Jai Arjun Singh's Blog, page 75

Trio of life: about Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus

[Did a shorter version of this for my DNA column]

A south Delhi multiplex is not the sort of place where you expect to linger after a film screening, listening to a discussion about (among other things) neuroscience, microbiology, extended phenotypes, and the nature of consciousness, morality and individual responsibility. Yet this is what happened after a recent PVR Saket preview of Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus , which releases in selected cities next week. Even the young writer-director seemed a little sheepish, as if aware that such conversations should ideally unfold at leisure, without the distraction of the hall management pointing at their watches to indicate that the (paying) viewers for another movie were waiting outside, rustling their popcorn sacks. But then, Ship of Theseus does lend itself to being discussed in terms of its big themes – which may be an injustice because it is also a splendidly constructed, visually fluid work, very assured for a debut feature, with some of the best ensemble acting I have seen in a while.


Personally I was in two minds about the post-screening talk. As a movie buff and journalist seeking background information, it was nice to hear from Gandhi and members of his unit, including Sohum Shah, who played one of the three main roles and took on the responsibility of producing the film when funds were scarce. Besides, the interaction itself was pleasant, with members of Delhi’s culturati – the painter Jatin Das, photographer Raghu Rai and veteran producer Suresh Jindal among them – warmly expressing their appreciation for the film (Rai couldn’t resist making a technical point about “apertures hanging” in certain shots) and relating personal anecdotes. Speaking as a viewer though, I would have preferred some time to let the experience sink in fully, to collect my feelings about the unusual images and sounds of the previous two-and-a-half hours.

The very title of this dream-like, occasionally slow-moving film comes from a well-known philosophical query (does an object that has had all its components replaced one by one remain the same object?), which means there was a measure of intellectual self-consciousness built into the project from the start. In the breadth of its ambition and in its desire to tackle big ideas about our physical and inner worlds, Ship of Theseus reminded me of Terrence Malick’s bloated, often spellbinding, sometimes incomprehensible Tree of Life . Unlike that film though, this one has a linear, easy-to-follow narrative. Or three: this is a triptych of stories about individuals struggling with bodily changes or emotional epiphany, or both.


In the first story a young, vision-impaired woman named Aliya (wonderfully played by the Egyptian filmmaker-activist Aida El-Kashef) takes photographs by listening to sounds and aiming her camera at them, using colour-identification devices and computer technology, and the aid of her boyfriend. An exhibition of the photos is enthusiastically received (is the acclaim for their actual quality or for the novelty of the venture?), but Aliya has a life-changing and art-changing moment when her sight is restored after a surgery, and the question arises: having gained something so vital, what might she have lost along the way? We see that she has become more conscious about what she is doing, and the film has a story about a frog and a centipede that suggests her predicament. (“How do you manage to walk on a hundred legs without ever stumbling?” the frog asks the centipede. The centipede, having never dwelled on such details of technique, now starts thinking about them – and promptly trips over himself.)


The second story begins with a long take of another centipede – this one isn’t stumbling, but it is in peril of being squashed by human feet until it is lifted on a piece of paper and set out of harm’s way. The monk who does this, Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi), is the story’s protagonist. “What if the insect’s karma was to get crushed?” a cocky young lawyer asks him, and their good-natured banter continues intermittently, even as they file a petition to improve the treatment of animals used for chemical testing by big corporations. But Maitreya’s ideals are put to a painfully severe test when he is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and finds that those same heartless corporations make the medicines that can ease his suffering.
 

Much more hard-edged and worldly than the gentle monk is a young stockbroker named Navin (Sohum Shah), whose story rounds off the film. “Zindagi mein khushi chahiye, aur shaayad thodi si maanavta” (“All you need in life is happiness, and perhaps a bit of humanity”) is Navin's personal philosophy, but his conscience is strangely awakened when he hears about a poor man whose kidney was stolen, around the same time that Navin himself had a kidney transplant. Even after establishing that he wasn’t the recipient of the pilfered organ, he feels personal responsibility - the poor, voiceless man may have become for him what the centipede was for the monk - and traces the stolen kidney to Stockholm, leading to a blackly funny sequence where a harried middle-aged Swede tries to understand what this Indian man wants of him (and later weeps and crouches in prayer like a Bergman character trying to fathom the mysteries of existence).

Taken together, these stories ask how much an individual’s actions can affect the world, and what is the real measure of a human being anyway: are we agglomerations of body parts, autonomous entities or “colonies” made up of trillions of bacteria, separate from our environment or indistinguishable from it? And either way, where does consciousness and self-awareness fit in? Ship of Theseus has many such balls in the air. During the preview discussion, Gandhi admitted that he was eager to put all his enquiries and influences into this one film (perhaps a natural impulse for a creative person who doesn’t know what the future may hold beyond his first big project). But he was also aware that a film conceived in such lofty terms can become turgid. One of his challenges as a writer, he said, was to make the dialogue sound as natural and organic as possible, “as if it really was flowing from the characters”, rather than the characters being mouthpieces for an ideology. “As an author, I was tempted to intrude on the characters’ space. I had to guard against that.” No wonder then that the auditioning process for the film had to be spread out over many weeks, and became an exercise in bonding and forming relationships. “I had to feel a strong connection with the actors who played even the smaller roles.” 



It certainly produced results: perhaps the most admirable thing about this film is how well it works at the level of intimate, worm’s-eye storytelling. There are a couple of static, over-expository passages – such as a courtroom scene with lawyers and judges speaking like philosophers – where I felt my attention wandering. But lightness of touch is the more dominant mode, and there isn’t a false note in any of the main performances. I particularly liked the splashes of unexpected humour in the third story, including a surreal but plausible scene where Navin walks around decrepit buildings in a poor neighbourhood, trudging up seemingly endless stairs and squeezing through narrow alleys, to find the house of the man whose kidney was stolen (it is almost as if the stockbroker were being forced to leave the material world behind, to negotiate a mountain and discover his inner hermit). Another long, unbroken tracking shot has Maitreya and his friend walking together along a road, passing walls with graffiti on them, exchanging corny jokes such as the one about Buddhists being allowed to send emails with no attachments – but even as the conversation becomes more intense as it goes along, and the pace of their walking appears to quicken, the smiles never leave the two men’s faces. The real, human tone of this film can be found in scenes like the one where we see the ravages of physical illness corroding even the most evolved mind (“Pata nahin,” says the illness-wracked monk to a supplicant who asks him if the soul exists) and where a plaintive request like “Please take care of yourself” then becomes more direct and pertinent than all the self-conscious soul-searching in the world.


