Everyone wants a happy ending

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Ludo tries hard to present the world as breezily anarchic, but it's hard to sustain while going on about good and evil

Anurag Basu likes to cultivate the idea of chaos, creating a tangle of threads so he can have the aesthetic pleasure of disentangling them. His latest film Ludo, which launched on a streaming platform earlier this year, takes that aesthetic conceit to its acme. A film with four different tracks needs a structuring motif, and Basu's choice is the popular board game with a board and counters organised into four primary colours. At first it seems that the only uniting factor among these disparate narratives is an unkillable don called Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), from whose gun -- and whose den -- all stories flow.

But while the four tracks appear to be treading their individual way to anarchy, Basu has clearly spent some time imbuing them with a fundamental premise. At the centre of each is a pair of individuals who seem like they ought to come together neatly: fill each other's blank spaces, so to speak. But they're also unlucky pairings, disunited by fate and selfhood. There's a bullied nurse and a bullied mall attendant; a neglected little girl and an ex-goonda separated from his own child; a besotted dhaba owner and his unrequited childhood love, reeling from her discovery of a cheating husband; and a pretty girl obsessed with hunting down the perfect husband, unlike the laidback guy she has fun sex with. There is also Sattu Bhaiya himself-- he who cannot be killed -- and the senior Malayali nurse Lata Kutty, to whom he takes an unexpected shine.

All of Basu's characters need rescuing -- but in each pair, there's one that we're told needs rescuing more. Abhishek Bachchan's Bittu, for example, is a sad man who wants his daughter back, and transfers some of his affections to the lost little girl he stumbles on one evening. The child (Inayat Verma) is named Mini, in Basu's clear tribute to the classic Kabuliwala narrative about another tall burly man who's actually a softie missing his faraway daughter. You'd think the child would be the more vulnerable one, but of course it's she who delivers the life lesson: if the object of your affections is happy elsewhere, you've just got to be happy for them. Bittu refuses to listen when his ex-wife delivers it as a stinging remark on confusing love and ego, but he absorbs it perfectly out of the mouth of a child.

Thankfully the little girl isn't implied to be exploiting Bittu – which does feel like the case with some of the film's other women characters. Aditya Roy Kapur's Akash seeks (and finds) casual sex on a matrimonial website. But it's his sexual partner Shruti (Sanya Malhotra) that we're told needs to be saved from her dream of finding a rich provider. Meanwhile Fatima Sana Sheikh's Pinky exploits Rajkummar Rao's unyielding affections all the way through school into adulthood, and even beyond – even her marriage to an ostensibly more suitable boy cannot prevent Alloo (Rajkummar) from being the only man she can turn to in a crisis.

Crisis, though, is what makes the film's boardgame-level philosophising work to the extent it does. “Jo bin matlab de saath, usi ka pakad le haath (When someone helps you without a motive, that's the one to hang on to),” Shruti quotes her grandmother as having proclaimed. The bullied twosome have no language in common – Pearl Maane's Sheeja can't speak much Hindi, Rohit Saraf's Rahul Awasthi certainly understands no Malayalam. As they find themselves launched on an adventure not quite of their making, the thrill of the ride is all they have in common. But when you see them at film's end, having exchanged their sad working lives for a hot pink car and fancy clothes, you wonder how long the spark can survive through such comfort. As Akash tells Shruti, in another of the tracks, having too little can make happiness hard – but having too much makes it impossible.

But for all Basu's attempts at Seventh-Seal-type commentary in the guise of Yamraj (the Hindu god of death), Ludo can't have only neat conclusions. As Yamraj says, “If the Kauravas were villains, what was Duryodhana doing in heaven at the end?” So Ludo leaves us with at least one un-deserved sad ending.

But the randomness he claims isn't really sustained – most characters get their just desserts, including Sattu Bhaiyya's deserved ludic one: paralysis followed by life with a loving caretaker, a vision of a lifelong future we've seen in previous Indian films, most visibly Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. Anarchy isn't as easy as they make it out to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Dec 2020.

The Lives of Others

Watching Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 murder mystery, in a post-COVID world 

“The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it,” wrote the hugely popular film critic Roger Ebert in his 1999 review of the film Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's film caused great outrage upon its release in 1960, and Ebert speculated — nearly 40 years later — that it was because it broke that unspoken contract between the audience and the filmmaker. By making its protagonist a serial killer who liked to film his victims in the throes of death, Peeping Tom forced viewers to contend with the violence of our own scopophilia, the pleasure we derive from looking.

Six years before Peeping Tom, another British director had made a film about the pleasure of looking, featuring a news photographer instead of a film studio focus-puller. But Alfred Hitchcock was too clever to make his audiences too uncomfortable. The kernel of Rear Window (1954) lay in a 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story called 'It Had To Be Murder', where the temporarily laid-up narrator's view of the windows across from his own leads him to suspect a murder. “I could have constructed a timetable of [my neighbours'] comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom,” concedes Woolrich's narrator, before quickly denying any intentional voyeurism. “That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea.”

Hitchcock's hero doesn't get let off so easily. Within the film's first few minutes, his no-nonsense nurse Stella berates him as a 'window shopper' who spends his days looking at newly married couples and “bikini bombshells”. Stella has no doubt that spying on other people is a modern-day evil: “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. They used to poke your eyes out for that sort of thing, with a red-hot poker...” . But Hitchcock, along with his superb screenwriter John Michael Hayes', transforms the original story to make his hero a professional viewer of the world — and his film all about looking.

LB Jefferies, better known as Jeff (James Stewart) is a globe-trotting photographer who's fractured his leg on a particularly adventurous shoot. When the film opens, he has been holed up in his New York apartment for five weeks, with nothing better to do than look out of his rear window. While he converts these telling glimpses of his neighbours into stories — and in Hitchcock's unspoken self-referential extension, into cinematic fictions complete with a plot — Jeff himself is never seen. Or at least, he tries his best to ensure that he isn't: wheeling his chair back, keeping his lights off, even hiding at opportune moments. Not really the usual style of a cinematic hero.

There is all sorts of genius in this Hitchcock treatment, starting with the fact that Jeff thinks of himself as being of generally superior intellect to others in his locality. He does have an interest in the outside world, but usually it is reserved for distant places that impinge on his consciousness only in some headline-making way — when his editor calls to propose a trip to Kashmir because the “place is about to go up in flames”, Jeff's excited response is “Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?”. His immediate vicinity he thinks of as dull, lulling us into that assumption — and also making us feel a little guilty about the voyeuristic gaze that seeks excitement.

Dullness appears to be a problem both for those outside relationships and those in them. One single female neighbour — Jeff calls her Miss Lonelyheart — often drinks herself to sleep. But her efforts to date are ill-fated, too: we watch one much-awaited young man thrust himself on her as soon as the front door is closed. Another single woman — Stella's 'bikini bombshell', named 'Miss Torso' by our hero — has no shortage of male admirers, but none of them looks worth having. A single male songwriter above Miss Torso seems equally starved for love.

Meanwhile the couples lead lives of sweetly boring domesticity, or else bitter conflict — the sort that can lead to murder. Our hero himself has a girlfriend most men would have killed for, Grace Kelly as a model called Lisa Fremont who appears on the covers of magazines, but he isn't happy either. He thinks she isn't cut out for marriage to someone like him, who spends weeks on the road in rough places. “If she was only ordinary,” Jeff whines to Stella. We're meant to see that Lisa's Park Avenue perfection and high fashionista status is dull as ditchwater to Jeff: once he even asks what her cocktail companion was wearing, only to ruthlessly mock her reply.

