Filmi Geek

Filling some gaps: Mini-reviews of Banaras, Slumdog Millionaire, Jaanwar aur insaan

With very few exceptions, this site contains a post about every Indian movie or India-related movie I have seen in the last eight years, even if just a paragraph or two.  Every once in a while, though, a movie slips through the cracks, and I neglect to write about it.  This offends my sense of order and completeness. 

And yet, for a variety of reasons, the chances are slim I will ever write a full review of some of these films.   So, here are brief notes that will fill in three gaps that have dogged me for months or years.

 

Banaras (2006)

Haay bhagwaan, this movie is awful.  It is the kind of awful I would have relished shredding in a full review, and I very much wish I had done so at the time I watched it.  But for whatever reason I did not get around to that, and I just can't bring myself to view it again as I would need to do to treat it properly.  Now, I remember little save the visceral shuddering sensation it induced, and the sense of embarrassment for the actors one feels when watching a truly horrendous work of cinema. 

Banaras, as I recall, is a dreadful, ham-fisted attempt to weave profound religious philosophy into the filmi archetypes of an inter-caste love story.  I can't say for sure that this idea is doomed from the outset; perhaps it has the potential to be a fine idea, and the film's near-unwatchability is due to irrecoverable flaws in execution.  Most of the film's cast is competent; Urmila Matondkar stars as a philosophical Brahmin woman, Raj Babbar and Dimple Kapadia play her parents, and Naseeruddin Shah makes an appearance as the enlightened mentor of the low-caste young man (Ashmit Patel) that Urmila's character falls in love with.  This Ashmit Patel is thoroughly outclassed in this company, and his stiff, breathy, awful performance contributes in no small measure to the cringeworthiness of this terrible movie. 

Having now been to the titular city in the years since I endured this film, I might at least enjoy its mystical setting.  There is something remarkable about being on the Ganga in Banaras; one can feel the holiness of the place in the collective sincerity of the pilgrims that flock there to worship.  But I would not risk desecrating those memories by superimposing this embarrassingly clumsy film on them.  It's just not worth it.

 

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

I saw this movie when it came out, but I didn't write about it right away, and after a week or two it seemed so much ink had been spilled about it that I had nothing to add to the greater discourse.  Now, more than four years later, I feel much the same.  It is a good film, tightly scripted, well-acted, manipulative in all the right ways, entertaining and moving (*).  But as a western movie by a western director, it raises issues that make me uncomfortable, issues I am not sure how to address. 

I don't think there is anything wrong, a priori, with people telling stories set inside cultures other than their own.  I do not think such stories are necessarily exploitative or colonial or presumptuous, although many are all of these things.  I do not even know whether Slumdog Millionaire errs in these respects, or whether its director Danny Boyle has treaded carefully enough to paint a legitimate picture.  But in a sense, it doesn't matter.  Western audiences with little knowledge of India will draw the conclusions they draw, regardless of how much care has gone into crafting the story. 

The portrayal of Bombay life  in Slumdog Millionaire may be faithful in some respects, but it is a faithful representation of only one of Bombay's multiplicity of truths, much less the truths of all of India.  Of course, no movie can explore all realities at once.  But there is an unfortunate tendency among western audiences without nuanced knowledge of India's many cultures to extrapolate from what they see in a movie like Slumdog Millionaire.  It is because of movies like Slumdog Millionaire that my mother accused me of neglecting the "real India" when I chose to take a walk on my own through Kala Ghoda and Fort rather than accompany her on a tour of Dharavi. 

After her visit to Dharavi, I showed my mother Dhobi Ghat (**), and I hope it helped her understand that the "real India" is in fact many real Indias, a layered and intertwined complex that cannot be experienced in an afternoon, whether one chooses to spend that afternoon in a poor or an affluent part of town.  But none of this means  categorically that movies about India shouldn't be made by western filmmakers and marketed widely in the west.  It has to be better for westerners to learn something about India, even if it is an oversimplified, undernuanced something, than to learn nothing at all.  Me, I would rather watch Indian movies made for Indians than western attempts at capturing Indian authenticities.  What I learn from, I suppose, is eavesdropping on the stories Indians tell each other.   But if even a small fraction of the westerners who filled theaters watching Slumdog Millionaire was inspired to go learn more, then the movie has already done more than a mainstream entertainer has any responsibility to do.

(*) I've been half-watching it while writing this, and I have to note that I am not finding it as well-acted or as moving the second time through.

(**) Once before our trip I had tried to show her Dharavi but she didn't get into it.

 

Jaanwar aur insaan (1972)

Shashi Kapoor made a lot of movies.  His work ethic is legendary, but he could not have been terribly discriminating in his choice of scripts.  The truly worst movies he ever made are probably - blessedly - forgotten, tucked away in dusty cans in some moldy storage locker in Bombay, never to be transferred to digital medium.  But others of his clunkers do remain.  And some Shashi Kapoor fans are devoted enough to be as undiscriminating in our choice of films to watch as he was in his choice of films to act in. 

When I stumbled across Jaanwar aur insaan on YouTube, I knew I had to bring it to Beth's attention.  In addition to Shashi Kapoor, it offered Rakhee, another favorite of hers.  I briefly scanned the file for subtitles.  It didn't have them, but I could tell it wouldn't matter; the scenes I watched had little dialogue, just Shashi Kapoor beating up bad guys and Shashi Kapoor stalking a tiger. This was a movie we simply had to see.

When I watched the movie in the company of both Beth and Amrita, we were not fully prepared for how dreadful it would actually be.  It starts out promisingly, with terrific overture music over the opening credits and legitimately impressive wildlife photography.  It treats you to some of the more hilarious fight choreography that Hindi films offer so richly, and Meena (Rakhee) in a memorabe sun-yellow pantsuit.  Make no mistake - the movie is stupid.  The plot, such as it is, consists mostly of Shekhar (Shashi) stalking a tiger which he remains unable to catch for much of his adult life.  There is also the obligatory "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" sort of story element, whereby tension is caused by Meena's father having murdered Rakhee's father. But for a while the stupidness is fun, at least when enjoyed with a like-minded friend or two.