At the same time, many diverse things are happening here at a formal level; this isn’t one of those “arty” movies that are content to let the dialogue do all the work. The images and the cutting (or lack of cutting) constantly reveal something of the inner lives of these characters. One scary scene on a busy road – with sound design and quick cuts used very effectively – gives us an immediate sense of Aliya’s disoriented state, her inability to deal with a complex sensory world where sounds and sights operate together (or in opposition). In another extended scene, she argues with her boyfriend and the
handheld camera moves back and forth between them, the movement,
dialogue and acting combining artfully to let us appreciate both sides
of the argument. There are long takes that follow the norms of Cinema Verite (as in a lengthy shot in a hospital room where Navin washes his grandmother’s bedpan, then helps her pee) but there are also visually showy sequences like the one in which a group of monks walk through a landscape dotted with windmills. “Ideas and enquiries” may have been the starting point for this film, but there is palpable cinematic ambition too, and much of it is achieved through Pankaj Kumar’s outstanding photography.

Ultimately (no spoiler here) the three stories – which have no visual breaks or markers to separate one from the next – smoothly converge in a scene where the main characters find themselves in the same room. But such is the context of this meeting that we are also led to wonder about the stories of the other people in that room, the ones we haven’t been shown. That open-endedness – the sense that what we have seen in these two hours is just a fragment of an immeasurably large and interconnected picture – is one of the things that make Ship of Theseus such a rewarding film despite its occasional verbosity. It is well worth watching on the big screen, so do look out for it.



P.S. (Cough cough) Highly amused to see the "genre" classification for Ship of Theseus on this Wikipedia page. Take a look.

Love across dimensions - on Vikramaditya Motwane's Lootera

My Barun Chanda fandom has been well-chronicled on this blog, but even a more “objective” viewer would probably agree that his dignified, sympathetic presence as the aging zamindar of Manikpur brings both gravitas and credibility to the early scenes in Lootera . That apart, there is much to love in Vikramaditya Motwane’s film, the first half of which contains a delicate romance and a tender parent-child relationship as well as an elegy for the passing of an old world. Here is a genuine Big Screen movie, lush and stately and beautifully shot by Mahendra Shetty (who also did Motwane’s debut feature Udaan ) – I couldn’t imagine being as drawn into it if I had first experienced it on a TV set.



Here is also a film with enough courage of conviction to let things unfold at a slow pace. It gives us close-ups of interesting faces, lets the camera linger over details of period décor, and allows its characters to occasionally speak in such hushed tones that the audience must strain to hear, and a new kind of sensory experience comes into play; you can see people on the seats around you turn their attention away from the wondrous things happening on their cellphone screens and paying heed instead to the other kind of screen in front of them. (It felt like a throwback to an earlier, idealised time in movie-watching.)

The film's look is very much at the service of story and mood-creation. The lambent interior scenes reflect the warmth of the relationship between Roychoudhury the zamindar and his daughter Pakhi (Sonakshi Sinha), but there is also an oppressiveness, a sense of a place in a time warp, waiting to be invaded by a harsher, more modern world. This is the post-Independence moment (the story is set in 1953-54), the zamindar’s estate is like a treasure-filled catacomb, and then a young archaeologist named Varun (Ranveer Singh) arrives on a motorbike of all things. He might just as well have come in a time machine (when his bike is knocked off the road by the quaint maroon car being driven by Pakhi, it is like a collision between two eras), for he is an anomaly in this setting; though well-mannered on the outside, he is as much a symbol of the rude future as James Dean’s Jett Rink, striding about the oil fields of Texas, his very presence unnerving the Old Rich, was in Giant . And he is as rootless as the landlords are tied to their way of life. (Ranveer Singh seemed a little miscast to me, not quite of this time and place, but I kept wondering if that wasn’t deliberate.)


Varun and his friend are here supposedly to unearth the ruins of an ancient civilization beneath the zameen, but from their cryptic conversations we can tell that something is off, and the film’s title is a giveaway too; and so it doesn’t come as a shock to learn that the “old civilization” they intend to dig up and plunder is the world of the zamindars. These are unprivileged young men who are trying to forge their destiny by operating outside the law, by reaching out and taking what they may have convinced themselves is theirs by right. (The East India Company stole riches from the country and distributed them to the zamindars once. Now, 200 years later, with the white overseers gone, it is time for the common man to even the scales.)

The narrative builds subtly in these early scenes, so that even when we think we know what is going on there are small, frisson-creating moments, such as the scene where Varun’s genial friend reflexively draws a gun when he is awoken. Or the aptness – with hindsight – of the use of the song “Tadbeer se bigdi hui takdeer bana le” from the 1951 Baazi, a film about a young pauper being led into a posh, unfamiliar world and told “All this can be yours if you play the right hand.” The film leads up to its halfway point with an adept, largely wordless cross-cutting sequence where the zamindar and his daughter discover Varun’s betrayal, and there is a shot of the disconsolate Roychoudhury framed at the entrance of a tunnel dug by the “archaeologists” – visual shorthand for the landlord sent to an early grave.

But the lootera has also stolen Pakhi’s heart and betrayed her trust, and their atypical love story provides the fuel for the film’s second hour, while making Lootera – for me at least – a little less gripping after the intermission. It is still wonderfully shot, the setting having shifted to snowy Dalhousie where a tuberculosis-afflicted Pakhi lives alone. The change in colour tones is so palpable, we see that the warmth and security has gone out of her life, and partly because of the move to a more plebeian setting the film itself now looks notably more contemporary (even though this section is set just a year later). But having offered so many interesting possibilities and diverse narrative strands early on, Lootera now becomes a chamber drama centred on two damaged people and their conflicting feelings about each other. And this change in narrative focus (or narrowing down of narrative focus) didn’t quite work for me.



Sonakshi and Ranveer both have undoubted screen presence, but the film places much too heavy a burden on their shoulders. They do a good job of smouldering or snarling at each other, but I just couldn’t believe in the deep, all-consuming passion. Too often, I felt I was being simply told by the script to accept that these two people are intensely in love, without much actual evidence – it became a version of “tell, don’t show”, and the long, languid takes and leisurely cross-cutting that I had enjoyed so much in the first half began to seem excessive and self-conscious after a point.


