The ghosts among us

My Mumbai Mirror column:

A new anthology film about the supernatural is a mixed bag, but it does try to point Hindi film horror in consciously critical directions.

A still from Dibakar Banerjee's segment in the new anthology film Ghost Stories.

After first coming together to pay homage to the cinema in Bombay Talkies (2013), and the self-explanatorily titled Lust Stories (2018), the once-unlikely foursome of Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar are back with a new anthology film: Ghost Stories.

The films vary widely, not just in setting and tone, but in quality. Anurag Kashyap's contribution, starring an awkwardly gangly sari-clad Sobhita Dhulipala as a woman who is both an expectant mother and a surrogate maternal figure to her little nephew, didn't work for me at all (spoilers ahead) despite the effectiveness of the scowling child. The possibility of an uncanny relationship between external visual depictions and real-life transformations – think everything from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to MR James 1904 classic ghost story 'The Mezzotint' – has always fascinated me, and it is of course also the basis of certain long-held ideas of magic, such as voodoo. So Kashyap's use of the child's drawing, his repeated scratching-out, and his apparently innate sense of his own power, was for me the most gripping part of the story. But the film stirs in all sorts of other elements – nightmares, superstitions, silent men, shouting mothers, half-human states, crows' eggs, and a whole room full of creepy dolls. If all these ingredients were meant to be a recipe for chills, the dilution leaves us baffled and lukewarm.

Zoya Akhtar's film wins big by casting the brilliant Surekha Sikri as a bedridden old lady attended on by a lackadaisical young replacement nurse (Jahnvi Kapoor). As always with Akhtar's films (including her segment about a maid and her master in Lust Stories), there is an attentiveness to space: the multiple empty rooms that the youthful Sameera dashes through with a token agarbatti, the echoing sound of children's laughter from the stairwell when she answers the doorbell to find no-one there. It's a talent particularly useful in crafting fear, if Akhtar were interested. But she isn't, not really.

What she seems keen on is a juxtaposition of youth and age, sharpness and shutdown– and things aren't as simple as they seem. Sameera's briskness as she cleans up Mrs. Malik is matched by her frequent distractedness. Mrs. Malik, meanwhile, drifts in and out of consciousness, but recites from Wordsworth's apposite 'Intimations of Immortality' with tinny perfection: “Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night or day./ The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” And knows more about the fruitlessness of waiting for someone than Sameera can.

Genre fiction and film – especially of the scary variety – has long been a vehicle for social commentary. The man-made monster at the centre of the still-popular Frankenstein – a book first published anonymously by a ridiculously young Mary Shelley in 1818 – is an early (and eerily prescient) warning against technological intervention in human life. Twentieth century horror, especially the zombie movie, has been powerfully shaped by George Romero's cult classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of his triad of 'Dead' films: Dawn of the Dead, set in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead (1985). Romero onwards, the slow-moving, cannibalistic zombie – a creature whose bite turns the bitten person into a zombie herself -- has more often than not been a powerful metaphor for the horrific things that ail society: racial prejudice, consumerism, militarism, classism. That tradition continues down to Jordan Peele's Us (2019).

Karan Johar's film isn't scary, despite his newly-married heroine walking us endlessly through the candle-lit expanse of her husband's family mansion (going for a cross between K3G and Trikaal) in search of a ghostly grandmother. The only effective presence is that of the forbidding housekeeper Shanti, who guards Dadi's room in a manner clearly inspired by Mrs. Danvers' guarding of Rebecca's in the Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film). Johar has moments that invite critical examination: such as the friend who declares the family as “totally legit” based on “community mein izzat” and “thriving business”, forcing us to think about how such an aura of social legitimacy survives the violence pushed under the floorboards. (But you'd do better to watch Parasites.)

There is, happily, a zombie film in the quartet. It is Dibakar Banerjee's, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the sharpest of the four – politically, but also in filmmaking terms. Sukant Goel plays a bored, exhausted sarkari official who arrives in a remote village to report on a government school – to find a ravaged, half-burnt settlement where the only living humans appear to be two children. The zombies from the bigger village have eaten everyone from the smaller village, and will eat everyone except those who turn on their own kind. If you speak up, you attract the attention of the creatures. If you join the feasting, you will save your skin – but be blinded for life. Watch it -- and try not to be blind.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jan 2020.

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.

The Copycat Criminal

Today's Mirror column:

Raman Raghav 2.0 is a breathtaking portrait of a serial killer. But it is also an incisive, disturbing perspective on violence. 

