Home is where the hearth is

My Mirror column:

Carrying on from last week: how the chef film appeals to our corniest instincts, bringing fathers and sons together while serving up bite-sized doses of life philosophy.

The chef movie has emerged as a popular cinematic lens on family and fatherhood. Last week, while watching Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef alongside Raja Krishna Menon’s 2017 Hindi remake of it, I thought about the fact that while male chefs might have achieved near-acceptability in the West, in the Indian middle-class setting, there is still a great deal of resistance to men choosing to cook for a living.

Menon’s adaptation tries to take this fact on board, supplementing Favreau’s nuclear father-son equation with a third generational angle that’s much more fraught with social censure. Saif Ali Khan’s Roshan Kalra, we are told, became a chef entirely against his father’s wishes. Running away from his Old Delhi home at fifteen, he went first to Amritsar — where he scraped together a living as a boy-of-all-work in a local eatery — and then to the US, where he rose to become a well-known chef at an Indian restaurant.

Roshan’s attempt to reconnect with his son Ary (Svar Kamble) also becomes a way to rebuild his own relationship with his estranged Bauji. It isn’t a bad idea per se, and Indian theatre doyen Ram Gopal Bajaj is a fascinating choice of actor to play Roshan’s embittered, lonely father. But though Roshan is supposed to be introducing Ary to the chhole bhature he grew up on, he seems as much of a tourist in Chandni Chowk as his son — while Bajaj’s prickly isolation hits a much deeper, harsher note than the rest of the film.

No such tonal disjuncture afflicts the similar return-to-roots narrative of Anwar Rasheed’s Ustad Hotel. A popular Malayalam drama from 2012, the film starred Dulquer Salmaan as its hero Faizi. As with Roshan in Chef, Faizi’s choice of career is not what his father Abdul (Siddique) wants for him. Having paid for Faizi’s expensive Swiss education, Abdul is shocked to learn that his only son and heir has trained not in hotel management but as a chef. Humiliated and deprived by his father of the passport he needs to take up his foreign job as a chef, Faizi goes off to stay with his grandfather Karim (Thilakan) who runs a small but famed biryani joint in Calicut.

Ustad Hotel is wonderfully comfortable with its orthodox, often patriarchal Kerala Muslim setting, in which for instance, the birth of three daughters in the effort to produce a son incites wry laughter, not external condemnation. That comfort in its own skin extends into the film’s grasp of its social milieu, which ups the believability of the father-son battle. Rather than being a simple gendered rejection of cooking as a woman’s job, it turns out that Abdul’s angst comes from his own biography. Having grown up a cook’s son, he is now a self-made businessman. The perceived social stigma of his father’s profession is not yet a distant memory — and his son’s decision seems to mock his struggle.

And yet, becoming a chef in a fancy foreign restaurant has a certain cachet. But in all these films, from Favreau’s to Menon’s to Ustad Hotel, the lure of that position threatens to distance the protagonist not just from his roots but from the very purpose of cooking: giving people joy.

That tussle between the imaginary high-status job and the down-home eatery is also at the centre of another chef-centred film featuring a father and son conflict: David Kaplan’s 2010 indie drama Today’s Special. If Faizi in Ustad Hotel finds himself waging a war against a five-star hotel to keep his grandfather’s eatery from closing down, Samir in Today’s Special becomes unexpectedly attached to his father’s dowdy old Indian restaurant in Queens.

