Do you know who wrote your favourite film?

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column for Sun 25 July:

Writers barely get the credit they deserve — a new book on women screenwriters in Bollywood illuminates a hazy corner of the glittering silver screen

Screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz ('Mank') and director Orson Welles, whose real-life collaboration and battle over writing credit for Citizen Kane is the subject of David Fincher's 2020 film Mank.

“Film is thought of as a director’s medium,” the great Billy Wilder once said, “because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot — the telephone book?”

Wilder, a Jew who managed to escape Nazi Germany for the US in 1933, became famous as the director of Hollywood classics as various as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. It’s no surprise, though, that he started as a screenwriter, his films forever filled with unforgettable characters and memorable lines.

The full version of the Wilder quote above ends with a sentence that dates him (perhaps even more than his mention of the telephone directory): “Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.”

Cinema has now been around for over a century, and the first ‘talking picture’ was The Jazz Singer in 1927 — but most screenwriters still don’t get the credit they deserve, even when the film is a grand success. 
Last year, in a rare reframing of film history, David Fincher — known for directing The Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network and Gone Girl, himself as much an auteur as Hollywood has ever had — devoted a whole film to a screenwriter who had to fight for credit for what’s often listed as the greatest American movie of all time – Citizen Kane (1941).

Until Fincher’s Mank (2020), most people who had heard of Citizen Kane (CK) saw it as a film ‘made’ by Orson Welles — not ‘written by Herman Mankiewicz’. Of course, Welles will remain a legend, as he should. But at least a larger cross-section of film-goers now know something about the sharp ex-New Yorker who first created the story of a newspaper magnate rising to power by manipulating public opinion during a war.

Within the smaller community of film nerds, the story of how Welles and Mankiewicz came together — and fell apart — in the making of CK has been talked about for much longer. Around CK’s release in 1941, the director and the screenwriter became embroiled in an ugly battle, with Welles eventually giving Mank shared credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay. In 1971, the influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote a 50,000 word essay foregrounding Mankiewicz’s script contribution as much greater than Welles’ — but Kael’s take, too, has since been challenged, drawing on the many drafts of the CK script in the archive.

The relationship between screenwriter and director need not always be this conflicted. The creative collaboration between them is often the bedrock of great filmmaking, with people sometimes establishing working partnerships that last for years. And yet, as film lovers or enthusiasts, we know far too little about the writers responsible even for what we might consider our favourite films.

Scripting Bollywood: Published by Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 2021. 300pp. 

Anubha Yadav’s stellar new book Scripting Bollywood: Candid Conversations with Women Who Write Hindi Cinema (Women Unlimited, 2021) is a great step in the right direction. The lacuna she addresses is two-fold. One, the writer’s job in Indian cinema has been even more invisibilised than in other film industries, for many reasons, discussed at length in my 2011 longform piece "Death by Dialogue". A primary one, as the screenwriter Anjum Rajabali rues (in his Foreword to Yadav’s book) is that” filmmakers as well as audiences in India treated cinema as an extension of pre-existing narrative performing art forms”, like tamasha, sangeet natak and Urdu theatre, so for decades, the best we had by way of a script was the director breaking down the story into incidents and getting dialogue written for the characters. More often than not, Hindi cinema was created on the studio floor, with the writer or writers being drafted into a highly informal set of collaborations, where someone might or might not be credited for ‘story’ and a writer was credited at best for dialogues, often because those had to be written in Hindustani/Hindi, which was often not the director’s mother tongue.

Now add to this already non-formalised working milieu, where the contributions of writers are barely documented, the possibility that that writer is a woman — and imagine how much power or influence she might be able to wield. That is the second reason why Yadav’s book is so important — she addresses a gap in the archive that we have barely begun to sketch the contours of.  

Yadav’s suggestive first chapter draws on new scholarly research as well as doing some independent detective work to open up the historical conversation about the women whose names we do know: Fatma Begum (who was also the mother of India’s first talking star Zubeida), Jaddan Bai (also the mother of Nargis), the utterly fascinating Protima Dasgupta (who collaborated with her sister-in-law Begum Para, making her a star) and the slightly better known Ismat Chughtai (who collaborated with her husband Shahid Latif). All these women performed multiple roles, often creating their own film companies with family members to try and achieve greater creative control.