Which is not to say that the film ever stops being interesting, or good to look at. At one point it wittily uses a passage from Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie”, a tune that was also used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. But there is another echo from that film: Varun, his past having caught up with him, arrives for shelter at the door of the woman he has wronged, much like Alex staggering through the snow and knocking at a former victim’s doorstep: “It was home I was wanting and it was Home I came to, brothers, not realizing where I was and had been before.” The context is different, of course. Here are two people who want to be together at some level, but know they will never be able to build a “home”. And perhaps that is because, like Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam , they aren’t really of the same world or the same dimension to begin with? In one of the film’s loveliest shots, as Pakhi teaches Varun how to draw, we see a canvas with a painted landscape on it set against a real landscape. The juxtaposition of reality and artifice might lead one to ask: is the world of the zamindars a pretty picture that has nothing to do with real life? Or is it the other way around – is the modern world a gaudy simulacra, an imposition? And either way, can they exist in the same space?

Speaking of reality and artifice, Lootera has an ending borrowed from the famous O Henry story “The Last Leaf” (which is credited by the film). It seemed a bit random to me, but it’s easy to see the appeal: “The Last Leaf” is the sort of tale that is almost guaranteed to have a powerful, irrationally emotional impact on someone who encounters it for the first time, and its use here gives Lootera the seal of being a mythic love story for the ages, irrespective of how convincing the actual romantic arc of the film is. For reasons I mentioned at the start of this post, this is still one of the two most absorbing movie experiences I have had in a hall in months (I’ll write about the other one next week) - but by the end it felt like a case of diminishing returns.



[A post on Motwane's fine first film Udaan is here]

Notes on Hitchcock (from an anxious fanboy)

I finally watched the 2012 Hitchcock , and it became a test case in the truism that you have to see a film for yourself to decide how you feel about it. That might sound blindingly obvious, but how often we read a movie synopsis (or even a measured review) and casually say, “Oh I’m sure I won’t like that one.” Even professional film writers – weighed down by deadlines or the tedium of watching mediocre movies week after week – sometimes make these assumptions, and regret them afterward.


As I wrote in this post last year, given my intense relationship with Psycho, I was always going to approach Hitchcock with a certain amount of dread, anticipating its many simplifications and inaccuracies. I expected to feel the same way about it as many Iliad-purists felt about Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (a film I thought highly of) – wanting to elbow the stranger in the next seat every couple of minutes and hiss “That ISN’T how it really happened!” The project seemed to pivot around the casting coup of Sir Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock and Dame Helen Mirren as his wife Alma, and given that relatively little is known about the inner workings of the Hitchcocks' 53-year marriage – or the precise nature of the contributions made by the publicity-shy Alma to her husband’s later work – it felt like this was going to be a neatly dramatized, easy-to-digest serving of Hitchcock Lite, for a modern audience that would probably have little time for his own films.

And to an extent, Hitchcock is all of these things. It includes Cliff's Notes-like summaries for viewers who have a basic acquaintance with the director’s work but who aren’t engaged enough to read books filled with analysis or biographical detail. (At one point, Vera Miles glibly tells Janet Leigh that Hitchcock is just like the James Stewart character in Vertigo , constantly needing to control and reshape women. QED.) It tinkers with the facts, placing a lot of dramatic weight on a subplot about the Hitchcocks’ writer friend Whitfield Cook that almost certainly has no basis in reality. But on the whole this is a better, more layered film than I’d expected. It is a considerate (by which I don’t mean hagiographic) pen portrait of a man who was all huff and bluster on the outside, and especially in public, but who may also have been insecure enough inside never to fully realize what a major artist he was. It is a largely engrossing account of a marriage going through a brief period of crisis, of a wife who was mostly content to stay in the background and of a husband who didn’t always acknowledge how vital her presence was to him. (The Lady Who Nearly Vanished vs The Man Who Knew Too Little?) And importantly, it is a droll, self-aware tribute that draws motifs from Hitchcock’s own work and understands something of his sensibilities. 



Consider the very first scene, where we see the mass murderer Ed Gein (whose macabre adventures inspired Robert Bloch’s book Psycho) clunking his brother on the head with a spade near their Wisconsin farm, upon which the mood abruptly changes from the gruesome to the comical: as the famous funeral-march tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents plays on the soundtrack, Hopkins’s Hitchcock enters the frame to introduce this story and to seal a blood pact with the murderer. Ed Gein committed horrible crimes, Hitchcock tells us in his patented faux-outraged tone, looking into the camera; but then, if he had never existed – or if he had been arrested earlier than he was – we wouldn’t have “our film”, would we?

This can be viewed as an artist’s admission to feeding off – and profiting from – the ugly aspects of the real world, and the suffering of others; but the words “our film” are also a reminder that Hitchcock implicated his audience in nearly everything he did, putting us through a gamut of disturbing, contradictory, morally ambiguous emotions. (An aside: as someone whose life as a movie-watcher and writer was hugely informed by Psycho, would it be callous of me to feel vaguely grateful for Ed Gein’s existence?) That opening scene catches so much of what the real Hitchcock was about: reflections on the relationship between life and art, between the artist and his patrons, between the watcher and the watched; the alternating of black, even tasteless humour with moments of human truth and insight. (At his very best, as in Psycho’s great parlour scene, Hitchcock used one to enhance the other.)


At times it is hard to figure out exactly what sort of audience Hitchcock was made for. It presumes that the viewer cares about Psycho, or at least has a good memory of the film (an intense scene where Hitch is shown directing Janet Leigh during the car-drive shoot, for instance, would lose much of its impact for someone who didn’t know Psycho well). But at the same time, the narrative emphasis is on something more universal: the relationship between two people as they approach the twilight of their long life together. One can tell the film is more interested in the Hitch-Alma relationship than in behind-the-scenes trivia, because it leaves out some of the most entertaining and filmable anecdotes about the making of Psycho, such as the one about Hitch taking Janet Leigh aside and asking her to “warm up” her cold-fish co-star John Gavin during their love scene, or the painstaking, half-successful experiments with moleskin to cover the “naughty bits” when Leigh had to be topless for the shower scene. The inclusion of such scenes would unquestionably have made Hitchcock a more accessible and exciting film for a mainstream audience; instead, it chooses to spend much of its running time on the bond between two people who have been married for 35 years.

Mirren and Hopkins play a big part in making this work. But equally notably, the growing tension and paranoia in the marriage (as Hitch wonders if his wife is having an affair) is presented not in the terms of a conventional realist drama but as Hitchcock himself might have opted to do it: there is a terrific scene where he crunches violently on celery in the kitchen and the camera moves in on Alma hunching over the sink, with the movement and the sound design suggesting that her husband momentarily feels like snapping her neck. (This may also be a reference to a darkly funny domestic scene in Hitchcock’s Frenzy .) Elsewhere too, the spirit – and some of the energy – of Psycho infects this film, from the deadpan one-liners (“You know where to plunge the dagger, don’t you?” is said during domestic banter in a scene that takes place, where else, in a bathroom) to the use of quiet, minatory passages from Bernard Herrmann’s superb score.