Today’s Special isn’t a great or even a good film. But despite a by-the-numbers romance and exaggerated gesture-laden performances from the supporting cast, it’s hard to resist the charm of food-as-philosophy. Corny as it is, this is what makes both Ustad Hotel and Today’s Special so watchable. The grandfather-grandson pair in Ustad Hotel find their match in Samir’s chance encounter with a flamboyant New York cabbie called Akbar. Akbar (Naseeruddin Shah thoroughly enjoying himself) converts the over-cautious Samir (Aasif Mandvi) to spontaneous cooking with the aid of lines like “A man who measures life never knows his own measure”. And again, in both these films, snobbery is decried and labour applauded as experience. If Samir finds himself making deliveries by bicycle, grandfather Karim turns young Faizi’s ‘book knowledge’ on its head, gently but firmly nudging him to work at every level of the business, from cleaning tables to carrying rice sacks.
It isn’t as if our heroes don’t resist. A tense Samir once snaps at Akbar, “I’m a chef. I don’t need to learn how to cook from a cab driver.” But he returns quickly, shamefaced, just like Faizi in the rice bag scene. In these times of prioritising poshness, these films are lovely lessons in dressing it down.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Aug 2018.

Feeding the soul

My Mirror column:

Food seems to bring out feelings. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that films about chefs are films about family and fatherhood. The first of a multi-part column.

Sometime in 2011, an award-winning Italian photographer called Alessio Mamo decided to travel through Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, taking pictures for what he called The Hunger Project.
Last Sunday, when Mamo’s pictures showed up on the World Press Photo’s Instagram page, they were met with outrage. Here were real poor, underfed people, posing before tables laden with fake food. Mamo’s explanation — that he meant to make “western people think, in a provocative way, about the waste of food” — does not excuse his bizarre insensitivity. The attempt to shock by displaying malnourished Indian bodies has led to allegations of ‘poverty porn’. But the more widespread anger is triggered by the fakeness of the food. Making hungry people dream of lavish meals with no intention of actually satisfying that longing seems deliberately cruel.

Thinking about the controversy made me think about how deeply food is wound up with our emotions. Hunger is the purest physical sensation, but it is also the strongest metaphor for a sense of deprivation -- just as the act of feeding someone is often a stand-in for love and care. Almost all over the world, almost all of the time, it is women who do that cooking and feeding. Meals are the most crucial part of the invisible, unpaid labour that keeps the household going. But of course cooking can only get its moment in the sun once it is taken out of the domestic arena, and when men who wouldn’t lift a finger in their own kitchen are willing to lay claim to it as a terrain.

Worldwide, as well as in India, any celebrated chef is invariably a man. Yet a man’s association with cooking isn’t something we can take for granted. It remains something that demands thinking through, making a big deal about. Further, being associated with a traditionally ‘feminine’ activity seems to push restaurant kitchen culture in the direction of an overcompensatory machismo.

So it’s interesting to find that films about chefs are so often about finding a balance between what's often understood as masculine and feminine, between worldly ambition and the nurturing of family. Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef, for instance, centres around a well-known Los Angeles chef called Carl (played by Favreau himself), whose public meltdown in response to a nasty review goes viral on Twitter. Having lost his job, he ends up on an unanticipated trip to Miami with his ex-wife and ten-year-old son Percy — and finds himself starting anew by opening a food truck.

Many elements of the plot aren’t new: the road trip, the father-and-son bonding, a man trying to reinvent himself after a midlife crisis. But putting food and cooking at the centre of this cinematic journey allows Favreau to wax gently philosophical about what we really need to nourish our souls. The battle between Carl and his restaurant owner boss Riva (Dustin Hoffman) speaks of how catering to a known market can kill all creativity, making you feel distant even from a job you love in theory. The road trip is another classic trope in a world of deadening capitalist routine – moving into unfamiliar surroundings to re-familiarise yourself with your feelings.


It’s in rejigging the beat-up old truck, though, that the film really hits its stride. There is something here about actual physical labour, about father and son working side by side, that feels wonderfully real. What’s nice is that it isn’t just about being able to summon up strength — something that might be seen as the displayable test of masculinity. Here, instead, we have a forty-year-old man initiating his ten-year-old son into a thoughtful work ethic. Clearing out the old doesn’t always mean acquiring shiny new stuff, Carl suggests to Percy: it can often mean the slow and laborious process of saving what can still be used, and the drudgery of actually cleaning it. The unglamorous stuff needs to be done, even if it’s not what goes into the social media pictures.


