tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153241702024-03-13T14:57:54.368-04:00QalandarQalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.comBlogger351125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-74128726970334600562018-09-16T02:10:00.001-04:002018-09-16T10:00:49.022-04:00MANMARZIYAN (Hindi; 2018)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms?msid=65333224&resizemode=4" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="254" data-original-width="720" height="112" src="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms?msid=65333224&resizemode=4" width="320" /></a></div>
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Manmarziyan opens with a shot of the Golden Temple, the sort
of thing that in recent times has been one of the lazier clichés in Hindi
cinema: if Sikhs are involved (and sometimes even when they aren’t), Amritsar’s
sacred shrine is a given.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, the vantage
point here is a bit different, enabling the viewer to take in not only the
iconic building, but also an incongruous neon sign perched on top.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is almost tempted to say it doesn’t
belong, except that in India, it sort of does.<o:p></o:p><br />
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That opening shot, if re-visited after the end credits have
rolled, tells you a lot about director Anurag Kashyap’s aims in taking up one
of the most hackneyed Bolly-genres of all – The Love Triangle – and in trying to
give it his own twist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, Kashyap
scrupulously adheres to the genre’s conventions in several respects (if I still
need to place a spoiler alert before telling you which hero the lady ends up
with, you haven’t seen very many Hindi films), a marked departure from his
reputation as the industry’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enfant
terrible</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This (should I say older,
more mellow?) Kashyap sees much to keep about those conventions, and if the
result is a less radical form and plot than the director has sometimes aspired
to, at least this Hindi film viewer found Manmarziyan a more satisfying film
than a number of Kashyap efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Kashyap doesn’t waste time, establishing locale and
character with great economy in the film’s opening sequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taapsee Pannu plays the fiercely independent
Rumi, passionately in love (and lust) with Vicky Sandhu (Vicky Kaushal), who is
“wrong” in all the ways relevant to a family wishing for a suitable “match” for
their daughter, even one as indulgent as Rumi’s (long-suffering) clan seems to
be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enter Mr. Right, in the form of
Abhishek Bachchan’s Robbie, a London banker in town for an arranged marriage,
and smitten by Rumi, the first woman he sees in Amritsar.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One cannot go much further without talking about the
performances, for these make the film, sustaining it even when the writing
flags.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The free-spirited “small town
girl” (recently spotted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bareilly ki
Barfi</i>, to take one example) has for years been the rather problematic fantasy
of (male!) directors, exotically invested with the sort of agency and
rebelliousness her big city counterparts rarely seem to possess (a sure sign
that the gaze is from the outside in), but Rumi (who is, it must be noted,
written by a woman, Kanika Dhillon), is rescued from staleness by Taapsee Pannu’s
fresh persona.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is to say, the
improbability of Rumi is rendered plausible by Pannu’s newness and conviction,
even if Dhillon’s writing strikes the occasional off-key note (Rumi’s casual
recounting of an abortion was like chalk on a blackboard; I found it hard to
believe that she’d undergo an abortion and be utterly un-marked by the
experience, or so forgiving of the man who couldn’t accompany her because
something had come up). Ultimately, Pannu’s verve and velocity is winning, and
sustains a film she’s in just about every scene of, as indefatigable at the end
as at the beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I wish the filmmakers
had been similarly consistent: early in the film we are told that Rumi has
given up hockey because of a man, but Rumi disagrees: it’s because another
female hockey player has been found dead on the train tracks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The implication, that violent misogyny is to
blame, hangs in the air, discomfiting the viewer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By film’s end, in response to Robbie’s
question, Rumi affirms that she votes, breezily moving on – no discomfort is
risked here, because we are never told who she has voted for; Robbie himself
seems least bothered.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Vicky Kaushal is even better: entrusted with the un-enviable
task of ensuring the audience doesn’t hate Vicky Sandhu even though he will
have ditched Rumi twice by the intermission, Kaushal plays his difficult role
very well, evoking genuine empathy at key moments. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Difficult” in that Dhillon and Kashyap give
him only one note to hit, and he could easily have lapsed into cartoonish buffoonery.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as Kaushal plays him, you don’t hate
DJ Vicky for not being ready for marriage, and you can’t help but feel for him
as he tearfully reverses his jeep before it reaches Rumi, who is waiting to
elope with him, and even as your heart goes out to the woman abandoned in the
middle of the night. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, by film’s
end, you can’t help but feel that the newly domesticated Vicky has gotten the
short end of the stick, pushed aside in favor of the film’s adults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But not before Kaushal reminds us yet again why
he is one of Hindi cinema’s most promising actors, adding to the range we’d
seen in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raman Raghav 2.0</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raazi</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Abhishek Bachchan has made an oeuvre out of imbuing with
thoughtfulness, even gravitas, characters who would seem trivial or absurd in
less adept hands (his Rohan Verma, IP lawyer-and-Prince Charming, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laaga Chunri Mein Daag</i>; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Umraaojan</i>’s Nawab Sultan come to mind).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He does so again here, with masterful
restraint and use of pause – silence, in a film so given to talky characters,
anchors the proceedings, and none use it better in contemporary Bollywood than
he does. It is a brave performance, by an actor confident of his restrained craft
in an industry (and public culture) given to celebrating coarseness (especially
coarse masculinity): he is never rushed, and keeps his own time, until, slowly
but surely, Manmarziyan starts to march to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the while, he doesn’t appear to be
breaking a sweat, and if Abhishek Bachchan is bothered by the growing marginalization
of what he represents amidst Indian popular culture, it doesn’t show. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one exception in Manmarziyan to this
restraint – when Robbie lashes out at Rumi – is one of the film’s best scenes, even
if neither director nor writer pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Robbie when
he accurately observes that Rumi and Vicky are well-matched, in their
narcissism and the narrowness of the circle they have drawn around themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Nor, one must concede, does Robbie: I
wondered why he continues to be drawn to Rumi.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His isn’t the most important character in
this film, but Bachchan is the film’s most important actor, essential if the
coming-of-age aspect of this film isn’t to be stunted, as so many Hindi film
love stories are, by permanent adolescence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I don’t know if he entirely succeeds – the film’s rather tame ending is
acutely aware of a movie-going audience that insists on juvenilia – but without
him Manmarziyan would have lost its best shot at an adult love story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just watch him as he stumbles out onto the
street with the film’s best song, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halla</i>,
playing in the background.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One might
think the fate of the world hung in the balance. (The rest of Amit Trivedi’s
album is quite a ways below <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Halla</i>, and
nowhere near <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dev D</i>, but is
reminiscent of the latter in its centrality to the film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stated differently, Trivedi’s music is the
very texture of Manmarziyan, and so completely that one is hard-pressed to
isolate particular songs beyond a couple of obvious examples.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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No discussion of the film’s performances would be complete without
mention of Saurabh Sachdeva’s turn as a marriage broker – he incarnates a
strange combination of timorousness and watchful callousness, and always
manages to look more intelligent than everyone else in the frame. His back
story points off-screen, and you can’t help but wonder what his story is, what
his life has been like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many actors can
do justice to their roles, but few add dimension the way Sachdeva does here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first half of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manmarziyan</i>
is fantastic, and a feather in Kashyap’s cap: flavorful, tightly edited,
surprising (not least because the director springs Robbie on us earlier than
expected), and visually impressive (the aerial shots of Vicky’s jeep being
driven along a winding road are more reminiscent of the sweep of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gangs of Wasseypur</i>’s opening sequences than
of the standard-issue Punjabi love story), it perhaps should have been the
film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heck, Kashyap even displays a
hitherto unsuspected talent for staging masala-style songs in the lovable “Dhyaan
kithe Dhyanchand?” video.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kashyap and
Dhillon do so well here that they run out of script at the intermission,
leaving little for the second half but the wait for the inevitable bourgeois
denouement we always see coming (think <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hum Dil
De Chuke Sanam</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That second half is
more than a few paces off the immensely watchable first: the strong cast (no
one more so than Bachchan), puts in a terrific effort, and meant that my
interest didn’t flag for long, but that doesn’t change my wistfulness for what
might have been had Kashyap and Dhillon continued in the vein of the
pre-intermission portions of the film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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And yet there is plenty here to chew upon in Kashyap’s
staging of the love triangle, in the director’s wanting to have his cake and
eat it too, tapping into the conservative pleasures of the convention while
subverting it from within.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The triangle
in Manmarziyan is literally the only one that I am aware of in Hindi film
history that does not leverage parental / societal constraint to create a space
for Hero #2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No forced marriage, no
accident nor pregnancy necessitates marriage to the second-in-time male lead;
here, the lovers themselves principally create the constraints, initially
because of Vicky’s frank inability to commit to Rumi; and subsequently by Rumi’s
impetuosity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, it is hard to think
of a more sympathetic bunch of cinematic parents and relatives than the ones in
this film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is bolder than it seems,
and I laud Kashyap and Dhillon for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
too long, Hindi cinema has given both, its free-spirited characters (mostly
men), and its conformist audience, a free pass: in films premised on the Love Triangle,
the mess isn’t the fault of the former, and the latter’s sense of order remains
undisturbed because the woman ends up with the more mainstream male character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manmarziyan</i>
manages a double inversion: here, the mess is very much the fault of the lead
characters, but the audience might not be able to derive great satisfaction
from the otherwise safe ending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By that
point, Rumi’s sexual license, Vicky’s banishment without any patriarchal “assignment”
of his love to his rival, and Robbie’s annulment of the marriage, all mean
there is no social order, no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shaadi</i>
to save; even if we presume one will follow off-camera, it isn’t clear everyone
can root for this couple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this
genre, on this terrain, that will have to be enough.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-47303523197833582782018-08-11T17:49:00.003-04:002018-08-11T17:49:28.981-04:00A Brief Note on THE SHADOW EMPEROR (2018)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36215985-the-shadow-emperor" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III" border="0" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1505275448m/36215985.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36215985-the-shadow-emperor">The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/35352.Alan_Schom">Alan Schom</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2490476815">2 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Schom's book should be interesting, and at the outset, he sets out his intention to redeem (from a historical memory that has regarded him as little more than a bumbler with the good fortune to inherit the Bonaparte legacy) the man who, more than anyone else, made modern France. Unfortunately, it isn't: the book recounts events, but does little to provide insight, giving it the feel of a breathless catalog (the one exception is in Schom's treatment of the Second Empire's colonialism in Algeria, where the author attempts to link the appalling crimes of the nineteenth century with intra-Algerian and Franco-Algerian migration patterns down to our day). Through it all, the reader isn't left with a great sense of Napoleon III as a person (Schom does far better with figures like the Emperor's half-brother Auguste de Morny, or Hausmann) -- a cardinal sin in a biography on such a well-documented life.<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53248059-umair-muhajir">View all my reviews</a><br />
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Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-83985252867218539492018-08-10T07:37:00.001-04:002018-08-10T07:50:17.738-04:00Requiem for Test Cricket<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://s3.india.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Virat-Kohli-picks-up-some-runs-during-day-3-of-the-First-Specsavers-Test-Match-at-Edgbaston_Getty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://s3.india.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Virat-Kohli-picks-up-some-runs-during-day-3-of-the-First-Specsavers-Test-Match-at-Edgbaston_Getty.jpg" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="700" height="189" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">It’s best to begin with a series that isn't taking place right now, and on a
note you’ve heard before: a few months ago, Australia </span><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/23448922/australia-cancel-hosting-bangladesh-later-year"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">canceled a home test
series against Bangladesh</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the grounds that it wasn’t “commercially
viable” out of season. (The ACB’s logic is nothing if not circular, since the
country isn’t exactly falling over itself to host Bangladesh during the regular
cricket season either; Australia has company, of course: India and England, to
name the two other wealthiest cricket boards, barely host tests against
Bangladesh either.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coming on the heels
of </span><a href="https://www.foxsports.com.au/cricket/england-cricket-board-announces-plans-for-100ball-competition/news-story/8cac3a628bc17ad34f75dfb4f390604f"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">England’s recent
announcement of a 100-ball format</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, Australia’s
undisguised cynicism is merely the latest reminder that international cricket
boards are doing their best to hasten the demise of test cricket: the newest
entrants, Afghanistan and Ireland, cannot count on more than occasional one-off
tests for the foreseeable future, irrespective of how many spirited performances
they might put up (indeed, Ireland pushed Pakistan far more than England did in
the recent Lords test between the two countries).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In
fact, the extent to which test series today do not account for the quality of
the match-ups is striking: a few decades ago, a “new” team might be given a
short series in (e.g.) England, but if it put up a good show, could count on a
longer one next time around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No such nod
(even a condescending one) to cricket quality these days: thus Pakistan gets to