Alfred Hitchcock lets Jeff tell many an uncle joke about nagging wives and the sad fate of husbands. But Rear Window can also be seen as undercutting Jeff's rather comfortable narrative: the rough-and-ready adventurer remains tied to his chair till film's end, while the exquisitely-turned-out Lisa does all the mystery-solving legwork, even putting herself at risk. Lisa's physical fearlessness is what finally impresses Jeff — he seems to think he's kindled her sense of adventure. And of course, Jeff's fracture literally bars him from legwork. Even so, his reliance entirely on visual tricks is fascinating: even when the murderer walks into his room, all Jeff can think of as a weapon is a battery-operated flashlight to blind him temporarily. And it's definitely possible to read Rear Window in a way that sees Jeff's immobility as emasculation, and emasculation as marriage — Hitchcock's hero ends the film with both legs in a cast and firmly embedded in traditional coupledom.

Rear Window is a ridiculously apposite watch for a post-COVID world, where travel for travel's sake seems to have gone, well, out the window. For one, Lisa's attitude turns the perfect side-eye upon Jeff's grandstanding travel stories. Other aspects of the film ring even truer in an era in which rising authoritarianism and the ubiquity of social media, combined with pandemic-enforced isolation, is pushing us more and more into the once socially dubious roles of the lurker, the invisible spectator in the dark. On our screens and off them, stalking and surveillance have greater currency than ever before. Stella's “homespun wisdom” — from a 1939 Reader's Digest — seems almost poetic in its appropriateness: “What people ought to do is get outside their own houses and look in for a change.”

Published in Firstpost, 25 Oct 2020

How to treat a doctor

My Mirror column: 

As part of the ongoing series about doctors in our cinema, a look at humanitarianism and humility in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's earliest film about a doctor: Anuradha (1960)

Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni in a still from Anuradha (1960)

Almost exactly twenty years before Bemisal, which I wrote about last week, Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed another film about a doctor. Unlike Bemisal, Anuradha (1960) was about a good doctor, a great doctor, with a humanitarian vision to match his mastery of his profession. Balraj Sahni's Dr. Nirmal Chaudhury is the sort of medical man that Vinod Mehra's reformed avatar tries to become in Bemisal: deeply committed, cycling through his remote rural area, treating zamindar and poor alike – or rather, treating them differently, because he does not charge impoverished patients. Asked where the doctor is to be found, a local responds: “Doctor wahin hoga jahan gandagi hogi, jahan makkhiyan bhinhina rahi hongi, jahan 15-20 mareez baithe khaaen-khaaen kar rahe honge... [A doctor is found where there is dirt, flies buzzing around, and 15-20 patients sitting around coughing...]”

But Mukherjee's concerns in this film are more personal. Sahni's Nirmal is a lovely man who falls for Leela Naidu's Anuradha Roy, a well-off young woman who is not just beautiful but artistically talented, singing and choreographing her own performances (the film's delightful music is by the late Pt. Ravi Shankar). Having wooed and married her, however, Nirmal and she move to the village, and he becomes the classic workaholic husband: out of the house most of the time and preoccupied even when in. 

Sachin Bhowmick's script uses the figure of the distracted doctor to indicate a man who always has bigger things on his mind. Small details suggest this from the start: even when Nirmal is courting Anuradha, he almost misses the start of her show. Where could he be, wonders Anuradha's brother. “Doctors are always late,” says the woman he's with. That line presages what is to come: Leela Naidu's disappointed face as her husband fails to pay her the slightest bit of attention, or even keep his word about the rare promise of time together.

Nirmal is no fool. His passion for medical science apart, he has enough emotional intelligence to notice other men's connection or disconnection from their wives – but apparently not his own. Nirmal's patients include one man who is mocked because he acts out his wife's every illness, his body mimicking the symptoms that his mind so empathises with. (The man who does the mocking is the bus conductor for whom ignoring his wife is mardaangi: even if she throws the kitchen tongs at him.) Another patient never notices that his wife is ill until it is too late, and Nirmal berates him:“If you can't take care of her, why marry?”. But his blindness to his wife's malady is an unspoken analogy for Nirmal's own obliviousness to what ails Anuradha.

What, in fact, does ail Anuradha? Naidu, never much of an actress, with her stilted Hindi delivery, relies on her expressive eyes to portray the profound emptiness of the woman who has lost her music and with it, her identity -- gaining a marriage that offers her none of the companionship it seemed to promise. Her tiredness in the scene in which Sahni returns hours later than promised and goes straight to his home laboratory, intending to spend the rest of the night looking for a cure for a local water-borne infection, presages another put-upon wife's (Shabana Azmi) sorrow and bafflement and frustration with her preoccupied doctor husband (Pankaj Kapur) in Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990).

The problem, both films seem to suggest, isn't so much the drudgery, which might have been the same for any other woman in any other comparable household. It is the exhaustion that comes from cooking and cleaning and taking care of a man who is entirely oblivious to your presence – and yet expects everything to be in perfect order, so that he can carry out his duties without a hitch. The fact that these duties happen to be to humanity at large helps hide what is equally true – that they serve the doctors' own sense of self. That these blissfully patriarchal husbands happen to be good doctors, I'd argue, is meant to underline their indomitable egos, the unshakeable sense of higher purpose that tars their wives' completely legitimate domestic desires as petty and ungrateful and limited.

These men may start by loving a talented woman as an equal, but the woman inevitably finds herself reduced to being a doctor's wife. Even at the very end of Anuradha, when Mukherjee inserts a nascent women's rights speech -- about the good doctor's sadhana and tapasya being nothing compared to the devotion and penance of “our wives, our mothers, our daughters” -- that speech must come from a senior doctor (Nasir Husain). In Bemisal two decades later, Vinod Mehra's cockily unethical gynaecologist learns his lesson only from his doctor best friend (Amitabh Bachchan). Apparently, it needs a doctor to teach another doctor anything – especially humility.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Oct 2020.

The people versus science

A respected doctor becomes the target of public anger in the uncannily resonant Ganashatru, Satyajit Ray’s 1989 take on the classic Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (1882)

 

In 1989, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray adapted into Bengali one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous plays, written a century ago in 1882: An Enemy of the People. The original Norwegian text was about a doctor who discovers bacteria contamination in the public baths for which he is medical officer. When he tries to expose the public health hazard, he finds the spa town's powers-that-be arraigned against him - including the mayor, his own brother.

Ganashatru turns the 19th century Scandinavian town into an imaginary 20th century Indian one, while retaining the dramatic device of having brother oppose brother in public: Dr Ashoke Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) is pitted against his younger brother Nishith (Dhritiman Chatterjee, no relation), who is head of the municipality. But the change that makes Ray’s 1989 adaptation feel truly Indian – and uncannily prescient 30 years later – is his replacement of Ibsen’s public baths with a popular temple whose bacteria-filled water is directly consumed by thousands each day – as charanaamrit.

The Norwegian play’s Dr Stockmann finds himself under attack for trying to reveal an unsavoury truth that might cost the town its prosperity. But for the good doctor of Ray’s film, the stakes are even higher. Ibsen’s play pitted a potential health disaster against a public panic - and a righteously superior whistleblower against a corrupt cabal of media and bureaucrats. Ganashatru takes that kernel - of one man trying to tell an unpopular truth to a resistant public - and expands it into a full-blown science versus religion debate.