Favreau’s film was officially remade last year in India by Raja Krishna Menon, starring Saif Ali Khan in Favreau’s role. Rather than the overweight Carl, who has a hilariously deadpan verbal contest with his father-in-law about who’s dropped more pounds recently, Saif’s Roshan Kalra is super-fit — but with anger issues, expressed in actually punching a customer in the US restaurant where he works. His return to India is spearheaded by losing his job as well as adesire to see his son Ary, who lives with Roshan’s estranged wife Radha in Kochi.


That seems believable. What doesn’t is the food truck — especially Menon’s attempt to relocate the father-son bonding over work into an Indian upper middle-class scenario. The ethic of dignity of labour is practically impossible to translate into a world in which all cooking and cleaning around a child like Ary is done by servants.


In Favreau’s film, the labour we see – even under Hollywood conditions and with the fetishising of such things as the chef’s knife – feels undoubtedly like work. In Menon’s film, neither father nor son can make us believe that it is anything but play.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 July 2018.

Crimetime Mumbai, Adapted

My Mirror column:

With new series Sacred Games, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane turn Vikram Chandra’s sprawling novel into an atmospheric but filmi crime thriller.

Watching a filmed version of a book one knows well is always a little unsettling, and more often than not, unsatisfying. No matter how detailed a writer’s descriptions might be, the places and people in them are not realised in your head the way they are when you see a film, play or television show.


When you read, there is always space between the words for your own images. And because the imaging — and imagining — is up to you, some characters or scenes might leap off the page more than others. And they’ll be different ones for different readers.


A book, you might say, leaves you alone with the story. But when the same story unfolds on screen, you watch it through the eyes of a team of people — the scriptwriters, the director, the musicians, the art directors. An entire technical team comes together to produce their vision of the story. The faces have been picked, and voices, accents, gaits, clothes, houses and street views have all been finessed into finality. The images are what they are: there is no space between them for your own imaginings.



And so, on Friday, as I prepared to watch the new Netflix series Sacred Games, my mind kept going back to Vikram Chandra’s magisterial 900-page novel from 2006, from which the show is adapted. As a reader who’s loved the book for a decade, I have lived with my own mental pictures of its central characters: an on-edge Sikh cop called Sartaj Singh and a self-aggrandising gangster called Ganesh Gaitonde. Watching Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane set forth their version of Chandra’s vision is interesting, but it’s going to take me some time to accept a turbaned Saif Ali Khan as Sartaj, or a mad-eyed, UP-accented Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the Marathi Gaitonde.


There are other reasons for my inability to go along instantly with Kashyap and Motwane’s fully realised world. Things get sliced off when a book —especially a sprawling, multi-headed hydra of a book like Chandra’s — needs to be fitted into a format like Netflix. It’s an unavoidable, perhaps even admirable surgical procedure; but the loss of detail can feel painful.


So, for instance, the series begins with the same memorable image as the book: a white Pomeranian dog flying out of a window, ending its life as a splatter on the ground near a group of convent schoolgirls waiting for a bus. But in the book, we know that the Pomeranian is called Fluffy, that “the man who had swung Fluffy around his head by one leg” from a fifth-floor window into the void was a Mr Mahesh Pandey of Mirage Textiles, that Mrs Kamala Pandey, from whose hands Sartaj extracts a knife with expert calm, talked of herself as Fluffy’s ‘Mummy’, and that there was “remarkably little blood”. In the Netflix series, an unnamed dog falls from a high-rise apartment, with the classic pool of blood around its sad little white body.


What was, in Chandra’s narrative, an introduction not just to the life and work of inspector Sartaj Singh and his assistant, constable Katekar, but to the violence that splices Mumbai’s domestic interiors to its streets, ends up here as a mere visual flourish.


