Sold (Out)

A piece of mine was recently published in the Sakaal Times (click on the image above for a clearer view).

Due to space considerations, the published version is about 100-150 words shorter than the piece I had submitted; the un-edited text is pasted below:

An air of self-congratulation is common among Hindi film audiences these days. Evidently, now that the over-the-top baddie, the weepy mother, the saccharine sister, and the rape scene, have been banished into the furthest recesses of our memory (banished so deep, in fact, that some in the contemporary audience seem to believe these were staples of every Bollywood era; Om Shanti Om, for instance, was especially notable in its inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Bollywood’s 1980s and preceding eras), we can all sit back, relax, and watch “edgier”, “different”, and “new” films – and ensconced in multiplex luxury to boot. Some weeks – the weeks when a Taare Zameen Par, Chak de India, Johnny Gaddar, or Black Friday is released – even I find myself succumbing to the dream of the popular cinema renaissance that is just around the corner. It’s just as well I manage to snap myself out of my reverie, for if I ever did get to wherever it is they’re staging the renaissance, I’d be terribly bored not to find any women at the party.
The marginalization of women is one of the best kept secrets in the new Bollywood: right in front of our eyes, and beneath the radar. In most contemporary Hindi films, lead actresses have nothing to do. Certainly, there’s plenty for women to do, given the hordes of Eastern European imports needed to serve as eye-candy in dance sequences, the number of poles that must be shimmied up and down, the excess of bastardized hip-hop tropes mindlessly re-cycled into Hindi song videos. Just don’t expect it to include meaningful characterization, or even much dialogue. With the exception of a Bhool Bhulaiya or a Jodha-Akbar, our lead actresses have been reduced to a gym-toned skin-show that tends more toward bland sameness than sexiness, and hence toward a fungibility that would have shocked predecessors like Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit, or Kajol, let alone the likes of Meena Kumari or Nargis. And even meatier female roles (e.g. in Dhoom 2 or Tashan) are sold as “about” the lead actress showing more than we’ve ever seen before (Yashraj’s Tashan website lists Kareena’s character Pooja’s “[q]ualifications” – as part of a mock CV the website had for all the film’s main characters – as “34-22-34”, a line that speaks volumes about the true function of the most intelligent character in the film).
Substantial female roles ostensibly survive in some of the more traditional Hindi film genres, though even here the game seems to be up, what with the male halves of the Shah Rukh Khan-Kajol and Saif Ali Khan-Rani Mukherjee pairs having moved on to romantic films with curiously passive heroines with nothing to do but smile (e.g. Om Shanti Om); or “thrillers” where it doesn’t matter who’s shedding clothes, as long as enough of ‘em are doing it (e.g. Race). As for the rest, the love stories have morphed into brain-dead comedies (do I really need to list them?) and wannabe styleathons (Dhoom 2). In fact, watching previews of U, Me aur Hum gave me the odd sensation of watching a throwback: the heroine was actually having a conversation. Strange indeed (and the sort of strangeness that perhaps explains why Imtiaz Ali’s films have struck a chord with youngsters; though casting the leggy and inept Deepika Padukone in his next film smells of an impending sellout). Nor are films like Laaga Chunri Mein Daagh or Saawariya much better: these certainly have women in important roles, but they are “about” womanhood itself, more specifically, about the problem of womanhood (in a world where femininity only exists in two relevant flavors, whorish and virginal; personally, I wanted lemon). Needless to say, neither film was even remotely progressive, or even interesting, in its representation of gender issues (although Laaga Chunri Mein Daagh went some way in subverting the easy complacencies of the sort of “family values” film the 1990s fed us dollops of).
Ultimately, filmmakers cannot be absolved of all responsibility – they are not mere mirrors of our taste, and shape it in important and subliminal ways – but neither can the audience. Its unwillingness to watch any film with a woman as the principal character (Aaja Nachle and Umraojaan, anyone?) speaks volumes about our preferred on-screen representation of contemporary femininity: lips parted and shaking her ass. Indeed, globalization has exacerbated the problem: sexism has never been a stranger to Bollywood, but today sexism is sold (and consumed) as the liberation of Bollywood’s on-screen personae. But those (like Shobha De) who (usefully) remind us that it is refreshing to see mean, manipulative, and tough women after a steady diet for years of good girls, also overstate the case. For while we’ve imported the stance, the gesturality, of Western film and music as far as representations of femininity are concerned, we (and Bollywood) certainly seem far less eager to import Western feminism(s), or even the West’s greater commitment to formal gender equality. In the absence of a concomitant intellectual frame shift, we and our films run the risk of reinforcing traditional inequities in new and more insidious ways – precisely while thinking that the shackles have been broken.

The Bhaiyya's Revenge: On Tashan (OUTLOOK)

A revised version of my piece on Tashan makes its way onto Outlook's website. Yenjoy.

The Bhaiyya's Revenge

'Bizarre, outlandish and a crashing bore; so over-smart, smug and self-indulgent...'? Was Tashan really all that bad? What accounts for severe panning from just about every reviewer?

Namrata Joshi's is perhaps the best review of all those panning Tashan: unlike most of her peers, she has an eye for the film's "smugness", that is to say its self-conscious nod to its masala roots, and is surely right when she says director Vijay Krishna Acharya has a tendency to lull the writer in him into a deep sleep (to her credit; most other reviewers have trashed the film on the same grounds--a wafer-thin plot; implausible characterization; poor dialogue--that don't seem to give them pause where other films are concerned (contrast the generally favorable reviews a farce like Race received), suggesting that something other than the film's thin storyline might have ticked them off. As for what that might be, and why and how there's a lot more at work in Tashan than Ms. Joshi has given it credit for, the answer lies in Kanpur--not so much the real-life industrial city that has seen better days, but the Kanpur of (Acharya's) imagination, a city "representative" of the heartland, and of a state of mind that might seem anachronistic in contemporary Hindi cinema.

There's little doubt that Tashan is deeply mindful of the cinematic tradition it is heir to, but it would be a mistake to think of Tashan as a "retro" film, unless by that term one refers simply to any film that is conscious in this way, or one means simply that the director in question has great affection for the films he grew up watching. Both of these are manifestly true of Tashan, but the film is no mere homage, nor is it smug in the "Look at how many films I've watched" way Quentin Tarantino has mastered. For homage, ironic distance from the past one wishes to not so much capture but allude to is an essential ingredient. Think Bluffmaster! or Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, each of which made reference to the Bollywood past, but used a combination of humor and affectionate remembrance to drive home the point that the films, the mood, were pretty darn good way back then--but that the past is irremediably past.

Tashan is in fact a rarer bird: it plays it straight, essentially seeking to present a masala movie in 2008 garb. But what separates it from the likes of, say, a Halla Bol, is Acharya's instinct for packaging designed to appeal to contemporary multiplex audiences (by now, sadly, the only audiences that seem to matter to the Hindi film industry), and his breezy--albeit uneven--humor. Not to mention a sensibility far removed from the earnestness of Raj Kumar Santoshi: whereas Halla Bol seemed to hope that upwardly mobile audiences would overlook a cinematic idiom that seemed to be past its sell by date, Acharya seems well aware of the challenge before him. Indeed, Acharya renders the challenge explicit by making a film that is unabashedly on the side of the bhaiyya--specifically, one called Bachchan Pandey (Akshay Kumar)--cheerfully excluded from fluency in English (an abstraction given flesh in the form of Jimmy (Saif Ali Khan)), and set against the course of over a decade of Bollywood history.This sensibility is not just a question of dialect (although Tashan includes liberal doses of what I am told is--but wouldn't recognize as--Kanpur's Hindi dialect) or of a character who isn't a yuppie from a major metro, or of a story that doesn't unfold in New York or Sydney or London. Rather, it is a question of an entire worldview: by privileging Bachchan Pandey's character, and (more importantly) his story, and by ensuring that only the Kanpuriyas have a "history" in this film, Acharya privileges the Ganga kinaare waala ethos (whether real or imagined; or, more appropriately in the context of a cinematic tradition stretching back at least to the Bachchan song of the same name in Don, imagined and real), and puts "the heartland" at the core of Hindi cinema in a way we haven't seen since Bunty aur Babli--and in a far more explicit, and (given the tastes of contemporary Bollywood audiences) courageous manner than Shaad Ali's 2005 laugh romp.



I wrote above that this sensibility is not simply a question of dialect--equally, however, the question of language is never very far from this film's lead male characters, each of whom has serious language issues. For instance, Acharya is acutely conscious of the privileged status Jimmy's access to English bestows upon him--not only is he a call center executive but an English-language instructor, the sort who grants Indians access not to the wealth of English literature or Anglo-American thought, but to the opportunity to serve customers who expect English to be the world's lingua franca. But Jimmy's privilege isn't simply because of the greater demand for his services in India's new economic paradigm; as the reverence of Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor) for Jimmy's well-turned out English phrases makes clear, to speak like Jimmy in the new India is to be the new (and uber-) Brahmin, potentially able to intimidate even those north of one on the totem pole of wealth and power. Bachchan Pandey is the opposite of Bhaiyyaji: for him, Jimmy's facility with English is itself suspicious, a sign of insufficient Indianness. For Pandey--who, in his name, incarnates two larger-than-life U.P. waalas, Hindi cinema's biggest star and the 1857 sepoy who graced our cinema screens only a few years ago--and, one suspects, for Acharya, the "real deal," the "asli" Indian, cannot be found in the India of the call centers and the shiny malls, but in the sort of galee where boys steal electricity to impress girls (watch the film, you'll see what I mean).