Except, of course, that there isn’t a debate. Hearing that the doctor has tested water samples for bacteria, the local industrialist Bhargava (who set up the temple, and the private hospital that employs Dr Gupta) shows up with a small vial of temple water. “This charanaamrita, and all charanaamrita, is free from germs,” he pronounces, speaking in English for emphasis in the midst of his Hindi-accented Bangla. “Aapni ki jaanen? Ki tulshi pata-e joler shob dosh kete jaaye? [Do you know? Ki all impurities in water are removed by tulsi patta?] It's a rhetorical question, it seems, because Bhargava has no doubt of the answer. “You won't know this, Dr Gupta,” he sneers at the stunned physician. “But Hindus have known it for thousands of years.”

‘Hindus', apparently against all lab-based evidence, 'know' that the water of Chandipur, and particularly the Gangajal-mixed water that temple devotees drink, “cannot be polluted”, so “Dr Gupta is making a mistake”. The local newspaper, having first commissioned the doctor to write about the lab's report, turns tail when it receives seventeen letters from readers – and a not-so-veiled threat to its existence from Nishith and Bhargava. Publication thus prevented, Dr Gupta plans a public lecture. A local theatre troupe pastes posters around town. A large audience assembles - but so do the turncoat editor and publisher and the poisonous Nishith.

What unfolds seems to shock our protagonist, who keeps saying he is only doing his duty as a doctor, that all he wants is for people to hear the facts so that they can make an informed decision, and that surely 'public opinion' - “janamat” - cannot be determined by editors and politicians in advance, to such an extent that they suppress any opinions they believe will be unpopular. But Dr Ashoke Gupta, if he lived in the India of 2020, would not be shocked. For anyone who lives in today's India, there is something completely commonplace about the independent-spirited doctor first being threatened, sought to be suppressed - and when that fails, discredited. While he tries to speak, his brother takes the microphone and asks if he is a Hindu. Suddenly, instead of water and sewage pipelines, the subject is the doctor not having ever worshipped at the Tripureshwar temple – so that whatever he now says is “against the temple”.

And there we have it, all the tragedy of our real-life present already distilled in this admittedly somewhat theatrical fiction from 1989: that faith takes precedence over science; that facts can be disregarded if they go against faith, especially if the source of those facts is somehow not to your taste; the keenness to preserve the image of the ideal city even at the cost of its actual well-being; the nexus between religion, politics, money and the media – and already, even in the left-ruled small town West Bengal of 1989, the quickness with which the needle of suspicion could turn upon a non-religious man.

But Ray's film is also plagued by his own predilections: he makes the doctor a hero. Unlike Ibsen’s protagonist, whose lack of humility and personal excesses ensure that he ends up fighting his battle alone, Ganashatru's Dr Ashoke Gupta isn't lonely for long. By the film's final scene, he not only has the unequivocal support of his wife and daughter, but of some kind of resistance - led by the “educated young students” of the theatre troupe and an ethical journalist who's left his job to report the farce of the public meeting to all the national papers. Hearing the sound of his name on the lips of the students marching towards his besieged house, Soumitra Chatterjee appears on the verge of tears. Watching the unreal optimism of Ray's 1989 ending in 2020, I felt on the verge of tears myself – but not of joy.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Oct 2020

The medical missionary

My Mirror column, the first in a series on films about doctors:

V Shantaram’s 1946 film about the legendary Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis sheds an odd light on the contemporary India-China moment and our pandemic year

2020 has been a year of medical heroism. It might be a good time to remember a heroic doctor from a very different period in the history of India and the world: Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis, whose valiant medical service in Communist China from 1938 to 1942 is still enshrined in that country's public memory. On August 28, even as Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off in a border conflict that remains far from being resolved, it was reported that a statue of Dr Kotnis was to be unveiled outside a medical school in North China named after him: the Shijiazhuang Ke Dihua Medical Science Secondary Specialised School. (‘Ke Dihua’ is Kotnis’s Chinese name.)

Kotnis is not often remembered in contemporary India, but barely four years after his death, his life and work were made the subject of a film by the great Indian director V Shantaram. Free on YouTube as well as available to stream on one subscription-based platform for world cinema, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani makes for interesting viewing for many reasons.

Released in 1946, a year before independence, Shantaram’s film commemorates Kotnis's as the ideal nationalist life: a life led – and lost – in the service of the nation. As one of the rousing patriotic songs from the film’s rather wonderful lilting soundtrack put it: “Jaan dene ka hi naam hai zindagi (Giving up your life is what living is really about)”. A film called The Immortal Tale of Dr Kotnis was clearly not shying away from either myth-making or propaganda.

What is fascinating to me, though, is that Kotnis’s nationalism is presented as what leads the youthful doctor to another country, where he helped their war effort. Heeding a Congress leader’s call for Indians to come to China’s aid during the Second Sino-Japanese War (Mao Zedong had apparently made such a request of Jawaharlal Nehru), the young graduate from Mumbai’s Seth GS Medical College decided to join a five-member medical mission to China in 1938. Watching Shantaram’s film in 2020, it is impossible not to be struck by the way Indian nationalism in the 1940s could be so naturally folded into an internationalist milieu of cooperation between what were then two poor Asian countries in a still-colonised world. (Some villains do exist: fittingly for a post-Second World War Indian film, it’s the Japanese, who are called ‘shaitan’ but shown as buffoons, in the almost classic tradition of the war movie.)

Scripted by the great KA Abbas, Dr Kotnis opens with the handsome young doctor (played by Shantaram himself) returning from Mumbai to announce to his shocked parents that he has just pledged to serve in China. His ageing father, caught off-guard while proudly displaying the clinic he’d had made for young Dwarka in their hometown of Solapur, has a teary turnaround. It’s a remarkable propagandist scene, where Shantaram and Abbas take the figure of the obedient son and finesse the resonant Indian idea of filial duty into duty to the motherland. The sacrifice is dual, because Dwarka’s father too must give up his ‘budhaape ki laathi’. The Hindi phrase about children as the support of one’s old age is propped up by an actual laathi that Dwarka presents to his father – which falls symbolically from the old man’s hand as his son boards the ship to China. The dramatic foreboding has a reason: the father will die without seeing his son again, and Dwarka will never return.

Shantaram cast himself as Kotnis, and the actress Jayashree – who had become his second wife in 1941 – as Kotnis’s assistant Qing Lan (pronounced Ching Lan), whom he married and had a son with. The relationship between them is tenderly depicted, though it doffs its hat quite obviously to both nationalist propaganda and Hindi film romance. For instance, Qing Lan first meets the good doctor disguised as a boy, and there must be some singing and dancing before love can be declared. But it is striking for a mainstream Indian film in the 1940s to have a foreign, Chinese, heroine, who wears trousers and a shirt all through (except a sweetly comic interlude when she attempts to wear a sari during their wedding) and is as deeply devoted to her work as her husband is to his. It helps that Vasant Desai’s lively, memorable soundtrack is so superbly integrated into the narrative: I loved Jayashree’s ‘Main hoon nanhi nayi dulhan’, though it is clearly not a traditional song sung by Chinese brides, and one of the film’s enduring images for me is the sight of the good doctor watching lovingly as his pregnant Chinese wife sings a rousing song to lead the Red Army to its next destination: “Ghulam nahi tu, josh mein aa / Yeh desh hai tere, hosh mein aa”.

The Chinese-Indian relationship and the internationalist iteration of patriotism apart, the film is remarkable for the way that the medical profession is celebrated. Dr Kotnis’s heroism is no less integral to the national war effort than the Red Army general whose camp he joins – he is captured by the Japanese, endangers his own life to create a vaccine for a plague that breaks out among the Chinese population, and succumbs to epilepsy, but after having saved the general from certain death of his bullet wounds. An internationalist nationalism that talks about saving lives, rather than merely laying down one’s own or killing one's enemies: that's propaganda almost worth having.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Sep 2020

The Reel Life of MS Sathyu - II

My Mirror column (a sequel to last week's piece):

In honour of his 90th birthday earlier this month, a look back at MS Sathyu's under-watched 1994 film Galige, currently streaming online.