Jaanwar aur insaan takes a decided turn for the WTF when Shekhar and Meena's child enters the picture.  Shekhar contends for father of the year in his approach to teaching his spoiled, miscreant child a lesson:  He takes the boy to the wilderness, ties him to a tree, and leaves him there to be sniffed and nuzzled by wild animals.  This is how Shekhar finally defeats the tiger that has troubled him for years: using his own son as bait.  The loyal Shashi Kapoor fan who suffers through this movie may wish that it was she tied to that tree instead. 

Kai po che (2013)

काई पो चे

It is not Kai po che's fault that I have begun to grow weary of movies about young men.   The persistent assumption in the movie industry (and not just in Bombay) is that stories about men are universal, while stories about women are niche.  As a result, audiences are inundated with the  former while the latter form rare, little-known exceptions.  (As I rehearsed this rant to a friend, she told me about Gul Panag's Turning 30, a movie I had not even heard of.  When even I am not familiar with a movie about young women, the marketing machinery has utterly failed.)  Even the likes of Zoya Akhtar seem resigned to the notion that movies about men are what people want to see.   And so as Kai po che's release approached, even as positive advance reviews came in, I found it hard to get excited.  Oh, boy, I thought, yet another story about young men.

Standing on its own, though, outside of that tiresome cultural context, Kai po che is a more than passably good film, thoroughly well-acted, if somewhat artlessly written.  The performances and characterizations of its three leads provide occasional truly sparkling moments embedded in a matrix of predictable cinematic emotional manipulation.  Part sports movie, part political movie, and part touching paean to the power of male friendship (in the way only Indian films can express it), Kai po che occasionally bows under the weight of cliché. By the time the characters are set forth and the story's foundation lain, it is apparent how the movie will unfold; it holds no surprises. But that isn't a terrible detriment.

Some of the characters are cartoonish stereotypes: the hothead with the heart of gold, the sweet-natured nerd, the smarmy politician.  The song sequence where the three boys careen through the countryside distinguishes their personalities in a most familiar movie shorthand, quoting from Rang de basanti (the granddaddy of modern movies about disaffected young men).  The impulsive Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) bares his chest, flings his arms, and shouts at the universe, while the reticent Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav) needs to be coaxed and cajoled into leaping from a high wall into clear water below. 

Still, the movie's backdrop provides a compelling view of the grim upheavals, both natural and human-caused, that shattered Gujarat in the first few years of the 2000s.  Weaving historical events into a movie can be risky; it can sometimes be a cheaply manipulative attempt to lend gravitas to a story.  Here, though, it works well, adding a firm sense of place and context. The 2001 earthquake, the Godhra train burning, the ensuing riots all serve to keep the narrative from folding in on itself.  And there is a powerful visual contrast between the cramped, busy streets of Ahmedabad shown during the movie's first half, and the eerily deserted, curfew-quieted city shown in the incipient hours of the riots.

Two of Kai po che's three central characters are, in one sense, typical movie heroes, driven by strong, though different, ambitions.  Govind, studious and polite, harbors cautious, carefully planned dreams of succeeding at business.  Ishaan, the loose cannon of the bunch, wants to run a cricket academy and mine the local talent to train the next national superstar.  The third of Kai po che's tight-knit friends, Omi (Amit Sadh), is a fresh and unexpected detour from movie archetypes.  Unlike most movie heroes, Omi is not a strong personality.  A young man with no ambitions of his own, Omi follows the instructions of those he loves.  When Govind implores Omi to ask his uncle for a loan to finance the boys' fledgling business, Omi does so.  And when Omi's uncle, the powerful and slick politician Bittu (Manav Kaul), asks Omi to work for his party, Omi obliges him as well.  And yet despite this evidently weak will, Omi transforms most deeply of the three, traumatized to violence by the train massacre.  His arc is the most catastrophic; in the movie's climax, he is the one with the gun in his hand.  Omi is in that way the boldest, least by-the-numbers aspect of the entire film.  His arc is reminiscent of Aamir Khan's ice-candy man Dil Nawaz in Earth, who also suffers a tragic descent in the harsh fire of communal violence.  But Dil Nawaz was a powerful will both before and after his transformation.  Omi, contrary to movie convention, is not.  Both before and after, he bends in the prevailing winds, whether the hopeful breezes of his friends or the angry maelsrom of his uncle and his party comrades.

Kai po che takes political sides unambiguously.  Bittu's political party is closed and polarizing, framing the world in terms of "us and them" - Hindu and Muslim.   This is driven home with a cudgel when, in the aftermath of the earthquake, Bittu's party refuses humanitarian aid to the Muslim family of Ishaan's cricket protegé.   Later, it is Bittu and his cronies at the head of the riots, ignoring pleas for mercy in their thirst for Muslim blood. Bittu's and Omi's rage is not without some justification; they do, after all, lose close family senselessly in the train fire.  But this motivation happens off-screen, and in shorthand; the audience must use its own knowledge (or experience) of communal rage to fill in the blanks.  More delicate writing on this front could have made Kai po che a better movie. Bittu could  have been presented more sympathetically, instead of with the mustache-twirling smarminess that makes him seem untrustworthy from the outset.  This, in turn, would have made Omi's transformation more plausible and empathizable, and his friends' unreserved forgiveness of that transformation more understandable. 

And finally, there is the trouble with which I started this review.  The only female voice in Kai po che is Ishaan's sister Vidya (Amrita Puri).  She is present to sweetly seduce Govind, to complain about hating maths, and have a precipitously-timed pregnancy scare - in short, to be a girl.  How were women's dreams and lives shattered by the terrible earthquake, or by the spasms of communal hatred that ripped through Gujarat in those years?  Kai po che unfortunately takes no interest in those questions.  This doesn't make Kai po che a bad movie, but it does leave me an unsatisfied viewer.  While no one movie can be about everything, it would be nice if  so many movies were not about the same thing. 