follow up an excellent 2-2 in England in 2016 with an abbreviated two test
series (if one can even call it that) in 2018, while an entire generation of
Sri Lankan greats has come and gone with that country playing only five tests
this century in Australia (next year’s series?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You guessed it: two matches). Meanwhile, no amount of recent, reciprocal
3-1 and 4-0 thrashings at home seems to dent the ardor of England, Australia
and India for each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The far better
India-South Africa match-ups are relegated to shorter series, especially in
South Africa (I suppose I should count my blessings that we got three matches
earlier this year, a step up from the two in 2013).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t so many years ago that fans worried
about the devaluation of test cricket, with the likes of Australia’s Matthew
Hayden </span><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/series/15140/scorecard/64048/australia-vs-zimbabwe-1st-test-zimbabwe-tour-of-australia-2003-04/"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">scoring 380 against
an anemic Zimbabwe</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, the game risks being devalued by too
many matches between seemingly strong teams who crumble away from home, even as
exciting talent – in Pakistan, in Sri Lanka, in Bangladesh, in New Zealand –
that would make for competitive series is starved for test competition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Note: I am not suggesting that series
between the “Big Three/Four” can’t be competitive – they can (and I fervently
hope for a keenly fought India-England series this month) – but merely
that whether or not they are competitive has no bearing on the length of the
series nor the frequency with which they are scheduled.)</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br />The old
system was doubtless also unfair – teams deemed weak (e.g. New Zealand, or Sri
Lanka in the 1980s) were given short series and few opportunities, but it at
least had a Darwinian logic to it: do well, and get more opportunities in the
form of longer series (at least in England, which tended to be a shade less
insular in this respect than Australia).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Senior players from (e.g.) </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Australia might bypass entire regions (such as
the Indian sub-continent; Dennis Lillee’s stats might have looked a bit
different had he played more than four of his seventy tests in South Asia), but
if nothing else, politeness dictated reciprocity, and even wealthy, powerful
countries were unlikely to simply cancel tours.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Today, England, India and Australia are crass enough to not stand on any
such nicety (and one suspects their counterparts in other countries simply
don’t have enough commercial leverage to match their crassness: one hardly
expects anything better from the uninspiring lot who comprise the West Indian,
Pakistani, or Sri Lankan boards).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Interest
in the sport can only suffer.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">As the
above should make clear, I am not pining for some imagined golden age of test
cricket unsullied by crass commercialism.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Quite the contrary: even apart from the (unmistakably white) old boys’
network, the rather drab 1960s (mostly leavened by the West Indies, with glimmers
of South African and Indian flair towards the latter part of the decade) needed
to be rescued by the invention of ODIs in the 1970s, and then the disruption of
Packer’s World Series a few years later.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">But one problem that bedevils us to this day is that cricket’s
administrators appear to have drawn the wrong lesson.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The means chosen back then – shortening the
game’s format – have hardened into a new orthodoxy, no less ossified than the
one many of us imagine afflicted the game decades ago.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Stated differently, the problem with cricket
today isn’t, as “purists” might put it, the invention of new formats – it’s
that some of the richest and most powerful cricket boards seem to have no
thought in their collective heads </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">other</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
than to shorten formats. </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Nor is the
problem crass commercialism – who could be more commercial than the folks who
run European football or American basketball? – it’s the fact that the men who
run global cricket are merely commercial-minded in the short term, with no
great sense of what the appeal of cricket rests upon, of what might retain and
bring new fans to the sport.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The
ECB’s announcement of the 100 ball-format is a case in point.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">What problem is this proposal meant to
solve?</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Is there any data at all to
suggest that fans find the T20 format, well, too long?</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">And by all of twenty deliveries? Too slow or
short of boundaries?</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Why stop at 100
balls?</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Why not 10 over-games, or perhaps
Super over-only contests?</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">To ask these
questions is to answer them.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In fact,
there is no such data: the ECB seems to have taken a genuine problem – the
steady decline of cricket’s hold on the affections of the English public – and applied
the last solution to have worked (abbreviating ODIs to T20s).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">It won’t work, just as T20s haven’t been able
to rescue English limited overs cricket from terminal decline. </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The
reason goes to the heart of cricket’s appeal, its very nature as a sport. </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Let’s begin with test cricket, the horizon
that continues to define all other forms of the game, for better or worse
(first-class cricket is not yet test cricket; ODIs were initially invented as a
way out of the problems associated with test cricket; T20s are simply one step
further, developed to remedy the fact that ODIs didn’t seem to be far enough
away from the point of departure).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In
pure sporting terms, what test cricket gives us is not tradition or some
“gentlemanly” version of the game, but as pure a contest of athletic skill as
one can find in sports, that – and this is crucial – isn’t distorted by the
tyranny of the clock.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Certainly, tennis
and baseball, for instance, exceed test cricket in being utterly untethered to
a clock, but for all practical purposes matches in those sports last no more
than a few hours – and, of the three, test cricket is unique in transcending
the binaries of victory and defeat, allowing as it does for not only a tie but
the far more common draw.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">This is more
than a detail: the nature of time in a test match, the way in which it
interacts with the rules of the sport, enables non-binary outcomes, possibly
the rarest thing in all sport.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">That is,
most test matches don’t end because one team runs out of time, they end because
one team is demonstrably better than the other; or because it has failed to
demonstrate its superiority over an inordinately long period.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">And yet
it isn’t completely true that time is taken out of the picture: it’s been </span><a href="http://www.punditcafe.com/history/last-timeless-cricket-test-match-rare-photos/"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">nearly eighty years
since anyone played a “timeless” test</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, and the end of the fifth day is a real limit, felt as such in the right sort of
contest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In such matches, for instance where one team’s
tail-enders battle to deny the other team victory, or even better, themselves inch
towards victory, the weight of all five days narrows to a point of almost
unbearable density; time seemed to barely matter at the start of the match – by
the end, as in </span><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/series/14934/scorecard/64127/India-vs-Pakistan-3rd-Test-pakistan-tour-of-india-2004-05/"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">Bangalore in 2005</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, </span><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/70843.html"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">Port-of-Spain in 1988</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, or </span><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/series/11718/report/667901/england-vs-sri-lanka-2nd-investec-test-sri-lanka-tour-of-england-and-ireland-2014"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">Headingley in 2014</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, it is
almost the only thing on anyone’s mind. To my mind, this constitutive
ambiguity, of time that both does and does not matter, of timelessness that can
nevertheless run out, is unique to test cricket.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other sports either always have the clock on
their mind (football, or basketball, for instance), or never do (such as tennis
or baseball, even as expected match length comfortably fits within an afternoon
or evening).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without this double view on
time, test cricket isn’t really test cricket: no time limit at all, and urgency
is sacrificed (it’s no coincidence that the timeless tests, originally billed
as deciders to prevent result-less series, tended to end up deadly dull); a
regular clock of the sort found in other sports, and victory and defeat are the
only specters haunting the action – there is no room for the more ambiguous
achievement of the draw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever the
virtues of limited overs cricket, this aspect of test cricket cannot be thought
in them: while traditionalists have often accused ODIs and T20s of “not being
cricket”, the more accurate observation might be that they translate test
cricket into the clock-driven victory/defeat binaries of just about every other
sport.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Limited overs cricket is very
much cricket – it just isn’t all that different from a host of other sports.</span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The
second thing that test cricket offers -- and this is odd in a sport so amenable
to statistics right from the start – is the oddity of non-standardization.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Few sports are as affected by non-standard
playing conditions (associated with the cricket pitch the game is played on) as
this one is: with the exception of the very greatest players and teams (and
perhaps not even then, considering that even Bradman was famously mortal on
“wet” pitches), one can never exhaust analysis by simply focusing on the
players or the scorecard, but must also account for the context of the playing
surface – and even this can change dramatically over the course of the match
(without further analysis, it is very difficult to “read” a first innings score
of 100 all out followed by the opposition making 400 – we could be talking of a
vast difference in skill level, or simply the outcome of a very fortunate toss).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Certainly, one could theoretically say the
same about ODI or T20 cricket too, except that the motivations for those
formats – shortening the game, associating excitement with runs scored, and
framing the contest in terms of the victory/defeat binary – inexorably tend to
incentivize the production of somewhat more standard conditions, bringing
cricket more in line with other sports where non-standardization is suspected,
not celebrated.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Test cricket insists
upon the hyper-local, and if that risks parochialism and renders comparisons
somewhat difficult, it privileges the insight offered by contemporaneity:
primarily the experience of actually watching the match but even listening to
or reading match accounts.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Little in
trans-national sport offers anything like this. </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The nature
of cricket’s appeal cannot, I would counter-intuitively suggest, be gleaned by
studying the current state of the sport in countries where it seems most
vital.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">That is because, in India,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, the relative impoverishment of sporting
culture in general, the intersection of colonial history with nationalist
narratives and the rise of a capitalist class, have, through many a twist and
turn, meant that “cricket” is now almost synonymous with sport itself, as far
as its hold over national life is concerned.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Here, new forms of cricket cannibalize older forms, and don’t really win
fans from other sports: witness the rapid decline in the fortunes of ODIs since
the advent of T20s; by contrast, test cricket – i.e. the popularity of the
five-day form – has remained essentially as it was twenty or thirty years ago,,
having already ceded most of its terrain to ODIs.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Similarly, T20s haven’t won new adherents
from football or field hockey, those sports having already been relegated to
distant blips in cricket’s rear view mirror.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Something
like the IPL might seem like an obvious counter-example, but in fact
underscores the point.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">T20s, and the
associated spectacle, have found fertile soil in South Asia, and doubtless T10s
would also find an audience, but the price to be paid in each case is
displacement of the reigning longer limited overs version – ODIs, and
ultimately perhaps even T20s – even as tests retain their niche position.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Stated differently, something like the IPL
has been a brilliant and entertaining option, but to my mind it has not brought
as many new fans to cricket </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">per se</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> as
it has to the spectacle of the IPL itself.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">This in turn has left other limited overs forms of the game bereft of
glamor and the oxygen they need to survive. The profusion of meaningless ODI
tournaments from the 1990s is a thing of the past, but more striking still is
the fact that no-one mourns them.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">More
broadly, every year there are fewer and fewer fans who wax lyrical about ODIs,
and even fewer will miss T20s when 100 ball-cricket or T10s become the
norm.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The arms race of shorter formats
that cricket has embarked upon has barely any end in sight.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Thus far the BCCI and ACB have shown
themselves extremely skilled at preserving the IPL and BBL brands (indeed,
neither depends on a healthy international sport for its success, a superb
strategy although only India possesses the confluence of market size and
cricket dominance in its domestic market to truly make it work), but the model
is extremely vulnerable to disruption.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In relative terms, test cricket has actually fared better than ODIs with
the advent of T20s: the five day-game has been a rather stable niche product
for years now – it is obviously not in absolute decline, but it is not a growth
business.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Much discussion of test
cricket’s commercial prospects elides the difference between the two, but the
distinction is an important one: the market for the niche product exists and is
healthy enough to sustain it, but needs intelligent marketing and thought.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">At a minimum, a keen awareness of what test
cricket brings to the table.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In
South Asia, the danger to cricket proceeds from a short-term focus on
extracting revenue as quickly as possible, which has meant that the authorities
are reluctant to give up </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">any</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> of the
game’s formats, no matter what it does to the sport’s viability or to those who
play it (increasingly, day in, day out, all year round).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The mindset is the same all over, but the
BCCI and Indian cricket’s commercial strength illustrate the situation most
clearly: alone in the region, the BCCI can afford to play large numbers of
ODIs, T20s, </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> test matches.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Far from abandoning tests, India actually plays
more of them than it did twenty years ago, </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">before</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
T20s existed -- the fact that the BCCI seems to have no plans to reduce this
number (at least as far as contests associated with the likes of England,
Australia, and South Africa are concerned; the commercial potential of the old
rivalry means Pakistan would easily be added to that list were it not for political
tensions between the two countries) suggests that the relatively small (niche?)