At the very start of Garm Hava, Balraj Sahni's Salim Mirza waves goodbye to a train at the station and sits himself down in a horse-drawn cart. The Agra of the 1940s is small enough for the tangawalla to be acquainted with each customer. Who have you dropped off this time, he asks. “My elder sister,” says Mirza, adding a gloomy metaphorical remark about how thriving trees are getting cut down in this wind. Yes, agrees the tangawalla, those who refuse to uproot themselves will dry up. Then he adds a Hafeez Jalandhari couplet, rendered in its most charming street avatar: “Wafaaon ke badle jafa kar riya hai/ Main kya kar riya hun, tu kya kar riya hai?” (I'd translate that as “You torment me in exchange for my loyalty/What am I doing, and what are you doing?”)

What's remarkable is the spectrum of moods that the sequence encompasses. There is the sombre farewell, the meditative remark, the deep sense of living through a eventful time -- and yet all of it is leavened by the comfortable chatter of the everyday, by casual acquaintances who make up one's sense of home, and an ear for humour in the minor key that keeps one from dipping into the doldrums. Galige, which Sathyu directed in 1994, attempts to create the same kind of energy.

The film has two narrative threads, both with immense potential for melodrama -- but Sathyu staves off all maudlinness. Currently playing in the Indian section of an international film streaming platform, Galige centres around a young Bangalorean woman named Nithya. She lives alone in a rented house and has a job in the HMT factory, riding a two-wheeler to work each day. One day, the orphanage where she was raised calls her. An old couple has arrived from a North Karnataka village to claim her as their long-lost granddaughter.

Now this is a theme that doesn't just animate popular cinema in India, it forms the matrix for it: the family separated by a calamity and reunited at the end, the pauper who is really a prince, the enemies who are really biological brothers. Whether as the basis of a comedy of errors (think of every single double role film you know), or the underlying theme of the family melodrama from Waqt to Trishul, or even when ostensibly subjected to questioning by the plot -- as in Awara's nature vs. nurture debate, or Yash Chopra's unsuccessful but fascinating Dharamputra, in which a Muslim orphan grows up to be a Hindu fundamentalist, blood ties are assumed to be the ties that bind.

But unlike the hundreds of film orphans we have all grown up on, Nithya does not hanker for a family. She is guarded, unsure if she wants to be co-opted into an identity she has thus far escaped. The orphanage manager's reminder that she was brought in by a fakir, on the other hand, makes the wannabe grandmother baulk: what if she's actually a Muslim? They part company – but on her way back home, Nithya feels bad for the stranded old couple and decides to invite them to stay with her for a while.

A still from Galige (1994)

What Sathyu does is quietly subversive at many levels. By making the young female character financially independent, and the old couple needier than her, he shows how easily existing power equations of age and gender can be reversed. The 'family' becomes something chosen, contingent on mutual desire and supportiveness, rather than a unquestionable given. Within this new space of equivalence, the young woman makes her own decisions, refusing to kowtow to either neighbourly gossip or 'grandparental' interference. She looks out for the old people, and enjoys their companionship, but feels no obligation to live by their rules. The old couple, for their part, learn that their opinions are simply that – their opinions.

Galige's other subplot is even more surprising – the Khalistan movement, and the fate of a reformed terrorist. Girl does meet boy, even in an MS Sathyu film, and Nithya meets hers in a thoroughly charming Antakshari scene on a train. As a girl without a family, she is perfectly comfortable with a boy without a past. And by bringing a Punjabi boy into a relationship with a local girl, of course, Sathyu plays on Bangalore's insider-outsider tensions. In the film, though, the locals' suspicions turn out to have some basis in fact – not all unknown pasts are equally benign.

There are many other moments when the film touches on the question of identity – Nithya's Japanese boss at the HMT factory, the Sikh dhaba owner or the play within the film where Ekalavya's birth becomes the cause of his tragic fate, while Guru Dronacharya shifts all blame onto him: “How can you hold me responsible for your low birth?” In an early aside, the film's resident commentator, one Narhari, asks the rhetorical question: “Do we lack temples, mosques, churches, gurdwara here? Must slap Urban Ceiling on gods – only so many temples per god.” Nithya herself speaks often of not needing to have a religion, of being free to believe in people.

All the threads of Galige don't necessarily come together. The music can feel tacked-on, as can some of the attempts at comedy, and the Punjab segment has the rushed quality of nightmare. The film's uneven tapestry benefits from being woven of low-intensity conversations, like the Bangalore in which it unfolds. In one lovely odd little moment, a drunken Narhari sings a Kannada song by the poet Rajaratnam to a companion in a prison cell: “If you wish to live, escape from this world. Create your own, forget this one.” Words to live by, now more than ever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jul 2020

Minding the Gap: Thoughts on Gulabo Sitabo

My Mirror column:

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual atmospherics and banter, but both its laughter and its nostalgia come at a cost

A screenshot from the film Gulabo Sitabo (2020)

Twenty minutes into Gulabo Sitabo, the film's septuagenarian protagonist Mirza Chunnan Nawab (Amitabh Bachchan with a prosthetic nose, a cotton-puff beard and a bent back) makes his creaky way up to the room that his rent-witholding tenant Baankey Rastogi (Ayushmann Khurrana) shares with an otherwise all-female household. The family is prepared. The youngest sister lies down immediately, another places a white bandage on her forehead, the third stands by gravely. The mother emerges on cue with an empty atta tin, while Baankey holds up an old blender they could sell to buy food. It's a fine performance, and even the suspicious Mirza is fooled. As he turns to leave, though, a loud ping breaks the melodramatic silence. It's the microwave with the family's actual dinner.

Things are not quite what they seem.

That gap between appearance and reality is the recurring motif of Shoojit Sircar's new film – and not always a consciously adopted one. At first glance, Juhi Chaturvedi's script appears to concern itself with an old nawabi Lucknow, centred on a decaying but still impressive old haveli and its khandaani Muslim inhabitants. But that Lucknow, of inherited feudal grandeur and flowery late-Mughal culture, has been in the grip of slow stasis since at least the mid-1800s, when the British exiled its beloved ruler Wajid Ali Shah, he of the brilliant shairi and thumri and kathak -- not just a connoisseur of the arts but an actual artist. What little survived of that culture through a century under the British has crumbled to nothing in the 70 years since independence. And so the characters that Chaturvedi and Sircar prop up as representatives of that past cannot live up to our imagination of it.

We may want crabby old Mirza and his 94-year-old wife, Fatima Begum (the inimitable Farrukh Jaffar, Bollywood's resident Sharp-Tongued Old Lady from Peepli Live to Photograph) to be all quiet gentility and noblesse oblige. But given that their sole resource is a building they don't have the money to repair, why is it surprising that they are instead skinflint, petty creatures -- one handing out coins as if they mean something, and the other actually exchanging them for tenners?

Amitabh Bachchan as Mirza sells off pilfered odds and ends in a scene from Gulabo Sitabo

Right from the start, the film's constant refrain is that Mirza is laalchi (greedy) and miserly. But there's something pathetic about a man who spends every day trying to redeem paltry rents from ever-dodging tenants, money he doesn't even control when he gets it. It is clearly because he has no money that he is reduced to thievery. So limited is his experience of cash that even calculating the sum of 30,000 rupees is difficult for him – and when the chaatwala pronounces the amount, Mirza falls over in shock. A much larger sum, later in the film, is entirely beyond his comprehension.