The rest of Yadav’s book is devoted to long, thoughtful conversations with 14 contemporary female screenwriters, from veterans like Shama Zaidi — associated with such classics as Garm Hava, Shatranj Ke Khilari, Umrao Jaan and a host of Shyam Benegal films — and Kamna Chandra (Prem Rog, Chandni) all the way down to Juhi Chaturvedi (Vicky Donor, Piku, October and Gulabo Sitabo). Collectively, these writers represent the whole gamut of what might be called Hindi cinema, and sometimes extend beyond it — like Zaidi’s work with Satyajit Ray, or the younger writers branching into web series, like Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh’s work on Delhi Crime, or Devika Bhagat’s on Four More Shots Please.

Almost every interview is studded with insights into not just each individual’s working process, but also the multiple ways in which films get made. Urmi Juvekar talks about the power of listening to the script (after it is written) to give it final shape, while Sooni Taraporewala talks of learning through the process of doing commissioned work (Salaam Bombay, Such A Long Journey, Ambedkar).

The nature of each collaboration is different, too — while Zaidi has worked primarily with three filmmakers, Muzaffar Ali, Shyam Benegal and her husband MS Sathyu, Chaturvedi’s work thus far has been with the director Shoojit Sircar. Sabrina Dhawan, who wrote Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, has also been an integral part of many Vishal Bhardwaj films. Reading Dhawan’s account of how she rewrote Vidya Balan’s character Krishna in Ishqiya to be the one that was playing the two men (rather than merely responding to them as in the draft Bhardwaj and Abhishek Chaubey brought her), or Urmi Juvekar’s candid but careful account of working with Dibakar Banerjee for four films before Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! ended their collaboration, even the most sceptical film-goer might start to pay a little more attention to screenwriters.

The story of Mank is instructive about the inevitable push and pull of the writer-director relationship. David Fincher was the one who read Kael’s essay and suggested Mank as a protagonist to his ex-journalist father Jack Fincher. But in a 2020 interview, David described his father’s first draft as “an anti-auteurist take” and “kind of a takedown of Welles”. “What the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration…" Fincher told the interviewer.

A writer is unlikely to get her idea on film without a director, but most directors need a script to work from, too. And so the process of collaboration carries on: complicated, sometimes fraught, but almost always indispensable to the making of cinema.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 24/25 July 2021. 

Dreamy pictures, earthly selves

My Mirror column:

Made in Heaven fails in the Delhi authenticity department, but there's some promise in its protagonists' struggles to embrace themselves. 

(The second of a two-part column. The first part is here.)

Last week, I suggested that Made in Heaven is a posh update on Band Baaja Baaraat, with a nostalgic dollop of Monsoon Wedding (MW) feels. MIH's creators actually rejig certain specifics from Mira Nair's 2001 film: MW's child-molesting uncle is transformed into a teen-molesting father-in-law, and at least two actors re-appear. There is the tragically underused Kamini Khanna, making the most of her minutes as a memorable aunty in 2001 and in 2019, and in a much larger part, Vijay Raaz: then playing a hangdog tentwala besotted with the pretty family maid, now appearing as the wry, edge-of-dangerous Johari, a plumber with a plan.

More than any of these things, though, what's common to MW and MIH is the use of English as the primary language. By which I mean it is the language in which this world is imagined, and the language primarily spoken by most characters, sometimes even when a character's social background can't carry it off: witness Vinay Pathak talking of unscented soap. Conversely characters who speak in Hindi or Punjabi often sound excessive: witness Tara hissing at her sister at the opening of her husband Adil's new factory: “Naali ki kutti ki tarah baat mat karo”.