audience for test cricket remains viable, or no less so than a couple of
decades ago.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Indeed,
one could argue that audience might even have been larger: the problem in a
cricketing environment like India’s results from a saturation of cricket. At
any point there is so much cricket being played, of all types and virtually
throughout the year, that fans – especially new fans – find it difficult to
invest contests with the sort of meaning that other sports achieve, especially those
that manage to strike a better balance between doling out the product and
withholding it to stoke demand and uphold the contests’ prestige.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None is better at this than football, but
cricket is inarguably the worst – and this despite the fact that the outsized
power enjoyed by the Big Three could easily enable them to simultaneously
preserve the cash cows of the domestic T20 leagues (like the IPL and
Australia’s Big Bash League) as well as the major international tournaments –
along the lines of </span><a href="http://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/23647927/shelve-t20is-focus-marketing-tests"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">a recent suggestion
by Graeme Smith</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">.</span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In
countries like India, the sport needs to cut down on scattershot cricket to
stabilize the sport, as well as minimize the risk of injury to the
national-level players.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">This in fact
simply requires an extension of the BCCI’s own model where T20s are concerned.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Witness the IPL, the brand of which is
fiercely protected by denying Indian players authorization to compete in other
global T20 leagues.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We need to extend
this approach to safeguard the game more broadly: the crowding of the cricket
calendar has over the years reduced the number of ODIs on offer, but we could
probably eliminate most bilateral ODI series, restricting ODIs to the World Cup
and perhaps one other major tournament (like the Champions Trophy). </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">I suppose most existing bilateral ODI series
could easily be replaced with (additional) bilateral T20s, although I’d prefer
to cut down on these as well, especially given the bi-annual frequency of the
T20 World Cup.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">That would surely spike
interest in the remaining ODI and T20 contests, while leaving the cash cows of
the domestic T20 leagues un-disturbed.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">A
few more test matches could be fit in, moving the game away from the neither
here nor there head-scratchers of one-offs and two test-series that don’t
really settle anything (the 2016 four test series between England and Pakistan
that ended in a 2-2 tie meant something; the 1-1 score in 2018’s two test
edition was no more than tantalizing; heck, even the recent India-South Africa
test series felt like it had been cut off before it was time, and for the
considerably less exciting pleasures of a seven match-ODI series that might
otherwise have still run to five matches). </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">On a
different note, the quality of test cricket is also a casualty of this sort of
system: the huge overlap between the talent pools for the various formats
probably affects test matches the most, since many players will simply not play
enough first-class cricket in their lives to hone the necessary skills.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">This is about more than batsmen who cannot
leave the ball, or who lack the mental stamina to bat for long periods; it’s
also about bowlers and captains whose defensiveness is forged in limited overs
cricket, and who find it difficult to switch over to the form of the game that best
rewards bowling aggression. </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Dhoni’s
career illustrates this well: a master tactician of the ODI game, even he was
never more than a mediocre test captain, reflexively defensive in a way that
would have been alien to his far better test match predecessors, Dravid and
Ganguly – </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">and if that was true of Dhoni,
one can only wonder about players from a generation or two after him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">In
England, Australia, and perhaps even South Africa, the perils are different,
and more grave: here cricket has never been the only game in town; rather than
accept this reality, the authorities seem determined to delude themselves that
shortening the game and changing enough rules to load those newer formats in
favor of the batsmen will magically get us the Holy Grail of “new fans” and
“young fans”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not going to happen:
in a world where football, rugby, Aussie Rules, basketball and much else are
all meaningful options, cricket is unlikely to be the sport of choice for those
who want their sporting fix at a certain pace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The fact that ODIs re-invigorated the sport isn’t a formula to be
mindlessly deployed every few years: T20s arose not because people felt ODIs <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per se</i> were too long and slow, but
because there were too many boring matches on flat decks that didn’t mean very
much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why not just cut the boring bits
out?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No wonder, the rise of T20s has
decimated ODIs, as administrators and groundsmen try and make them as close to
extended T20s as possible (witness the almost comical scorecards, with 350 and
400 breached with great regularity).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are
television ratings for these ODIs any higher than what we saw 10-15 years
ago?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where are all the newer fans in England? I
infer there haven’t been all that many, else we wouldn’t be hearing about 100
ball-cricket.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Then there
is the question of television rights: before coming up with its 100 ball idea,
did the ECB pause to consider the relative impact format length as opposed to, say,
two decades of private broadcasts of cricket by Sky – as opposed to the BBC,
its public predecessor – might have on the fans, especially poorer kids who are
now </span><a href="https://www.barb.co.uk/tv-landscape-reports/tracker-uk-households-by-tv-platform/"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">less likely to be
able to get to watch the players in action</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Australia is going down a similar route with </span><a href="https://www.bbc.com/sport/cricket/43750432"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">the end of its Channel 9 era this year</span></a><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">, and doubtless the deals make commercial sense— but they further incentivize a
structure where returns on the investment in rights will be aggressively sought
through the quickest route (presumably T20s, or 100 balls, or, in time, T5s).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suspect these are bad investments: it’s
hard for anything to compete with the glitz and spectacle of the IPL and
Australia’s BBL, and that works both ways: longer forms of the game will be
left behind (indeed the habits of mind that lead fans to patronize them will
not be nurtured), but equally, ever newer, shorter forms will smack of
desperation, taking us so far from anything that’s recognizably cricket – that
presents something <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unique </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to cricket, that one can’t get with other
sports – that we will offering younger fans an off-ramp – to other sports.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It isn’t that I dislike fast-paced,
scoring-oriented sports: but beyond a certain point I get those sort of kicks
from NBA basketball, and don’t need them from T20s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve watched my fair share of the IPL, but I
suspect because of a lingering mental tic that still recognizes it as “cricket”
(player overlap helps sustain that habit of mind); but as the game evolves,
that won’t always be the case. </span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Ultimately,
it is difficult to conceive of any change for the better absent a global model
of revenue sharing, of the sort we see in healthy domestic leagues like the
American NFL.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Absent such a regime, the
poorer cricketing nations risk simply becoming labor pools for the T20 leagues
of wealthier nations.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Test cricket in
turn becomes a sporting caste system where the top two or three teams keep
playing each other, often in rather one-sided series (and cricket occupies a
shrinking share of the market in some of those countries as well).</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Meanwhile, old school fans like me who come
to cricket for what they cannot find elsewhere are disrespected and driven
away.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The test game today simply allows
for fewer surprises like Vinoo Mankad at Lords in 1952, or Fazal Mehmood at the
Oval in 1954, or even, frankly, Sachin Tendulkar at Perth in 1992: today, a
great talent from a country that wasn’t deemed major might never get a test
match in Australia (as, for instance, Bangladesh hasn’t in nearly two decades
since it got test status); one is limited to the various T20 leagues if one
wishes to see much of a Rashid Khan.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">I
suppose India, England and Australia playing each other </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">ad nauseam</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> is better than nothing (I’ll take my test matches where
I can get them, especially given I well remember the days when India played a
fraction of the test matches it now does) but to pretend that the system </span><i style="color: #1f497d; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">had</i><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> to be this way is disingenuous.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Genuinely interesting contests create fans
and spark interest, not 4-0 whitewashes simply because “major” teams are
involved: in no small measure the system we have creates the very boredom it
claims to be responding to.</span><br />
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">What is
at stake with test cricket?</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">At one
level, nothing: sport is, after all, merely sport.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Moreover, like everything else, a sport has a
history, and a lifespan, and it was perhaps a matter of time before something
like test cricket, itself heir to its nineteenth century county predecessors,
found itself out of sync with the tempo of the times, and in that sense there’s
nothing to mourn, at least not in some cosmic sense.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">But it’s also true that not all changes are
equally felicitous, and most testify to some meaning that isn’t reducible to
the mere events that constitute them.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">
</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We’d do well to ponder what this particular cricketing shift might
signify: I’d venture to map the move away from test cricket at its best to T20s
and other (yet shorter) forms of the game as a move away from strategic
aggression towards tactical aggression in the context of strategic
defensiveness; from bowlers towards batsmen; within batsmen, from timing
towards power; from a focus on the playing field towards the staging of
spectacles; from finesse towards muscular, sometimes breathtaking athleticism;
from experience towards sensation; ultimately, from sensibility towards a
certain coarseness.</span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">As such, these
changes refract, and present in concentrated form, others in the culture at
large, a context any sport must necessarily be embedded in. Whether or not
cricket means anything, and whether or not we find the shifts in the way the
game is consumed to be good ones, the shift itself is a pointer to, and can
help us decode, the parallel markers we are likely to find elsewhere – in cinema,
in politics, in society at large.</span></div>
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Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-10600393694909642072018-02-28T14:39:00.000-05:002018-03-01T09:41:57.688-05:00Maheshenthe Prathikaaram (Malayalam; 2016)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/33/Maheshinte_Prathikaaram.jpg/220px-Maheshinte_Prathikaaram.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="293" data-original-width="220" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/33/Maheshinte_Prathikaaram.jpg/220px-Maheshinte_Prathikaaram.jpg" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The charms of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maheshenthe
Prathikaaram</i>, Dileesh Pothan’s 2016 directorial debut, cannot be reduced to
its plot, fresh though this is: the tale of everyman Mahesh Bhavana (Fahadh
Faasil), worried about his father’s advancing age, passed over by the woman he
has long loved in favor of a groom with better prospects, publicly humiliated
in an un-related village brawl, and Mahesh’s vow to forego slippers until he
has avenged his insult, never lost my interest as it wended its way through the
contours of its lead protagonist’s life, and on to a resolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More importantly, the plot never becomes
farcical, not even that last bit about Mahesh’s vow: in the context of the
film, it seems quite organic, the self-inflicted wound of a modest man at the
end of his tether.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Pothan intuitively grasps that for contemporary Malayalam
cinema to thrive, it must be and mean something other than what Tamil cinema
offers on a larger canvas, avoiding the trap of the “merely” local, an “authentic”
counter to the national hegemony of Bollywood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tamil cinema is of course a lot more than that, but far too often over the
last decade or so, even (especially?) in its best films, Tamil cinema has been
content with the fact of representation – and while I (an outsider in some way to
all non-Hindi Indian cinematic traditions) have reveled in it, especially where