Yes, he speaks rather hopefully of the Begum's impending death (and Sircar and Chaturvedi milk every drop of humour from Bachchan's goggle-eyed shock when she recovers from every physical setback). Yes, he confesses to having married the Begum essentially for her haveli. But he has also stayed married to a woman a decade and a half his senior, and looked after her and her house as best he could, receiving little for his pains, his younger and ghar-jamaai status keeping him at semi-attendant level.

Thinking of Mirza as a villain, even a comic villain, or as a greedy heartless sort, seems to me to miss the wood for the trees. And as the film proceeded, it became increasingly clear to me what that wood is -- a whole city full of people on the make, using whatever they can to climb that one rung up the ladder that might insulate them from the vagaries of fortune in the economically vulnerable, socially depleted, politically compromised world that is present-day Lucknow. The small-time lawyer (Brijendra Kala) who thinks he can make a deal on Fatima Manzil with the local mafioso builder, the Department of Archaeology official (Vijay Raaz) who wants to get it declared heritage property, Baankey's girlfriend who ditches him for a richer match, or his sharp younger sister Guddo (Srishti Srivastava), perfectly matter-of-fact about sleeping with a useful contact – they're all in it for what they can get. Strangely, none of them get labelled greedy. 

Waning Moons, a recent PSBT documentary watchable on Vimeo, features two real-life Nawabi descendants, Mirza Nasir Abbas Maliki and his sister Naaz, who describe their father as having lost all their money because of his “seedhapa” (straightness). Naaz, who was never really sent to school, describes an actual haveli roof collapse that destroyed many antiques. But somehow, those selling their antiques for a pittance are greedy -- not those who re-sell them at massive mark-ups?

It is not just the chandeliers of Fatima Manzil that are disappearing. The city that held them up is gone, too. Even the overblown nazaakat that 1950s and 60s Hindi cinema capitalised on -- in Lucknow-set Muslim socials like HS Rawail's Mere Mehboob (1963), poetic romances like Mohammed Sadiq's Chaudhavin ka Chand (1960) or joyfully bantering ones like Subodh Mukherjee's marvellous Paying Guest (1957) – has long disappeared, leaving a shell in its stead.

Abhishek Chaubey's Dedh Ishqiya (2014) played the perfect double game with that fact, creating a dark comedy that seemed to cater to our fantasy of gorgeously-dressed, poetry-spouting old-world romance, only to ruthlessly undercut it. Let it be noted that Gulabo Sitabo's ostensibly gentle comedy about an old Muslim Lucknow, with its gratitude to the Uttar Pradesh Police, UP's Minister of State for Minority Welfare and the ex-Vice President of the BJP's Youth Wing, comes to us in the midst of a pandemic during which Muslims have been constantly attacked by both media and the government. Nostalgia and mockery combine well, not just on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Jun 2020.

The Rules of the Game

My Mirror column:
 
A neighbourhood chess tournament provides both setting and metaphor in the Ektara Collective’s sharp and delightful indie Turup (Checkmate), currently free to stream online. 

“Unless, like Thelma and Louise, you plunge off the side of a canyon, there is no escaping the everyday,” wrote Geoff Dyer in his marvellously idiosyncratic sort-of biography of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997). “To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed,” he added. “There are intervals of repose but there will never come a moment of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious.”

Dyer’s riffs on freedom and the everyday came back to me this week as I watched, for the second time, a lovely film called Turup (Checkmate), made in 2017 by an unusual group of filmmakers who call themselves the Ektara Collective. Turup is currently free to stream online in the ‘Viewing Room’ set up by the organisers of the Dharamshala International Film Festival and addresses both the precariousness of our freedoms and the mundane, unglamorous, repetitive settings in which we must fight for them.

Set in the Bhopal neighbourhood of Chakki Chauraha, the film uses a public neighbourhood chess-board as narrative and metaphorical anchor for its fine-grained take on a set of interlocked lives. It is very much a feature film, with a script, characters, and often sharp turns of dialogue –but it has a documentary-style sensitivity to its chosen milieu, attending carefully to the faces, spaces and sounds that bring it to life.

Some of Turup’s attention to the everyday is about catching playful moments of enjoyment. A man pauses to watch a woman he likes tying up her hair. A child hides some ber where an old man can find them. One young man cajoles another into betting on a chess game he’s not even party to. More often, though, what the film places under its observational microscope are aspects of Indian daily life that too often go unnoticed.  An upper caste man tells a little girl to move away from her spot at a public chessboard with a wordless gesture of caste distancing, adding that she should take “her pieces” with her. An upper middle class woman fails to recognise the sweeper who cleans the street outside her house. A husband thinks nothing of conducting large financial transactions from a marital ‘joint’ account without consulting his wife. A younger brother invites a potential groom’s family home to ‘see’ his elder sister because he disapproves of her choice of romantic partner.

That quasi-anthropological gaze, defamiliarising the familiar, forcing us to look at the inequities to which we usually turn a blind eye, is one part of what makes the film powerfully political. The other thing I think Turup gets right is how the local, the personal and the everyday are inextricably wound up with wider social, public and historical currents flowing through the country and shaping our times. Like a well-executed piece of ethnography, the film’s focus is small – one urban neighbourhood – but its socio-political canvas is large. It also manages to gesture to the ways in which our ‘local’ reality is now in constant conversation with mass media (Though I am less optimistic than Turup’s makers about the relative reach and effect of newspaper journalism and bigotry-filled WhatsApp forwards).

Made three years ago, the film is attuned to the rising tide of rightwing Hindu majoritarianism that now threatens to drown out all other political voices. At several points in the film, we see the mobilising of men – especially those who are unemployed, poor or in whatever way insecure — around the totem of the endangered cow mother, and the endangered Hindu daughter. The bogey of ‘love jihad’ is the apposite bedrock of Turup’s plot, revealing gender as the fault line along which fictional ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives can most easily be spun. “Apni ladkiyon ko kaaboo mein nahi rakh paye toh izzat gawaayenge,” says one man. “Nahi maan rahi hai? Arrey toh manwaao,” says another, talking of a girl who is resisting a forced arranged marriage in favour of studying further and eventually marrying the man of her choice. A young Dalit man is shown as susceptible to such gendered messaging, especially when religion is thrown into the mix – but the film also reveals how caste is often the limit of Hindutva’s imagined solidarities. The same young man, who thinks he’s being enjoined to be part of a movement for dharam raksha, finds himself being urged to sacrifice a morning’s work to ‘help out’ with a blocked septic tank.

Turup offers no large victories. What it holds out are small incremental achievements in what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have called a War of Position, a process in which cultural activities and social interactions are the locales in which people can begin to imagine new ways of being. The young Dalit man refuses the work for which his caste is seen to make him automatically ‘qualified’. A woman starts to claw back some power in her marriage by re-establishing some professional self-worth. An upper caste local bigwig finds himself losing a final to the young ‘outsider’.

The wresting of freedom, as Dyer suggested, is part of the daily grind. But it is also a game in a continuing tournament.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Apr 2020.