As a corrective to the recent indifference of Bollywood toward much of its erstwhile audience, and to the ease with which denizens of "the metros" in my experience dismiss "Bihar vihaar", I found the spirit of Tashan irresistible. And never more so than when Akshay Kumar makes his entry dressed as Ravana in a sequence that is utterly, wonderfully, compelling, clearly out to upset the complacency of audiences who uncritically see the recent arc of Hindi cinema as a narrative of virtue, moving from "cinema for the rickshawaalas" to the "advanced" cinema that won't make it cringe--although Acharya's essentialism is hardly unproblematic, and I can easily see just why this film might be alienating for an audience that prefers to watch just the sort of film Bachchan Pandey would sneer at. Acharya's crude tonic is welcome to me, but I must concede that it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of commercial sense.

Itna aagay nikal gaye, aur ab tak story ke baare mein nahin bataaya? Skirt chaser Jimmy falls for Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor, more skeletal than sex symbol, and miles removed from the kohl-rimmed hotness of Asoka) at first sight, and agrees to give her private English classes--except the classes aren't for her but for her boss, a U.P. don called Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor) with an addiction to broken English. Jimmy and Pooja fall in love (or so he thinks), until one 25-crore scam and one irate gangster later, Pooja is on the run, Jimmy's getting the living daylights beaten out of him by Bhaiyyaji's henchmen, and bounty hunter Bachchan Pandey is on the money's trail. The three meet up and hit the road together, and by film's end we have (mediocre) action sequences, khoya hua bachpan ka pyar, and two extended flashbacks set in Kanpur's lanes (one of which bizarrely erupts towards the end of the film). In short: paisa vasool for this viewer. And then some.



Acharya's debut film is unquestionably superior to the last action/adventure film featuring two male leads and a female thief he was involved with--while both Dhoom 2 (which Acharya wrote) and Tashan suffer from egregious wannabe moments, the latter has genuine soul at points, and is never merely plastic (at least if you exclude song videos like Chaliya, Yash Raj Films' latest ill conceived attempt to manufacture sexiness by means of skimpy clothing). Not to mention that it features far better visuals (a large share of the credit for which must doubtless go to cinematographer Anayanka Bose), music, and dialogue than 2006's biggest grosser. And more affecting performances than anything in the earlier film, none more so than Akshay Kumar in what is for me his best performance since Khakee: he's heavy handed here as he typically is, but nevertheless manages to plausibly incarnate not only a rowdy antisocial with Manoj Kumar's soul, but also the wide-eyed air of a boy from the boondocks.

Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor are both effective, although Khan doesn't have very much to do once Akshay enters the proceedings. Khan is perfectly cast though (although not perfectly styled; I was struck by how "off" Jimmy's get-up seemed to be given the sort of chap the film would have us believe he is), and easily carries the film through its first half hour. Kapoor has rather more to do, and while her role does not call for much nuance (at least none that is very plausible) she is good fun to watch as the tease trying to get close to Pandey so that she can pull off one more scam.



Somewhat surprisingly, Anil Kapoor's is by far the worst performance in the film: his Bhaiyyaji is labored and downright unfunny, or, more accurately, Bhaiyyaji commits the worst sin a villain can. He is funny enough not to seem very dangerous, but not funny enough to justify the number of lines of broken English he is given. Kapoor's non-performance must squarely be laid at Acharya's door; Bhaiyyaji's role is so farcical and contrived, the dialogues associated with it so bad, it would likely fell greater actors than Anil Kapoor. A special mention must be made of Yashpal Sharma, who is superb as the Haryanvi A.C.P. Hooda on the crooks' trail--he has no more than a few scenes in the movie, and is the best thing about every one of them.

I must admit to having been somewhat ungenerous to Vishal-Shekhar's music prior to Tashan's release. In the context of the film the songs work quite well (although Falak Tak might as well be from a different film, or just about any film; a pity, given that the rest of the music is very far from generic).Piyush Mishra's lyrics are in sync with Acharya's vision, ranging from Urdu (in Chaliya); to grand Hindustani lyrics in the testosterone-drenched tradition of Firoz Khan's films (as in Tashan Mein; when was the last time you heard a song go "Apni to… har baat niraali hai / Apne to … Khoon mein ishq ki laali hai", or "Hum se hairaan hai teer Sikandar ka / Hum pe qurbaan hai neel samandar ka"?); and bhaiyyaspeak (just about everywhere) is refreshing after the endemic contemporary Bolly-overdose of all things Punjabi.



Tashan certainly has its flaws: it isn't always clear on what sort of film it wants to be, the dialogue should have been much better than it was, the song videos were generally underwhelming, and the action scenes are a let down (an unpardonable sin in these action-starved times). But I can forgive it much because it is clear on the sort of film it does not want to be. That is, Tashan is no spoof, nor is it afflicted by the sort of retro-clever that borders on obscurity. By means of it, Acharya has placed his studio's money on the wager that a relatively "straight" masala movie that turns its back on Bollywood's recent history can be viable at the box office. I hope he's right on that--certainly if convincing this reviewer were all that were required Acharya would be well on his way--although the irate theatergoers I walked past after the show had ended serve to underscore how daunting Acharya's task is: the bhaiyyas have left the building, likely priced out of the new multiplexes, and a generation brought up on the easy inanities of Hindi cinema's brain-dead comedies or its addled NRI love stories might well find Tashan's brew not simply bakwaas, but ideologically offensive.

IRON MAN (English; 2008)

The Marvel comics explosion at the start of the 1960s was a two-headed beast. On the one hand the world was treated to newfangled types of superheroes like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, "all too human" in a way unrecognizable from many of the godlike (and boring) DC comics superheroes of the 1940s (we won't speak of the 1950s, the imbecilic decade that gave us the Batbaby), and even from Marvel's own Captain America. Spidey, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men were fresh, and they were most definitely A-list (although the X-Men probably had to wait till the mid-1970s before they could be considered permanent fixtures of comicdom's upper echelon). The second head of the Marvel Janus, however, were superheroes who were either knockoffs of characters created by the Distinguished Competition, or too weird to be loved by the public-at-large (Antman, anyone?), or even low-grade versions of Marvel's OWN A-listers (Daredevil vis-a-vis Spiderman; the blind man's revenge would be long in coming, but once it did in the form of Frank Miller, it would be pretty permanent). We may callously group these cheerful, but low-prestige, heroes together as Marvel's B-listers.

Iron Man was one of them. Old tin can didn't even have his own comic until 1970, and had to share Tales of Suspense with fellow Avenger Captain America (who was, of course, the bigger draw) in a "split book" format. And while things did change for Tony Stark and Iron Man in the decades to follow, he never could live down the sense that the multi-millionaire Stark was simply a brasher version of Bruce Wayne; never did make it to Marvel's upper echelon; nor did he ever cross over into the wider popular (i.e. non-comic reading) culture in the way that Batman, Hulk, and Spiderman did. He did become a stalwart of the Marvel universe, however, even becoming a pivotal (if somewhat authoritarian) figure during Marvel's recent "Civil War" story arc, willing to serve as Uncle Sam's super-suited cop against his old friends and teammates (not to mention that he enabled Marvel to pander to post-9/11 Republican readers in addition to whatever Democratic ones they might have been pandering to with Captain America). All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying, my friends, that if ever there was a hero who wouldn't be in a $100 million opening weekend film, it was Iron Man.

Oops. Scratch that last sentence.

Iron Man's sensational opening weekend illustrates yet again that this is truly the golden age of superhero movies: not only has the special effects technology caught up to the comic books' conceit, but just as important, the filmmakers behind Batman Begins, X-Men, Spiderman, and now Iron Man, have displayed a firm grasp on the comic medium, and on how its heroes might be re-imagined for cinema. Often the goofy earnestness of the 1960s comics is preserved to an extent, but blended with much-needed contemporary irony. The over-arching conviction, of course, is that comics are as respectable a medium as any other: and rather than crushing the filmmakers beneath the weight of pious attempts to placate fanboys, this conviction seems have liberated Hollywood to take as many liberties with them as they do with literary adaptations. All of which weirdly preserves the freshness of the 1960s comics, no small feat given that we've seen it all by now, and means: bring on Ant Man (Henry Pym, we never knew ye).