the representations are of people and milieus increasingly elided from Hindi
popular cinema (and not only Hindi popular cinema), that says more about the
sort of globalized, plastic sludge that is most of Bollywood, than it does
about the path the so-called “new” Tamil cinema has been on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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Conversely, the most populist cinematic forms (in Tamil,
Telugu, and even in Hindi (for instance, in Salman Khan’s films over the last
decade)) suffer from an inability to re-invigorate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">masala</i> filmmaking idioms, positing a hyper-masculine “rootedness” (as
another marker of cultural authenticity, even as the paradigm seems exhausted
and stale (although Tamil cinema seems alone in its worthy attempts to
problematize this sort of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">masala</i>
while re-affirming its central gestures, as shown by the likes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vikram Vedha</i>; tellingly, however, that
runaway hit featured Madhavan and Vijay Sethupati, and it’s hard to imagine a
Vijay or even, sadly, Surya, in anything like it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Malayalam cinema is itself no stranger to
crude <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">masala</i> cinema, as the
heartbreaking choices of Mammooty and Mohanlal over the last couple of decades
loudly remind us; but I suspect the alternative Hindi cinema has chosen – an urbane,
Malayali version of the sort of middling film that does well in Hindi and is in
self-conscious step with the mood of the urban bourgeoisie, the sort of film
Dulquer Salman risks specializing in – does not offer a viable path
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I enjoyed the likes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bangalore Days</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ustad Hotel</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kammatipaadam
</i>quite a bit, but too many of these risk the permanent displacement of
Malayalam cinema in favor of Hindi and Tamil cinema.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So what? Pothan is one of those Malayalam filmmakers who
intuits that at its best, Malayalam popular cinema has been a vehicle for the
universal in the local, and a particular sort of universal at that, firmly on
the side of the humane, the gentle, even, it must be said, of the slow, and
thus the very antithesis of Indian cinematic modernity (both in its rootless
and its self-consciously “artsy” avatars).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maheshenthe Prathikaaram</i> is a
worthy addition to this tradition, drawing viewers in with a painstakingly
constructed sense of place and character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Pothan announces his intentions early on when the film opens with an ode
to Idukki (no breeze, we are told, is sweeter than the one that blows here, and
the lush greenery of the backdrop makes that claim plausible), before the
setting gives way to the village lanes, homes and shops where most of the film
unfolds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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That setting is memorable in no small measure due to the combined
efforts of Pothan’s colleagues: Bijibal’s melodious songs are integral to the
ambience of this film, his post-Rahman, post-Harris Jayaraj romantic numbers
unobtrusive and sweet; Shyju Khalid’s camera-work is assured, and he deserves
credit for not letting the film’s visuals lapse into the usual clichés surrounding
God’s Own Country (witness the scene in the forest, late in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maheshenthe Prathikaaram</i>, where Mahesh
and his friend gaze up at a large cotton tree, the delicate white flowers
floating down, furnishing them ideas for an urban photo-shoot a few minutes
later).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, the art direction and
costume design, by, respectively, Ajayan Chalissery and Sameera Saneesh, bring
the village to life: no two domestic interiors are alike (anyone who pays such
close attention to metal gates and grates, and wire-backed chairs, is A-OK in
my book), and the outdoor spaces are no less distinct: witness the stairs
leading up from the bus-stop to the photography studios where Mahesh,
Babychetta and Crispin while away their days, with green mountains serving as
backdrop to the little establishments, pretty without the sin of postcard
picturesque – that entire setting (and it plays a crucial role in Mahesh’s and
Jimsy’s love story) stayed with me long after the film was over.<br />
<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Fahadh Faasil is excellent in the title role, and one really
has to have seen him in other films (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bangalore
Days</i>, for instance) to appreciate how immersed he is playing the part of a
small-town photographer specializing in weddings and passport shots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the finest traditions of Malayalam cinema,
Faasil is understated and gentle, and (a rarity these days anywhere) isn’t
afraid to shed tears onscreen (he weeps with great, heaving sobs when his
girlfriend leaves him, and the effect is neither embarrassed nor showy, but
simply moving).]</b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, and so seamless
that it is hard to single anyone out: Mahesh’s neighbor Babychetta (Alencier
Ley Lopez); earnest new kid on the block (and unwitting source of much of the
plot’s trouble) Crispin (Soubin Shahir); Mahesh’s nemesis Jimson (Sujith
Sankar); or his first girlfriend Soumya (Anusree); are simply four of many
memorable characters, testimony to Pothan’s light touch and willingness to let
his characters breathe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hard, but not impossible: Anthony Kochi deserves especial
attention for his turn as Mahesh’s mostly silent father, Vincent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kochi brings memorable gravitas to his role,
a task rendered easier by his arresting looks and screen presence: Kochi
outdoes everyone else in the film in this respect, and you miss him when he’s
not on screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mahesh’s second
girl-friend Jimsy (Aparna Balamuri) doesn’t have the best-written part, but
Balamuri rescues the character from mere cliché with her portrayal of a spunky
girl who knows what she wants (her participation in a dancing flash mob, viewed
from afar by the camera and gawkers at their balconies alike, is one of the
film’s high points).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, we have a
delightful one scene-cameo featuring an absentee landlord-couple Sara (Unnimiya
Prasad) and her husband Eldho (played by the director himself), to great comic
effect: exasperated married couples have rarely been this much fun.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maheshenthe
Prathikaaram</i> isn’t perfect: in particular, I was disappointed in the way
writer Syam Pushkaran ended his story, doing some violence to the logic of
Mahesh’s character and ethos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
violence isn’t just metaphorical, and while the fight that serves as the film’s
penultimate sequence is very well-choreographed (in equipoise between a
naturalistic representation of a scrum, and the sort of stylization necessary
to hold a viewer’s interest in two guys going at each other), the film, and
Mahesh, shouldn’t have ended that way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s a small, sour note for me, in a film remarkably free of rancor,
despite the heartbreak, failure, and humiliation Mahesh suffers along the way: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maheshenthe Prathikaaram</i> recovers that
good cheer in its last scene, despite the fact that several characters are
arrayed around a hospital bed, and the last shot is of Mahesh’s rueful smile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That choice tells you all you need to know
about the director: all might never be well, but there’s hope for Malayalam
cinema, and for us, as long as there’s space in the culture for sensibility
like the one showcased here by Dileesh Pothan.</div>
</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-21777627892311064162017-06-13T14:59:00.002-04:002017-06-13T14:59:45.578-04:00Book Review: Kashmir's Contested Pasts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My <a href="https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47311">review</a> is up on H-Net; thank you Professor Guha for commissioning it!</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-82317997600445354502017-05-03T21:04:00.002-04:002017-05-03T21:04:21.794-04:00A Brief Note on "A Colony in a Nation" (2017)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30629730-a-colony-in-a-nation" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="A Colony in a Nation" border="0" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1466083450m/30629730.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30629730-a-colony-in-a-nation">A Colony in a Nation</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/662774.Christopher_L_Hayes">Christopher L. Hayes</a><br /><br />My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1990225264">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><br />Hayes' book is far more than a polemic about America's racial inequities; "A Colony in a Nation" weaves a sophisticated argument inviting us to re-conceive the country's dual (black/white) systems as analogous to those of a colony, where the distinction between "citizen" and "subject" is always salient. The influence of diverse thinkers, principally Fanon and Mahmood Mamdani, informs this book, but the deftness, urgent accessibility, and commitment to demonstrating the relevance to contemporary "inner cities" of anti-colonial modes of analysis are all Hayes' own, making this a deeply relevant book, and an intellectual bridge between the activism of the Civil Rights Era and that of "Black Lives Matter!". (Nor is this a book bereft of international resonance: Hayes' argument translates quite readily to many other polities, post-colonial in theory but that show very little commitment to dismantling the structures that under-gird recognizably colonial states.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/53248059-umair-muhajir">View all my reviews</a><br /></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-45219705835227341612017-04-04T19:18:00.000-04:002017-04-04T19:18:26.851-04:00PHILLAURI (Hindi; 2017)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://images.indianexpress.com/2017/03/phillauri-film-759.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://images.indianexpress.com/2017/03/phillauri-film-759.jpg" height="177" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
There is a certain magic to Phillauri, Anshai Lal's directorial debut for
actress-producer Anushka Sharma, and it isn't because of the supernatural
element (Sharma plays Shashi, the ghost of a woman from 1919 who haunts nervous
Kanan (Suraj Sharma), on the verge of his wedding to Anu (Mehreen Peerzada) a
century later in the same village). It's because the old-fashioned
virtues of focused storytelling, memorable characterization, strong casting,
and above all fresh dialogues and lyrics by Anvita Dutt, elevate what could so
easily have been the hackneyed Punjabi love story of Shashi and Roop Lal
(Diljit Dosanjh), making of it a story about two individuals, not mere
instances of the Bollywood hero and heroine, and in a particular time and
place, the Jalandhar village of Phillauri on the verge of the Indian national
movement.<br />
<br />
Unusually for Hindi films, both members of the pair (not just the male half)
are imbued with strong personalities, and this isn't accidental. A gentle
current of feminism runs through the film, brought to mind by an initial effacement:
Shashi is one of the Phillauris of the film's title, that is to say her
village's name serves as her pen-name for the poetry she publishes in the local
journal (no one knows she's the author, as it wouldn't do for a respectable village
girl to be seen to write, even if she is the sister of a progressive
doctor). The village bard Roop Lal initially passes off the poems as his
own (a bit of an odd echo (and inversion) of <i>Kannathil Muthamittal</i>,
where Madhavan's writer uses a pen-name that corresponds to his wife's given
name; here Roop Lal adds “Phillauri” to his name, albeit for the unsavory
reason that he is pretending to be the poet), until he encounters the woman
behind the verse, and falls for her. Once in love, the tables are turned:
Shashi wants her verses to be passed off as her lover’s own, but Roop Lal
demurs: up to this point he has been posing as a poet, even as his songs have
featured entirely different lyrics; now he wishes to give voice to Shashi’s
lyrics, with due authorial credit as it were: the gramophone disc he ultimately
cuts in Amritsar features both their names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And if one may read into this Anvita Dutt’s wistful nod at the realities
of popular art – writers remain among the most anonymous filmmakers in India –
who could blame her?<br />
<br />
Fast forward a century, and I was struck by how garish the Punjabi milieu of
Kanan and Anu seemed: there seems to be little place for slowness or
thoughtfulness here, with copious amounts of alcohol used to lubricate just
about every social occasion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anu too is
far more passive than Shashi, far too willing to sit around waiting for Kanan
to make up his mind and decide if he wants to marry her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We also seem to be regressing in more
substantive ways: Shashi’s brother (played by Manav Vij), as the most educated
person in the village, is “naturally” drawn to the nationalist movement, as is the
urbane seth played by Raza Murad in a pleasurable cameo; in 2017, the
Canada-returned Kannan grumbles but gives in to his modern family’s pressure to
address his status as “manglik” by marrying a tree prior to marrying Anu (it
would be one thing if his relatives overtly believed in the necessity of the
ritual, as the priest does; in fact their attitude is farcical, a sheepish
acknowledgment that this sort of thing might be ridiculous, but “hey, why not?”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is that they become ridiculous,
devoid of the dignity of either the unembarrassed believer or the proud
rationalist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kannan and Anu clearly do
not believe, but are far more cowardly than, as will be clear by film’s end, Shashi
or Roop Lal were.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kanan’s haunting by
Shashi is a kind of punishment, a joke – who marries a tree instead of a woman?