Status of women, women of status

My Mirror column: 

Thappad's single slap shakes the foundations of one marriage, but exposes the imbalances upon which most Indian families are built

Pavail Gulati and Taapsee Pannu play husband and wife in Anubhav Sinha’s thought-provoking film Thappad

Described in a sentence, the premise of Thappad seems rather all or nothing: a man slaps his wife once, and she decides to leave him. “Will a slap decide whether a couple can stay together or not?” was the response from the director of Baaghi 3. The actions of Thappad's heroine Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) look particularly outré in a country where domestic violence is not. Our last National Family Health Survey (2015-16) indicates that 31 per cent of India’s married women experience physical, sexual or emotional violence by their spouses - and 52 per cent women think it’s all right for a man to hit his wife.

Anubhav Sinha is that rare Indian filmmaker who’s gone from crafting money-spinners to slapping audiences in the face with ugly reflections of ourselves. His recent subjects of choice are all ones that New India would rather keep ‘in the family’ – i.e. things we don't like to talk about until people actually die, and even then the problem isn't us. In Mulk, it was the nationally normalised injustice of treating the Muslim community as guilty until proven innocent. In Article 15, it was the unconscionable continuance of caste hierarchies. In Thappad, Sinha targets the misuse of power often found closest home: gender. The aimed-for confrontation with the self here takes place within a two-person context: a marriage. But Sinha and his co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo display a keen awareness that in this country even more than others, heterosexual domestic partnerships are part of an intricate web of familial, social and professional relationships. And that web is suspended in a matrix that’s invariably patriarchal.

With that in mind, let me re-describe the premise of Thappad. Confronted with a professional crisis while hosting a private party at his home, Vikram (Pavail Gulati) loses his temper at his wife Amrita and slaps her, in front of the assembled guests: his bosses as well as the couple’s family, friends and neighbours. Amrita, an educated upper middle class woman who has chosen not to pursue a career in favour of being a devoted wife to Vikram, finds herself unable to forget, forgive, ‘move on’. It doesn’t help that Vikram is entirely unable to see Amrita’s shock and humiliation – and unable to comprehend what he does see. It definitely doesn’t help that he assumes his wife’s forgiveness, even as he explains instead of apologising. “Saara gussa tum hi pe nikal gaya [All the anger tumbled out onto you],” is all he can manage before turning the marital conversation back to his only real preoccupation: himself.

The film is largely well cast and acted, with adeptly-written scenes that prevent characters from seeming like ideological messengers, even when delivering that usually bludgeoning thing: a climactic monologue. There are clever little touches, like Vikram complaining unendingly about feeling hard done by at work - “Vahan rehna hi nahi jahan value nahi hai [Who wants to stay on where you have no value?]” - while remaining tone-deaf to Amrita’s silences. What emerges, with empathy and without drama, is the patriarchal context that normalises the ‘working’ husband’s dependence on the ‘non-working’ wife - while invisibilising her labour, both physical and emotional. The wife is a full-time companion, hostess and cheerleader; manager of their upper middle class household, primary caregiver to him and his ageing mother and any potential children. But her husband doesn’t notice when her foot is hurt – so of course he doesn’t notice when her heart is.

Demanding empathy, support and sacrifice from their female partners while giving none back is simply the norm for men, and women have previously had no choice but to live with it. “Thoda bardaasht karna seekhna chahiye auraton ko,” says Amrita’s mother-in-law, not unkindly. “Aap khush hain bardaasht kar ke?” is Amrita’s counter-question. “Mere bachche khush hain,” the older woman replies.

Subjugating personal desires to the ‘larger’ cause of “family” is something women learn subliminally, becoming agents of our own submission. It is this acceptance that Thappad pushes back against: the notion that women should be content to derive satisfaction from satisfying others, not set out to find their own. “We know how to keep our families together,” says Vikram. “Hamare yahan ladkiyan chhoti chhoti baaton pe nahi jaati ghar chhod ke.” The totemic power of “ghar” is also the binding agent in the film's other relationships. Amrita's father (a superb Kumud Mishra) seems the gentle, supportive dad every girl needs, and a considerate husband. But the film makes him – and therefore us – come to see that his wife never had the freedom he did. She may not have been barred from pursuing her musical talents, as Amrita isn’t from dancing, but the household always took precedence over self-development. In other marriages, coupledom takes precedence over self-respect.

Divorce remains stigmatised in India (think Mohan Bhagwat), and so Amrita’s unshakeable resolve, however quiet, has raised hackles. As the film lets one of its own characters point out, if all women who’ve been slapped once by their husbands started leaving their marriages, the majority of Indian families would not be ‘together’. But like a before-her-time Preity Zinta insisting on being able to respect her man in Kya Kehna, Amrita isn’t most women. And Thappad is powerful because it isn’t programmatic. It doesn’t lay down the law about what you as a woman should do. It only lays out the possibilities for what you could.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Mar 2020.

The arc of appearance

My Mirror column:

Amar Kaushik’s Bala takes a witty Kanpuriya route to show Indian viewers that our preoccupation with surface-level qualities runs depressingly deep

 
Bala in Bala is a pun on the Hindi word for hair, as well as the nickname of its hero Balmukund Shukla. What’s remarkable about Bala is that its hero is not a nice guy. And no one in Amar Kaushik’s film is trying to tell us that he is. Once the teenaged Shah Rukh Khan of his Kanpur school/gali/mohalla, Bala in his twenties is experiencing a massive crisis of confidence. As he loses his once-luxuriant mane of hair, he also loses the head-tossing arrogance that came with it.

Once the sort of cocky upper caste boy who could effortlessly cast himself as hero of his North Indian small-town universe, the balding Bala is now assailed by self-doubt in greater measure than those who haven’t had his level of entitlement. Far from being an action-packed vehicle for his starry antics, Bala’s life is now a tragicomedy: a series of misadventures with ever more outrageous hair-replacement tactics.

Coming after 2018’s Stree, in which Kaushik sneaked a snide gender angle into a ghost-centric comedy, it isn’t surprising that in Bala he uses the male balding plot as a way to hold up a mirror to our lookist universe. But not just any universe. Bala’s second plotline, featuring Bala’s childhood friend Latika, is about India’s constricted ideas of beauty, particularly for women. It holds up to the light our bizarre obsession with “fair” skin, which does especially widespread damage to self-esteem in a country where almost everyone would be considered “dark”. And it illuminates how these ridiculous casteist, subliminally racist ideas, far from being smashed by a more inclusive ‘global’ modernity, are being reinforced and amplified by a social media explosion that feeds on ever-greater exhibitionism and display.

In fact, we might think of the film as deriving its premise from a semi-conscious recognition: that women have been judged primarily by their looks pretty much through history, but the image-focused quality of the selfie era has finally started to get to men, too. Bala’s particular form of vanity gives him long-term aspirations – he does stand-up comedy on the side. But his need for outlets for more immediate gratification leads him down the TikTok path. Which leads into the arms of his dream girl Pari Mishra: a TikTok celebrity and the ‘face’ of Pretty You, the mass market fairness cream for which Bala is a marketing agent.

Having first cast Ayushmann Khurrana, Bollywood’s current patron saint of North Indian masculine vulnerability, as Bala, Kaushik goes on to give his hero a great deal of screen-time so we might learn to sympathise with him. Having seen the preening boy Bala at his worst – mocking his teacher for being takla, or jeering at Latika for her dark skin, we see those frailties turned inside out in the adult Ayushmann, when the character’s own fixation on good looks comes back to haunt him. You may still not like the fellow, but there’s definitely something about his honest appeal for help that works to make him human.

