Cover to Cover

A 'Perspectives' piece for The Caravan, about books in Hindi cinema. 

"People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, screechy caricature of an upper-class young woman in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s plucky graphic novel Persepolis. Sometimes, though, book-spotting can be more fun, when the choice of title is meant to function as shorthand for a character’s personality, or as a sideways comment on a situation.

In the 1965 hit Jab Jab Phool Khile, for instance, when we meet the protagonist Raja, a poor Kashmiri boatman played by Shashi Kapoor, he proudly displays a shelf of classics in his houseboat to a guest, Rita, played by Nanda: “Ismein Tagore hai, Shakispeer … aur Munshi Premchand hai. Bahut accha log hai ismein, memsaab!” But the memsahib merely rolls her eyes. A little later, we see Rita—her high-heeled feet on a divan and a string of pearls around her neck—absorbed in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 1950s American novel about a man’s sexual obsession with a young girl. The besotted boatman, slate in hand, cajoles her into giving him Hindi lessons, and the two later begin an unlikely romance. But once you’ve seen that book in Rita’s hands, you know that this modern woman will soon find herself struggling to deal with this traditional Indian man.

A more recent instance of book-as-comment occurs in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, when Tara (Deepika Padukone) picks up a half-read copy of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 from the floor where Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) left it the previous night. Strangers in Corsica, they have embarked on a fling on conditions of impermanence and anonymity. Her quick, knowing smile on reading the book’s title suggests an internal dialogue, an unspoken note to herself on their predicament. She checks the flyleaf for a name. (If there had been one, their agreement would have fallen through—as would have half the film’s plot.) But all she finds is a stamp from Social, a fashionable “urban hangout” with branches in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Years later, that remembered stamp becomes Tara’s clue to finding Ved.

It is a sign of the times that the book now functions merely as a form of product placement—and not for its publishers, but for a café and bar chain. But perhaps the real thing to note about the book in Tamasha is how little it matters. In a film that’s all about celebrating the power of stories, the printed word is barely a blip. It is the oral tradition of Urdu storytelling, dastangoi, as practised by Piyush Mishra’s character, that leaves an impact on our hero. And even that crabby old man tells his stories for money.

Books were not always so inconsequential in Hindi films..."

Read the whole essay on the Caravan site.

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.

Cinemascope: I Am; Shor in the City

This week's Sunday Guardian film review column:

I AM
Director: Onir
Starring: Juhi Chawla, Nandita Das, Manisha Koirala, Sanjay Suri, Rahul Bose

Ambitious & unusual, filled with taut acting

****
Onir's I Am is an ambitious and unusual film, both in form and content. It consists of four independent tales, the only link between them being that a minor character in each segment becomes the protagonist in the next. In 'I Am Afia', a woman (Nandita Das) recently divorced from her two-timing husband decides to have a baby on her own. In the next tale, Megha (Juhi Chawla), a successful young Kashmiri Pandit woman, returns to Srinagar to sell her childhood home. In the third, a young documentary filmmaker called Abhimanyu (Sanjay Suri) tries to come to grips with a traumatic childhood, while 'I Am Omar' is about a harrowing night in the life of a gay man (Rahul Bose).

I Am could easily have sunk under the weight of the many disparate "issues" it seeks to address: single motherhood, political and religious conflict, child sexual abuse, queerness. And it does sometimes feel a little too deliberate, like a nice guy who takes himself too seriously. On the whole, though, Onir has managed to craft a film that is moving without becoming maudlin, thought-provoking without being bombastic. It is also well acted. Manisha and Juhi turn in astonishingly taut performances as childhood friends who meet after 20 years in a context riven with guilt, resentment and loss. Bose and Arjun Mathur are very good, too; Bose in particular playing the middle-aged corporate not-out-to-his-parents gay man with a perfect blend of cageyness and nonchalance, vulnerability and outrage.

The dialogue strives to sound natural and largely succeeds, in no small part because characters are allowed to move freely between languages as Indians do in real life: English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Kashmiri and Kannada all appear. Arvind Kannabiran's cinematography is superb: in the Kolkata sequence where Nandita looks at men on the Metro, but most noticeably in the Srinagar section, where his sharp-eyed, almost documentary technique brings to life a city beleaguered by barbed wire and bunkers, an urban milieu that feels unnaturally slow, dull, as if arrested in time by the country that holds it in a stifling embrace.

SHOR IN THE CITY
Director: Raj Nidimoru, Krishna DK
Starring: Tusshar Kapoor, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Nikhil Dwivedi, Pitobash Tripathi

Luminous look  at  dark underbelly of Mumbai

*****

Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, directors of 2009's smart-alecky and somewhat disappointing 99, have made an absolutely terrific film this time around. Three narratives unfold against the vivid backdrop of 11 days of Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai, somehow remaining quite separate while simultaneously coming together to constitute a sharply-etched portrait of the city. Three young men (including a new and improved Tushhar Kapoor and the brilliantly manic Pitobash) make money by pirating bestselling novels, sometimes even kidnapping the author in the bargain; a watchful, good-looking NRI (Sendhil Ramamurthy) attempts to start afresh in India, but is haunted by goons who insist that he hire them for 'protection'; an unemployed young cricketer struggles to catch the eye of the selectors while his girlfriend fields an unending barrage of suitable boys. Not only does Shor juggle this vast cast with enviable control, it also manages to give every character, no matter how minor, their one minute of fame. So the old security guard, fading after a bank hijacking wound, says to his rescuer, "Pehle paise vault mein rakh do", while the printing press man dismisses missing pages with a "Poora book kaun padhta hai sahib?". The women may not have a lot of screentime, but they are certainly memorable. The NRI's model girlfriend asking a taxi driver for a cigarette while he looks on in admiration, or the brilliant Radhika Apte, who plays Tusshar's wife announcing to her gobsmacked husband that she can actually read the books that he struggles to: these are characters superbly conceived.

This is the city's gritty underbelly, but with plenty of humour and a lot of heart. It's a world where young cons stumble upon a bomb in a local train and decide to try it out for themselves; where men who organise political rallies moonlight as arms dealers, and do the deal just like it's a property transaction: "Party tayyaar hai, maal ready hai kya?". Think Kaminey without the pointless machismo, and with a lighter touch. Watch it.