Band Baaja Baaraat knew the Delhis into which it shepherded us. MIH doesn't. So wedding after wedding feels like a PR video seen from the objectifying distance of Bombay – a tastefully well-off older couple get an old haveli setting, an organic-seeking IAS groom gets a trip to Dastkar Haat, a poor Muslim bride gets a rooftop sangeet. A character like Jassi/Jazz is interesting in theory – the Dwarka girl doing South Delhi – and she gets a couple of great moments, like when she shows up in a blingy dress for Kabir's ultra-dressed-down house party. But most of the time MIH can't pull off Jassi's in-between-ness – her clandestine liaisons with a motor mechanic are even more unconvincing than her desire for Kabir. The dialogue verbalises things in a way no-one living it ever would. For example, no Delhi person, no matter how rich, would use the word “vernac”.

So is MIH still worth watching? I'd say yes, for the riskiness of its central characters. MIH is rare in this regard – and not only because Karan is gay and Tara is married. When we first meet Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala), we're primed to empathise with her, perhaps because she's trying to make it as a businesswoman, and her rich industrialist in-laws don't seem to trust her or her acumen. Ditto for Karan (Arjun Mathur), who seems to have a domineering father and not-so-nice friends who bring up his all-too-real money troubles at inopportune moments.

But as the series progresses, we learn new things about both. Karan's backstory focuses on his sexuality. He is a gay man who's out to his friends and colleagues, but still straight at the family dinner table. His dating life, which seems to frequently begin at The Piano Man and end in bed at his rather nice barsati apartment, must be conducted away from the prying eyes of landlords and policemen alike. But if the forced secrecy of Karan's life presents him to us as a victim, MIH also successfully complicates our perspective by showing us someone Karan once victimised. (This happens with other characters, too – turning their victimhood or villainy upside down – and it might be the best thing about the way the show is written.)

Tara's backstory is even more interesting. On the surface, it's about class – she's the good-looking girl who managed to marry the boss. But it is also, quite vividly, about her sexuality. If sex is Karan's Achilles' heel, it is Tara's secret weapon. The flashbacks that trace Tara's relationship with Adil (a very sexy Jim Sarbh) are among MIH's most interestingly crafted sections, with Dhulipala turning in a fascinating performance as a woman aware that her sexiness is her most monetisable asset – but also realising that it isn't a stable one.

Karan and Tara's problems don't seem comparable at all. And yet, as the series progresses, for both the question of selfhood emerges as the crux. Karan has hidden his inner self so long that he doesn't quite know what life outside the closet might entail. Tara has polished her exterior so successfully that she fears she may have rubbed herself out.

Some of the show's most ambitious arcs involve a central character recognising themselves in another. Example: Tara is a lot like the first bride we meet in MIH – a journalist marrying a business scion she'd first met to interview. At another level, Tara is a successful version of Jassi: she's successfully transitioned out of her old class. Sometimes a situation allows for unspoken resonance: when an older character I won't name sees himself in Karan, or when Karan seems to identify, unwillingly, with the young girl who thinks a monetary compromise is a better deal than a public battle. 

Sometimes we only see ourselves in the mirror of other people.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Mar 2019.

We girls are lions

My Mirror column:

Young girls battle the odds of childhood in Kampala and Kabul: thoughts on Mira Nair's Queen of Katwe and Yosef Baraki's Mina Walking.

Queen of Katwe, directed by Mira Nair

You only have a childhood if the world allows you one. And much of the time, much of the world doesn't. Yosef Baraki's incredible 2015 film Mina Walking tracks the everyday life of one such 'child', the 12-year-old Mina. We walk with Mina from the shack she shares with a senile grandfather and a drug-addict father through the streets of Kabul, where she joins the war-torn city's endless stream of hustlers, selling cheap mass-produced scarves with the plaintive and unbelievable tag of “I sewed them myself”.

The 27-year-old Baraki, whose family migrated from Afghanistan to Canada when he was a child, was inspired to make the film after he met a group of young streetsellers on a trip back to Kabul as an adult. Having cast a real-life 12-year-old called Farzana Nawabi as Mina, Baraki's approach was to give her only segments of his fluid script, often shooting her in real-life situations. Following Mina and the other characters around the city's crowded bazaars and empty backstreets, the skeletal 5-6 member crew tried to blend in whenever possible.