– given spectral form: if you’re daft enough to marry the tree, why are you
shocked to find yourself married to the ghost-woman in the tree?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, Kanan can act <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as if</i> the ritual mattered, but only because he feels it does not –
and is promptly haunted by the fact that even his insincere participation in
the ritual has let loose a spirit: act as if the ritual matters, and it just
might.<br />
<br />
Just as unusual is the implicit seriousness with which this film takes the
arts, not just Shashi's poetry but Roop Lal's singing as well (indeed, one of
Shashi's most damning charges against Roop Lal early on is that he has a
magical voice, but is wasting it in trifling tunes) -- a far cry from
offensiveness of the sort we see in the likes of Fitoor, where one can't quite
shake the feeling that Aditya Roy Kapur's character is a painter because, well,
he and Katrina Kaif would look so good with some color smeared on those
abs. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phillauri</i> does so in part by
rendering the making of art concrete, as the work of physical bodies : we see
the rustic pens people write with, the black ink-stains on Shashi's hands; the
close-up of the ghungroo on Roop Lal's feet as he makes his entry with a
musical performance (anklets are also at the center of a cheekily erotic moment
later on, when we see village girls string up their own paazeb on Roop Lal's
door; a subsequent shot of several feet in a row, some of them without anklets,
is sexy -- bare feet as a sign that something has been, unbidden,
offered). In short, the arts here are not removed from sweat, and are
seamlessly part of who Shashi and Roop Lal are -- in most contemporary films
they are mere posture, conveying a sense of style in the way an accessory would
(does anyone really believe Farhan Akhtar's character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara </i>could be a poet? Or that Siddharth
Malhotra's and Fawad Khan's characters could have collectively written four
novels between them in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kapoor & Sons</i>?)<br />
<br />
It’s also easy to take Roop Lal’s music seriously when the film features two
songs as memorable as “Dum Dum” and “Sahibaan”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They are both intensely romantic ballads rooted in Punjabi/Sufi
mellowness – composer Shashwat Sachdev had the unenviable task of making
Punjabi music (the horse Bollywood just won’t stop flogging) seem fresh, and he
manages it with little showiness, and a lot of soul (to the point where one can
forgive him the abruptness of more than one transition in “Dum Dum”; there are
no such missteps in “Sahibaan” which, by song’s end, veers into qawwali without
missing a beat – the track is splendid).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Neither song is imaginable without the disarming freshness of Anvita
Dutt’s romantic imagery: if you don’t respond to “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O Sahibaan, O Sahibaan / Hijr ki chot hai laagi re / O Sahibaan / Jigar
hua hai baaghi re</i>” or “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O tere bina
saans bhi / Kaanch si, kaanch si, kaate, kaate re</i>”, you might need to be
punished with a diet of Badshah forever.<br />
<br />
Diljit Dosanjh and Anushka Sharma are the stars of this show: this is only
my second encounter with Dosanjh’s low-key charisma, and as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Udta Punjab</i>, he steals almost every
scene he is in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It isn’t hard to see why
he is a huge star in his native Punjabi film industry (not to mention that the
man can sing!), and as with so many successful star-actors from India’s
so-called “regional” industries, one is reminded of what Bollywood’s star-kids all
too often can’t get us: a smooth finish, the result of a lifetime of grooming
for one’s position in the family business, yes, but not that flash of some
authentic experience unmediated by industry privilege, that whiff of other
scents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I found myself wishing Rakeysh
Mehra had cast Diljit Dosanjh rather than Harshvardhan Kapoor in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirzya</i>.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anushka Sharma is always likeable when she isn’t going down the
Kajol-route (typically in lighter roles), and Phillauri is no exception: she is
excellent as Shashi in the flashback (the standout is a wordless moment when a
friend, shocked to find out she has slept with her lover, asks her if she
wasn’t ashamed to do so; Shashi nods at first, then shakes her head from side
to side, even as her eyes maintain the same sparkle through both gestures: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not at all</i>), and less impressive as the
ghost in the comic scenes set in the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Among the other actors, Salima Raza stood out as Kanan’s perennially
drinking grandmother, with some wonderful comic timing.)<br />
<br />
Phillauri is far from perfect: the film's two story arcs don't meld well –
or at all – partly because of some uninspired writing for that segment, but
mostly because the actors playing the contemporary pair leave us utterly
cold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s hard to get over how ineptly Suraj
Sharma bumbles his way through the role, without ever seeming like he can be
taken seriously, or that he can provide comic relief; Mehreen Peerzada as his fiancée
is inert, and between them both manage to botch a number of scenes. The
imbalance between the two pairs meant I was disinterested every time the film moved
back to 2017, and over time I couldn’t help the uncharitable thought that the
entire second track was simply an unfortunate attempt to shoehorn some Punju
comedy into the film (it’s quite mystifying that the film has been marketed as
a comedy – it’s far more of a straight film, and stronger for that).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That sort of problem – and it is a huge
problem – would have sunk most other films; but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phillauri</i>’s heart is in the right place, its old-world charms too
potent to be completely wasted by “new Bollywood” badness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same might be said of the producer
Anushka Sharma, who has now followed up the relentlessly grim <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">NH10</i> with this (uneven) charmer: I can’t
wait to see what she gets behind next.<br />
</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-63769078110273964352017-03-18T14:36:00.002-04:002017-03-18T14:46:12.143-04:00Why I Have Nothing to Say About Dangal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I more than
enjoyed Dangal: it was fantastically well-made, uniformly well-acted, and
pulled off the difficult feat of making wrestling interesting, even deeply
engrossing – that’s creditable, when you consider that most sports movies rely
on the built-in appeal of sports that are already popular, with great cultural
resonance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heck, to even make a sports
film – i.e. a film in one of the most hackneyed genres – half decent, let alone
excellent, is pretty darn impressive.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And yet, when I (more
than once, and over a period of a few months) sat down to write a review of
Dangal, I found I had nothing to say. Which might make this piece nothing more
than a narcissistic exercise in my writer’s block, but I’d like to believe
there’s more going on here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “nothing”
is symptomatic of a wider issue, namely that Dangal is a very impressive film –
just not a very interesting one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is that
a high bar?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly – after all,
no-one asks whether Chennai Express, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, and Dilwaale
Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge are interesting films (the likes of Karan Johar insist on
treating movies like Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil as examples
of interesting cinema, but that sort of move testifies not only to Johar’s
mediocrity, but to a rather transparent attempt to account for
under-performance at the box office) – but not unreasonably so: in terms of
commercial cinema, Aamir Khan has set a relatively high standard over the last
fifteen years, and has reaped many rewards for his efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dangal, though, crystallizes a trend in Aamir
Khan’s recent work, one that runs through 3 Idiots and PK (but not through
Ghajini or Talaash): it panders to its audience, i.e. it tells us viewers what
we already believe about the world, and does so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in order to make us feel good about ourselves</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s that last
bit that should give us pause: Dangal’s pandering isn’t problematic because it
gives us what we want (that is banal, in the sense that it is true of most
mainstream movies), it’s problematic because the film demands that it be taken
seriously, and then rewards that engagement by telling us we – the “we” who
have filed in to watch this film – have nothing to worry about, we have been on
the right side of history all along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What is, after all, the “message” of Dangal?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That girls and women are just as good as
men?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But who could disagree with
that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, more to the point, while there
are millions who might disagree with that, as even a casual look at India’s
socio-economic data on gender and disadvantage will show, who among Dangal’s
audience would disagree with a proposition framed in that fashion?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>
very much the fashion in which the film presents the proposition, with Aamir’s
Mahavir Phogat leading his daughters Geeta and Babita (fantastically played by
Zaira Wasim/Fatima Sana Shaikh (Geeta) and Suhani Bhatnagar/Saniya Malhotra
(Babita)) into terrain traditionally off-limits to women: the world of
wrestling, and in the Jat communities of Haryana to boot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The father is repeatedly told (including by
how own wife) that wrestling isn’t for girls, and he refuses to take received
wisdom as a given, ultimately getting his way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nothing should be off-limits simply because one is female.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Self-evidently
true, but it’s that “simply because” that trips me up: it’s where so much
discrimination, so much exclusion lurks in disguise, and enables bigots and
discriminators to watch this film with a clean conscience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This matters because, in today’s day and age,
sexism and other forms of discrimination do not announce themselves <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as such </i>(just about everyone recognizes
that a certain opprobrium, a social cost, attaches to open displays of hatred,
it’s almost a marker that one is un-civilized), but as something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, the misogynist hastens to assure us he
doesn’t have anything against women, “but…”; the racist insists he doesn’t hate
African-Americans, but in fact it’s whites who bear the brunt of racism in
America; Yogi Adityanath heaps vitriol against Muslims, but resists any
implication that he is anti-Muslim, or even that he has any problem with
pluralism (he wishes to offer us “true” pluralism, secularism, etc.).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, if the hallmark of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century –isms was essentialism (e.g. the openly expressed view that
biological differences between men and women meant that each had certain
spheres of activity proper to them; or that different races were scientifically
demonstrated to be superior/inferior to others), the truth of our own times is
the lie: a hatred that dares not speak its name, and dares a great deal as long
as its name is not uttered.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">For Dangal, the
above means that the audience never has to face any uncomfortable questions
about its own sexism, or to reckon with misogyny of a more subtle kind –
everyone can get on board this party program, and the happy ending means we
don’t need to worry about what isn’t on the menu.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the classic problem with a pop culture
Raavan: if there’s a villain out there somewhere and he can be killed, you
don’t need to worry about the more complicated demons within (an inversion of
Javed Akhtar’s memorable lines from the Swades Ramleela song come to mind, the
words “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">…dekh taj ke paap Raavan Ram tere
mann mein hai</i>” pointing to a more complicated, more suggestive link).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s nothing mean or contemptible about
that truth, but it is important to remember that is the truth of the super-hero
comic, and as such it is no more than a pleasant diversion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Dangal, the world is divided between the
benighted – those who think women can’t do what women haven’t done for ages –
and the enlightened, and the film leaves no doubt it thinks the audience is
among the enlightened (indeed the structure of the film as a sports-film makes
this explicit: by movie’s end we are all rooting for the female athletes, and