The show’s first season is eight episodes, each roughly an hour long, and there are obviously things that would have to go as the screws tightened around Chandra’s baggy monster of a book. But the Sacred Games reader arriving at the TV series must deal not only with subtractions but additions. Writers Varun Grover, Vasant Nath and Smita Singh have clearly immersed themselves in the book’s universe, but even from the two episodes I’ve seen, it’s apparent that they’ve also made crucial changes.


With Sartaj, for instance. The book’s Sartaj Singh has his moments of bleakness: “He was past forty, a divorced police inspector with middling professional prospects... He looked into his future and saw that he would not achieve as much as his own father, and much less than the redoubtable Parulkar.” But Chandra’s Sartaj remains a handsome man who has once appeared on a magazine cover, is the object of flirtatious ribbing from bar dancers, and mothering and potential setting-up from his senior officers’ wives. He also receives benevolent patronage from his boss Parulkar, who at a press conference early on refers to him proudly as his “most daring officer”.


In the series, by contrast, Sartaj is a man who has let himself go. His relationship with Parulkar is far from benevolent. This Parulkar — played with more than a hint of cruelty by the superb Neeraj Kabi — mocks Sartaj to his face for his insistence on honesty, his refusal to cooperate in turning fictional encounters into facts. Behind Sartaj’s back, he dismisses him as a “low-performing officer” with a weight problem and a dependence on anti-anxiety pills.


Sartaj’s supporting cast of colleagues is replaced by a nasty crew that can’t wait to see him down. For example, the book’s friendly Majid Khan, who invited Sartaj over for kheema cooked by “your bhabhi”, becomes, in the series, a snarling younger man with a penchant for punches. Gaitonde, meanwhile, acquires a remote rural childhood with apoor priest for a father and a mother who’s having an affair. These are filmi touches — a hero seems more heroic if he’s alone against the world, the villain can always do with a tragic backstory of deprivation. Among literary Indian English writers, Chandra is perhaps already the most steeped in moviedom, so none of this feels jarring, yet. But whether the upped filmi quotient will stand Sacred Games in good stead remains to be seen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 July 2018.

The Fantasy of Phantom

My Mirror column this morning: 

Why Kabir Khan's journey from Bajrangi Bhaijaan to Phantom isn't the massive about-turn everyone's claiming it is.

Saif Ali Khan heading to a 'Haaris Saeed' rally in a still from Phantom

Kabir Khan has released two films in 2015: Bajrangi Bhaijaan (BB) and now Phantom, adapted from S Hussain Zaidi's novel Mumbai Avengers. BB drew on Salman Khan's role as Bhai to a country of young men to create a pure-hearted if somewhat mule-like hero, who could now perform that elder-brother function cinematically in relation to a mute Pakistani girl-child. (A 2014 documentary about Salman Khan fans and imitators was called Being Bhaijaan.) Not particularly interested in (or adept at) characterisation, Phantom is a pacey thriller, with Saif Ali Khan as a man on a secret mission to kill off the engineers of 26/11.

If BB's projection of a people-to-people Indo-Pak love affair caters to one kind of pervasive Indian fantasy, Phantom gratifies a collective desire of a very different sort. As our avenging hero Saif declares to Haaris Saeed (the film's token alteration of Hafiz Saeed's name) as he prepares to pump the last bullet into him: "Kya chahti hai India? India chahti hai insaf!".

I would argue that BB is a clever film, with an astute sense of how to deliver winning cuteness and melodrama with one hand, while doling out some sly jokes with the other (eg. Nawazuddin Siddiqui asking Salman: "Do Bajrang Bali's powers also work in Pakistan?") But even many who dismissed the film as simplistic grudgingly approved what they saw as its humanitarian message: I have heard BB proposed as a model means of cultural communication with Pakistan even in the India International Centre Auditorium. These voices are however now turning on Kabir Khan for having made an "anti-Pakistan" film that apparently 'undoes' all the good he may have done before.