And there may even be a few hat-tips to the intense visual design of Psycho: the echoing gestures and movements, the use of similar-looking objects (windshield wipers in the rain, a knife swinging back and forth in a shower). Take two scenes – very different in mood – that have our portly director making flamboyant use of his arms. In one, deeply distressed, he insinuates himself into the shooting of the shower sequence, moving the knife savagely back and forth to show the crew how it is done (and indulging in self-therapy in the process). In the other scene late in the film, he stands outside the preview hall, so thrilled by the audience’s reception to the shower scene that he waltzes about and moves his hands like an orchestra conductor slashing a baton through the air. Neither scene plays like an accurate representation of what the undemonstrative Hitchcock might actually have done in those situations, but they achieve a poetic credibility in showing what may have been going on in his head (the latter scene is presumably a literalisation of his remark that he liked to “play the audience like an organ”). They make a good, playful stab at summoning the master's ghost, and for that I was happy to overlook this film's little inconsistencies.


P.S. I like Scarlett Johansson, but I was a little underwhelmed by her performance as Janet Leigh; though that is probably because the real Leigh in the first 45 minutes of Psycho – so skillfully holding the best section of the movie together – is so thoroughly embedded in my movie consciousness (it is a great performance, one of the best in a Hitchcock film). I might have felt the same way about James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins, but the difference is that D’arcy has a smaller, less important part, and in the two or three scenes we do see him he bears a strong enough physical resemblance to Perkins and does a decent job of imitating the actor’s real-life earnestness – whereas Johansson has the harder task of playing Janet Leigh in recognizable scenes from Psycho (in the car, and in the shower).

More on musical sequences: the pleasures of “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”

[A sequel to the last post, and part of an irregular series about musical sequences in Hindi cinema]



In this post I mentioned one of my favourite recent discoveries, the long song sequence “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” from the 1968 film Aashirwad. As far as I know, it is among the only Hindi-movie scenes to make extensive use of the Lavani dance form with its many hallmarks, including sexually aggressive gestures by the performers and banter involving the audience. The full video is below. You might need to watch the song a couple of times to really appreciate it, but it builds in energy, and I especially like how it goes from the 3.45 mark onwards.








Some context: music is central to this film. The lead character Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is the son-in-law of a rich zamindar, but he is also a lover of classical music and never feels happier, more relaxed and more in touch with his finer emotions than when he is practicing with his “guru”, an old villager named Baiju (played by the poet/actor Harindranath Chattopadhyay). In the scene in question, Jogi Thakur, Baiju and their friend Mirza saab go to watch a performance by a visiting dance troupe and end up participating in a musical battle of wits.

Some things I like about the sequence:

– One of the big themes in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema over the decades – in films as varied as Anuradha , Mem Didi, Abhimaan and Rang Birangi – is how men and women move tentatively towards parity in a relationship. This is often expressed in humorous terms, with music as a conduit: for instance, Mem Didi has the dance number “Hu Tu Tu” in which a group of women face off against a group of men during a celebration, singing about the politics of marriage, each group jokingly claiming victimhood for itself. In “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”, music becomes an equalizer, blurring roles and mannerisms: the women on stage whistle lewdly, make crude “male” gestures such as scratching under their armpits to mimic a monkey (“Kyun Sikandar, banoge bandar?”), mock their audience (“Aisa lagta hai jaise hum gadhon ke gaon mein aa gaye hain”). And the watching men participate in the performance with a childlike delight, shedding the baggage that they might otherwise carry of being privileged observers or patrons. In both directions, gender is being transcended. (Within the narrative of the film, we have already seen a reversal of traditional roles: Jogi Thakur is a caring father and in general more humane and sensitive than his wife Leela; the implication is that this is because he is more in touch with his artistic side, while Leela – a thakur’s daughter – has grown up obsessed with money and power.)


Music is also an equalizer on another level in this film: it removes class and caste lines. The “guru” is the lower-class Baiju, who recoils in embarrassment when Jogi Thakur tries to touch his feet; for me you are the real Brahmin, says the upper-class man, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. In this scene, the two men sit together on the floor and sitting with them is a Muslim friend; the unforced bonhomie is a direct result of their love for music and the performing arts.

– It took me a couple of viewings to "get into" the song, but I like the way the music shifts register, from the languid, sweet melody when the women describe “Radha” and “Jamuna”, to the strident, challenging notes when they demand the answer to their riddle. And the wordless dance movements near the end, where the dancer conveys a possible answer to Jogi Thakur’s riddle purely through gestures rather than words; the viewer is allowed to interpret her movements, it isn’t spelt out.

– Ashok Kumar’s voice may be rough-hewn and nasal, but how appropriate it is for this song, and how much it adds to the authenticity of the scene. In a regular Hindi-film song – the sort that one can think of in dreamlike or symbolic terms, as taking place outside normal time and space – it isn’t so disconcerting to suddenly have an actor’s voice being replaced by that of Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi. (Of course, viewers who are new to Hindi movies do take some time to adjust to this.) But “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo” is very much a “realistic” part of the film’s narrative – an actual performance with real Lavani dancers performing on a stage with real musical instruments being played. Given this, how pleasing it is to hear the lead actor sing in his own voice (one of the most recognisable voices in the history of Hindi film, going back to the first decade of sound). Chattopadhyaya, all of 70 years old, does his own singing here too, just as he would in the lovely “Bhor Aayee Gaya Andhiyara” in Bawarchi.


– The sequence is beautifully acted, both by the dancers (especially the lead, whose name I don’t know) and by Kumar and Chattopadhyay, who seem so comfortable with the setting, so genuinely pleased by the opportunity to do something like this on screen. I particularly love the two-second scene near the end where Jogi Thakur, about to reveal the answer to his riddle and seal his triumph, looks back at Baiju and Mirza (who are out of the frame) with an impish, childlike smile; Kumar’s expression is pitch perfect, and so “musical” as well – it has its own beat and rhythm.

– How the answer to the final riddle overturns our expectations – expectations that arise from the innuendo-laden nature of the performance, as well as the naughty way in which Jogi Thakur asks his question. But though the mood here is one of fun and games and laughter, the riddle takes on somber echoes later in the film. “No one gets to see his own wife as a widow,” Jogi Thakur points out gleefully, and the words foreshadow what will soon happen to this jovial man: he will go to jail and effectively be “dead” for his wife and little daughter.