 

Weaving historical events into a movie can be risky; it can sometimes be a cheaply manipulative attempt to lend gravitas to a story.  Here, though, it works.

Special 26 (2013)

स्पेशल छब्बीस

A good caper movie demands that you like the anti-heroes who are pulling off the heist.  A movie that gives you characters doing something morally reprehensible, and expects you to root for them to succeed, takes on the responsibility of convincing you to go soft on the perpetrators.  Special 26 almost meets this burden, but falls a few yards short.  The movie is slickly produced and displays a winking sense of satiric humor.  But it needs a more careful scripting hand, more attention to character and backstory, to elevate it to something especially memorable.  The cons are clever, but the film is soulless.

Special 26 makes some nods in the direction of exploring its characters' lives and motivations.  The characterization that works the best is that of P.K. Sharma (Anupam Kher), the oldest member of the group which drives investigators crazy by posing as government officials and confiscating cash and goods.  Driven by Anupam Kher's thoughtful and touching performance,  Sharma ping-pongs between anxiety and gutsiness.  He quails before each of the gang's capers, though he performs with confidence during them.  The thought of improvising worries him, and of getting caught even more so.  Sharma wants to retire, and when the film briefly visits his Punjab home for his eldest daughter's wedding, we see why:  He has a gorgeous family, a swarm of beautiful children and yet another on the way.  Sharma has reasons to pull off heist after heist, but he also has compelling reasons to hang up his spikes.  His conflict is portrayed sympathetically and with depth.

With respect to the rest of the gang, though - and to their nemesis, CBI Agent Wasim Khan (Manoj Bajpai) - the movie gives short shrift to this kind of motivation and backstory.  We are given peeks into their domestic life, but these raise more questions than they answer.  Joginder (Rajesh Sharma) lives in a crowded joint household with some elderly relatives.  And Iqbal (Kishor Kadam) is barely scraping together a middle-class existence; he and his wife share domestic chores because he can't afford a servant.  It is a mystery why either of these men live such humble lives.  The gang has pulled off 50 cons across the nation; what happened to all that money?

And then there is Ajay (Akshay Kumar), evidently the gang's leader, mastermind, and chief shot-caller. What Special 26 offers us of his motivation is his clandestine love affair with a literal girl next door, the sad-eyed  schoolteacher Priya (Kajal Aggarwal).  This storyline is a disaster; it nearly sinks the movie.  Akshay Kumar paired with a woman half his age is increasingly stomach-churning, and here there is simply no reason for it.  Even if Ajay has to have a love interest (there is nothing about the story that requires him to), she could be ten years older than Priya without any compromise to this facet of the story.  And whatever drives Ajay's criminal endeavors, it does not appear to be his love for her or any financial need on her part.  Indeed, despite the slow-motion cavorting that Ajay and Priya do in soft-focus ballads purporting to show us Ajay's tender, human side, Special 26 is woefully weak when it comes to painting his character.  When Priya asks him why he continues to carry off these cons, Ajay resorts to a time-worn chestnut of an answer:  It's all I know.  And that is all we get.

Special 26 is not a dreadful movie; it is entertaining enough while it is happening.  The cons, especially the climactic job, have a great deal of cleverness and guts to them.  The friendship between Ajay and Sharma has some sweet and genuine moments; indeed, it is far more satisfying than the relationship between Ajay and Priya.  There are some fine performances in addition to Anupam Kher's, especially from Jimmy Shiergill as Ranveer Singh, a contrite, green Delhi police officer burned by Ajay's audacity, and from Manoj Bajpai as the CBI inspector determined to foil the gang's plans.  Divya Dutta (a house favorite here at Filmi Geek) is always a pleasure, and here, as always, is a pleasure in too small a portion; she plays a colleague of Ranveer Singh who gets about one-fifth as much screen time. There is a crispness to movie's dialogue and photography, and the little bit of fat (such as Manoj Bajpai's athletic chase of and melee with a man who turns out not to be connected with the story in any way) is forgivable, because smartly executed.  

But all through, the sense that something is missing nags.  The feeling doesn't coalesce until afterward, when I think back over the film and the men I just spent two hours with.  Then I realize how little I know about them, how many shortcuts the movie has taken in presenting their lives and their friendships and their passions and their motivations.  Just as these men con their marks, posing as CBI agents or tax officials, Special 26 cons me.  It poses as a touching tale about a group of friends and their last big job, and escapes with the loot while I slowly realize just how superficial it is, how lazy the scriptwriters have been at breathing life and dimension into its characters. Ajay and Sharma's personal histories, why lying and thievery is all they know, even how these men who hail from four corners of the country came to form a notorious band of con-artists - none of these questions is answered.  And without these answers, Special 26 rings hollow, all brains and no heart. 

 

Life of Pi (2012)

The long-standing convention in the movies is that the camera is a truthful, omniscient, unbiased observer. What we see on the screen is what really happens within the movie's canonical universe. Every once in a while, though, a movie challenges this idea, offering the audience the pleasaingly dissonant experience of realizing that the camera has been lying to us. 

This is a fascinating idea space for a movie to explore, the unreliability of subjective narrative.  The TV show The X-Files did this often, showing supernatural or alien phemonena which seem "real" to the camera's eye, until one notices that no character save Mulder is witness to them.   Mystery-thrillers like To Die For and The Usual Suspects allow the camera to illustrate deceptive stories fabricated by characters as if those stories really happened within the movie's reality.