The female leads are both actors who have been paired with Khurrana before: Yami Gautam in Vicky Donor, and Bhumi Pednekar in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Gautam aces the part of Pari, the perfectly turned out social media queen, whose primary desire on her wedding night is to make a suhaag raat TikTok video. Her purpose is primarily to entertain, but she gets one powerful dialogue moment in which to introduce us to the interiority of the surface-level character. Latika is played controversially by Pednekar in unfortunately varying degrees of black-face make-up. Pednekar gets a well-intentioned but not very fleshed-out role as the strong girl who refuses to be defeated by her complexes. She is meant primarily as a mirror for Bala to begin to see himself. But it seems to me significant that the film is self-aware enough to flag that fact – and that Latika has several moments to point out Bala’s self-absorption to him.

What makes the film transcend its inherently lecture-like core is the consistently well-crafted surround sound, achieved by a great ensemble cast who take the superbly written dialogues and produce a pitch-perfect rendition of a contemporary Kanpur milieu. Particular mention must be made of Abhishek Banerjee as Bala’s friend Ajju, Javed Jaffrey back in fine fettle as the Amitabh-impersonating Bachchan Bhaiya, and Seema Pahwa as Latika’s marvellous upbeat mausi, who has had her own look battle to fight in the form of being identified as “moochhon wali” (Ritesh Batra’s recent Photograph also contained a reference to a moustachioed aunt). The film has a brilliant soundscape, in which the base physicality of “kantaap” bounces effortlessly off the Shuddh Hindi register of “guru upahaas”. It also gives us an infectious Tequila song – and the potentially viral coinage “babyu”. We may not believe in Bala’s redemption speech entirely, but the film keeps us listening.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Nov 2019.

Practised to deceive

My Mirror column:

The new Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl turns a promising gender-bending premise into a shallow comedy that’s disappointing on multiple fronts.

Dream Girl comes to us as the latest in the now-established Ayushmann Khurrana genre of Hindi films: gently comical lessons in sexuality that also take the necessary swipes at masculinity. Having variously played a secret sperm donor in 2012’s Vicky Donor, a husband who feels saddled with an overweight wife in Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), a bridegroom afflicted with erectile dysfunction in Shubh Mangal Savdhan (2017), and the embarrassed adult son of 50-something parents who find themselves expecting another baby in Badhaai Ho (2018), Khurrana has helped many a conversation out of the closet. His role in Dream Girl – as an unemployed young man who becomes inordinately successful working a phone chat hotline in a female voice – might have been a way to challenge deeply entrenched ideas of feminine and masculine.

But director Raaj Shaandilyaa seems completely uninterested in the potential of his own material. He gives us a character with a perfect backstory, even a cultural context: Khurrana’s Karam is that young man in every Indian small town who does the female roles in local theatrical productions.

The interiority of female impersonators has been a subject of some thoughtful filmmaking in recent years – Ananya Kasaravalli’s 2017 Kannada feature Harikatha Prasanga (Chronicles of Hari) explored the complicated sexuality of a Yakshagana artiste, while Jainendra Kumar Dost and Shilpi Gulati’s superb 2017 documentary Naach Launda Naach gave space to the cross-dressing male performers of the Bihari naach tradition, associated with the Bhojpuri plays of Bhikhari Thakur. 

Shaandilyaa is obviously working in a very different register from either of these, but it does seem glaring that Dream Girl offers no sense at all of how Karam thinks about his channelling of femininity. What does Karam feel about growing up as the boy his friends depend on to conjure up a fictitious mother or girlfriend; the guy who plays Sita and Radha and Draupadi with such aplomb that little children stop by to seek his blessings even when he’s out of costume? We have no idea. Does he enjoy the seductive power he has as ‘Pooja’ (his feminine alter ego)? We are never told.

Instead, Dream Girl seems to want us to think of Karam’s easy gender-switching falsetto as nothing more than a party trick, an unusual skill he happens to have mastered: it might as well have been juggling, or standing on his head.

And yes, Dream Girl is a comedy, and we could just have stayed at that level. Especially since Shaandilyaa makes sure to hand his hero a conventionally attractive girlfriend (Nushrat Bharucha), a depthless relationship whose existence seems intended only to stave off any doubts that might otherwise emerge about Karam’s masculinity.

But by having a whole host of men – and one woman – fall for ‘Pooja’ rather than any of the actual women that answer the call centre’s phone lines, the plot opens up a world of possibilities, only to immediately close them off. Why are all these people – the Gujjar teen ruffian (Raj Bhansali), the Haryanvi policeman-poet (Vijay Raaz), the virginal gau-sevak caught in a brahmacharya he doesn’t really want (Abhishek Banerjee), the lonely long-time widower (Annu Kapoor), the man-hating female journalist (Nidhi Bisht) – so attracted to ‘Pooja’?

Having once set up the question, the film doesn’t seem interested in the answer at all. The answer Khurrana’s character provides – in a preachy, boring speech at the end – strips the scenario of all reference to sex or gender by going on about loneliness and everyone needing a confidante. A much more honest – and honestly sexy – answer was provided by 2017’s delightful Tumhari Sulu, where Vidya Balan demonstrated that the sari-wali-bhabhi’s popularity as a late-night RJ was not about removing flirtatiousness from the equation with her listeners, but mixing empathy in.

Dream Girl, on the other hand, has its collection of lonely hearts falling for someone who is patently false – the high-pitched falsetto voice is a stand-in for femininity that is more imagined than real, and ‘Pooja’s appeal seems about becoming whatever the male caller wants, changing accents and persona, pretending to be a poetess for the secret versifier, or a dignified older lady for the widower.

But when faced with the possibility that love might actually transform you, Dream Girl can only mock it. Much of the film’s second half is taken up with a totally unexpected subplot in which ‘Pooja’ masquerades as Muslim as a way of putting off a Hindu suitor, only to have Annu Kapoor rise to the romantic challenge by preparing to convert to Islam. Bad jokes about flowery Urdu move swiftly into bandying around the worst stereotypes, about Muslim families being much larger than Hindu ones, for instance, or needing a masjid inside the house – which seemed not just in bad taste, but a powerful form of othering.

Meanwhile Dream Girl’s approach to its women characters is one of near-total disinterest. Other than the whiskey-swigging grandmother (who feels like a semi-rip-off from Vicky Donor), the actual women on screen – Bharucha, Bisht or the female phone-chatters who are Karam’s colleagues – are mere place-holders for Shaandilyaa’s plot. If you were imagining a nuanced challenge to gender stereotypes, Dream Girl’s only message is, dream on.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Oct 2019.

  

The dance of anger

My Mirror column:

Ivan Ayr’s film about a Delhi policewoman, now streaming on Netflix, is an astute study of female power and powerlessness.

The members of any oppressed class have two options on the world stage. They can fill the roles they're given, thrill to the indulgent applause that comes their way -- and accept that they will never direct the show. Or they can demand the bigger, better parts, try to change the script -- and risk finding themselves thrown out of the production.

When a system is stacked heavily against you, there are many advantages to be gained from not upsetting the apple cart. Given a bit of power within such a system, most people would play safe. But Soni isn't most people.

At one level, Ivan Ayr's first feature is a finely observed study of what it might feel like to be an ordinary young woman in present-day Delhi — in the streets, at home, in school, at work. But at another level, Ayr's eponymous protagonist is clearly not an ordinary young woman: because she works with the police. Co-written with Kislay (whose short fiction Hamare Ghar was mercilessly astute about our behaviour as middle class employers of domestic help), the film plays constantly on the gap between what Soni appears to be and what she actually is. It begins with Geetika Vidya Ohlyan's physical presence, her body language. When we see the petite figure on the bicycle, cycling as fast as possible through a dark alley, her lips pursed into silence even as her harasser grows increasingly vocal, we imagine the worst. We are primed to imagine a woman on Delhi's streets as a victim. So there is a sense of shock – and perhaps embarrassment – when we realize she isn't one.