If anyone has further thoughts on this sequence, the film, and on Lavani in general, do weigh in.

Aashirwad, “Rail Gaadi” and the vitality of the well-done song sequence

[From my DNA column]

The use of the song in popular Hindi cinema – its disruption of narrative, its apparent lack of “logic” – often invites snobbery from those who have a narrowly defined view of realism in art. But a great song – combining rhythm, lyrics and singing to optimum effect – can reach emotional depths and express poetic truths in ways that conventional narrative cannot. Similarly, a well-filmed musical sequence can work within the context of a movie to deepen our attitudes to the characters and situations. And an advantage of being a movie buff in the YouTube age is being able to watch old song sequences almost on demand – to view them either as short films in their own right (much like MTV videos) or as part of the larger work.

The vitality of some of these scenes – even in generally mediocre movies – is remarkable. At times it is like the film has entered a magical realm, the music inspiring the unit to transcend their own efforts and move beyond the commonplace of standard, plot-oriented storytelling. Little wonder that even Satyajit Ray, who was famously snarky about many aspects of popular cinema, wrote in an essay: “It is surprising how much thought goes into the cinematic handling (‘picturisation’, as the term goes) of these numbers […] Songs are now choreographed. It is not uncommon these days to have each line of a lyric sung against a different scenic background. This is – and I am not being facetious – a daring innovation, wholly cinematic and entirely valid if it is related in style to the rest of the film.”


In 1968, the year of Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne , the man who played the delightfully goggle-eyed magician Borfi in that film also appeared in - and sang in - the Hindi movie Aashirwad . Harindranath Chattopadhyay (credited here simply as Harindranath) is the genial old musician Baiju, who becomes guru to the protagonist Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar), and one of the film’s highlights is the long, teasing song sequence “Saaf Karo Insaaf Karo”, where Jogi and Baiju watch a performance by a Lavani dance troupe, answering riddles and posing their own. This is an energetic, innuendo-laden jugalbandhi between women and men, superbly acted by Kumar and Chattopadhyaya – who are palpably enjoying themselves – as well as by the dancers. (That’s another thing: we sometimes take our song sequences so much for granted that we overlook the amount of performing skill that can go into them.) Incidentally Jogi’s final question, which stumps the women, has a minor thematic link to what happens later in the film – an example of an apparently superfluous musical sequence being organic to the story.

Harindranath also wrote the words for the most famous song in Aashirwad, one that trivia buffs – even those who haven’t seen the film – know well. This is the “Rail Gaadi” number, sung by Ashok Kumar in his own voice for a group of little children. Rooted though it is in the cadences of semi-classical Indian music, the song’s rapid-fire style has won it a reputation as a precursor to modern rap and hip-hop; among cineastes, “Hindi cinema gave the world its first rap song” is a proclamation made with nearly as much pride as “India gave the world the concept of Zero”.


But what I was unprepared for when I watched “Rail Gaadi” on YouTube recently was its visual language. Around the one-minute mark, as Kumar launches into the song’s fastest movement, racing through the names of train stations (“Mangalore Bangalore / Talegaon Malegaon / Khandwa Mandwa”), the camera begins a series of super-fast zoom ins and zoom outs – going from a medium shot of the actor to an extreme close up and back in the time it takes to snap your fingers; the visuals are mimicking, or trying to keep pace with, the music. There were many creative song sequences in 1960s Hindi cinema, but offhand I can’t think of another one that employs this effect to the same degree. (Even the vibrant “Yahoo!” sequence in the Shammi Kapoor-starrer Junglee feels a little staid in comparison.) The quick zooms are like an anticipation of similar techniques in such MTV videos as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Give it Away” more than 20 years later.













This is particularly notable because the film’s director, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, was hardly a major stylist at this point in his career. In his earliest films in the late 50s, Mukherjee (perhaps influenced by his association with Bimal Roy) did show a certain visual flair, but by the time Aashirwad was made he had settled into the more functional, character-oriented storytelling that would make him such an endearing figure in the “Middle Cinema” of the 1970s. Yet here he and his lensman T B Seetharam are, using an unusual cinematic language – positively avant-garde by the standards of the time – to match a song’s energy.

It is the sort of scene that can make you rethink your ideas about cinematic form. After watching it, I revisited a markedly different type of song sequence, the gentle “Kuch Dil ne Kaha”, from another Mukherjee film of the time, the 1966 Anupama. In this scene, Anupama (Sharmila Tagore) – a reticent, emotionally repressed girl – is singing to herself, unaware that she is being watched by the film’s hero Ashok (or by us). Accordingly the camera is respectful of her shyness and her need for solitude. It maintains a decent distance, there are many long takes and slow tracking shots as we are put in the position of the watching Ashok: intrigued, paying attention, but taking care not to be intrusive. This sequence is just as placid and sober as “Rail Gaadi” is vigorous, but in both cases the stylistic choice is apt for the character and the mood – and these are just two among countless examples of how songs can be enriching presences in the unique storytelling engine that is the mainstream Hindi film.

[An earlier post about visual language in another Hindi-film song sequence, “Bachpan ke Din” from Sujata. More on song sequences soon]

On the appeal of pre-historic special effects

(Continuing thoughts from the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde transformation scenes mentioned in the last post)

The discussion about whether movies are “better” or “worse” today vis-a-vis an earlier time is a pointless and irresolvable one, subject to shifting benchmarks, individual tastes and hard-line biases that run both ways, from the Golden Ageist syndrome (the past was always a better place than the present / old songs were so melodious, today it’s all noise) to contemporary chauvinism (old movies are awkward and creaky / black-and-white is boring). But one area where something resembling consensus is possible is when assessing technological improvements. Though I haven’t seen the new Superman film yet, I have no trouble accepting that it is probably much more visually fluid – and a grander aesthetic experience – than the 1978 Superman; and this despite the fact that I have irrationally defensive feelings about the latter, having grown up with it.


However, agreeing that technology is objectively superior today – and that more things are now possible in movie-making, things that would have been regarded as magic a hundred years ago – is not the same as saying that modern CGI is always more effective than techniques used in the distant past. As I have written before about films like Fritz Lang’s Siegfried or the original King Kong, the use of a papier-mâché dragon or stop-motion animation can give a fantasy or horror film a primal, viscerally stirring quality, because it feels otherworldly and removed from our regular experience – whereas modern computer effects by their very nature make everything crystal-clear and even commonplace, so that the image of a giant monkey fighting a giant dinosaur, or a Balrog battling Gandalf on a narrow bridge, becomes as credible as a weekend outing to the local mall (assuming of course that you think of malls and their zombie patrons as real-world things).