hence for the virtuous cause they and their father stand for).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From this perspective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bajrangi Bhaijan</i> was far more interesting: consider the myriad
scenes in which rather everyday examples of communalism are represented, scenes
(set around, for instance, dietary practices) that evoke uncomfortable
recognition (displaced by some clever humor, allowing the viewer to engage with
the communalized texture of his reality, but not denied) – in Dangal, the
analogous scenes create a distance between viewer and character: it’s not “we”
who are sexist, not like those Haryanvi rural Jats, shocking really, what goes
on there. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dangal’s
filmmakers are doubtless aware that even in the film’s target audience, women’s
wrestling might be a bridge too far for some, so it deploys a second lever:
nationalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At every point, Mahavir’s
and the film’s feminism is powered by nationalism, a one-two punch that makes
Dangal more about the latter than the former: feminism and women’s empowerment
is not an end in itself, but (this is a sports film, after all) something that
will win the nation medals and glory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
a reflexive fan of the Indian cricket team, I’ve got no problem with
sports-patriotism – but I do have issues with setting that up as a goal so worthy
even women’s empowerment may be used to further it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stated differently, Dangal’s double move is
to accept as a given that most of us will be rooting for Geeta and Babita as
they make their way in the world of wrestling (under, I might add, the
leadership of their father; the film unsubtly makes the point: when Geeta
forgets his path, she must contend with athletic failure) – but those who don’t
must reckon with the politically uncomfortable truth that they are impediments
to the nation’s progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">(As an aside,
this is of course an old trope, a common defensive or nationalist response to
the colonial gaze: when purdah was seen as a symbol of Eastern backwardness,
“native” modernizers hastened to insist that “their” women should discard it;
when the absence of a European-style national identity was presented as
evidence that the colonized weren’t ready for freedom, leaders of national
movements insisted on constructing histories designed to show that just such
nations had been there all along; and today, when the discourse has shifted to
women’s empowerment and gay rights, it isn’t surprising to see the
once-colonized try and show that they are no longer backward on that front as
well – blind to the problem that accepting this discourse of modernization,
that is to say, accepting the logic of catching up, means one is forever
behind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once upon a time, a culture’s
greater indifference to homosexuality, or “lax” standards on men and women
inter-mingling, made it backward vis-à-vis the Victorians; today the opposite
makes one backward, even as the frame remains in place.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">What could be
less feminist than this double move?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
Dangal, feminism isn’t even worthy of standing alone as something worth
striving for – the something that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>
worth striving for, that is valuable in and of itself, is nationalism, and
women’s empowerment can help that goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is an instrumental feminism, not something one can give Dangal a
medal for – indeed, what happens to those who seek or win no medals?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What happens to causes that do not have any
payoff in national glory at the end of the quest, merely greater justice (and
no, I am not referring to the pat we can all give ourselves on being part of a
system where that greater justice is ultimately obtainable – that’s the path of
the Hollywood “feel good” movie on race and civil rights, no less clear an
example of pandering than Dangal)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
happens, in short, when the quest for justice does not bring national glory?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On that, it seems, Dangal has nothing to say.</span></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-3534993550068258872017-01-18T21:48:00.001-05:002017-01-18T21:48:23.071-05:00A Brief Note on Visaranai (Tamil; 2016)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">
I <a data-mce-href="https://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/pink-the-rest-of-the-box-office/#comment-336867" href="https://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/pink-the-rest-of-the-box-office/#comment-336867">just saw <em>Visaaranai</em></a>, and I don't think I can write a review of the film. Or rather, there's something obscene about (merely) reviewing this terrifying representation of four migrant laborers caught in a criminal justice system so pitiless, so oppressive, "corruption" is a banal term for it, banal and lying in its suggestion of hope that the norm might be something else; obscene, because <em>Visaaranai</em> does not so much indict "the system" as it does everyone who allows himself to consume uncritically a news report or a police story of gangs busted, terrorists nabbed, or policemen feted. The most charitable thing one can say is that a great chasm of unknowing separates us, should separate us, from trust in such news stories: Visaaranai demonstrates, with almost mathematical precision, that any other response is unethical. There are plenty of other reasons to watch this film: as a naturalistic representation of a politicized police force, it is unequalled by anything I have seen; the acting is uniformly good (perhaps none more so than Samuthirakani as Inspector Muthuvel); and the direction by Vetri Maaran superb, but these are not essential: the implicit proof that it offers of our own degraded complicity in the charade, is. I haven't seen a better film in years, and I haven't ever seen a more necessary one.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">
A huge thanks to Chandrakumar for writing this, and for affording us the privilege of hearing his voice at film's end, and really to everyone associated with this film (including Dhanush, who gets a producer credit) for making this film possible. Thanks also to Netflix for making this film available in the US (I can only hope it's available at Netflix India as well).</div>
</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-44526751993185011902016-03-12T20:36:00.003-05:002016-03-12T20:38:09.094-05:00X Qs for Prof. Eric Beverley<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">A conversation with Professor Eric Beverley on his book<span style="color: #3b3721;"><span style="background-color: #fff8dd;">, </span></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hyderabad-British-India-%20World-Sovereignty/dp/1107091195" style="box-shadow: 0px 1px 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #774e24; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850-1950</em></a><span style="background-color: #fff8dd; color: #3b3721; font-size: 16px;">, </span><a href="http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/univercity/xqs/xqs_v_a_conversation_with_eric_beverley.html">on ChapatiMystery</a>...</span></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-8769987634982388802016-03-12T20:28:00.000-05:002016-03-12T20:28:09.410-05:00A Note on BANGALORE DAYS (Malayalam; 2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://img.nowrunning.com/content/Movie/2014/Bangalore-/stills/Bangalore-Days-movie-75.jpg?fbrefresh=120122647321" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://img.nowrunning.com/content/Movie/2014/Bangalore-/stills/Bangalore-Days-movie-75.jpg?fbrefresh=120122647321" height="160" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Everything about the way <i>Bangalore Days</i> begins, it turns out, is a bit misleading: the opening frames introduce us to the narrator, a dorky, newly-minted software engineer called Krishnan P. P. (Nivin Pauly) with dreams of the big city, and then to his cousin Divya (Nazriya Nazim), who puts her dreams of a MBA on hold after meeting the man her parents have set her up with, the aloof America-returned executive Das (Fahadh Faasil); and finally to a third cousin, the free-spirited biker Arjun (Dulquer Salman). The cloying "nativist" sentiments of those opening scenes, or what felt like par-for-the-course sexism, weren't promising, and it seemed the most one could expect was a breezy film, insubstantial coming-of-age fluff of the sort Bollywood has made us gag on for some years now, rendered bearable by the likable Dulquer Salman. By the time she was done, though, writer and director Anjali Menon had made me swallow every single one of those presumptions, with this measured, charming, emotionally resonant film, one that is quite a bit cleverer than the plot -- the love stories of these characters, present and (in one case) past -- would have one believe.<br />
<br />
The film's length is crucial to its impact: certainly most Hindi films these days barely clock in at a couple of hours, and on this sort of terrain that isn't (at least not in the absence of very good writing) enough time to develop characters, for the viewer to invest in them. <i>Bangalore Days </i>is a few minutes shy of three hours, and that old-fashioned length is put to good use: Menon is able to accord each of the four major characters a lot of time, patiently developing their arcs, tying up loose ends, and in almost all cases upsetting the expectations of the cynical viewer. (In the process, Menon also does justice to the strong album, even if Gopi Sunder's music sounds like it would be most at home in a Tamil film.) By film's end, we see the same characters, but refracted differently from the outset. Krishnan's fixation on all things traditionally Kerala ultimately seems nostalgic rather than blinkered, especially given all that has happened, not least the abandonment of that tradition by the one Krishna had assumed would be most invested in it. Here, as elsewhere, Menon is more thoughtful than her genre typically allows, sensitive to the reality that the son's beloved tradition of home and hearth might be the mother's drudgery of endless toil and limited vistas. For her part, Divya shows herself to be made of sterner stuff than her early amenability suggests, in a turn that includes a (very gentle) rebuke of Malayalee bourgeois ideals of domesticity. The biggest change is in how we view Das: the film's early cues -- about his authoritarianism, his domination of his young wife, even his fondness for dogs -- acquire a completely different valence as we learn more about him, and he ultimately emerges as the film's most interesting character, strikingly rendered by Fahadh Faasil (the son, incidentally, of prominent Malayalam film director Fazil) in a fine, restrained performance. None of these arcs, ironically, redounds to the credit of either Arjun or Dulquer, both of whom leave the film as charming as they entered it, but no more layered. That isn't a crime, especially if one is as likable as Dulquer is (although I certainly found myself missing the father's rough edges, that trace of nastiness that always spiced up a Mammootty performance), but it does mean that the standout performances in this ensemble cast belong to Faasil and then to Nivin Pauly.<br />
<br />
Living in India over the last five years I'd heard a number of jokes about the special place Bangalore holds in the hearts of Keralites, but I was nevertheless un-prepared for the scope of this film's claim to that effect: <i>Bangalore Days</i> never tires of reminding us that Bangalore is no mere city or land of economic opportunity for Keralites, but a state of mind, a horizon, the place where one can be fully oneself. I cannot pretend to know enough about the culture to evaluate this claim, but I was moved by the earnestness with which it was made: whether or not it bears the same name, we should all have such a place.</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-19917338606815352762015-12-29T12:38:00.001-05:002015-12-29T21:15:13.753-05:00BAJIRAO MASTANI (Hindi; 2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.media247.co.uk/showbiz/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Ranveer-Singh-Bajirao-Mastani.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.media247.co.uk/showbiz/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Ranveer-Singh-Bajirao-Mastani.jpg" height="216" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
There are really two films in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's <i>Bajirao Mastani</i>:
the first is a rather crude period film, recycling the nationalist tropes
familiar to us since the beginnings of colonized nationalism in the nineteenth
century, and indifferent to advances in historiography over the last
half-century. And understandably so, given the different aims of the two:
the rewards of academic historiography -- the greater understanding afforded by
appreciation of nuance, context, and complication -- are more ambiguous, and
less accessible to those who merely seek the affirmation of identities (new and
old) offered by fables about virtuous/manly/vigorous Hindus/Muslims/us/them
waging righteous war against their polar opposites,
savage/effete/treacherous/feeble/dastardly Muslims/Hindus/them/us. <i>Bajirao
Mastani</i>'s approach to the historical material is squarely a product of the
latter.<i> </i>The issue here is not that mythical beast, "historical
accuracy" -- the tedious debate around that phrase simply enables
filmmakers and audiences to deflect the real question, namely, the sort of cramped,
exclusionary vision that is almost reflexively enshrined in this film.