Whether in his still-unreleased Paanch, about a band of friends who turn killers, or 2014's Ugly, in which a child becomes a pawn in a game of one-upmanship between adults, or the more familiar power struggles of Gangs of Wasseypur, the psychology of amorality has always been Anurag Kashyap's predominant interest. Raman Raghav 2.0 might be the tautest, most mature exploration of that interest. This is particularly admirable because the subject is a serial killer, someone without any rational reason to commit the crimes he does. Unlike in an Ugly or GoW, violence here cannot be explained as a means to an end. It is sui generis, and its own reward. 

And yet violence is also - like all human traits - something we learn by mimicking others. Kashyap and writer Vasan Bala make that imitative impulse central to their brilliant script, in more ways than one. The fictional protagonist—played with pitch-perfect, chilling ordinariness by Nawazuddin Siddiqui—is not the notorious 1960s serial killer, but a murderer in the present who decides to model himself on him. Like the filmmakers, he is fascinated by the figure of Raman Raghav. Some of this sense of kinship may or may not be triggered by his own given name, which may or not be Ramanna. But the man who first surrenders at the police station gives his name as Sindhi Dalwai, telling the confused cops that that was Raman Raghav's real name, and now it is his. Raman was in wireless communication with God, he says, killing whoever God tells him to. As for himself, he's a little more advanced: he's God's CCTV camera. 

But Ramanna's copying of Raman is only the first form this mimicry of violence takes. [This isn't a review, and there are spoilers ahead, so if you plan on seeing the film, you might want to stop reading now and come back afterwards.] Much more terrifying is the mirroring between the serial killer and the policeman, Raman and Raghav. "I'm like a Yamraaj ka doot [an agent of the God of Death], ridding the world of people," says Siddiqui's Ramanna to Vicky Kaushal's cocaine-fuelled Raghavan. "Is maamle mein hum same to same huye [In this respect we're exactly the same]." The impunity and arbitrariness with which the police murder people in India is a public secret (the devastating Tamil film Visaaranai is a recent filmic reminder). But that fact has perhaps never received a more sinister, personalised reflection in fiction than Raman Raghav 2.0. 

Ramanna and Raghavan may seem poles apart to start with, but as the film progresses you see their similarities: their vulnerability and the violence that disguises it, their salaciousness about women they are close to. Kashyap adds other signifiers of mimicry, as ordinary as they are masterful. For instance, in accordance with his self-declared persona, Siddiqui keeps circling his fingers around his eyes (it is a gesture familiar from a very different sort of Hindi film thriller: Pran used it as informer Michael D'Souza in the 1974 Majboor). If Ramanna is constantly putting on imaginary spectacles, Raghavan never takes his real ones off. If Ramanna's ek-tak gaze never misses anything, his eyes lighting up in the dark, Raghavan's is always shielded from the light. It is no coincidence that the last purchase Ramanna makes is a pair of secondhand sunglasses. 

Barring a couple of exceptions, Kashyap provides few clues to why this man kills those he does. But what the film suggests, emphatically, is that he only kills those he knows he can. In what might be one of its most breathtakingly filmed scenes, a homeless, starving Ramanna, having just escaped from days of illegal police confinement, discovers a little hutment almost hidden by greenery. A woman is cooking rotis on an open-air chulha, handing one to a little child. Siddiqui's hungry gaze follows them first, and then he picks up a stone and does the same. But where he had imagined a solitary woman, there is a whole circle of men, eating silently, sitting on their haunches. As he almost trips backward and makes a run for it, one thinks of how effortlessly the scene has suggested his animality: the cat whose mewing first draws his attention, the leafy wildness of the surroundings, the silent padded feet on which he approaches his victim, and his fleet-footed departure from a sense of self-preservation when he realizes he is outnumbered. 

Violence is an elemental display of strength, Kashyap seems to be saying: a way of expressing one's advantage over those who cannot fight back: the unarmed, older or physically weaker, the drunk, the fast asleep. It can, once the brain has contorted itself thus, give the powerless man a strange sense of power, no matter how ephemeral. And sometimes that power is infectious enough to be a warped kind of sexy. 

But it is not only serial killers who experience that high. Perhaps the film's most devastating insight comes from Raghavan's scene with his father (the superb Vipin Sharma). The cocky young cop, whom we have so far only seen bossing over his team and bullying his lover (a very interesting Sobhita Dhulipala) takes only a few seconds in his father's hectoring company to be reduced to an errant child. And then, like a confused actor who's suddenly remembered his role, he turns the tables. It is as if the only communication between them is fear—and here, too, the son mirrors the father. As with Raman and Raghav, the copy outdoes the original. 

Bala and Kashyap have produced an unforgettable character, a man whose madness is unique-—and yet also located him on a continuum. That makes RR 2.0's exploration of violence more frightening than any serial killer film I've ever seen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 June 2016.