repeat of the first. After all, the film is the same, and ostensibly, so are you.

What happens when you watch a film for the second time? I don’t mean the sort of second watching that comes decades after the first — like when your mum finally decides she’s had enough of Arnab Goswami and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar is playing on the next channel. I mean something much more deliberate: returning to the theatre or sitting down with your laptop to watch a particular film, a few days or a few weeks or, at most, a few months after the first time you saw it.

Now when you’ve watched something once already, you think you know how you feel about it. You know what you liked about it and what you didn’t, where the actors seemed to be trying too hard and which scene played itself out too quickly. So one might imagine that the experience of viewing a film the second time will be a tidier, more predictable repeat of the first. After all, the film is the same and, ostensibly, so are you.

But think about it, and you know that the second time is likely to be different. And not just different, but unpredictably so. That scene which you thought you wanted to watch unfold forever the first time might now seem excruciating rather than deliciously condensed. The jokes you laughed at the first time may lose their punch: repetition often does that to humour. Additionally, the experience will depend at least partly on what you hope to achieve by the repetition. Sometimes we’re just blown away by the film, and it seems like a pleasurable idea to try and recreate the magic. Sometimes it’s cinematic complexity that creates the desire to return — meaning there was such a host of things going on in the film, visually or aurally or narratively, that a second watch seemed necessary to absorb them. Sometimes it’s just chance that brings the film back into your life — a friend who insists you watch it with them, or a public screening that lets you decide to watch it again.

A recent trip to McLeodganj to attend the utterly charming Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) was bookended for me by two such instances. The festival’s opening night involved a screening of Thithi, a Kannada film that I first saw in Delhi at a Siri Fort Auditorium screening of National Award winners early this summer, and that opened to a long and fairly successful run in cinemas across India soon after.

My memories of watching Thithi (and the notes I made at Siri Fort) were dominated by the characters. Like everyone else, I was most struck by the bearded, unkempt Gadappa (literally ‘beard-man’). But there were others who stayed with me: the bush-shirt-clad wheeler-dealer through whom Gadappa’s son wants to sell the family land, the gleeful excitement of Gadappa’s grandson Abhi as he successfully woos a striking shepherd girl who’s caught his eye.

The other thing that had stayed with me was a powerful sense of Raam Reddy’s chosen landscape: stretches of almost barren red earth, bumbling herds of sheep, groves of sugarcane whose overgrown greenness is beholden to an erratic irrigation pump.

This time around, I remained enchanted by Gadappa’s face and bearing — his memorable melding of a childish stubbornness and a wisdom that can only come from experience. And perhaps because I already knew what they were going to say, I could gaze uninterrupted at the faces of many others.

But otherwise it was like watching a different film. The visual seemed to recede into the background, and sound came to the fore. The funerary band that I had marked for their incongruously orange sashes, I now noted for the deliberate gaiety of their music: defying the lovely gravity of the faces around the pyre, perhaps defying death itself. There was the tinny congratulatory tone of the TV talk show, and the sulky silence of the blocked-out porn clip. I heard, as if for the first time, the mobile ringtones piercing the otherwise bucolic quiet of the village: songs of youth, anthems of the present. But suddenly, now, I heard more and more industrial sounds: the loud tractor on which Abhi and his friends go on their illegal logging expeditions, or the borrowed bike that makes him monarch of all he surveys, the dull whirring of the wood-cutting machines. But I also heard, with much greater clarity, a repeated exclamation: “Hou!” — its intonation differing from person to person and situation to situation. It is not a word I know, I have no wish to look it up — and yet, somehow, it felt absolutely central to Thithi’s conjuring of a landscape.

On the way back to Delhi after the festival, part of a crew of returning journalists, I found myself granted the unreturnable gift of the video coach. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was to play, and greeted with a mix of delight and mock-despair. “Our last DIFF screening,” said someone. Ae Dil wasn’t a film I had intended to watch again. But there in the back of the Volvo, surrounded by new friends whose reactions I couldn’t predict and was utterly curious about, it became a different film. Or rather, as many films as there were faces to watch.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 19th Nov 2016.