But it seems to me that BB and Phantom are entirely of a piece. Both have a second half and a climax set in Pakistan. Both have an Indian hero who gets to Pakistan with only the support and knowledge of a female love-interest (though Kareena in BB stays stuck at home, Katrina in Phantom gets to participate). Each hero also has a secret mission, whose justness is so self-evident that several Pakistani citizens come to his aid. Yes, Phantom's hero is on a much more murderous mission than BB's, but I think it would be a mistake to see it as simply anti-Pakistani— unless you make no separation between the Pakistani state establishment, Pakistani militant organisations, and the Pakistani people. It might be more accurate — and fertile — to think of Phantom as an Indian nationalist film, which takes the position that the illegal vigilante murder of a few men is a much lesser evil -- from the perspective of both the Indian and Pakistani public — than the continuance of mass acts of terror, or the other possible alternative: full-fledged war. And it seems to me that the very fact that Hafiz Saeed — a man ostensibly in state custody— could get this film banned in Pakistan, says something undeniable about his power and access.

But to return to Phantom's specific marshalling of nationalist tropes. First, there's the army. Director Kabir Khan turns the retired Lt General of Zaidi's novel into Daniyal Khan: also ex-Indian- army. But rather than being gracefully retired with military honours, our youthful hero is a man wrongfully shamed and dishonourably dismissed — and willing, therefore, to go to any length to win back the respect he once received from his jawaans (who clearly stand in here for the country at large, especially its non-Muslim majority). So second, there's the Muslim. This figure of the wronged good Muslim who must fight to regain his honour is a trope unfortunately familiar to Hindi film viewers: think of Chak De India's Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan's screen name, not our film's director) and My Name is Khan's Rizwan Khan (also played by SRK).

If the quest for "khoyi hui izzat" (lost honour) is the stated motor for Daniyal Khan, it is also what the film presents as the driving force behind the Indian secret mission: to make amends for the 'beizzati' and 'laachaari' India is said to have collectively experienced during the events of 26/11, when as the film puts it, 10 "jaahil, ganwaar" (uncivilised, rustic) young men put an entire nation to shame. And yet, as new RAW recruit Samit Mishra (played with his usual perfect economy by Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub) says frustratedly to his boss Roy (the Bangla cinema staple Sabyasachi Chakrabarty, nicely cast here), "Yeh log kucch bhi karein, hum log toh kucch bhi nahin karte. Sirf cricket khelna bandh kar dete hain."

Both Ayyub's character and the stuttering Indian convict that Daniyal encounters in the Chicago prison are conduits for audience desire. When LeT-confederate David Coleman Headley's co-prisoner expresses a desire to do away with him, or Ayyub jumps up with a gleam in his eye upon hearing news of another successful 'accidental' death, they speak vicariously to our bloodlust. But at least those couched as national enemies are not another nation. If cinema's greatest power is its ability to approximate reality, the screen is also the magical space for that which cannot be made real. The unfolding of a collective fantasy is an eerie form of wish fulfilment. Phantom may not be a Zero Dark Thirty, but it is certainly a guide to what Ashis Nandy memorably termed the secret politics of our desires.

Read more: a link to my review of Kabir Khan's 2012 film Ek Tha Tiger, from the time I used to be film critic for Firstpost. My Mirror column on Bajrangi Bhaijaan is here, and here's my take on another film that took on our collective desire for vengeance for 26/11.

Every trick in the book

My Mumbai Mirror column from Nov 23rd:

Writers are at the centre of Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru's Happy Ending. One wishes one could say the same of the writing.