One would never know from this film that the Maratha state under Baji Rao
Ballad once allied with the Nizam against the Mughal court in Delhi (for
instance, the film prefers to use the one sequence of Maratha-Nizam sarkar
diplomacy to paint the absurd spectacle of Bajirao swaggering into Chin Qilich
Khan's tent, threatening and insulting him, in a scene of staggering imbecility
and anachronistic macho); or that the first Nizam was at times intimately
involved in the politics of succession to the Maratha throne or that, far in
the future, an uneasy Mughal-Maratha alliance in the closing decades of the
eighteenth century would represent the last time native polities would hold
sway in Delhi. <br />
<br />
I don't have any cause to complain that these particular events aren't
depicted in <i>Bajirao Mastani </i>-- indeed there's no great reason why such
events should form a large part of this love-story (although there was just as
little narrative reason for the inclusion of other sequences, such as the final
battle with the Nizam's son Nasir Jung). The problem is that these
omissions and inclusions underscore a deeper falsity, namely that the world
evoked in the film is utterly inconsistent with the fluid, shifting political
and social alliances (equally irreducible, it must be said, to our more
liberal, anachronistic notions of secularism or pluralism) that form part and
parcel of any serious engagement with eighteenth century-India. History,
simply put, is deeply embarrassing, especially if we seek to use it as mere grist for our own ideological mills (of the Right or the Left). <i>Bajirao
Mastani</i> prefers the politics of the familiar, that is to say, the
familiarly modern: Hindus line up with Hindus (with the desire to help out a
fellow Hindu monarch presented as sufficient justification for diverting an
entire army from its original aim), and Muslims are pretty much
interchangeable, with the Nizam's heirs and Rohilla Pathans looking like each
other, and in turn very similar to the bearded, mustache-less chaps familiar to
us from news footage of the Taliban (the reflex that gives us these representations
disturbs me more than deliberate malice would). Bajirao Ballad is a Hindu hero,
and the aim of the Maratha state is simple: a Hindu <i>swaraj</i> and polity
stretching across all Hindustan. That is, the <i>Peshwai</i> of this film
makes sense to those of us brought up to regard the identity politics and
communal fault-lines of the 20th and 21st centuries as innate -- but seems
foreign to India's complicated 18th century, where any of Maratha, Rajput,
Mughal, or Rohilla Pathan might be allied with, or square off against, any of
the others at any particular time (indeed terms like "Maratha" and
"Mughal" themselves obscure more than they reveal, given the
independent factions, sub-states and other "sovereignties" operating
under each of those signs -- the Nizam, for instance, was nothing if not Mughal, as reflected in the very title the rulers meticulously held on to, a Mughal title for the realm's principal minister); or where no bond based on "Hinduness" would
prevent Maratha forces from pillaging the likes of Jodhpur or Jaipur, or
Bengal, no "Muslim" tie would prevent the Rohillas from, in time,
blinding the emperor Shah Alam (then the figurehead of a Mughal-Maratha
alliance). <br />
<br />
In that sense Bhansali's film is a huge disappointment -- its Hindu-Muslim
love story is shorn of any political implications (beyond the soft target of
Brahmin caste orthodoxy, always easy to skewer now that it is safely
"past"; even here there is a missed opportunity, with the film oblivious to the ebbing promise of Shivaji's populist <i>swarajya, </i>subsumed in a generation or two
by the Peshwas' Brahmin dominance), and firmly grounded in the personal.
Bhansali's Baji Rao is simply a headstrong lover, his passion for Mastani not
seen as having any political implication for the state (it <i>is</i> seen as
having religious implications for the state's claim to uphold a Brahminical
order). It is certainly the director's prerogative to make that film, but it
does make the tale less interesting to me, and more akin to a
"straight" love story, dressed up in the past's borrowed
finery. In this, <i>Bajirao Mastani </i>is not the equal of <i>Jodha-Akbar,</i>
which, although more at home in the world of <i>saas-bahu</i> serials and Amar
Chitra Katha than the blood and sweat of genuine historical epic, knew enough
to represent the Jodha-Akbar alliance as bearing profound political
implications. The "love story" was Bollywood, but the meaning
of the wider symbolism, of Akbar's re-casting of the Mughal state from a Turkic
monarchy to an Indian sultanate with the Rajputs firmly ensconced as one of its
pillars, was sophisticated, and to my mind profoundly correct. <br />
<br />
Luckily for the viewer, there's a second film here, easily Bhansali's most
dynamic and engaging. And that film -- markedly more cinematic and
enjoyable than the likes of <i>Jodha-Akbar</i> -- is worth going to the cinema
for; it's driven by an excellent performance by Ranveer Singh, a worthy
supporting cast (ranging from Priyanka Chopra as Bajirao's first wife Kashi;
Tanvi Azmi as the matriarch Radhabai; Yatin Karyekar's upholder of Brahmin
orthodoxy, Krishna Bhatt (in the context of an aborted meal he hisses "<i>ye
Peshwai hai to Mughlai kya buree thee</i>?!", a clever reference not just
to the enemy Empire but to the cuisine as well); to a dignified Milind Soman as
Ambani Pant; a delightfully dissipated Mahesh Manjrekar as the Maratha king
Shahu, and the woefully under-used villainy of Aditya Pancholi's Panth
Prathinidi), and some darn enjoyable <i>dialoguebaazi </i>by Prakash
Kapadia, the sort that crackles across the screen all too infrequently
these days. It's this second film that meant I was engaged throughout the
nearly two hour-and-forty-minute-run-time (at least until Bhansali dredged up
his inner Devdas one more time in the film's interminable closing portions) --
no mean feat these days, when even masala movies often rush past anything that
might discomfit multiplex viewers, striving to present hits-and-giggles cinema
in under two-and-a-half hours; the more self-consciously Hollywoody films
barely squeak past two. <br />
<br />
Against such a backdrop, it’s hard not to respect the uncompromising nature
of Bhansali's vision, which simply demands more (time, attention) from his
audience in a film like <i>Bajirao Mastani</i>. And if in the past this
uncompromising vision has often resulted in fantastic, inert spectacles devoid
of any life, Bhansali's involvement with masala like <i>Rowdy Rathore</i> seems
to have energized him: while his last directorial effort, <i>Ras-Leela</i>, was
wretched, it wasn't so for the same reason that <i>Devdas</i> and (most extreme
of all) <i>Saawariya</i> were terrible; <i>Ras-Leela</i> was energetic (perhaps a first
for this director), but little else. In <i>Bajirao Mastani</i>, Bhansali
seems to have found the right balance: the visuals are less showy, the dialogs
possessed of velocity and zing (perhaps a deliberate nod to the Hindi film
historicals of decades ago, with <i>Mughal-e-Azam </i>the grand-daddy of them
all), and all this anchored in the right hero, giving what has to be the best
performance of his young career.<br />
<br />
As Bollywood's Bajirao Ballad, Ranveer Singh was a pleasant surprise,
essaying the role with a near-permanent twinkle and impish charm, his
insouciance easily bettering the earnestness of Shah Rukh Khan in <i>Asoka
</i>or Hrithik in <i>Jodha-Akbar</i> (the latter a performance I had quite
liked at the time). Unlike those colleagues, Ranveer isn't weighed down
by the role, and acquits himself creditably. Even his toned body doesn't
seem like as much of a distraction here, and I didn't find it an irritating
intrusion of the 21st century gym into the world of this film. I can cite
no principled basis for my view that Ranveer avoids this Hrithik-effect, and
will simply note that he was persuasive, and made me believe that he could be
the warrior of Maratha legend. [Bajirao's famed intelligence was less
convincing in its Bollywood avatar: with the exception of the battle in
Bundelkhand early on in the film, Ranveer's Bajirao prefers to bellow into
battle, often by his lonesome, than to actually, um, plan anything; this is a
pity, because a more subtle director would have harnessed the actor's innate
slyness to greater effect. Stated differently, Ranveer Singh might well
be the right actor to play the precocious Chanakya of the Maratha court, although, ironically,
the role as written is that of a "mere" warrior. Bhansali would have been better off
siding with Odysseus rather than Achilles.] To be sure, the performance isn't
flawless -- Ranveer seemed uneven to me in the drunk scenes (an inconsistency
mirrored in the writing), and was upstaged more than once by the polish of
Milind Soman and Tanvi Azmi, or the sheer fun Mahesh Manjrekar brought to the
table -- but nevertheless, Ranveer's has to be one of the most enjoyable lead
male performances of 2015, and a cut above what his peers seem to be capable
of.<br />
<br />
Deepika Padukone is frustrating. On paper, she has everything going
her way in this title role of the Muslim<i> </i>Mastani bewitched by Bajirao:
she looks gorgeous in Indian dress, and this film gives her ample opportunity
to dazzle viewers, her beauty married to her trademark inability to seem vulgar
(yes, even in stuff like the <i>Billoo Barber </i>song); plus, her role is
substantial enough (even if it is afflicted by the usual problem Hindi films
seem to have with kick-ass female roles: once these women have demonstrated
their mettle, they are domesticated by love). But she isn't a good enough
actress to pull it off, leading to a discombobulated effect: she looks the
part, and delivers her lines well, but doesn't seem convincing as the lone
woman who suddenly shows up in Pune to stake her claim to Bajirao's
attention. Perhaps one needed old-school Bollywood heft to render plausible a
setting this absurd, and Padukone is a product of a different idiom, not just
in her affecting naturalness (the sort of thing that stands her in good stead
in a role like <i>Piku</i>) but in the urbane ease with which everything seems
to come to her -- but comfort isn't always a good thing, and where the
role requires her to essay the strange and unfamiliar, Padukone falls back on
facility and naturalness. She isn't <i>bad</i> as Mastani, but isn't
memorable, and her co-stars out-perform her. [A word about the early
action sequences though: as in <i>Chandni Chowk to China</i>, Padukone is very
good as the warrior, and her introduction scene, with blade at Bajirao's neck,
was worthy of the masala <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seeti</i>.