Iron Man reaps the benefit of having an unusually strong cast for a superhero film: Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark, the billionaire scientist-genius, tycoon, and playboy, who is captured by Afghan warlords and forced to build his famed weapons for them. Except what he builds is the first Iron Man suit, using it to kick some ass and high tail it out of the bad guys' lair. Stark's character has rightly been termed "preposterous", absurdly so, in fact, yet Downey plays him to perfection, with the sort of twinkle-eyed lightness that is essential for pulling off the sort of role even the film's target audiences will have trouble taking seriously. Downey is matched step-for-step by Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Stark's long-suffering assistant Pepper Potts with a bemused charm that would be the envy of bombshells everywhere (such as the journalist who beds Stark, reminding me that I went to the wrong college). Jeff Bridges was almost unrecognizable as Stark's business partner Obadiah Stern, but no less wonderful for that, an old-school baddie you can see coming a mile away.

The story, or how-do-we-get-to-the-part-with-the-nifty-suit: Stark's sojourn in Afghanistan has revealed to him the human cost of the international weapons industry his work helps propel, and he decides to get Stark Industries out of the business of weapons manufacture. He also decides to devote time to perfecting his Iron Man concept (in order to track down the baddies who've been using Stark weaponry, and take out their stockpiles), and while the run-up to the new suit's unveiling is about as hackneyed as they come, it nevertheless succeeds in holding the viewer's attention. Director Jon Favreau is able to do this because he dwells long enough upon the plot to make it seem that he is taking it seriously, but not long enough to be bogged down by its silliness. Many wonderful SFX moments and a (to me, disappointing) climactic fight with a "bad" Iron Man later (and, much much later, Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury), the movie does not so much end as point toward a sequel -- which might well be even more fun than this instalment.

Iron Man contains much to delight the comic book purists too: the red-and-golden armor is a throwback to one of the "classic" Iron Man looks (thank God they dispensed with the golden monstrosity Stark wore in Avengers #1), and it was gratifying to see Stark's first armor as grey as it was in the 1960s comics when he created it in captivity at the hands of Communists in South-East Asia -- indeed, the scenes of the first Iron Man armor being forged in an underground cavern in Afghanistan went a longer way toward justifying Stark's character (independent of the spectre of Bruce Wayne) than anything I'd encountered in the comic books; for in those sequences, Stark's brashness, his rough edges, began to make sense: he is the Marvel Universe's Hephaestus, metalsmith to the Gods, and a practical, blunt, fact of a man (in contrast to Wayne's blue-blooded intellectualism; the latter loves to play detective, the former, to get his hands greasy taking things apart). There are plenty of other "insider" references to comic nerds like yours truly: to Stark's budding alcoholism; to just how much of a mouthful the long form of the acronym for Marvel's premier cloak and dagger agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., is; to the fact that Stark's buddy Jim Rhodes did end up wearing the Iron Man armour for a period in the comics; and to the sheer lameness of the notion that Stark's secret identity was protected by virtue of the pretense that Iron Man was really his bodyguard (the movie puts this idea in play, and then cheerfully discards it).

Iron Man will never have the mythic resonance of a well-made Batman film; but Favreau is to be commended for avoiding the sort of fake angst that can mar even a well-made Spiderman film. Despite his heart condition, public ridicule, and threats to his life, Tony Stark knows life is good (why wouldn't it be, when you have Gwyneth Paltrow for an assistant?). And Favreau, given a monster budget to seemingly do as he wished, knows it too. The film reflects that; and, as its opening weekend box office receipts showed, good cheer can be infectious.

TASHAN (Hindi; 2008)

It would be a mistake to think of Tashan as a “retro” film, unless by that term one refers simply to any film that is conscious of the cinematic tradition it is heir to, or one means simply that the director in question has great affection for the films he grew up watching. Both of these are manifestly true of Tashan, but the film is no mere homage. For homage, ironic distance from the past one wishes to not so much capture but allude to is an essential ingredient. Tashan is in fact a rarer bird: it plays it straight, essentially seeking to present a thoroughly masala movie in 2008 garb. But what separates it from the likes of Halla Bol is director Vijay Krishna Acharya’s instinct (indulged in liberally though not uniformly in Tashan) for packaging designed to appeal to contemporary multiplex audiences (by now, sadly, the only audiences that seem to matter to the Hindi film industry), and his breezy – albeit uneven – humor. Not to mention a sensibility far removed from the earnestness of Raj Kumar Santoshi: whereas Halla Bol seemed to hope that upwardly mobile audiences would overlook a cinematic idiom that seemed to be past its sell by date, Acharya seems well aware of the challenge before him. Indeed, Acharya renders the challenge explicit by making a film that is unabashedly on the side of the bhaiyya – specifically, one called Bachchan Pandey (Akshay Kumar) -- cheerfully excluded from fluency in English – an abstraction given flesh in the form of Jimmy (Saif Ali Khan) – and set against the course of over a decade of Bollywood history. This sensibility is not just a question of dialect (although Tashan includes doses of what I am told is – but wouldn’t recognize as – Kanpur’s Hindi dialect) or of a character who isn’t a yuppie from a major metro, or of a story that doesn’t unfold in New York or Sydney or London. Rather, it is a question of an entire worldview: by privileging Bachchan Pandey’s character, and (more importantly) his story, and by ensuring that only the Kanpuriyas have a “history” in this film (Jimmy's one minute of "flashback" isn't even allowed the dignity of a real place, and serves as stagey contrast to the lovingly imagined Kanpur lanes of Pandey's past), Acharya privileges the Ganga kinaare waala ethos (whether real or imagined), and puts “the heartland” at the core of Hindi cinema in a way we haven’t seen since Bunty aur Babli – and in a far more explicit, and (given the tastes of contemporary Bollywood audiences) more courageous manner than Shaad Ali’s 2005 breezy romp.

I wrote above that this sensibility is not simply a question of dialect – equally, however, the question of language is never very far from this film’s lead male characters, each of whom has serious language issues. For instance, Acharya is acutely conscious of the privileged status Jimmy’s access to English bestows upon him – not only is he a call center executive but an English-language instructor, granting Indians access not to the wealth of English literature or Anglo-American thought, but to the opportunity to serve customers who expect English to be the world’s lingua franca. But Jimmy’s privilege isn’t simply because of the greater demand for his services in the new economic paradigm; as Bhaiyyaji’s reverence for Jimmy’s well-turned out English phrases makes clear, to speak like Saif in the new India is to be the new uber-Brahmin, potentially able to intimidate even those north of one on the totem pole of wealth and power. Bachchan Pandey is the opposite of Bhaiyyaji: for him, Jimmy’s facility with English is itself suspicious, a sign of insufficient Indianness. For Pandey – who, in his name, incarnates two larger-than-life U.P.waalas, Hindi cinema’s biggest star and the 1857 sepoy who graced our cinema screens only a few years ago – and, one suspects, for Acharya, the “real deal” of the "asli" Indian cannot be found in the India of the call centers and the shiny malls, but in the sort of galee where boys steal electricity to impress girls (um, watch the film, you’ll see what I mean). As a corrective to the recent indifference of Bollywood to much of its erstwhile audience, and to the ease with which denizens of “the metros” in my experience dismiss “Bihar vihaar”, I found the spirit of Tashan irresistible – Akshay Kumar makes his entry dressed as Ravana in a sequence that is utterly, wonderfully, compelling, and he is clearly out to upset the complacency of audiences who uncritically see the recent arc of Hindi cinema as a narrative of virtue, moving from “cinema for the rickshawaalas” to the “advanced” cinema that won’t make them cringe – although Acharya’s essentialism is hardly unproblematic, and I can easily see just why this film might be alienating for an audience that prefers to watch just the sort of film Bachchan Pandey would sneer at. Acharya’s crude tonic is welcome to me, but I must concede that it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of commercial sense.

Itna aagay nikal gaye, aur ab tak story ke baare mein nahin bataaya? Skirt chaser Jimmy falls for Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor, more skeletal than sex symbol) at first sight and agrees to give her private English classes – except the classes aren’t for her but for her boss, a U.P. don called Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor) with an addiction to broken English. Jimmy and Pooja fall in love (or so he thinks), until one 25-crore scam and an irate gangster later, Pooja is on the run, Jimmy’s getting the living daylights beaten out of him by Bhaiyyaji’s henchmen, and bounty hunter Bachchan Pandey is on the money’s trail. The three meet up and hit the road together, and by film’s end we have action, khoya hua bachpan ka pyar, and two extended flashbacks set in Kanpur’s lanes (one of which bizarrely pops up towards the end of the film). In short: paisa vasool for this viewer. And then some.

Acharya’s debut film is unquestionably superior to the last action/adventure film featuring two male leads and a female thief he was involved with – while both Dhoom 2 (which Acharya wrote) and Tashan suffer from egregious wannabe moments, the latter has genuine soul at points, and is never merely plastic (at least if you exclude song videos like Chaliya, Yash Raj Films’ latest ill conceived attempt to manufacture sexiness). Not to mention that it features far better visuals (a large share of the credit for which must doubtless go to cinematographer Anayanka Bose), music, and dialogue than 2006’s biggest grosser. And more affecting performances than anything in the earlier film, none more so than Akshay Kumar in what is for me his best performance since Khakee: he’s heavy handed here as he typically is, but nevertheless manages to plausibly incarnate not only a rowdy antisocial with Manoj Kumar’s soul, but also the wide-eyed air of a boy from the boondocks.

Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor are both effective, although Khan doesn’t have very much to do once Akshay enters the proceedings. Khan is perfectly cast though (although not perfectly styled; I was struck by how “off” Jimmy’s dressing seemed to be given the sort of chap the film would have us believe he is), and easily carries the film through its first half hour. Kapoor has rather more to do, and while her role does not call for much nuance (at least none that is very plausible) she is good fun to watch as the tease trying to get close to Pandey so that she can pull off one more scam. Somewhat surprisingly, Anil Kapoor’s is by far the worst performance in the film: his Bhaiyyaji is labored and downright unfunny, or, more accurately, Bhaiyyaji commits the worst sin a villain can. He is funny enough not to seem very dangerous, but not funny enough to justify the number of lines of broken English he is given. Kapoor’s non-performance must squarely be laid at Acharya’s door; Bhaiyyaji’s role is so farcical and contrived, the dialogues associated with it so bad, it would likely fell greater actors than Anil Kapoor. A special mention must be made of Yashpal Sharma, who is superb as the Haryanvi A.C.P. Hooda on the crooks’ trail – he has no more than a few scenes in the movie, and is the best thing about every one of them.

I must admit to having been somewhat ungenerous to Vishal-Shekhar’s music prior to Tashan’s release. In the context of the film the songs work quite well (although Falak Tak might as well be from a different film, or just about any film; a pity, given that the rest of the music is very far from generic), and the album’s nod to Urdu (in Chaliya); grand Hindustani lyrics in the tradition of Firoz Khan’s films (as in Tashan Mein; when was the last time you heard a song go “Apni to… har baat niraali hai / Apne to … Khoon mein ishq ki laali hai”?); and bhaiyyaspeak (just about everywhere) is refreshing after the endemic contemporary overdose of all things Punjabi.

Tashan certainly has its flaws: it isn’t always clear on what sort of film it wants to be, the dialogue should have been much better than it is, the song videos were generally underwhelming, and the action scenes are a let down (an unpardonable sin in these action-starved times). But I can forgive it much (even apart from its mouthwatering shots of Indian locales) because it is clear on the sort of film it does not want to be. That is, Tashan is no spoof, nor is it afflicted by the sort of retro-clever that borders on obscurity. By means of it, Acharya has placed his studio’s money on the wager that a relatively “straight” masala movie that turns its back on Bollywood’s recent history can, if packaged and sold right, be viable at the box office. I hope he’s right on that – certainly if convincing this reviewer were all that were required Acharya would be well on his way – although the irate theatergoers I walked past after the show had ended serve to underscore how daunting Acharya’s task is.

Ellora & Ajanta

It is well nigh impossible to over-esteem the stupendous achievements in architecture, sculpture, and painting visible at Ellora & Ajanta, where the temples, monasteries, and sculptures were not "built" or "made" but simply excavated from solid rock, mostly in the first millenium A.D. Nowhere are the challenges associated with these endeavors (and one's awe, bordering on disbelief, at their realization) driven home more clearly than in Ellora's Cave 16, a mammoth Kailash temple that was excavated and shaped over a century and a half. Not to put too fine a point on it, the temple -- apparently intended as an earthly replica of Mount Kailash, abode of Shiva and Parvati -- is simply one of the most impressive sights I've ever seen. But the paintings that have survived at Ajanta add yet another layer of wonder -- at the mere fact of their survival, but also because the Ajanta paintings humanize the sculptural setting, by enabling the viewer access to a more intimate register, one that does not overawe with its scale but with its vividness. The scale of the artistry on view at these sites, and the forbidding light conditions of the caves, mean that any notion of doing justice to Ajanta & Ellora by means of these photos is frivolous.

Mumbaaaaaaai

...no, not that awful song from Shootout at Lokhandwala, just some pics of the incomparable city.

Aurangabad & Khuldabad...

Aurangabad was my base for the sublime pleasures of Ajanta & Ellora, but the town itself (one-time capital of the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb during the latter portion of his reign) is well worth a visit...

...as is the nearby tomb/dargah-drenched town of Khuldabad, famous for the graves of Aurangzeb, Asaf Jah I (the first Nizam of Hyderabad), not to mention a robe of the Prophet Muhammad and a plethora of graves of relatively minor Sufi saints of the Chistiya order...

A selection of my pictures is on shutterfly...

HALLA BOL (Hindi; 2008)

If multiplex Bollywood were a Persian rug in a rich, powerful person's home, Raj Kumar Santoshi would be the guy pissing on it. If you think this is an odd (or crude) way to begin a film review, you evidently aren't familiar with Santoshi's oeuvre, and you certainly haven't seen Halla Bol, a nearly three hour long birdie flipped by Santoshi to over a decade and a half of Hindi film history. No songless films for Santoshi, no sequences in New York or Sydney or Switzerland, no low-key dialogues either. There's no chance of unobtrusive background music, and as for de-mythologized, "naturalistic" characters? !@#$%?! 'em. By the way (in case you haven't been reading my blog for long), in my book those are all potentially good things, and I thus went to see Halla Bol with great expectation. For Santoshi has over the course of his career been determined not to throw out the baby of Indian modes of storytelling and characterization along with the bathwater of cinematic mediocrity; nowhere is this attitude more apparent than in the uncompromising Khakee, at once a damning indictment of our political cynicism and an old fashioned, unabashed actioner. Sadly, this attitude is only intermittently evident in Santoshi's latest offering, which left this viewer ruing the weak script and clunky treatment. The end result is an uneven nostalgia trip, featuring a few scenes of awesome power and resonance, and ending up as a film that is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Ashfaque (Ajay Devgan) is an actor in the street theater troupe of one-time dacoit, now social activist, Sidhu (Pankaj Kapoor), with dreams of making it big in Bollywood, so much so that Ashfaque has no qualms about admitting to his lady love Sneha (Vidya Balan) that if pressed to choose between his lover and his acting career, he would opt for the latter. [Incidentally, the parents of Muslim Ashfaque and Hindu Sneha seem utterly indifferent to the religious identity of their child's lover; in the typical masala film this would hardly be an issue, but in a film so self-consciously political, the blitheness of the protagonists' parents makes them seem not so much from a small town as from another planet.] Ashfaque -- reborn in Bollywood as Sameer Khan -- does find fame and fortune, losing his soul in the process and becoming the archetype of the narcissistic celebrity who thinks the most important thing in the world is his career, his position, and his gratification.

The above is presented to us by way of flashback; Halla Bol begins with the "fallen" Sameer Khan, and while the creative choice probably makes the film's length seem more manageable (by mildly interrupting the linear narrative the film so badly wants to be), it robs the flashback of any dramatic tension. That is, we already know what Sameer Khan became, and while that in itself is not a meaningful criticism, Ashfaque's journey is hardly presented in any new or resonant light. This failure is symptomatic of the wider failure that is Halla Bol: a stale air hangs over the film, which seems to have been cobbled together from bits and pieces of films we have seen earlier. The film works as an exercise in nostalgia, particularly for those of us who have watched with dismay as contemporary Hindi filmmakers have begun marching to the rhythm of Hollywood films as if there were no other path to cinematic "progress". But at its worst one is reminded of Khakee, and not in a good way: Halla Bol is less bold, less pungent, and less fun than that Santoshi masala masterpiece. No doubt masala may be enjoyable without breaking any new ground (look no further, given that Vikram's Bheema has just hit the screens, than Saamy), but not when the film carries as much baggage, and takes itself as seriously, as Halla Bol does.

Nevertheless, once Sameer Khan's life is thrown into crisis by a cold blooded murder committed before his eyes, there are enough flashes of the sort of drama Santoshi is capable of to keep the viewer's attention engaged. The sons of two very powerful men murder a woman who has spurned their advances -- in the middle of a party, no less. Sameer Khan and dozens of high society's brightest and best are witnesses, yet no-one does anything to prevent the killers coolly walking out and, as is all too depressingly familiar from the newspapers, no-one is subsequently willing to step forward to testify against the criminals. No-one, that is, until Sameer Khan wakes up to his calling in life, and decides to speak truth to power, destroying his career and public standing in the process (and winning back the respect of his estranged wife and former guru). By film's end, the good guys have won, somewhat hearteningly not just because some judge rules in their favor but because Sameer's and Sidhu's courage sparks a popular movement determined to bring the killers to justice. The film's conclusion, that is, does not so much focus on the judicial outcome -- the wrongdoers' conviction -- so much as on the prerequisite to a healthy justice system: a vigorous and concerned citizenry. For Santoshi, the real culprits are not the villains but our own apathy. The director's clarity (so welcome in the wake of the Madhur Bhandarkars of the world, who seek to assuage the audience's collective conscience by pointing to a fantastically corrupt and decadent "other") is laudable, but sadly Halla Bol works better as a concept than as a movie. It's just not engaging enough to be a good film.