And yet, that is by no means the end-point where the film wishes to deposit us. Because what becomes eminently clear is that Soni's unusual position of power – bolstered by her physical training, her job as a law enforcement official, even just her status as a financially independent working woman – does not in fact exempt her from the anxieties of ordinary women. That is true just as much within her closest private relationships – in the heartbreaking sense of feeling abandoned by the man she might have loved – as it is with men in public places. Even the women handling police control hotline are not immune to the unwanted attentions of men.

Ayr and his cinematographer David Bolen do a brilliant job of showing us how a woman walking alone on the Indian street might experience it as an obstacle course, a video game filled with potential dangers. The roads half-blocked by Metro construction, the lack of any pavements to speak of, the rickshaw that drives too close to you, the men huddled around bonfires at street corners, their casually delivered 'behen ke lodey's audible as you approach – these everyday sights and sounds of a Delhi winter night are both perfectly ordinary and possible sources of assault.

The scenes with Soni working as a police decoy have an indescribable intensity. As Soni walks tensely through the streets, her face drained of colour even in the glow of Lohri fires, one feels as if the city turns each woman in it into a decoy, each walk we take is an experiment upon the self. If even pretending to be a victim can be so draining, the filmmakers seem to suggest, can you imagine what it's like to actually be one?

And yet this is not some hopeless, helpless film. One of my favourite moments is when Soni gets out of the police car to get the special chai that the tea stall guy will only make if he knows it's for her. That individual relationship with the city, that claim upon it, is one women deserve to be able to make as much as men – and some day perhaps we won't need to remark upon it.

Soni is also a twin character study, contrasting the hotheadedness of its eponymous heroine against the quieter foil of her boss Kalpana (Saloni Batra). Though also a woman in a male-dominated force, Kalpana has arrived there via a very different route: the Indian civil services examination. That more bookish route is gestured to in Kalpana's rule-bound decision-making; in her attempts to make her subordinates follow the letter of the law – automatically file an FIR when a woman complains of harassment, or call in a woman officer to help question a clearly petrified girl who may or may not have been raped. There is also, of course, a class difference between Soni and Kalpana which might have some impact on their differential levels of self-control, though the film is never so crude as to spell that out.

But what is so fertile about their relationship is that each appreciates the other's characteristics. As the senior officer, Kalpana is constantly having to answer for Soni's outbreaks of uncontrollable anger. But her chastising of Soni seems always to come from a space of understanding. It is as if a part of her would be glad to punch those men herself. Violence isn't the answer, but sometimes it makes the questions visible.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Mar 2019.

A half-told tale

My Mirror column:

Nandita Das’s ambitious biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto feels like a showreel of what could have been.

Many Indian film heroes have drunk themselves to death over a lost love. Manto might be the first one to do so over a lost city. Bombay was not the place of his birth, but Manto thought of the city as both muse and workplace. Its streets spawned many of his strongest stories and its film industry gave him both livelihood and community.

He was clearly profoundly shaken by Partition, writing several stories about how the new boundaries around nations and religions were also carving up human beings. Still, given Manto’s strong attachment to Bombay, his departure remains somewhat inexplicable — and it appears as such in Nandita Das’s biographical film about him.

Das’s ambitious tapestry of a script weaves Manto’s fiction in and out of the life he may have lived. So some of his most well-known Partition stories — ‘Khol Do’, ‘Thanda Gosht’ — are interwoven with moments when the communal divide inserts itself between Manto (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, for once a bit out of his depth) and his best friend, the actor Shyam Chaddha (the sadly wooden Tahir Raj Bhasin). We also hear, at a filmi party, the jibe that Bombay Talkies — the film studio where Manto worked — had “too many Muslims” in its employ.

More interestingly, in a scene set on the eve of Partition, we see Manto witness a conversation in a Bombay shoe shop where his wife Safia is shopping. “Mera toh watan Bhendi Bazaar hai. Main isse chhod kar Grant Road na jaaoon, aur tu mujhe Karachi bhej raha hai?” Manto hasn’t said the words himself, but the idea of the locality as stand-in for the nation has been introduced — allowing us to think of it later, when Manto’s nostalgia and sense of exile moulds itself around a city rather than a country.

In real life, Manto wrote scathingly and prophetically about the directions in which Pakistan’s politics would go. But the film fails to establish why he never felt at home in Pakistan — barring glimpses of his obscenity trial and a single scene based on one of Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ (lit up by Neeraj Kabi’s performance), there is little of his political bite on screen. Instead Das focuses excessively on Manto’s rather performative mourning. Like a dramatic lover trying to forget a past relationship, he refuses to even open letters from Bombay written by friends like Shyam and Ismat Chughtai. When a policeman rifles through his desk and says rudely, “I believe you write many things, where is it all?”, Manto’s retort is to hand him a scrap of paper. “Ismein toh Bambai ka pata likha hai,” says the Lahore cop. “Wahin toh hai sab kucch,” mutters Nawaz’s Manto. A cinematically stereotypical descent into lovesick madness follows, with Nawaz pricking up his ears and saying he hears a melody that Shyam used to sing.

Das’s film succumbs to another familiar filmi motif: muftkhor drinking partners whose appearance foreshadows the hero’s decline. These hangers-on, who serve to insulate the hero from self-realisation in films as disparate as Muhafiz / In Custody (also about a writer in free fall) and Guide, are here concentrated into the single figure of Shaad (Shashank Arora). But even the talented Arora cannot breathe life into this one-note character, whose only brief appears to be to provide Manto company as he drinks more, and more darkly.

Another of the film’s themes — because it was one of Manto’s longstanding fascinations — is the sex worker. The film opens, for instance, with one of his finest stories: ‘Ten Rupees’, in which a young girl is taken out by three older male clients. The scenario has the whiff of doom, but Manto does something unexpected: he preserves Sarita’s marvellous state of innocence till the story’s end, depositing us and our fears at the edge of a precipice. In another fictional segue, we see Tillotama Shome as a sex worker pushed to the brink by her pimp (Paresh Rawal).

The segments enacting Manto’s fictions contain the film’s better performances (Ranveer Shorey, Divya Dutta, Vinod Nagpal). But their near-pulpy high drama throws into relief the dullness of the rest of the film. Das tempts the cultural-historical junkies among us with a period recreation of a mythical Bombay in which Progressive Urdu writers mingled with film folk. But the interactions are flat; the characters —Krishen Chander, Ismat, Himanshu Rai, Ashok Kumar — cardboard cutouts. Only one, Ila Arun as the courtesan-turned-filmmaker Jaddan Bai (Nargis’s mother), has any spark. The only other interactions that achieve any immersiveness are those between Manto and his wife Safia (the excellent Rasika Dugal).

Given that so much of Das’s dialogue is provided to her by her inimitable protagonist, it is a shock when it falls flat. Even Manto’s sharpest barbs — “Agar aap mere afsaanon ko bardaasht nahi kar sakte, toh woh isliye ki zamaana hi na-kaabil-e-bardaasht hai (If you can’t tolerate my stories, it is because the age is an intolerable one)” or “Accha toh tum bhi tarakkipasandon ki tarah is daur mein bhi optimistic rehna chahte ho? (Oh, so you’re like those Progressives who want to stay optimistic even in this era?)” — fail to offer the non-Manto-knowing viewer a bridge between our times and his. Like Toba Tek Singh, Manto remains stuck in a no-man’s-land.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Sep 2018.