The result is a gritty film whose performances and locales both have a wrenching, dry-eyed aridity – the wasteland of a graveyard, a polluted river, plastic everywhere, Airtel umbrellas providing little shade to the blue-burkaclad women with whom the film ends. Some of Baraki's urgent, discomfiting immediacy comes by placing us in medias res. As soon as the film begins, we are accosted by the vision of a child shouldering more responsibilities than most adults.

The motherless Mina not only takes care of her ailing, half-demented grandfather -- cooking for, and feeding him, even begging neighbours for milk for him -- but has to also save him from himself when she goes to school, by tying his ankle to a post so that he doesn't wander off. In school, her textbook theorises about the equal responsibility of men and women to educate themselves. On the street, she is the one given the job of breaking in the new entrant, and the only one who defends the young ones against the older boys. Back at home, she must defend both her earnings and her school-going against a father who constantly berates her, arguing with her as if he is a child himself.

“Boys are so weak. We girls are lions,” preens a schoolmate of Mina's. Her childish bantering tone befits the classroom, where there are still children with childhood troubles, such as not being able to do homework because visiting grandparents have caused a late night. But it seems utterly incongruous when applied to Mina, precisely because it is true.

Another indomitable young girl, hustling for survival on the streets of another third-world city, is at the centre of Mira Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe. Nair's film and Baraki's couldn't be more different – Baraki is a first-time filmmaker funded by his father, Nair is an established international director backed by Disney. And Nair is telling a real-life fairy tale. The film's eponymous 'queen' is Phiona Mutesi, a ten-year-old from the Ugandan slum of Katwe, who went to a chess class run by missionary 'Coach' Robert Katende for the free porridge and ended up reaching the World Chess Olympiads.

But the comparison springs to mind, partly because Phiona's surroundings, like Mina's, are desperately poor. Nair's frames are not gritty and her camera isn't handheld, but she does not shy away from the indignities of the Kampala slum: the murderous traffic, the putrid heaps of garbage, the laborious daily filling of water in yellow plastic containers at an open tap – and conversely, the terrible annual rains that flood the Katwe shanties, making families homeless. For a film that a lot of children have watched, Queen of Katwe is also impressively frank about this being an economy in which women can often survive only by selling their sexual selves. We see Phiona's fear of treading the same path as the many young women she has watched graduate to high heels, only to keel over into the laps of men. “Very soon men will start coming after me. Where is my safe square, Coach?” says Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), soon after she has learnt that her older sister is pregnant.

In different ways, sexual adulthood seems to loom over these girls as a threat: increasing their supposed value in a market in which they don't wish to become commodities. Young Mina's struggles for money, for food, for dignity, come to a head when her father decides to use his position as an adult man to trade in the only capital he still possesses: his daughter. (The same premise appeared in two films I wrote about a fortnight ago, Closeness and What Will People Say. If it recurs so often in realist cinema, I wonder, how much more terrifyingly often must it occur in life?)

Nair's film picks out the one narrative in a million where a young woman in a dysfunctional society manages to pick herself up out of grinding poverty. It celebrates the inspiring exception, turning an African underdog story into the perfect American dream: as a classmate tells Phiona, “In chess, the small one can become the big one.” Mina's story doesn't allow her – or us -- that sort of happy ending. And yet there is something that lets us believe, even as her bright courageous gaze is covered up by a blank blue flap of cloth, that Mina is still out there somewhere, walking.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Dec 2017.

Picture This -- In the Eyes of the Beholder

My BL Ink column:

The idea of dance as “not respectable” has a long history in the Indian subcontinent, as Mira Nair’s India Cabaret shows us.

“Aapke pair dekhe, bahut haseen hain. Inhen zameen pe mat utaariyega, maile ho jayenge. (I saw your feet. They’re very beautiful. Don’t lower them to the ground, they’ll get dirty),” goes Raaj Kumar’s note to Meena Kumari in Pakeezah. Those words are usually considered among Hindi cinema’s most legendary romantic dialogues, the epitome of poetic delicacy. But think about the line again in the moral universe of Kamal Amrohi’s film, and you realise that it encodes a specific message for the tawaif to whom it is addressed: Sahibjan, the dancing girl, is being told that dancing defiles her.