Saif and Govinda in a still from Happy Ending

Happy Ending, the latest offering from Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru, will be a sad let-down for fans of the wonderfully talented writer-director pair who gave us 99, Shor in the City and Go Goa Gone. One part of this disappointment is Saif Ali Khan. Think about it: in his previous collaboration with Nidimoru and DK, he played a Russian zombie hunter in a dystopic Goan rave-party-gone-wrong. In Happy Ending, he plays a handsome, commitment-phobic slob, whose air of supreme confidence is rooted in never having had to try too hard, especially with women. It's the same Saif who celebrated his break-up with Deepika Padukone with a 'break-up party' in Love Aaj Kal, and the same one who was perpetually sprawled on the sofa in Cocktail, who when asked by a disbelieving Diana Penty what he was doing replied through a mouthful of popcorn: "Oozing charm". In Happy Ending, too, Saif's character Yudi is so convinced he has a way with women that he thinks nothing of following them around, sometimes stopping to offer unsolicited advice in his self-declared role as "friend, philosopher, guide, stud". Unfortunately, the act has worn very thin indeed.

What I was particularly looking forward to about this film was the fact that its protagonists are bestselling writers. A bestselling writer featured in one marvellous strand of DK and Nidimoru's best film, Shor in the City (2011): the film's central trio (Nikhil Dwivedi, Pitobash Tripathy and Tusshar Kapoor) are book pirates who kidnap a Chetan-Bhagat-type and insist, at gunpoint, that he hand over to them the manuscript of his latest unpublished novel. What Shor did so astutely was to locate its characters in terms of class, and more crucially, in terms of their varying degrees of cultural capital. The writer is picked up from a fancy-shmancy book launch, where our street-thug heroes stick out like sore thumbs: there's a fun scene where Pitobash insists on downing a whiskey (or preferably two) from the tray of a befuddled waiter. In another superb scene, Tusshar Kapoor, faced with a suspicious shop attendant at a large chain bookstore, asks him which books are doing well, and buys a whole carton-load. Later in the film, we realize that none of the three are fluent enough readers of English to be able to read the books they pirate. It is Kapoor's discovery that his newly-wedded wife (Radhika Apte) actually can that finally melts the ice between them; their differential English literacy seems set to become, in some ways, an equaliser in what might otherwise have been a 'traditionally' unequal marriage.

From a filmmaking team so sharply attuned to the talismanic power of English in India, Happy Ending's bizarre depiction of publishing and writers comes as a bit of a shock. I completely understand that unlike Shor, for instance, this is not a realist film. So let us leave aside the fact that our desi hero and India-based heroine write books that are both bestsellers in the US market. Not to mention that Yudi has apparently made so much money off his single book that he hasn't needed to publish anything else in five and a half years. He just sort of hangs out in his posh California pad, and no, he doesn't have a day job. Or even a part-time job on weeknights. Meanwhile his 'bestselling' book is no longer even on the shelves, so he can't be getting any royalties. This is the writerly life as no writer I know has ever lived it - except in their dreams.

But it is not the logical leaps that I baulked at so much as what the film seemed to be saying about writers. We have here Aanchal Reddy, a bestselling female writer of sappy romances who's in fact completely cynical about love and relationships. So why does she do it? Well, if readers are such suckers for lovey dovey claptrap, she's happy to supply it. "Mere likhne na likhne se koi farak nahi padta hai," is her ridiculous disclaimer. Her smug self-sufficiency is a good set-up to break down Yudi the stud's smug self-sufficiency. But the film never questions her motivations, or even really gives her any. It's a tragically flat role, and Ileana D'Cruz suffers through it by smiling so fakely at everyone, including Saif, that one worries she's going to turn out to be a secret psycho a year after the film ends.

Meanwhile, we have Yudi the stud, who without any proven experience of writing either comedy or romance, lands himself a gig to write a "kickass romedy" for an ageing Hindi film hero called Armaan ji, whose generosity is expressed in piles of dvds for Yudi to steal scenes from. Govinda as Armaan ji, written as the film's greatest caricature, rings far truer than Yudi or Aanchal.

Nidimoru and DK, who (deservedly) see themselves as hat ke writers, have made a film to mock Bollywood's disregard for writing - but via a thinas-ice film about two writers who seem to have no integrity themselves. Saif Ali Khan has cast himself as the hat ke writer, but in fact he's veering dangerously close to becoming the self-indulgent star, making a living off playing himself. It's all a bit of a pity.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.