That Halla Bol works at all is due in no small measure to the strength of the mythic paradigm Santoshi taps into, not to mention a film-stealing (albeit uneven) performance by Pankaj Kapoor: he hits only one note, and does it with great panache at times, although he lacks the raw screen presence to pull off the sort of herogiri Santoshi insists on foisting upon him. Devgan's performance is, as is his wont these days, curiously passive, and Santoshi seems to appreciate this given the extent to which the second half of Halla Bol is propelled by Pankaj Kapoor. Devgan is in far better form playing the callous superstar of the film's initial reels: even if the film's satire of shallow celebrities is a bit too heavy handed, both Santoshi and Devgan seem to be having fun doing it. Vidya Balan is utterly wasted in a role virtually anyone could have done, and Sneha's presence in the plot seems wholly instrumental. Darshan Jariwala deserves special mention: his old-school baddie, the minister father of the man who actually fired the shots, is the sort of menace for whom cinematic time stopped in 1987: he's loud, crude, and always engaging, the last a quality the film could certainly have used more of.

Much can be forgiven Santoshi, however, for two contrasting scenes: the second of these occurs when Sameer Khan, fresh from a humbling defeat in court, shows up drunk at the minister's house in the middle of the night. Jariwala gloats with abandon, convinced that Sameer has come to make peace on bent knee, and points out the multi-cultural (and presumably ill gotten) splendors of his palatial home: a chandelier from Belgium, a painting from Holland, a rug from Persia, and whisky from Scotland. Jariwala can do it all, because (as he keeps reminding us) he has "paisa, power, and the public" behind him; while he prepares Sameer's drink, we hear the hiss of urine falling on the horrified minister's Persian rug. "Ye dhaar hai -- pure Indian," Sameer sneers at his enemy, reminding him that for some things one doesn't need paisa, power, or the public, but simply "gurda...jo mere paas hai." Much of the family audience at the sedate Dubai multiplex I saw Halla Bol at seemed horrified; the anti-social riff-raff element (including yours truly), however, were reminded of the thunder of a bygone era, and erupted in cheers, wild hooting, and whistles. As the Mastercard commercial would say: Priceless.

The first scene is the work of a far more subtle sensibility, and is, I suspect, destined to be one of my favorite scenes this decade. Sameer Khan has been named a youth icon; the star, his mind perturbed by the murder he has recently witnessed, arrives onstage and is startled by his outsized image opposite him. In what is to my mind the most perceptive observation on the nature of celebrity ever made in a Hindi film, Sameer Khan acknowledges that he is wholly other than his on-screen persona. "Ye sab kuch kar sakta hai," Sameer says wistfully, rendered impotent by his own success, "aur mein kuch bhi nahin." This scene is uncanny, revealing nothing so much as the impossibility of stardom: Ashfaque has strived for years to be in this position, yet the one in this position is someone other than Ashfaque, one who has rendered Ashfaque an imposter to himself. Nothing else in Halla Bol approaches this pinnacle, but make no mistake: this scene is itself worth the price of admission. While it cannot redeem the film, it offers hope for Santoshi the director, and means that when he next decides to present to the audience a glimpse of his vision, his stubborn adherence to a cinematic idiom out of step with the upwardly mobile consumers at India's ever burgeoning multiplex population, I'll still be in line waiting for a ticket.

Khajuraho

Khajuraho has become something of a cliche, but no amount of tourist over-exposure can render a visit to the millennium-old religious seat of the Chandella dynasty an anti-climax. It makes little sense to speak of the temple "architecture" versus the sculpture populating the walls of most of the surviving temples: here, architecture and sculpture are inextricable, and the resulting achievement is extraordinarily vivid, combining spiritual ardour, frank eroticism, and artistic ambition in a vertigo-inducing cocktail. Or, stated differently, decades of tourism have been unable to bury the event, and it is impossible to inoculate the visitor against the shock of encountering the uncanny...

Datia

Datia wasn't originally on my itinerary; but a couple of days in Orchcha were enough to convince me that I needed to make a detour to check out that other wonderful palace built by the Bundela raja Bir Singh Deo. The palace did not disappoint, set amidst and atop a basti that has grown around it, and all but forgotten by tourists. Its confusing staircases and dark passages are almost impossible to navigate without a guide, but one's efforts are well rewarded by gorgeous architecture and spectacular views of the surrounding area; several rooms preserve portions of the original tile- and coloured stone-work, and towards the top lies the grave of Abul Fazl (more accurately, of his head), killed by Bir Singh Deo on the orders of Prince Salim (the future emperor Jahangir). There is something incredibly moving about the unmarked grave of one of the brightest of Akbar's nau rattan, who did more than perhaps anyone else to cultivate the aura of the Mughal emperor, a mythos that survived the loss of temporal sovereignty all the way down to the revolt of 1857. Abul Fazl's grave is small, reflecting the fact that only his head is buried in the palace at Datia.

Orchcha

I went to Orchcha in search of the palaces and tombs of the Bundela rajas; I expected a medieval ghost town, and while I certainly found my share of atmospheric ruins and monuments, I was pleasantly surprised to find a contemporary pilgrimage center and temple town as well...

The result: pictures. Lots of 'em...

Gangu Teli

Pictures from Bhopal (supposedly named after Raja Bhoj), where I have family and spent a few relaxing days last month and this week...

Warangal

Check out some of the many pictures I took on a day trip to Warangal from Hyderabad in mid-November...

SAAWARIYA (Hindi; 2007)

Midway through Saawariya an overhead shot shows us a boat docking at a green and blue tiled shimmer of a pavement, the sort of image that takes one’s breath away. It isn’t the first shot in the film that is reminiscent of the work of Barcelona’s modernist architect genius Antonio Gaudi, and it won’t be the last, in a film that owes an ample debt to Gaudi’s love of riotous color and dynamic surfaces, and of the glazed tiles that hearken to Iberia’s Moorish past (a characteristic Gaudi shared with other Barcelona modernists, perhaps none more so than Domenech i Montaner, whose masterpiece, the Palau de la Musica Catalunya, just has to be the most beautiful concert hall in the world). The tribute is apt, given that Saawariya is itself set in a fantasy city partly out of the Arabian Nights, and partly out of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, a self-consciously stagey backdrop to the one-sided love story of itinerant minstrel Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) and Sakina (Sonam Kapoor), and (briefly) Sakina and Imaan (Salman Khan), as narrated by Gulabji (Rani Mukherji, in yet another role playing a hooker with a heart of gold). So striking are the visuals (despite the outsized debt to Luhrman), so successful director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s and art director Omung Kumar’s claustrophobic reverie of a world immune to whiffs from the outside (so much so that Imaan’s explanation to Sakina that he has to leave her for a year because he works for "the country", is jarring – could anything so real as a country exist in the world of Saawariya?), that nothing in this or any other review should dissuade one from seeing this film on the big screen. One of Hindi cinema’s most unique visual idioms deserves no less.

The film (purportedly an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s White Nights) takes place over four nights, and centers on Ranbir’s love for Sakina, a shy girl he sees waiting on a bridge. She is waiting for Imaan, a former tenant and lover who has left her with a promise to meet her a year later on the bridge. Sakina is clearly drawn to Ranbir, but stops short of committing herself, verging on succumbing only when Ranbir convinces her that Imaan will not return. Except of course he does, and Sakina returns to him, completing the rather slight allegory: Ranbir has a hard time believing Imaan even exists, but Sakina (the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s great-granddaughter, and in Shiite Islam a symbol of patience and suffering womanhood in light of the slaughter of virtually all her male relatives by the forces of the Caliph Yazid) keeps the faith (“imaan”), and her devotion is given flesh and blood form by film’s end (a fantastic Salman Khan, whose hyper-stylized presence works well with Bhansali’s vision). Not for nothing is the film set in a Muslim ambience, and one might see a basic Sufi allegory of imaan fulfilled as partially operative here. And as in much North Indian Sufism, Krishna imagery suffuses Saawariya: Sakina is a sort of Mirabai, and Krishna was of course the original saawariya (“dark one”), although Bhansali, in an inversion of the trope of the eternally waiting woman, ultimately makes a Mira out of his saawariya, leaving Sakina and the kohl-rimmed Imaan as Radha and Krishna. The dark deity is manifest in the film’s colors too: Bhansali has gone on record to the effect that the film’s blue-green hues are meant to evoke the peacock (symbolizing Krishna), and the point is driven home by the film’s endless night, Krishna’s own black cloak as the song from Satyam Shivam Sundaram memorably phrased it (reminiscent also of Muhammad’s black shawl; indeed each is referred to in song and popular tradition as the “kaali kamli waala”, most recently in Bunty aur Babli's Kajra Re).

In the final analysis, however, nothing can make up for the fact that Saawariya is wretchedly boring, the sort of unabashed snoozefest that makes one’s jaw drop in disbelief. Contrary to Bhansali’s protestations on television, this has nothing to do with whether or not Saawariya is a work of art (or Work of Art, as Bhansali would doubtless prefer it), or with his (disingenuous) posturing that absent Saawariya, Hindi cinema would be left to a stagnant inertia of puerile comedies and hackneyed genres, or with media hostility (though Bhansali is doubtless right to complain about the intellectual dishonesty and sheer incompetence that has characterized most of the film’s reviews thus far). Rather, it has something to do with the fact that Saawariya has nothing to say, or at least nothing that hasn’t been done to death. Some films, that is, are structured around a plot driven by events (e.g. Sholay); other films are simply vehicles for their stars (e.g. Sivaji); yet others are driven not so much by events as by meaning and signification (e.g. 8 ½). In the last instance, it isn’t that the action is devoid of events, merely that the film’s meaning cannot be reduced to them, and in fact self-consciously exceeds them.