Ang Lee's Life of Pi takes the unreliable narrator idea a step further.  Its unreliable narrative is not just a plot twist for thrilling, surprise-ending effect. Instead, the notion of unreliable narrative forms the central allegorical premise of the movie.  Its narrator, Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi (Irrfan Khan), tells two versions of his terrible experiences following a shipwreck.  When his listener (Rafe Spall) asks which story is true, Pi invites him to choose the truth that he finds more satisfying.  "And so it is with God," Pi concludes, underscoring the message that religious narratives, too, provide a multiplicity of tellings of the same underlying tale, none more inherently correct than any other, even if they are mutually inconsistent.  Life of Pi transforms unreliable narrative from a bug into a feature; it is not a reason to distrust conflicting worldviews, but rather a reason to embrace and even cherish them.

Pi himself, as a boy, was driven by the simultaneous experience of concurrent, conflicting narratives; he considered himself a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian all at once.  But the story that the adult Pi tells is not just an allegory for reconciling religious dogma.  It represents our experience of self, our power to choose our own interpretetations of the truths that swirl around us and within us.  In one version of his tale, Pi is stranded on a lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger.  Nature takes its course, and before long only Pi and the tiger remain, staking out their respective spaces for survival.  In the other, darker version of Pi's story, the zebra becomes a wounded Japanese sailor, the orangutan his mother, and the hyena a cruel, murderous ship's cook.  The tiger, of course, is Pi himself, a wild, raw facet of Pi that both threatens him and keeps him alive as he drifts over the ocean.  (It is perhaps the movie's only misstep that it makes this mapping between animals and humans explicit, and fails to give the audience the chance to draw our own allegorical conclusions.)

In the fanciful, allegorical truth in which Pi shares his lifeboat with an untamed tiger, Pi faces and acknowledges his animal demons, understands them, and even though he neither befriends nor assimilates them, is able to let them go once his ordeal is over.  This is a very satisfying truth indeed, not just because the story is more fun and magical, but because of what it says about human strength, resilience, instict, and power.  And while Pi invites the listener to choose between the two stories, Ang Lee stacks the deck in favor of this version.  It is rendered in breathtaking and magical detail.  The visuals are not merely realistic; they are super-realistic, extra-realistic, beyond realistic.  The Pacific waters range from preternaturally glasslike calm to wild, towering, black waves. Luminscent sea creatures light Pi's lonely nights with wonder. Cheerful, chirping meerkats scoot and swarm across the brambles of a living island.  The gruesome tale of the cook and Pi's  mother, however, Lee does not illustrate at all.  Instead, the camera focuses close on the exhausted, weathered face of the young Pi (Suraj Sharma) as he recites this version of events without affect.  In the cold world of logic and reality, this version of the story is more plausible and more likely.  But in Lee's movie-world, the magical version is the one that occurs in the camera's view, the one which is granted that conventional imprimatur of truth.

Finally there is Irrfan Khan, the calm, steady heartbeat of the film even as the story and the viewer are tossed about on violent waves.  He is superb actor and delivers a worthy performance.  This is no mean feat given his character's extroardinary equanimity and the fact that most of his lines are delivered in voice over, so that Khan cannot even press his marvelous face into service of performance.  The adult Pi, narrating his tale, does not reveal a tremendous range of emotion.  And yet his presence is large; one has the sense of a man who has reached an enormous depth of insight and now takes genuine, warm pleasure in leading others to the same revelations.  He has the beatific air of one who has reconciled the infinite contradictions of this world and its many gods.  He, and Lee, invite us to join him in that peaceful place, as peaceful as Pi's boat floating in a silent sea of starlight.  It is an irresistible invitation. 

 

 

Aiyyaa (2012)

It must be unusual for a movie to make the year's best lists of many thinking critics, and at the same time the year's worst lists of equally many others. Sachin Kundalkar's Aiyyaa was nothing if not divisive, a hot mess of a film to some, subtle and even revolutionary to others. Beth's thoughtful, substantial praise describes a movie of startlingly bold feminist sensibility, a nearly unprecedented story about a woman's desires and autonomy.  With those ideas in mind, I expected to side with Beth and others who love Aiyyaa's fresh, female-oriented approach.  That isn't what happened.

I am willing to give Aiyyaa the benefit of the doubt, and credit it with aiming for the subversive narrative that Beth perceives in it.  For me, though, Aiyyaa falls far short of the mark.  As a story of female autonomy, it is passable, but not astonishing. Worse than that, as a movie, it just isn't very well crafted.  Weaknesses of script and incomprehensible choices in direction undermine its strengths and potential, yielding a movie-watching experience that is more puzzling than exciting.  If Beth is right about Aiyyaa, I should be front and center in the choir to which it preaches - but it mostly leaves me cold.

Aiyyaa takes its first wrong turn in the formulation of the ambitions of its protagonist, Meenaxi (Rani Mukherjee).  Meenaxi retreats into a fantasy world in which she dances out the famous routines of the likes of Sridevi and Madhuri.  Unlike those stars, though, Meenaxi dances not for the male gaze, but for her own pleasure; in Meenaxi's "Kaate nahin katte," Mr India is not merely invisible - he is absent.  This is remarkable, this discounting of the male gaze, and Aiyyaa deserves credit for taking its heroine this far.  But her dream is still the superficial, stereotyped dream of being a film star, of looking beautiful and being entertaining.  In that, Aiyyaa is not revolutionary - it's just lazy.  Need a big, sweeping ambition for a character who feels hemmed in by her family and circumstances?  Easy - she wants to be a film star!

The characterization does not improve when Meenaxi's desires snap into focus on Surya (Prithviraj), the art student who catches her eye.  Rather, the script underscores Meenaxi's superficiality, sending her ambitions into overdrive over a hunky guy who smells nice.  Other than this, all Meenaxi knows about Surya is that he speaks Tamil and treats her with something in between indifference and outright scorn.  None of that matters - his pecs and his fragrance are enough to drive Meenaxi to teach herself Tamil, abuse her privileges at work to examine his records, stalk him to his home, and lie to create a pretext to talk to his mother. 