The idea of dance as “not respectable” has a long history in the Indian subcontinent, tied to entrenched patriarchal and caste-based ideas of inequality. India’s performing artistes have traditionally had a lower social status than their audiences: in terms of gender and often also caste. Any woman who appeared in front of men — whether the performance was erotic or not — was seen as sexually available. Patriarchy thus divided women into those who were marriageable and those who could perform in public.

The nationalist and social reformist agenda that rescued the classical arts from this ‘taint’ unfortunately pushed most other performers into an even more illicit zone. The scholar Anna Morcom has argued in a recent book that for the vast majority of hereditary female performers from communities such as Nats, Kanjars and Deredars, where performing arts had ceased to be a livelihood since Independence, “dancing in bars had been a form of rehabilitation from sex work”.

I found myself thinking about these things as I watched Mira Nair’s affecting documentary India Cabaret recently. Made in 1985, it is a precursor to more recent films about the twilit worlds of performing women: Saba Dewan’s trilogy — The Other Song, followed by Delhi Mumbai Delhi and Naach — perhaps also Shyamal Karmakar’s I Am The Very Beautiful. Nair’s atmospheric hour-long film deals with the world of cabaret dancers in what was then Bombay, weaving its way in and out of seedy, dimly-lit bars and homes, talking to women who dance for a living, and some of the men who come to watch them.

The visual contrasts are striking, and often depressing. When the women are at work, they must look a certain way. They wear make-up and glittering clothes, and twist and turn and writhe on the floor as they slowly remove articles of clothing. Though neither they nor the spaces they dance in look anything like the glamorous Hindi film version immortalised by Helen or Bindu or Padma Khanna, the effort they put in is apparent. Meanwhile the watching men sprawl, as they might in their own living rooms, their ungainly paunches spilling out of gradually unbuttoning shirts.

But as you move from the ghostly green tinge of these interiors to the drab light of day, and watch the same young women waking up, automatically reaching out for cigarettes and a newspaper, your heart leaps up. Sleeping on mats on the floor, their meagre lives in rented rooms may be nothing to write home about — but there is something free about the moment; a freedom from enforced domesticity that is usually only granted to men.

Nair’s film is deeply invested in the freedom these women have earned. Her conversations with the cabaret dancers touch on their jobs and their negotiating skills, their comfort in their bodies and their pride in making a living for themselves and their families. What emerges clearly is the dancers’ own recognition that unlike other women, their bodies are not owned by husbands or lovers.

The contrast is established particularly sharply when Nair follows one Gujarati client to his home, where his wife says she waits every day for his return. She is aware that he goes from his office to the cabaret. She may not like it, but she is resigned. The madonna is as much a slave to patriarchy as the so-called whore.

But the film does not shy away from the sadder aspects of the bar dancers’ lives: the pervasive addiction to cheap liquor, the tenuousness of a career in which age subtracts from value, the deliberate public shaming by neighbours and strangers, and the lack of respect even from family. We watch as one dancer, Rosy, travels back to her village near Hyderabad to get her sister married. Her family is content to use Rosy’s money, but they shun her otherwise.

For the most part, though, the women stay sharp-tongued and cynical. One of them tells a joke which has a series of ‘sati-savitris’ arrive in the other world alongside a cabaret dancer. Yamraj, the god of death, duly recognises the virtue of those women, and gives them the keys to the silver door. The cabaret dancer gets the keys to Yamraj’s own door.

“Do you feel any shame?” asks Nair at one point. “When I go out at night, sometimes a customer sees me and says, ‘Look, there goes that naked dancing girl, that whore.’ I say, ‘Motherf****r, you enjoyed me on stage, and now you say this?’ That’s when I feel shame,” says one dancer. “If somebody said that to me, I’d say, ‘Here’s my address. Come see me tonight.’ If we speak of shame, then how would we work? And if we don’t work, how would we make money? That’s why, in such a place, shame does not exist,” says the second dancer. “If the viewer does not feel shame, why should the viewed?”

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 5th Aug 2016.