Saawariya is clearly intended as this kind of film, and fails miserably in saying anything meaningful about the themes it puts in play: love, desire, devotion, sacrifice, the ethics of being in the world. Instead, we get a pose, a gesture, and a stale one at that – the waiting woman and the nomad who wishes to “rescue” her, a sort of Peter Pan view of Indian femininity (stressed ad nauseam in his interviews by Bhansali, who is prone to characterizing those who disagree as culturally inauthentic “screaming” feminists) and of love, drained as it is of any urgency or passion. The Sufi/Krishna imagery remains no more than a schema, and is never incarnated for the audience: the fault lies in an under-developed script, inexperienced debutantes who are impressively assured but cannot suggest gravitas, and Bhansali’s repeated attempts to evoke the specter of Raj Kapoor, the sort of cheap dynasticism more at home in the world of Karan Johar or Sarkar than in Saawariya. The burden of Raj Kapoor’s tramp persona is too great on Ranbir Kapoor, all but smothering his natural boyish charm. Sonam Kapoor is not given much to work with (entirely consistent with Bhansali’s track record with heroines in love stories), but suggests enough to make me look forward to seeing more of her.

It isn’t often that I urge people to go watch films I’ve disliked; I’ll make an exception here, warranted by Saawariya’s scale and its filmmakers’ vision. This creative failure demands engagement.

OM SHANTI OM (Hindi; 2007)

There’s no worry of spoilers in this review, as Om Shanti Om’s filmmakers have ensured that by now every desi on Earth knows every last plot twist and turn. This odd juxtaposition of defensiveness (I imagine director Farah Khan thinking “hey let’s tell the audience just how old school this story is at excruciating length lest they expect Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham”) and unabashed indulgence mars what could have been a hugely enjoyable romp through ‘70s kitsch. Instead, we are given spoof masquerading as homage, and despite all the ingredients – an underdog, an upscale baddie, a maa, a mehbooba, reincarnation, and good triumphing over evil – the sine qua non of emotional heft and impact is missing, a cardinal sin in a film on the punar janam theme. The resulting brew is more khichdi than masala curry, and not all of Farah Khan’s and Shah Rukh Khan’s enthusiasm can salvage the dish. Which is not to say the film is bad – it is in fact quite watchable, and features some heart stopping moments that can only be done justice on 70mm – merely that it is empty and somewhat pointless. So are any number of Akshay Kumar comedies, of course, but those films aren’t so grandiose, and do not purport to distill Hindi cinema’s most iconic decade into a 2007 bottle. Nor can Om Shanti Om claim the benefit of the sort of zany subversiveness that compensated for the breeziness of the likes of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom or the initial reels of Jaaneman. Om Shanti Om could have been a classic, folks, and as it stands is a lavishly mounted missed opportunity.

It is 1977, and Om Prakash Makhija (Shah Rukh Khan) is a struggling extra on the sets of RC Productions, along with his trusty sidekick (a thoroughly wasted Shreyas Talpade). Om dreams of (what else?) becoming a big star one day, not to mention of winning the heart of the country’s heartthrob and “dreamy girl” Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone). The second of these ambitions does not seem quite so remote after a series of chance encounters between Om and Shanti, but we learn soon enough that Om is deluding himself, as Shanti has fallen for the cold charms of money-hungry producer Umesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal). One thing leads to another, and let’s just say Mehra is responsible for the deaths of both Om and Shanti, courtesy a spectacularly staged fire on the RC Productions set, the cinematic highlight of the film. Damn, arson has never looked so good. In any other country this might spell end of story, magar this is India, aur picture abhi baaqi hai mere dost: Om is reborn as Om Kapoor, son of a Rajesh Khanna-like yesteryear superstar Rajesh Kapoor (Javed Sheikh), and, by 2007, a brash, spoilt, young superstar himself. The pot comes to boil when Mehra decides to return to India to make a film with Om, part deux, who begins to receive visions of his former life. ‘Nuff said (let’s just say the fact that the film opens with a clip from Karz is not coincidental).

The first half of Om Shanti Om purports to be set in the 1970s, but is shot through with curious anachronisms: Karz was not being shot in 1977; the dacoit scene wherein Om Prakash plays an extra yelling “Bhaago!” is more reminiscent of the 1980s than the 1970s (the likes of Ganga ki Saugandh (1978) notwithstanding), as is the staging of a (tasteless) mock Tamil action sequence by means of which Om Prakash tries to impress Shanti, and the prominence assigned to Subhash Ghai. The slippage is not coincidental, and testifies to a certain intellectual dishonestly on the film's part: ‘80s badness is a lot easier to spoof than ‘70s cinema (easily the creative highpoint in Hindi film history), yet lacks the retro charm and groovy vibe of the earlier decade. The stereotypes Om Shanti Om peddles -- and that Shah Rukh Khan ceaselessly harped on in the promotional blitz leading up to the film’s release – of overactors and farcical cinematic situations, fit the 1980s far better than they do the ‘70s. Not surprisingly, Farah Khan focuses on the prominent exceptions – the likes of Manoj Kumar and an ageing Rajesh Khanna-clone – as soft targets to manufacture a general rule for the 1970s. In short, Om Shanti Om spoofs the 1970s by pretending they were the 1980s. The result is neither amusing nor subversive, merely insidious.

Farah Khan is on much surer ground when she spoofs contemporary Bollywood, skewering Abhishek Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, and Shah Rukh himself in a delightful Filmfare awards sequence, although this is nowhere near the cinematic equal of Salman Khan’s zany dream sequence in Jaaneman. Both the selling of the 1980s as the 1970s, as well as the Filmfare award sequence, illustrate the director’s real goal here: the coronation of Shah Rukh Khan not merely as heir to, but as the summa of the Hindi film tradition. Stated differently, the Filmfare sequence in Jaaneman “works” because director Shirish Kunder was interested in Hindi cinema; for all her stated fondness for 1970s cinema, Farah Khan seems interested in little besides Shah Rukh, nowhere more clear than in the Dard-e-Disco video. This obsessive focus is unfortunate, and leads Farah Khan to compromise on the verve we know her to be capable of: it is impossible to believe she could not have made a better video for the Deewangi song (featuring cameos from dozens of stars and minor celebrities) than the horrendously boring, formulaic sequencing of shots showcasing various members of the film fraternity cavorting with Shah Rukh at a party celebrating Om Kapoor’s Filmfare award. It is fitting indeed that here (and elsewhere) Farah Khan includes a fake applause track, evoking both the superficiality of the sitcom as well as the artificiality of propaganda. (The "manufactured" cannot completely stamp out the event, as illustrated by the hysterical crowd reaction at the single-screen I saw the film at when Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar made their brief appearances (including hooting from yours truly in the latter instance).) Farah Khan does a much better job with most of the other songs, although nothing in this film matches the campy fun of Tumse Milke neo-qawwali from Main Hoon Na. My favorite musical moment was the film’s closing credit sequence, paying homage to the entire team behind the film, and ensuring everyone a red carpet moment – capped by the director herself, who shows up not in a swanky car but in an autorickshaw, after everyone has left. It’s a nice, self-deprecating touch, and one scours the rest of the film in vain for more of this sensibility.

The director surely cannot blame her cast for anything here: Shah Rukh is in good form here, and his enthusiasm is infectious, even when he grates as the spoilt brat Om Kapoor. Shreyas Talpade is effective but thoroughly wasted in a role virtually anyone could have played. Deepika Padukone is striking but curiously passive, lacking in both the expressivity of a genuine actress as well as the charisma that enables a stunner like Aishwariya Rai to make an impact. The surprise performance comes from Arjun Rampal, who is a convincingly nasty baddie in both 1977 and 2007, and seems to be having a ball here. It’s a pity the villain is an endangered species in Bollywood today, for this year both Jimmy Shergill (on the strength of Eklavya) and Arjun Rampal have proved that they would make for good (contrasting) masala bad guys. Ultimately, however, the cast cannot be expected to rescue a film so devoid of drama, so manufactured and mediatized, so focused on promoting its male lead as historically indispensable to the Bollywood enterprise, and so very silly. By contrast, if you want to see how to pull off what could easily degenerate into farce, do yourself a favor and rent Kudrat and Karz instead.

NO SMOKING (Hindi; 2007)

No Smoking is the story of a non-conformist. More accurately, of the attempts of the world to beat his non-conformity out of him. Nothing wrong with that, one might think, where the non-conformity consists of an addiction as harmful and extreme as K’s to smoking. One might think that, but one would be hard-pressed to maintain that equanimity in the face of the methods used in K’s “treatment”, which involve liberal doses of severed digits, threats to loved ones, and bombs, courtesy the "doctor" Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal). But the point is not (or not merely) that it is the extreme nature of Baba Bengali’s methods that render them problematic. Rather, it is that Baba Bengali is at the heart of a regime that privileges “normalcy”, a regime that must depend on suitably docile subjects in order to perpetuate itself. (Indeed, smoking is simply one of many vices that Baba Bengali's Kolkata Karpets cures.) We don’t ordinarily “see” the ethical compromises, the fraud and violence, this sort of regime entails. The director of No Smoking, however, does, and seems to want nothing more than to represent for us -– with unabashed literalism -- what he sees.

