Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

Haunted by Homelessness

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

When it comes to city housing, Hindi films have often painted a bleak picture, and CityLights is as dark as they come. But now even our fantasies only promise homes for the rich.

Hansal Mehta's CityLights returns us to what used to be a persistent theme of Bombay cinema: the search for a home in the city. An authorised adaptation of last year's British-Filipino film Metro Manila, CityLights brings its protagonists - Deepak (Rajkummar Rao), his wife Rakhi (Patralekha) and their daughter Mahi - from a Rajasthan village to big, bad Mumbai. (In what is one of the first signs of the hoariness of the plot, Deepak is escaping the clutches of a moneylender.) Within hours of arrival in the metropolis, they have been tricked out of their savings by the promise of a home. 

The enormity of that first betrayal is depicted in an early scene that is bleak, and powerful. Rakhi has already started cleaning the empty flat as her own when the construction workers return. There is an unspoken, brutal marshalling of class here: seeing a woman squatting on the floor with a jhadoo, the city workers assume she is a hired cleaning woman. Because of course no-one who looks like a bai can possibly be at home in this relatively comfortable space. Bai, tum ghar jao, they say to the baffled Rakhi, who continues to sweep at first. Then, as realization dawns on her (and them), she roots herself to the floor. It is a harrowing moment of cinema: the frail young woman clinging literally and metaphorically to the ground beneath her feet, as the men try their best to drag her out of the flat.

Rakhi is removed, of course, and when we next see the family, it has floated into that vast amorphous population of the urban homeless. They move from pavement to pavement for a few days, until a bar dancer helps arrange temporary shelter in a half-constructed multi-storeyed building. "When this flat is ready, it'll go for three crores!" declares the tout with that strange pride in something he will never own. Then he pockets a hundred rupees a night to let the family sleep on the bare floor, amid the exposed bricks and beams and dangerous open parapets.

The shadowy spaces of the half-constructed building are a favourite locale for Bombay cinema: most often as the site of action sequences, or a villain's den. CityLights is perhaps the first film to use the space as ironic shelter for the homeless, the city view spread out below less grandly picturesque than cruelly anonymous.

Watching CityLights reminded me of Gharonda (The Nest, 1977), about another young couple's ill-fated striving for a home. Though of course that unusual Gulzar screenplay -- directed by Bhimsain -- was about middle class office-goers: people who did not have ready cash, but could conceivably save up for it. And Gharonda's protagonists do try, working overtime at odd jobs. Sudeep (Amol Palekar) puts up film posters at night, Chhaya (Zarina Wahab) takes on a modelling assignment. But the Rs. 5000 down payment they need to book an LIG flat -- via a munshi known to Sudeep's roommate - is too large to generate so quickly. Sudeep's monthly salary is only 600. So they borrow money to pay the munshi, and in the lovely song 'Do Deewane Sheher Mein', fill the half-done building with their dreams of domestic bliss.

But a house in Bombay is no place for dreaming. It is a matter of life and death. The munshi disappears with the money; Sudeep's roommate commits suicide; Sudeep himself, broken by the turn of events, turns bitter and desperate. And as in CityLights nearly four decades later, acts of desperation only drag you further into the quagmire. Sudeep ends Gharonda as a ghost of his former self - walking away into the horizon, dwarfed by the tall buildings of Bombay.

Amol Palekar as Sudeep in Gharonda

Abandoned buildings were also the scene of a very different sort of film about homelessness and injustice, earlier this summer. All across Mumbai, according to the Amitabh-Bachchan-starrer Bhootnath Returns, are apartment buildings on whom work has stopped because they are haunted. They are haunted by the ghosts of those whose lives were lost in their construction - from engineers who fell to their deaths to displaced jhuggi dwellers. The good ghost Bhootnath (Bachchan) combines forces with a little boy from Dharavi (Partho) to get these hapless souls justice, so that they go peacefully into the next world and our ghostbusters can get paid by the building mafia.

Once upon a time, mainstream Bombay cinema sold a dream - the dream of the poor boy who would grow up to be Amitabh Bachchan, and buy the building for which his mother had once broken stones as a labourer. Sometimes that dream was a mass one, as in the marvellous scene in Coolie when Bachchan smashes the villain's chandelier as he says, to give every coolie's house a light like that one. The middle class film in the same period - even a film as sensitive as Gharonda - simply did not encompass the labouring classes in its imagination. The one time that manual labourers appear in Gharonda, they pause their work obligingly to turn into a gigglingly indulgent audience for the middle class couple's song of home ownership. (It is another matter that the song's desires remain unfulfilled).

In 2014, Bollywood has offered us two visions. On the one hand, the darkly cynical denouement of CityLights, in which we learn that there is no such thing as a free gift - or a free home. On the other, a feel-good tale in which Bachchan -- now a ghost of his former self -- gives corrupt officials lessons in citizenry. But to what end? So that the work of building houses for the rich can continue. For the rest, a home in the city is no longer even held out as fantasy.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.