All of this is the time-honored stuff of superficial filmi stalker-romance, albeit typically executed by a nominally charming hero in pursuit of some vapid heroine who has struck his fancy.  The fundamental problem for Aiyyaa is that reversing these roles - making the man the objectified meat, and the woman the aggressor - does not make such superficial stories any more satisfying or romantic.  As a viewer I don't particularly root for the pairing, because the script offers no compelling evidence that the two belong together, and anyway Surya seems to be, at best, a bit of a jerk.  (He is proven to be a Nice Guy (TM) at the end of the film, but that post hoc justification of the romance does not retroactively fix the story.)  Beth argues that Surya doesn't need a personality because the story is about Meenaxi, not him.  I don't buy this argument.  The message I get is that Meenaxi in the sort of woman who can lose her head over a guy with no personality.  That is  hardly revolutionary.  

What makes this so frustrating is that Meenaxi is a terrific character, executed as well as can be imagined by the always appealing Rani Mukherjee, who can pull off loony-cute better than any actor of her generation.  Meenaxi has a very real drive, which she articulates to her incomprehensibly nutty coworker Mynah (Anita Date) - a drive for financial independence, so that she can move out of her family's quite literally stifling home and marry at leisure, instead of at her overbearing mother's insistence.  There is superb, if unsubtle, symbolism in that household which chokes the life out of Meenaxi's dreams; between an enormous stinking pile of garbage, Meenaxi's brother's impromptu kennel for wayward dogs, and her father's smoking four cigarettes at a time, Meenaxi cannot breathe at home.  Yet she retains an exquisitely tuned sense of smell that guides and fuels her when she is away from home. These devices represent Aiyyaa at its clever best, and it's disappointing to see them squandered by the script's choice of such uninteresting prizes for Meenaxi as Bollywood fame and a ripped boyfriend.

Aiyyaa's direction certainly gives it a unique feel, almost theatrical, with an unusual and lovely background score and a parade of side characters that are wild and cartoonish and clearly intended to be funny.  Whether this ensemble falls on the right side of the line between comedy and annoyance has to vary from viewer to viewer.  For me, all the side characters are shrill and self-consciously weird, more puzzling and irritating than entertaining.  Meenaxi's family members scream at each other from the first scene, her father's bizzarre collection of old telephones rings constantly, her brother's dogs bark, her wheelchair-bound grandmother caromes back and forth across the set flashing her gold teeth, all in a swirling cacophany that at least engenders sympathy to Meenaxi's need for escape, if it doesn't also induce a migraine. And then there is the inexplicable Mynah.  Perhaps she is meant to make a point about marching to the beat of one's own drum, but in execution she is only strange, shrill, mystifying, and even - when she squeals orgasmically about John Abraham's muscles - embarrassing.

And so, despite some signs of cleverness and thoughtful intentions, I just can't say I like Aiyyaa.  As a thought-provoking commentary on women's desires it undermines itself with its own superficiality.  And as an entertainer, it veers so far into the wacky as to be more of a head-scratcher than a romp or a fun ride.  

 

Himmatwala (1983)

हिम्मतवाला

I really want to love Sridevi.  I truly do.  Her talent bursts out of the screen when she smiles, when she dances, even when she pratfalls.  But, through no fault of her own, Sridevi's filmography makes appreciating her a tiresome slog.  For every great movie Sridevi is a part of (such as Mr India), there are numerous terrible movies in which she is the only watchable element (I'm looking at you, Chaalbaaz).  Worse still are movies so dire that even the magnificent presence of Sridevi cannot redeem them.  Himmatwala ("man of courage") is that dire. 

The titular Himmatwala is the upstanding goody-two-shoes Ravi (Jeetendra), the dreariest sort of film hero.  You know the guy - he is flawlessly devoted to his mother's honor, never tells a lie, delivers incessant lectures on morality to everyone around him, and can beat up four bad guys without breaking a sweat.  Yawn.  This kind of intolerably boring character can nevertheless be appealing if he's played with charm and cuteness (Shashi Kapoor made an art form out of this) but here, Jeetendra has none.  It's hard enough to swallow this sniveling, creepy old man as a freshly-graduated engineer and a romantic hero; I would say he was an obvious inspiration for the physical appearance of The Dirty Picture's Suryakant, but I don't know whether Ekta Kapoor could really have backed such explicitly unflattering reference to her own father. More than that, it's hard even to believe this is the same actor who made Caravan so delightful with his chubby-cheeked stupid cuteness.

Same guy?  Are you sure?

The villain of Himmatwala, Sher Singh Bandukwala, is played by Amjad Khan.  This, too, you might think would be a plus - how many awesome filmi villains has Amjad Khan delivered over the years?  Alas.  Here, he is doughy, bloated, mealy, and as far from menacing as an Amjad Khan villain could be.  There is some weak humor surrounding a running joke where he yells for his rifle-bearing sidekick - "Banduk!" - since his name is Bandukwala, you might think he'd have a rifle close at hand himself.  But a corny running joke hardly makes a villain, at least not in an apparently earnest morality tale like this one. Speaking of corny running jokes, dialogue-writer Kader Khan has a role in the movie as Bandukwala's spineless accountant (and father of Ravi's chief romantic rival, naturally played by Shakti Kapoor), whose every dialogue is peppered with arbitrary references to geographical locations.  Weird.   

Speaking of weird, guess who plays Ravi's mother.

 

What on earth is Waheeda Rehman doing in this God-awful movie? 

Himmatwala is not utterly without redeeming quality.  After all, it does have Sridevi.  When we first meet her, as Bandukwala's spoiled daughter Rekha, she is clad in a dreadful pleather outfit, leading a pack in cruelly taunting another girl.  This, I suppose, is Hindi film's first glimpse of its future rani. 

Instant stardom?

Once the petulant, brutish Rekha gets a taste of Ravi's morality lectures, though, she begins to soften, and sheds the skin-tight pleather in favor of classical dancing togs, as she dreams about her upstanding new love in the movie's best-remembered song, "Nainon mein sapna."