Personally I feel a thrill every time I see “special effects” in a very old film because one gets a firsthand sense of human minds working with a young medium, trying to supersede the limitedness of available resources. Almost since its inception, cinema has adapted literary works that contain supernatural elements – see this 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland – and some of the early filmmakers seem like masochists setting themselves impossible tasks rather than simply using the motion-picture camera to record everyday things (which would have been a worthy enough pursuit, given how new the technology was). Today, with an adequate scale of production, it is possible to create a convincing visual representation of just about any story, no matter how outlandish the setting. But 110 years ago, just figuring out how to show the disembodied head of the Cheshire Cat in such a way that it looked like a halfway-alive thing (as opposed to a cardboard cut-out pasted on the set) would have required intense brainstorming.

In 1910, Thomas Edison’s studio made a 12-minute-long version of Frankenstein, which is extant today and can be found on YouTube. The film is as jerky and theatrical to modern eyes as you might expect, but there is genuine inventiveness in a couple of scenes, including one with a large mirror in which the Monster eventually disappears (raising the question of whether he was a figment of his creator’s imagination or perhaps an alter ego). For the difficult scene in which Frankenstein’s unworldly creation comes alive, the filmmakers put a life-size wax replica of a skeleton in a big vat and set fire to it so that it slowly dissolved and crumpled (meanwhile someone out of sight moved its arms around a bit). They then played the film backwards, so that one gets the impression of something hideous being forged out of fire until it sits upright, a ghastly mockery of the human form.


Much of the pleasure of watching this scene comes not from its visual appeal (though if you’re in the right mood, it does have a creepy appeal) but from imagining the problem-solving process: the discussions that these pioneers of film must have engaged in decades before the advent of computer technology (or anything else that we would think of as “special effects” today), the other things they might have tried and failed miserably at, the possibility that they needed to build multiple wax figures and experiment with the intensity of the fire because the first few attempts didn’t work. How random and slapdash it seems to us today, yet how vital it was to the writing of movie grammar, and to the creative growth of a medium that was often dismissed at the time as having no artistic future because it was simply a bland reproduction of reality.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

Elbow on knee, heart in film - Rouben Mamoulian on the natural and the true

In my short list of “books to keep on a desert island”, one place is permanently reserved for the anthology Conversations with the Great Movie-Makers of Hollywood’s Golden Age . As a reader this book is always a work in progress for me, a living, shifting thing: I might set it aside for months on end, then dip into it again for just a few minutes and emerge with a new treasure. Even the familiar passages are worth revisiting over time because the filmmakers’ insights – and the diversity and occasional contradictions in their views – become more meaningful as you watch more of their films. (If that desert island didn’t have a DVD player and an electricity connection, this book would lose much of its appeal.)

There are dozens of quotes I’d like to share from Conversations, but for now here is something by Rouben Mamoulian, who made one of my favourite movies, the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . This is Mamoulian, speaking at a seminar, on stylization, realism and what literary critics sometimes refer to as “poetic truth” (as opposed to literal truth).

I’ve always believed in stylization and poetry. Even on the stage, things are stylized – every movement, every grouping. If you preserve the psychological truth of the emotions and thoughts of the actors, and combine that with physical expression that is utterly stylized and that couldn’t happen in real life, the impact upon the audience is one of greater reality. Perhaps that’s why they call it surrealism [...] Done correctly, stylization carries greater reality in its impact on the audience than everyday kitchen-sink naturalism can ever achieve.

[...] Stylization is really an extension of feeling and thought, a sharper way of showing that thought. Let me all ask you a question. You probably know “The Thinker”, the great statue of Auguste Rodin. Will you show me how he sits? Let’s see.

Without exception all of you are wrong. It never fails. His man is sitting, believe it or not, with one elbow on the opposite knee. It’s not natural or comfortable, but aesthetically and artistically it has a focus. It has design and rhythm and power. So, what is unnatural becomes true, and you can apply this idea to any kind of a scene. You can put everything upside down or reverse it, provided what it does is sharpen. In your desire to express love or hate or doubt, whatever it is, you ask yourself “How can I express this more acutely?” Then you’ll wind up with a gesture that is not natural, but perfect as an expression of that thought.

As you'd expect then, Mamoulian’s version of the Jekyll-Hyde story is a brilliantly stylized work, and one of the most impressive-looking movies of its time. The first two or three years of the sound era were a generally poor time for visual inventiveness, because movie-makers already had so much on their hands dealing with problems caused by primitive recording technology. (Remember this scene in Singin’ in the Rain?) But Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a testament to what Mamoulian says elsewhere in the seminar: “My interest in the camera was always in the marvellous things you can do with it – with the angles, the dollying, the dissolves, the props, and the framing”. The film was also remarkably imaginative when it came to special effects, as in the famous transformation scenes where Fredric March’s Jekyll slowly, painfully becomes the simian-like Hyde.

Below are two videos of these scenes. The first one has a couple of cleverly disguised cuts as the camera moves from Jekyll’s face to his hands and back again, but the first 25 seconds provide an unbroken view of his face appearing to darken and change.




This must have been astonishing for audiences of the time, and the secret of the transformation was revealed only years later: different layers of coloured makeup had been applied on March’s face, and matching light filters were used at the beginning so that the makeup wasn’t visible on black-and-white film; as the scene progressed, the filters were changed and the makeup came into view, “magically” casting shadows on the actor’s face. It's a great example of problem-solving in an era when the computer effects of today were barely imaginable.

This second video has another transformation scene (beginning around the 55-second mark with the camera adopting Jekyll’s POV as he looks into a mirror). Here again, you can see March’s face changing colour, but the rest of the scene is equally notable for its use of the disorienting, rotating camera and a proto-psychedelic soundtrack that anticipates what Pink Floyd and others would be doing in underground clubs 35 years later.








But I’ll give the last word to Mamoulian again – here he is on the use of sound for this scene:

I asked, “What kind of sound can we put with this? The whole thing is fantastic. You put a realistic sound and it will get you nowhere at all.” So again, you proceed from imagination and theory and if it makes sense, do it. I said, “We’re not going to have a single sound in this transformation that you can hear in life.” They said, “What are you going to use?” I said, “We’ll light the candle and photograph the light – high frequencies, low frequencies, direct from light into sound. Then we’ll hit a gong, cut off the impact, run it backward, things like that.” So I had this terrific kind of stew, a mélange of sounds that do not exist in nature or in life. It was eerie but it lacked a beat, and that’s where I had to introduce rhythm. We tried all sorts of drums, but they all sounded like drums. When you run all out of ideas, something always pops into your head. I said, “I’ve got it.” I ran up and down the stairway for two minutes until my heart was really pounding, took the microphone down and said, “Record me.” And that’s the rhythm of the big transformation. So when I say my heart was in Jekyll and Hyde, it’s literally true.