And there surely is a lot to see here. Beginning with Kolkata Karpets, the site of a rehabilitation program for smokers trying to kick the habit. We are introduced to the program at the same time the protagonist K (the well-cast John Abraham, in what has to be one of his most effective performances) is, as he discovers that the city he lives and works in contains unsuspected layers. In what is a hallmark of director Anurag Kashyap’s vision here, K’s discovery is startlingly literal, as he descends, akin to an archaeologist, layer by layer and staircase by staircase, into the lair of Baba Bengali, the man at the core of Kolkata Karpets. Baba Bengali is a rather nasty Hindu godman, one whose staff includes dozens of burqa-clad women manning the switchboards. The switchboards are a giveaway, signaling that Kashyap does not see Baba Bengali’s outfit as un-modern in any way: indeed, technological modernity -– specifically, the technology of identification, surveillance, and destruction -- is essential to what Baba Bengali does. That is, Kolkata Karpets might not be the pre-modern “other” of the world inhabited by sleek yuppie K, but might in fact be the un-nameable secret of that world, acknowledgment of which is so deferred (like the deepest traumas) that it must go by the name of an establishment selling carpets. No Smoking, in short, is alive to the possibility that the fanaticisms (religious and otherwise) that plague our world aren’t necessarily at odds with the modernity we like to think of as epitomized by technology, and might even be enabled by it. Kashyap telegraphs the end game rather early in the film, when he shows us K’s wife (and somewhen secretary) (Ayesha Takia) crying as she watches footage of Auschwitz. By film’s end, we know that Baba Bengali’s program has been leading up to the gas chambers all along, not Hitler’s death-chambers so much as modern techno-industrial sites for the effacement of (the kink that is) individuality in favor of a bland smoothness that is more comfortable for all concerned. More comfortable because fitting in always is. And if it is all a dream -- each time K (and we) think he has woken up, he hasn't -- then one is reminded of Stephen Dedalus' words in Ulysses to the effect that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. In short, if the world of No Smoking is a never-ending dream sequence, the political stakes might even be higher: this is no exercise in mere navel-gazing (though on the evidence of this film, Kashyap is a passionate defender of the fimmaker's right to stare at anything he chooses), but a warning of what we risk losing amidst the seductions of conformity on the one hand, and unvarnished narcissism on the other.

The story goes like this: K smokes. All the time. His marriage is going down the tubes, and to top it all even Kashyap's (and K's) longtime friend Abbas Tyrewallah (Ranvir Shorey) seems to have crossed over to the other side: not only has he given up smoking, but pitches to K the treatment that has led Abbas to quit (without telling him what the program entails, making of Abbas a curiously empathetic Judas-figure). K is initially dismissive, but changes his tune once his wife leaves him, and tells her he will quit in order to get her to come back (introspection is clearly not one of K’s strengths). K decides to see what Kolkata Karpets has to offer, but sadly for him Baba Bengali does not offer any trial runs, and K soon finds himself an unwilling participant in a brutal program intended to cure him of smoking once and for all. To add insult to injury, K has to pay for the privilege of being cured (he is a rupee short, the sort of seemingly trifling cost that exacts a heavy toll at every step of K’s downward spiral into losing his soul).

No Smoking’s K is no romantic rebel figure, and his smoking fetish is nothing if not pointless. K himself is a mean, sullen, and somewhat authoritarian man (at one point outlawing smoking at his office because he can no longer indulge the vice). In keeping with the autobiographical allusions that litter the movie, it is tempting to read K as constructed out of the Hindi film industry establishment's caricature of Kashyap as enfant terrible (aided in no small measure by Kashyap's own penchant for fashioning a persona as Bollywood's Misunderstood Genius). A more political reading offers greater rewards, however, and, as noted above, certain of K's own characteristics suggest an intimate link between K’s world and Baba Bengali’s domain. If so, then K is no mere innocent. One might even speculate that his non-conformity, the difference that is K, falls victim to his own choices (not for nothing does No Smoking evoke the specter of Faust). Fittingly, by film’s end, it seems that K (if we may call the remaining shell K) has made his peace with the world around him: he hasn’t sold out; he’s just bought in.

Not Kashyap though: No Smoking is itself, in its whimsicality, its allusiveness, its obscurity, its almost offensive invocation of the Nazi death camps, nothing if not “different”, the very antithesis of the factory-approach to filmmaking that increasingly dominates film industries the world over. And if it doesn’t always make sense, if the pieces don’t always fit together into a coherent whole (no, not even into the enframing architecture of my review, or any other that I have read, a reflection not so much of the film's rich ambiguity as of some scattershot thinking on the director's part) I am nevertheless inclined to cut No Smoking slack. For Kashyap is not about feeding the audience a pill labeled “cinema”, with a list of ingredients one can read on the packet. If the seams show -- to me they did, both in terms of the film’s pacing and somewhat muddled tone as well as of sequences that just don’t add up -- Kashyap deserves my indulgence, for his continuing belief in cinema that does not “owe” the audience an idealized representation of what it already believes, of worlds it would like to see, but that instead revels in the opportunity afforded by the medium to enlarge the audience’s experience by positing strangeness, and by using the unfamiliar to illumine the world we think we know.

JOHNNY GADDAR (Hindi; 2007)

Johnny Gaddar has been mischaracterized as a "thriller" a bit too often for my liking. It just isn't one. What it is, is a product of pulp and the sort of sensibility that characterized the "small film" of the 1970s, dressed up in contemporary multiplex garb; and director Sriram Raghavan pays overt homage to both parents by means of multiple shots and references to the James Hadley Chase novel The Whiff of Money, and 1971's Parwana, another film featuring a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. That is, one would do well to take seriously the repeated shots of Vikram (Neil Nitin Mukesh) reading the Chase novel, for they illustrate an important distinction between the world of Parwana and that of Johnny Gaddar: in the older film, Kumar (Amitabh Bachchan at his lankiest) murders a man he is fond of, and frames a rival, for the sake of love. Johnny Gaddar on the other hand is set in a world where, as the film's title song urges, zindagi jua hai khel yaar. . . matlab hai bas asli yaar. In a word, the protagonists of the film, Vikram, Seshadri (Dharmendra), Shardul (Zakir Hussain), Prakash (Vinay Pathak), Shiva (Daya Shetty), and Kalyan (Govind Namdeo) are all after money. Specifically the money from a planned deal that goes missing after one of their own decides to make off with all of it instead of a one-fifth share. This is not to suggest that the film's characters aren't susceptible to the tug of heartstrings -- they are, as Vikram's love for Mini (Rimi Sen), Prakash's affectionate relationship with his wife (Ashwini Khalsekar), and Seshadri's wistfulness for his departed (or dead) wife, attest. But virtually every such relationship in Johnny Gaddar is compromised by lies or violence (Seshadri's isn't, but then his wife is, fittingly, not around, and we only hear her on tapes from long ago, in a sentimental evocation of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape). It takes no genius to figure out that these folks are headed to a Very Bad End indeed.

Sriram Raghavan is what I would call a fan of the Little Film. Not in the esoteric, "I've seen more movies than you ever will" way that Quentin Tarantino incarnates, but in the sense that for Raghavan, the spirit of the film industry he clearly loves so much appears to reside in the marginal, yet accessible, film that the 1970s produced in greater measure than perhaps any other decade. This vision was intermittently discernible in Raghavan's first film, Ek Hasina Thi, and thoroughly informs his latest offering -- which offers a far more consistent narrative (although somewhat less virtuosity) than Raghavan's previous film -- from the film's title (in Hindi and Urdu no less!) to the role sheer luck plays in the plot's twists and turns, to the somewhat moralistic ending. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable two-hour ride, and a lean, focused film without much fat, and one that deserves a larger theatrical audience than it has received.

A film like Johnny Gaddar rises or falls with its cast, and the film does not disappoint on this front. Dharmendra is wonderfully evocative in his brief role as an ageing racketeer, and Govind Namdeo memorably brings a lifetime of experience playing baddies to his role as a corrupt and thoroughly nasty cop determined to find out who the ghaddar of the film's title is. But the film's most impressive performances come from Zakir Husain, Vinay Pathak, and Ashwini Khalsekar, playing the sort of "character" roles that typically get only a few minutes in the typical star-logged Hindi film. Here, however, the "character" actors are the main event, and seem to relish the spotlight, pithily etching vivid character sketches, each reminiscent of characters we have seen before, yet fresh for all that. Neil Nitin Mukesh performs creditably on debut, and did enough to make me want to see more of him -- having said that, I couldn't shake the feeling that his role required more verve and experience, and I found myself missing Saif Ali Khan's stylishness, not to mention his ability to effortlessly summon up ruthlessness on-screen. Rimi Sen's role does not have much scope, but reminds us that she is too good to be relegated exclusively to the likes of Golmaal, Dhoom or Phir Hera Pheri (the sequence where she scrawls 2,50,00,000 on a bathroom mirror with her lipstick - then rubs out the "2" - is the pick of her scenes, revealing a wistful whimsicality that is too fragile to portend happiness in this film). Perhaps dropping an "m" will help.