 

This is a really terrific song and is worth watching; no need to squirm through the rest of the movie to enjoy it, though.  Jeetendra comes closer to appealing here than at any other point in the movie.  His outfit is horrible and he looks as creepy and weird as ever, but at least he can dance.   He demonstrates this as well in another of the film's better songs, "Wah wah khel shuru ho gaya."  These songs seem to have pioneered the side-by-side dancing style that is so characteristic of the 80s and early 90s. 

But before you get too comfortable with the idea that Himmatwala's songs are safe and pleasant enough to watch even if the rest of the movie is cringe-inducing, be warned: "Imtehaan" blindsides you with grim stock footage of dead flood victims arrayed in a muddy plain.  That's right, corpses in a song:  WTF, Himmatwala?  This is just one of the gruesome lurches in tone taken by this barely coherent movie, which careens from goofy lowbrow comedy to high-falutin' moralizing and back again without warning, all in service of demonstrating the many skills and qualities of its infallible, justice-driven hero.  Feh. 

And then there is Sridevi, the only reason I subjected myself to this drivel in the first place.  Sridevi is certainly cute here, if not yet quite fully-formed.   She does display marvelous presence in the movie's songs (see above).  Her comedic skill gets pressed into service too - one of the movie's better scenes comes where Ravi and Rekha scheme convince Sher Singh Bandukwala that Rekha is pregnant, and as Rekha hams for Bandukwala's benefit and feigns a green mango craving, we get a glimpse of the Sridevi that is to come.  But as in Chaalbaaz, she's just not enough to rescue an otherwise tiresome excuse for a movie. 

There is a remake of Himmatwala coming out later this year which, in the time-honored filmi tradition of ouroboros-like self reference, aims to introduce a Southern star to the Hindi-language audience.   As much as Tamannah is a guilty pleasure of mine (see Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam), the first trailer of this Sajid Khan indulgence looks every bit as dire as the original.  And the wizened, leathery Ajay Devgn (sic) opposite fresh-faced Tamannah appears  just as revolting as Jeetendra 2.0 was with Sridevi.  I can't wait. 

Charulata (1964)

চারুলতা

Among the many trademark expressions of Satyajit Ray's artistic genius is the exploration of a singular imprisonment:  that which confines the minds of bright young women in the households of rich, intellectual, Victorian-era high society.  Ray's sumptuously-appointed Victorian interiors stifle sumptuously-dressed young Bengali women, and hint at a kind of oppression particular to the upper classes.

In both Ray's Ghare baire and Charulata, a man concerned about the loneliness and intellectual satisfaction of his young, intelligent wife attempts to broaden her sphere by introducing her to a vibrant outsider.  In both movies, the foundations of identity and home and marriage are shaken, with catastrophic results.  And in both movies, the counterpoint of relationships is a proxy for the the complex dance of East and West.  In Ghare baire, the tension is epitomized in the woman's English studies and repetition of an English song.  In Charulata, it is captured in (among other ways) a scene very early in the movie, in which the titular Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) peers through lorgnettes between the slats of the shuttered windows, watching a stereotypically ordinary Bengali man strolling by.  Something about him - his freedom, his ordinariness, his Bengaliness - captivates her attention, and she flits bird-like from window to window in her lushly filigreed European parlor to keep her gaze fixed upon him.  

Charu's husband Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), insted of inviting her to join his world of politics and newspaper editorials, indulges Charu's love for literature though he does not share it.  Curious to know whether she harbors real literary talent, Bhupati enlists his dreamy, indolent cousin Amol (Soumitra Chatterjee) to teach and encourage Charu to write.  The result of this experiment is both affirming for Charu, when her writing is successfully published, and devastating, when her growing love for Amol threatens her identity and her marriage.  The movie concludes on an ambiguous note, without resolution for Charu and Bhupati.  And Charu's literary and emotional awakening reminds me - as stories in this vein so often do - of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, whose protagonist has nowhere to go but into the sea once she has tasted freedom of spirit and body and mind.  Charu's ending is less tragic, but it carries just as strong a sense that there is no returning to her old life.  It takes only a tiny gesture to release a bird from its cage; coaxing her back in is another matter entirely.

As for the catalyst of Charulata's awakening, Amol himself is detached, sarcastic, even bratty.  Charulata's love for him reflects  her own immaturity more than a real emotional connection.  This is not a tragic love story of soulmates kept apart by the deep injustice of circumstances or society.  Rather, the story presents a talented but incompletely formed young woman with a sort of jealously competitive crush on a young man whose only advantage over her (and it is not an inconsequent advantage) is that he is male, and therefore more worldly and educated and confident than she.  Despite his own immaturity and indolence, however, Amol represents the hometown side in the East-West struggle that threads through the film. He wears Bengali clothes and writes in Bengali.  He sings Rabindrosangeet - even his "Ami chini go chini," nominally a love song to a foreign woman, is delivered with a sarcastic, mocking air.  He even refuses a generous opportunity to travel and study in Europe.  All of this is in stark contrast to Bhupati, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, penning English-language newspaper editorials about the English politics of the English rule over Bengal.  When Bhupati chides Amol for his literary passions, insiting that politics is far more important and real, Amol smirkingly plays "Good Save The Queen" on the piano.

The pleasure of Charulata, and indeed the pleasure of any Ray film, lies in the density of content and meaning that is packed into a movie of relatively few words. An incredibly rich, layered assemblage of visual imagery, subtle cues, and symbolism paints a story that operates on multiple canvases at once.  Commentaries on the value of literature and the futility of politics, on the tension between Bengali and European modes of thought, on the nature of youthful infatuation and ambition, on the frustrations of the idle upper-class life especially for women, all these threads mingle and cross at many points of juxtaposition and harmony.  Recurring symbols like Charulata's birdcage, stormy weather, and the newspaper itself highlight the movie's important themes.  One of the most touching visual metaphors contrasts Amol's confident, fluent writing with Charu's initial halting effort; when he writes, the words flow out of the pen in an effortlessly beautiful script, while her words scratch and blot the page.