On Habib Tanvir, Shyam Benegal, and a truthful thief

Given that Shyam Benegal is one of our most respected directors, I’m a little surprised by the under-the-radar status of his second feature film, the 1975 Charandas Chor . This version of Habib Tanvir’s famous play about an honest thief was done in collaboration with Tanvir – before the play itself had acquired its final shape – and I think it is one of Benegal's most enjoyable movies and one of Hindi cinema’s sharpest satires. But it is often overlooked, perhaps because it was made for the Children's Film Society and therefore seen as being geared to a non-adult audience. I have read Benegal profiles that refer to Ankur, Nishant and Manthan – cornerstones of the Indian New Wave – as his first three films, with no mention of Charandas Chor. (See the second sentence of this Wikipedia entry, for starters, and the “Feature Films” subhead.) Even Dibakar Banerjee – a voracious movie-watcher and a big Benegal fan – had not seen the film when I spoke with him last year, though he was certainly familiar with Tanvir’s play. (Banerjee noted that the play contained a precedent for the Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! theme of a thief’s career becoming a comment on the society around him.)

The neglect notwithstanding, Charandas Chor is a notable film on many levels. It represents a rare meeting between cinema and folk theatre (with vital contributions by musicians and actors of the Chhatisgarhi Nacha troupes who worked with Tanvir) and is a document of one of our most significant modern plays in a nascent, transitional form – but it is also recognisably a film, cinematically imaginative and dynamic. It was one of Govind Nihalani’s most impressive early outings as a cinematographer, as well as the feature debut of the young Smita Patil, as a beautiful princess who is besotted by the bumpkin Charandas.


Despite the seriousness of its themes, its form is that of a playful entertainment from the very first image, a medium shot of a doleful-looking donkey, its tail apparently wagging in tune to the folk-song on the soundtrack. While this animal plays a functional part in the narrative (it belongs to a dhobi who will become Charandas Chor’s sidekick), the ass motif is integral in a wider sense: many of the side-characters, including a “chatur vakeel” (clever lawyer), are depicted in illustrations as donkeys that Charandas will get the better of (or expose as hypocrites). The film's episodic structure is quickly established too, with Charandas (Lalu Ram) encountering the dhobi Buddhu (Madan Lal), who wishes to become his chela. The scene employs the language of an enlightened guru addressing his disciples: asked to impart his gyaan of thievery, Charandas replies, "यह कला है, बेटा - बड़ी साधना से मिलती है।" (“This is an art, son – it requires practice and rigour.”)


But this being a parable about the duplicities of social structures – including the ones rooted in class and religion – we also meet a “real” guru who, as Charandas observes, has an even more efficient money-making gig going. “आपका धंदा बैठे बैठे, और आमदनी ज़्यादा" (“You sit and do nothing, but earn more than me”) he tells the sadhu with genuine reverence in his eyes. This lampooning of authority figures extends across hierarchies: for instance, a view of temple idols shorn of their ornaments (making them look bald, comical and most un-Godly) is echoed by a shot of three unclothed policemen drying their uniforms by the riverbank. Through most of these episodes, the chor maintains his essential dignity and his moral compass while the “law-abiding” world is revealed as hollow, rotting or plain naked.

There is so much to enjoy here, for children and adults alike. There is Nihalani’s black-and-white photography (inferior Orwo film had to be used due to import constraints of the time, but the occasional graininess goes well with the subject matter and the bucolic setting) and his imaginative use of zooms, particularly effective in chase sequences that evoke the silent cinema's Keystone Kops. Also the Nacha music, which continually comments on the action, and wonderful lead performances by village actors from Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, including the emaciated Madan Lal – one of Tanvir’s favourite actors – who played Charandas on stage but plays Buddhu in the film.



Inter-titles are used like chapter heads, and Tanvir himself reads them out in his nasal voice, fumbling over big words the way a child might. ("बुद्धू का चोरी के दाव... दावपेंच सीखना।") In a funny little cameo, he also appears as an absent-minded judge who might have dropped in from Alice in Wonderland, holding large scissors and a walking stick instead of a gavel***. And there is the casual drollness of such exchanges as the one where Charandas, miffed by the princess’s show of largesse, proudly tells her “मैं चोरी करता हूँ, दान नहीं लेता" (“I steal, I don’t accept alms”) while the sadhu standing behind her pipes up "दान लेना तो मेरा काम है, बेटी" ("Taking alms is what I do").

*****

A few months ago I briefly spoke with Benegal about Charandas Chor, particularly the divergence between his version and the one that Tanvir finalised for the stage. One important difference was the ending: in both film and play Charandas is put to death, but in the film a humorous epilogue shows him plying his roguery in the afterlife, where he steals Yamraj’s buffalo and presumably sets off on a fresh round of adventures. (This narrative circularity is of course common to many myths or fables; one might also recall the last scene of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, with the rake coolly strolling into the far distance as a TV news reporter blathers on.) But Tanvir’s later modifications to the play made it bleaker and more hard-hitting, with a conclusion that allowed his hero to maintain his integrity – to die for the truth he holds so dear, while the world around him continues on its merry path. “He turned it into a sophisticated tragedy,” Benegal told me, “whereas my film was a moral story done as a comedy for children.” The playwright also opted for a sparer, more minimalist idiom, removing the part of Buddhu along with other extraneous elements, including that zany courtroom scene.


But film and play have one important thing in common: Tanvir and Benegal were both influenced by Brechtian alienation, wherein the audience is asked to be intellectually aware of the issues raised in a story, rather than becoming emotionally immersed in it or “forgetting” the constructed nature of what they are watching. In her book Habib Tanvir: Towards an Inclusive Theatre , Anjum Katyal observes that Tanvir made atypical use of Indian folk music: while our folk theatre tends to use songs in a didactic way (explicitly telling the audience what is good or bad), Charandas Chor follows the Brechtian technique of having two songs express contradictory ideas (e.g. one might say “Charandas is not really a thief, he is a good man, there are bigger thieves in society” while another goes “he is a dangerous thief, protect yourself from him”) and letting the viewer weigh each stance and consciously work out his own attitudes.