Perhaps all such "retro" films run the risk of pointlessness, as it isn't always clear what purpose is served by the constant allusiveness, the conjuring of tropes from years past. This is as true of Raghavan as it is of Tarantino or the Rohan Sippy of Bluffmaster!, yet the criticism, while valid, might miss the broader point. Films like Johnny Gaddar aren't so much about the stories they tell as about cinema itself, about the extent to which who we are and what we do is post-cinematic: stated crudely, had there been no Parwana, the lives of the protagonists in Johnny Gaddar would have turned out very differently (though perhaps no "better"). Cinema, that is to say, does not simply entertain us; it conditions us, insinuates itself into our dreams, and determines who we are, and who we can be (although it has virtually no power to make us "better" or "worse"). In the face of this reality, more importantly the wilfull forgetting entailed by a paradigm that views films as merely consumable and/or diversionary, the Raghavans of the world might be seen as taking it upon themselves to remind us that after cinema, even our dreams and pathologies are no longer our own. And if Raghavan, in playing it "straight", misses the humor and the ironies of other filmmakers who have gone down this path, possibly laying himself open to the charge of indulging in tricked up nostalgia and nothing more, one can nevertheless forgive his directness, because at least it is uncompromised by the sort of cleverness that might have dissipated the point even as it led to a superior film. And what could be less Bollywood than that?

Music Review: NO SMOKING (Hindi; 2007)

The latest musical offering by Vishal Bharadwaj and lyricist Gulzar reminded me of the Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo's modernist classic about a man who has smoking, and only smoking, on the brain. The terminology of smoking pervades Gulzar's lyrics, bleeding from one song into the next, even as the sound changes radically from track to track. Bharadwaj's music is alive to this theme as well, reflected in repetitive beats and loops in the more electronic tracks here. And while this sort of music has nothing to do with smoking per se, it is a first for Bharadwaj, suggesting that he sees the sort of club trance that the likes of Midival Punditz and many many others specialize in, as the right vehicle for a musical representation of addiction and mania. "Mania" is doubly apt, given we are talking about a film that is not only about a hopelessly addicted smoker and the insane world around him, but is directed by Anurag Kashyap, whose previous outing -- Black Friday -- is nothing if not psychotic (yes, I mean that in a good way). How good is this album? If you expect the musical riches of Omkara, or the purity of The Blue Umbrella, you will be disappointed. No Smoking is a proudly "minor" work, tending in a direction Bharadwaj hasn't gone before, and its pleasures are those of the niche: odd, and more than a little interesting.

Jab Bhi Cigarette Jalti Hai (Jazz) is an anthem of sorts for charsis everywhere, its lyrics capturing the mania of smoking along with generous doses of whimsicality. The music serves as perfect complement to Gulzar's lyrics, beginning with a mellow, jazzy vibe and over the course of the song alternating with more conventional Hindi film vocals. Those vocals are Adnan Sami Khan's, who infuses genuine upbeat feeling into the song; indeed the moments when Sami lets it rip serve as contrast and counterpoint to the more restrained music in the instrumental portions of the track. The result is a flouncy souffle of a song, not catchy main event so much as charming backdrop.

Sunidhi Chauhan is unwilling to cede center-stage to anyone, and her rendition of the same song, Jab Bhi Cigarette Jalti Hai (Trance), is a far more urgent affair, both because her vocals infuse a throatily carnal vibe (not since Asha Bhonsle can anyone have enjoyed mouthing the word "kambakht" as much as Chauhan clearly does here) and because Bharadwaj's music here tends toward an ominously ambient yet sleek sound, one reminiscent of both the Midival Punditz instrumental in Farhan Akhtar's Don and 1970s Hindi film music as re-imagined in the likes of Bombay The Hard Way. It all adds up to a less charming song than the Adnan Sami version, but undoubtedly a more impressive one.

At times Rekha Bharadwaj's voice sounds indecent, so perfectly does it marry womanly maturity to a sort of childlike simplicity. It speaks volumes about Bharadwaj that this is actually a compliment, to one of the most compelling female singers in Hindi cinema today. Phoonk De (Club Mix) illustrates just why, her incongruous and enthralling voice soaring above the sort of electronic background more associated with the likes of The State of Bengal than with Bollywood music (at least music not made by Vishal-Shekhar when they're in the mood). But make no mistake, Phoonk De is recognizably Vishal Bharadwaj's music, largely because of the way he uses Rekha Bharadwaj here: the relatively narrow and concentrated vocal range, suggests an intimacy that borders on the illicit, and is oddly reminiscent of Maqbool's Rone Do (albeit in a very different musical context). I must confess that I'm unsure how much I like this track at the moment -- but Rekha Bharadwaj's singing keeps me coming back for more.

The same cannot be said for Sukhwinder Singh's rendition of Phoonk De, which is a catchier, but ultimately duller sibling of the club mix version. Sukhwinder sings with great passion, although as a general matter I can't shake the feeling that his passion is indiscriminate, and that an advertising jingle or a passionate love song would both be grist for the same mill where he is concerned. The track is not bad by any means, but lacks the freshness and personality of the others.

Kash Laga is hilarious: the most conventional song in the album, and structured like a "straight" Hindi film song in its recognizable chorus and stanza-moments as well as its instrumentaion, in any other album this might be a love song, or something the hero sings as he returns to his hometown after a long absence. Here, however, the "Kash Laga" chorus is in reference to dragging (on a cigarette that is), and the humor lies in the utter seriousness with which the song takes this notion, and in the awkwardly rushed way in which the chorus lines end in "behta ja behta ja". This song can say with a straight face "Zindagi hai...kash laga", and charms addicts everywhere. The music itself is not as interesting as the conceit: it is by far the most Rahmanesque song in the album in its orchestration, while simultaneously serving up a throwback to the film music of old (for a better sense of what I mean, think of Dekho aayee Holi from Mangal Pandey), yet the combination is a trifle more staid than I would have liked. Nevertheless I do suspect this song will grow on me, if for no other reason than that the chorus brings a grin to my face every time I hear it.

Deva Sen Gupta's voice bears a distinct kinship to Adnan Sami Khan's, and on the evidence of Ash Tray, that isn't a bad thing. But it's not the best thing about this track -- that palm has to go to Bharadwaj's night-time notes enframing Gupta's voice, in particular an incessant electronic throb that means the other shoe is about to drop. Don't hold your breath waiting, though: Bharadwaj is not in the business of satiating us, which means that the song doesn't end so much as simply cease, leaving us wanting more. Fittingly so. I think I'll go light up.

More Bile

Nearly a year-and-a-half ago, I was feeling bilious (nothing new, alas); but now, in light of the Justice Sabharwal scandal, we can add the specter of venality, plain and simple, to the ethical dimension (i.e., the lack thereof) of Delhi's drive to wish away its less fortunate denizens.

Arundhati Roy gets it exactly right, in her best piece since The Greater Common Good (you might need to register on Outlook's website in order to view Ms. Roy's piece on l'affaire Sabharwal once a few days have passed).

The Kamal of My Dreams: Musings on His Many Indias

[I was recently asked to write the 200th post on All Things Kamal; I enclose the link below -- Qalandar]

LINK

My Favorite Amitabh Bachchan Performances

ZANJEER: It's 1973: do you know where your screen icons are? Not in Kashmir, romancing heroines to gorgeous songs featuring the voices of Rafi, Kishore, Lata and Asha, that's for sure. But you can find an icon-in-waiting gazing out at the world behind the bars of his window (looking uncomfortably like the bars of a jail cell), scaring his lady love Jaya Bhaduri with his litany of how wretched the world is from up close. Yet Bachchan's Inspector Vijay is no rebel or defeatist -- although he refuses to accept the status quo -- making him a strange sort of anti-establishment figure, one who gave birth to three decades of cinematic non-conformists as well as by-the-book types. And gave birth to so many, in fact, that I was compelled to include him in this list. Zanjeer made the Amitabh Bachchan who existed prior to it almost unrecognizable, and even today one is struck by the "oddity" of an Anand, a Parwana, a Bombay to Goa.

SAUDAGAR: One of the casualties of Bachchan-the-icon has been memory: of an Amitabh who was other than a megastar and an icon, who was in fact an actor of great fineness and subtlety, one of the finest practitioners of the art of minimalism. Saudagar, wherein he plays a decidedly unglamorous gurh-seller from rural Bengal, is not the only film one could cite to make the point, but it is a personal favorite. Bachchan's Moti is utterly, coldly ruthless, yet not insensible to the tug of remorse, and in the final analysis a cramped, small man unworthy of Mahjubeen's (Nutan's) magnanimity. With a lesser acto