Unlike movies made by mere mortals, where emotions are too often spelled out in explicit, expository dialogues, Ray requires you to divine characters' internal states of mind from expressions and circumstances.  He demands of his audience a great deal of thought, empathy, and theorizing.  The result is a movie-watching experience more akin to voyeurism than to being told a story.  It is both unsettling and compelling, and it is what makes Ray's movies so deliciously rewarding of rewatching.  Ray's films are packed with overloaded symbols, subtle cues of meaning, visual metaphors, and allegories that operate on multiple levels.  Charulata, in this respect, is perfect vintage Ray - a beautiful and beautifully crafted movie that reveals more and more of its richness with every viewing.

Maqbool (2003)

मक़बूल

In recent weeks I have gushed beyond reason about Vishal Bhardwaj's recent movies Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola and 7 khoon maaf.  And in light of that gushing, I became more conscious that I hadn't yet seen his widely acclaimed Shakespeare adaptations, including Maqbool, based upon Macbeth.  So many people I respect hold this movie in very high regard, and I went in with high expectations.  That was not careful thinking on my part.  While I appreciate why the movie is effusively praised, it is just not a story I needed to hear told.  There is next to nothing I like about Maqbool.

I almost pulled the plug during Maqbool's unbearable first half hour, which is a scene after scene litany of anonymous angry men sneering and threatening and pointing guns at one another.  Eventually, their relationships begin to fall into place (though the swaggering and gun-pointing doesn't substantially abate).  Pandit and Purojit (Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah) are corrupt police inspectors. They moonlight as heavies in the employ of Jahangir Khan, also known as Abbaji (Pankaj Kapur), who is a widely respected - and feared - underworld boss.  Abbaji's right-hand man, Miyan Maqbool (Irrfan Khan), is a brooding and angry fellow.  He is nursing a secret relationship with Abbaji's mistress, Nimmi (Tabu), who goads him into betraying Abbaji and taking over the gang himself.  Both Abbaji and Nimmi are beset by fits of guilt as a result of this betrayal.

The trouble with this story, for me, begins with the underworld setting.  I just don't care about underworld stories.  Much of this movie is one dick-fight after another - Pandit and Purojit versus whatever rival they are sent to assassinate; Pandit and Purojit versus Maqbool; Abbaji versus corrupt politicians or other smugglers he does business with; Maqbool versus Abbaji's other deputy, Kaka (Piyush Mishra), or versus Kaka's son Guddu (Ajay Gehi), who is Maqbool's principal rival as heir to Abbaji's reign.  Many times through the film I just wished they could break out the rulers and be done with it.  The incessant chest-beating is not just tedious; it underscores how fundamentally uninteresting these characters are.  When relationships are determined by who displays the swaggiest machismo, I can muster little interest in the outcome.

Miyan Maqbool, who is of course the avatar of Macbeth himself, is supposed to be more nuanced.  Macbeth's internal conflict forms the meat of Shakespeare's play.  Likewise, Maqbool is meant to be an exploration of Miyan Maqbool's moral struggle, as his thirst for power outweighs his sense of filial loyalty to Abbaji.  The problem is that Maqbool is a reprehensible person.  He's senselessly rageful and cruel from the outset of the film.   He makes his living as a thug and an assassin for a gang of weapons smugglers that includes corrupt policemen and politicians.   And so if his reprehensible actions have consequences that pain him, so what?  I do not feel sorry for him and I do not find his angst or his suffering terribly compelling. 

If Vishal Bhardwaj had chosen to map the grand conflict of Macbeth onto more accessible, everyman characters - instead of a bunch of unredeemable underworld criminals - that could have been an utterly brilliant movie.  After all, even ordinarily good people do make colossally bad choices from time to time.  The fallout of an awful, evil action committed by a regular, relatable person could have been intensely compelling cinema.  Instead, Maqbool offers yet another dreary story about angry men who don't know any way to respond to strong emotions except by pointing guns at people's heads.  I am aware that such men exist in the world, but I am utterly uninterested in seeing their stories told again and again and again in the movies.  I just don't care. 

The only redeeming feature of Maqbool is Nimmi, and Tabu's smoldering, sinuous performance of her.  Nimmi's story has more nuance than that of the men.  She must achieve her manipulation and intimidation without the benefit of machismo, thugs, and weaponry; subtler methods are required.   Nimmi is aware that her days with Abbaji are numbered after a young starlet catches Abbaji's eye; Nimmi points out that she'll have nowhere to go if Abbaji throws her out.  Thus, she manipulates Maqbool - not because she truly loves him or thinks he deserves to inherit the mantle of the gang, but because it's the only way she can protect her comfortable position in the gang's luxurious haveli. 

But while Nimmi's arc makes the middle of the movie more tolerable than its execrable first half hour, she is not enough to overcome my fundamental frustration with the premise.  Underworld gangsters can go ahead and kill each other and betray each other and feel guilty about it or not, as much as they like.  But I don't want to hear about it, and I don't watch to watch movies that glorify it.  There are just so many other stories I would rather be told.

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola (2013)

मटरू की बिजली का मंडोला

If Vishal Bhardwaj's 7 khoon maaf is a creepy fun house at a sinister carnival, his Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a visit to a surrealist circus.  Trippy, touching, and uproariously funny, this movie sparkles and dances and enchants.  It is a sweet story of redemption, a biting political satire, and a magical romp all rolled into one crazy film.  It is wild, brilliant, and great fun.

The narrative at the core of Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a potentially heavy one:  A crorepati industrialist, Mandola (Pankaj Kapur) schemes with the chief minister of Haryana (Shabana Azmi) to buy out, for a pittance, the farmers of the village that bears his name, so that he can develop a lucrative factory-mall complex on their land.  A mysterious figure calling himself after Mao Tse-Tung galvanizes and supports the villagers to fight back and preserve their livelihood.  Without the otherworldly, yet humanistic, levity that effervesces through Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola, this could be the stuff of a Prakash Jha film.  But Vishal Bhardwaj paints on a different kind of canvas here.