Many of Benegal’s later films, notably Arohan (which begins with Om Puri directly addressing the camera, speaking about the subject of the film and introducing the other actors) and Samar , would use similar distancing techniques. One sees it also in Nihalani’s directorial ventures such as Party or Aghaat, where self-conscious, expository dialogue takes the place of naturalistic conversation. The film of Charandas Chor doesn’t do this to the same degree (it was, after all, made for children and needed something resembling a conventional narrative flow) but it does draw attention to the storytelling process through its titles, illustrations and voiceovers. At one point the images on the screen even shake and rupture – as if there were an error in the projection – and Tanvir’s sharp voice asks “Kahin film poori toh nahin ho gayi?” In its own way, this entertaining “children’s movie” is very much a companion piece to the meta-films in the new art cinema of the 70s and 80s.

P.S. For anyone interested in Tanvir, the English version of his unfinished memoirs (translated by the multi-talented writer, historian and dastangoi Mahmood Farooqui) has just been published. I haven’t yet read it, though I intend to (it only covers Tanvir’s life up to the 1950s, I think). Anjum Katyal’s study of his life and career, mentioned above, is strongly recommended too.

P.P.S. A few months ago I discovered that Charandas Chor was on YouTube in a good print, and despite my reservations about watching movies on a computer screen I grabbed this available option. Unfortunately the YouTube video was removed a few weeks ago. But perhaps this indicates that a fresh print of the film will soon be made available on DVD. One can hope.

*** The stammering judge in Charandas Chor is probably an extension of the role Tanvir played in the 1948 IPTA comedy play Jadu ki Kursi, which also had Balraj Sahni in an acclaimed lead performance.

The pros and cons of being a movie-star with very little ego

After watching the trailer for Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 – the Deol family film, which releases this week – I headed YouTube-wards to watch the song sequence from which the film gets its name: “Main Jat Yamla Pagla Deewana” from the 1975 film Pratigya. As a friend, a fellow Dharmendra fan, noted during a recent conversation, this is one of the most exuberant Hindi-movie scenes ever. “All the director had to do was put a liquor bottle in paaji’s hand, give him a large open space to goof around in, along with a jeep and a few other props, and tell him to invent whatever dance moves - or things that resembled dance moves - he felt comfortable doing. And the result was magic.”


Perhaps it can also be seen as an outtake from Dharmendra’s superb, boisterous performance as Veeru in Sholay, made a few months earlier. But watching the song, I was also reminded that for most of his lengthy career, Dharmendra had a remarkably unselfconscious screen presence. In much of his best work (and some of his worst work, but we’ll come to that), you get the sense of a man surprisingly bereft of ego; there is little trace of the self-absorption that has always been a prime quality of our leading men.

For decades, Hindi-movie heroes of all stripes have carefully nurtured their screen images. The personas might vary from Dev Anand’s upbeat urbaneness to Dilip Kumar’s studied bouts with tragedy, but most of them (even the ones we think of as “understated”) come with tics suggesting that the star-actor knows exactly what effect he is having on the audience, and is determined to milk it. Hence Raj Kapoor’s martyred smiles as his awara or Joker deals with life’s injustices, or Rajesh Khanna’s romantic head-bobbing, or the young Manoj Kumar’s painfully evident knowledge that his handsomeness was too much for any Eastman Color processor to bear, hence his face had to be in side-profile or covered by his hand.

Dharmendra had mannerisms too, of course, but one rarely feels that he had pre-conceptions about what he should be doing on screen – from the beginning of his career, he seemed willing to do almost anything he was asked, to subjugate himself to the film. And this willingness to be putty in someone else's hands is a double-edged sword for a movie star. Working under such men as Bimal Roy, Chetan Anand and Hrishikesh Mukherjee in the 1960s, it could mean small but powerful character parts in movies of integrity. In slight but inoffensive thrillers like Saazish, it might entail "fighting and climbing rope ladders in his chaddies" (as Memsaab Story puts it in this post). But in the context of the direction his career took in the bad, bad 1980s (the “kuttay-kameenay” years), it became lack of discernment in role choices, complete disregard for personal dignity and sleep-walking his way through assembly-line multi-starrers with endless variations on the izzat and badlaa themes.

In the mid-1980s, I remember Rishi Kapoor getting praise for his self-effacement in playing secondary roles in woman-centric films like Prem Rog and Tawaif. Dharmendra was in a similar mould two decades earlier, a solid foot-soldier to strong heroines such as Nutan, Meena Kumari and Sharmila Tagore in such films as Bandini, Majhli Didi, Anupama (or even a tiny but important cameo in the Waheeda Rehman-starrer Khamoshi). During this time, he was among our most likable romantic leads and even, depending on the film, something of a sex symbol. He then developed into a marvelous physical comedian and a convincing action hero (both qualities converging in the train-attack sequence in Sholay), but what worked so well in some of the early films soon made way for unthinking repetition. Well into his sixties, he continued doing C-grade action films made specifically for audiences outside the urban centres. (Just the other day, I saw him in this thing called Sultaan on TV, looking old and haggard but mechanically participating in badly choreographed fight scenes.)

It is a pity that such films may have marred the legacy of this underappreciated performer, but it is never too late for redemption. With the Yamla Pagla Deewana films containing many allusions to dialogues and scenes from his old movies, there are signs that Dharmendra may belatedly have developed a sense of self-importance, a meta-sense of his own filmic past. The man who so bashfully played "himself" in Guddi – as a star who is, aw-shucks, just a regular guy – may now, at age 78, be facing up to his legacy. And regardless of the quality of the YPD ego-projects, it is a legacy that deserves to be rediscovered.

[An earlier post on Dharmendra here]

Trains in Indian cinema - an essay

The new issue of the magazine The Indian Quarterly is in bookstores now. I have an essay in it about the use of trains - as harbingers of love, tragedy, development and action - in Indian cinema. Had fun writing it, and reviving my own memories of "Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai", Half Ticket, The Burning Train, the chook-chook song from Aashirwad, the train as a hypnotic black serpent in the Apu Trilogy, and many other films. Do look out for the magazine. (There isn’t an updated website for it yet, but you can see some of the pieces from the first issue at this link. The Facebook page is here, and subscription information is available at theindianquarterlyATgmail.com.)

P.S. Somewhat related – here is a piece I did about the 1973 film 27 Down, about a man who measures his lives in train journeys. And here is an old post about The Burning Train (also known as The Turning Brain for the effect it has been known to have on audiences’ minds).