Mandola is a man divided against himself.  When sober, he is hard and calculating, willing even to use his own daughter, Bijlee (Anushka Sharma), as a pawn to advance  his schemes, including marrying her off to the chief minister's idiot of a son (Arya Babbar).  When Mandola is drunk, though - as he is much of the time - he sympathizes with the farmers and undermines is own business interestes.  He enlists an overqualified servant, Matru (Imran Khan) to watch over him.  But Matru's own motives are murky and his loyalties do not exactly lie where Mandola thinks.

This story is embedded in a matrix of the absurd that brings it to life with joyful giddiness.  The movie careens from pink buffaloes to dung-slinging trebuchets to swarming bees to a drunken midnight joyride in a flaming airplane.  A troupe of African dancers and an itinerant wedding band are among the disparate elements that shimmer in and out of Bhardwaj's magically unreal yet palpably dusty world.  Thrown into the mix is some very clever skewering of the press, the police, and the machinery of politics that is part Peepli Live, part Welcome to Sajjanpur, and all Vishal Bhardwaj. 

While invoking many established filmi conventions - such as a "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" type of climax - Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola turns others on their head.  In one sequence, the rains come to the agrarian village - but contrary to convention, the rain is not a cause for village-wide rejoicing.  It's after the harvest, and the deluge threatens to destroy the stored grain that the farmers need to sell to keep their land.  Mandola, the chief minister, and their cadre of corrupt officials dance in the downpour like film stars, while the villagers scramble to protect their livelihood.

For all its rich, rangy pleasures, Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is not without a few warts.  The characterizations are at times inconsistent, especially around Bijlee; her strengths are a bit unclear, and her relationship with Mandola a touch underdeveloped.  But these are minor quibbles in a movie that utterly enthralls and delights while it is happening.  (Other reviewers have complained that it sags in the middle; that could not have been further from this reviewer's experience.)  The relationship between Matru and Mandola is as touching as it is dysfunctional, and often hilarious and sweet as they drunkenly navigate the world together.  In one brilliant scene they crash into a well on a motorcycle and, deciding the well's location  is a dangerous, attempt to move it by dragging it by the rope that suspends its bucket.  United in this nonsensical and futile task, Matru and Mandola bond in the shared absurdity.

The movie is propelled through the madness by the performances of its actors.  Pankaj Kapur owns the film; Mandola is as loveably unloveable, as much the selfish softy, as his meanyhead in Bhardwaj's The Blue Umbrella.  Shabana Azmi delivers deliciously even as she chews the scenery with relish.  She has vastly too much fun as the long-suffering embodiment of manipulative evil, rolling her eyes as she strains to tolerate the buffoonery of her pawns, her son and Mandola.  I could watch Shabana Azmi all day long in roles like this one, a distillation and magnification of the character she developed for Loins of Punjab Presents.  Imran Khan does not emote much behind his fetching beard, but he is adequate to the demands that Matru's bizarre world places on him.  Even Anushka Sharma - who had better show some range soon if she is to live up to the promise of Band baaja baaraat - restrains the over-bubbliness here, and turns in a solid, reasonably grounded effort. 

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola has been receiving widely mixed reviews, and I went in with some trepidation, unsure what to expect.  But I came out grinning, utterly delighted with a film I can't wait to see again and confirmation of the storytelling genius of Vishal Bhardwaj.  The weaknesses will fade in memory, and all that will remain are the many pleasures, the reality of the ridiculous, the splendid satire, and the lingering laughs.  I'll stand by my gushing here because it is an honest response to a movie I enjoyed every moment of.  Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is simply a wonderful and unusual piece of cinematic art. 

Karz (1980)

क़र्ज़

An inspiration and source for Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, Subhash Ghai's Karz ("debt") is in virtually every respect a flawless masala entertainer. It has everything, and I mean everything.  As one of Hindi cinema's canonical peechle janam stories, it has a healthy dose of mysticism and larger-than-life themes like justice, karma, and familial bonds. It has a main character, Monty (Rishi Kapoor), who is a famous stage performer, for no reason other than to provide excuses for its fantastic, over-the-top songs - set pieces like song from which Om Shanti Om took its name, in which Rishi Kapoor dances awkwardly on a giant spinning record after riding in on the tone arm.  It has Pran, playing a good guy who speaks largely in couplets.  It has a brilliant Aruna Irani item number that also features Pran disguised as a fakir.  It has Simi Garewal, in a melodramatic yet wonderfully rangy performance - cold and creepy as a murderer, and increasingly disturbed and distressed as Monty gaslights her into explosive confession of her crimes.  It has Durga Khote, who recognizes Monty as the reincarnation of her murdered son without question.  It has strange, inappropriate nude photographs sprinkled throughout its sets, for the camera to focus on at symbolically charged moments.  It has a bizarre, greedy villain, Sir Juda (Premnath), who communicates by tapping out codes that only his henchman Mac Mohan can understand.  It has Iftekhar and Yusuf Khan in hilarious fake beards.  It even has Jalal Agha. In short, Karz has just about everything there is to love about Hindi movies in one fantastic package, with a quick pace and very little fat (allowing for a little pudge around Rishi Kapoor's rapidly spreading middle).

My utter delight as I soaked in every frame of this hilarious, satisfying movie came out in the tweets I made while I was watching it, many with screencaps to highlight the visual awesomeness.  Thanks to Storify, I have collected all those tweets here, and allow them to serve as my review of this fantastically entertaining movie. 

So without further ado, here is the joy and brilliance of Karz, summarized via live-tweets from a gobsmacked, delighted Carla.

 

 

Be sure to click the "Read More" link after Durga Khote - there are more tweets and I'd like you to see them all.