A pity <i>that</i> Mastani isn't really seen after the first twenty minutes.]<br />
<br />
Oddly enough, although Priyanka Chopra's Kashi (Bajirao's first wife)
doesn't have the title role, she has just as much screen-time as Padukone, and
does justice to her role. For Bhansali, Kashi's role is a step forward:
all too often his fixation on the way women look and dress, rather than what
they say and do, borders on the fetishistic, but Chopra's Kashi is not in that
vein: her normalcy is refreshing (indeed she might be the only character cut
from ordinary dimensions in the film), and her expressive face and comfort with
<i>desi</i> gesturality means that while Mastani talks a whole lot about her love
for Bajirao, it's Kashi's sentiments that are more keenly felt. Neither
heroine is as impressive as the severe Radhabai: Tanvi Azmi admittedly only has
one note to play here, but she does so with great authority and charisma (who
would've thought the most impressive look in this film would rely on a shaven
head and widow's white sari)?<br />
<br />
Ah, the music: perhaps never before in the history of Hindi cinema has a
director been so smugly satisfied with his sense of music, with such little
reason, as Bhansali appears to be, with one flabby album following another with
boring predictability over the course of his career. The music here (credited to Bhansali himself) is
no different: I could barely remember a strain even a minute after a song had
ended, with the breezy charm of <i>"Pinga"</i> perhaps the only
exception. A pity: the lyrics of Siddharth-Garima deserved better music.<br />
<br />
The director does much better on the visuals: in <i>Bajirao Mastani</i> the
sets and props do not serve as distractions (as in <i>Devdas</i>), nor are they
suffocating (as in <i>Black</i> or <i>Saawariya</i>). In both <i>Ras
Leela</i> and <i>Bajirao Mastani</i>, Bhansali seems to have belatedly realized
that the cinematic is a different animal than the merely visual, and his latest
film is his best yet on that front, with the sets and sumptuous dresses at the
service of the film, and not the other way around: only after the film did I
realize that Bhansali's Aaina Mahal set was not only his best yet, but might be
my favorite Hindi film palace-set of all time. The rest of Shaniwar Wada, the
understated court of Chatrapati Shahu, and the battlements of Chhatrasal are
also notable (Bhansali's eye is less sure in battle-scenes, and amidst
Indo-Islamic aesthetics -- that milieu (e.g. the Nizam’s tent) is rendered
hastily, and without imagination ("hey let's use green!")). But
perhaps most memorable of all is Bhansali's representation of Maratha court
dress: it isn't easy to make those caps and court dresses seem glamorous to an
audience brought up to regard Western lines as normative, and the director
doubtless "Europeanizes" a number of male garments (the warriors in
particular seem like refugee-knights from the Crusades), but the result is
nevertheless deeply impressive, and sets a high bar for other period
films. That alone is reason enough to give this film a chance on the big
screen: sure, Bhansali's intellect is not the equal of his eye, but his eye is
precious rare indeed.<br />
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Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-20996083012360930972015-07-30T03:22:00.000-04:002015-07-30T07:47:13.626-04:00BAAHUBALI (Telugu/Tamil; Hindi (dubbed); 2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.filmibeat.com/img/2015/06/05-1433479584-04-1433393208-baahubali-audio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.filmibeat.com/img/2015/06/05-1433479584-04-1433393208-baahubali-audio.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">By now,
writing about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> risks getting
mired in banalities, about the film's gargantuan scale, its grandeur, the sheer
spectacle it offers the viewer, the whole often tinged with (Bollywood?)
condescension ("The biggest movie in town is a <i>southern</i>
film!") or, conversely, (Southern?) pride ("Hey we've shown them how
movies are made"). And it's all completely true: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> is a big big movie, with a
compelling story, great velocity, and more fun in each half than most filmmakers
can manage in an oeuvre. (And a specific kind of fun too: this is a film
that revels in its bigness, the way Cecil B. Demille's <i>The Ten Commandments</i>
did.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But none
of that is sufficient to make the film epic, that is to say, not only pitched
at a scale that is itself impressive, but with enough attention to spare for
the day-to-day to make the world represented plausible. Homer is epic in
a way the horrid Hollywood <i>Troy</i> isn't: the latter has all the ships and
battles, but the former includes the taste of tears, the smell of rotting
corpses, and pleasure in the way things work in that world (things that are, of
course, being destroyed on the battlefield). That is to say, <i>Troy</i>
is merely a spectacle (certainly not the worst or least entertaining one, not
in a world that includes <i>300, </i>a film that seemed so wretched from the
trailer I never could bring myself to watch it), whereas <i>The Iliad</i>
makes its world so real you actually care about what happens in it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">What makes
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> striking is precisely this
"world-making", director S.S. Rajamouli's ability to imagine the
particulars of every scene to such a degree that this make-believe world
becomes real for the audience, even plausible. Plenty of other filmmakers
can focus on the battle scenes and grand sets, but absent this eye for the
little, it can all seem a bit lifeless (think <i>Gladiator</i>, with its
emphasis on grand sets and action, as opposed to the HBO TV series <i>Rome</i>,
which isn't short of action or amazing sets, but also helps you get a whiff of
the streets, the religious ceremonies, the markets and ports; the former is
airbrushed, the latter feels alive). In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i>, this eye is seen everywhere: think of the bales of straw
the castle's defenders use to try and prevent Sivudu from riding out of Mahishmati's
capital on a chariot; or of the hollow (wooden?) tube the hero uses to hold the
green snake he's going to release on Avantika while she's taking aim atop a
tree (utterly bereft of any vulgarity, a delightfully perverse scene in the way
it highlights the tense warrior ready to unleash her arrow at the unknown man
who's painted her hand, even as the same man hovers behind her with the snake
slithering over her arm: poised to attack, Avantika is rendered immobile); or
the way in which Mahishmati's rulers discuss the battle plan in the film's
second half. At every step, Rajamouli and writer Vijayendra Prasad seem
to have thought long and hard about how such a world might work if it existed
-- and because they have done so, that world comes alive for us. Compared
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i>, even the best of
Bollywood's grand fables --think <i>Lagaan</i> -- seem airbrushed, most
historicals </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">-- <i>Jodha-Akbar</i>
comes to mind, or <i>Asoka</i> -- </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">superficial in the face of its thoroughness, and the less said about wannabe fantasies
(like <i>Krrish</i>) the better. In this it is inspired by the best of
contemporary American TV (and, much like Game of Thrones, ends with a
sensational cliffhanger). Walking out of the cinema after the film I had a
stupid grin on my face, the sort that meant: This too is possible. A
derivative mush of all sorts of mythological tropes and archetypes, not to
mention other movies and TV serials, a film with huge sets and
not-always-seamless CGI (what Rajamouli would do with a Hollywood budget one
can only dream of), a recognizably Telugu film yet like nothing else from the
industry (not even the director's own <i>Magadheera</i>), that is to
say, completely, utterly itself, <i>Baahubali</i> is a landmark.
And if it isn’t as quirky or the action as imaginative as Shankar’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enthiran</i> is, it’s grander and more
impressive: there has been no more spellbinding, more immersive cinematic
experience in recent times.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A tale
like this has to begin with a foundling. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> opens with a landscape of striking waterfalls, and pretty
soon we see the Rajmata (Ramya) trying to get a baby to safety. She
manages to save the child from drowning, long enough to ensure he is found by
the local village chief and his wife. The baby grows up to be Sivudu
(Prabhas), a hulk of a man obsessed with the idea of climbing the height of the
waterfalls to see what awaits him. When he finally makes it there, he
lands smack in the middle of a love story (his own for Avantika (Tamannah Bhatia)) and an ongoing
guerrilla rebellion, by the army Avantika serves in, against the royal court
and kingdom of Mahishmati, usurped by Bhallala Deva (Rana Daggupati) and his
father from... ah, but I can't say more without giving away a mild surprise.
But if you can't guess by now that Sivudu is the messiah, the Baahubali the
oppressed masses have been waiting for, you have wasted your life watching
something other than masala movies. There are plenty of surprises left,
though: in the second half, the film shifts gears, focusing on a flashback
sequence culminating in what has to be the longest, most impressive battle
scene in Indian film history, and a film-ending cliffhanger worthy of Game of
Thrones. That's right, this film doesn't end -- it directly leads into
the finale to be released next year.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
film's representation of women is striking. Both Ramya and Tamannah
Bhatia play characters with great strength and agency (although Avantika does
become more passive once she falls in love with Sivudu), and the Rajmata is
just as impressive in the film's second half as any of the male characters she
shares screen time with; easily one of the most memorable "kick-ass"
female characters on an Indian screen in years. That this film has gotten
<a href="http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/the-rape-of-avanthika/article7433603.ece">called out for sexism in a few media articles</a>, when every multiplex Bollywood
film gets a free pass for similar sexism (and is bereft of any strong female
characters to boot), speaks volumes about the role social class continues to
play in Indian film criticism. Stated differently, Western-style sexism,
imported from American pop culture as it were, and to the taste of the upwardly
mobile, urban classes who increasingly dominate the Bollywood audience, does
not even register as sexism; whereas representations in a more
"vernacular" idiom are called out, even as those who do so pat
themselves on the back for being progressive. Don't believe it. Is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> sexist? Sure, a few
scenes are -- but overall this fantasy world of battles and court intrigues,
with its female warriors, armed guards, and matriarchs, is <i>less</i> sexist
than the vast majority of Hindi and Telugu films I have seen. Perhaps no scene
epitomizes this better than the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i>
Avantika’s entry (you’ll see why I’ve used the adjective once you see the
film): the warrior is pursued by a band of soldiers, and just when Sivudu – and
the viewer – think he’ll have to jump out and rescue the damsel in distress,
she and her fighters turn the tables and slaughter their enemies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This woman needs little rescuing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
charge of racism is perhaps closer to the mark, given the long battle scene
with hordes of black, demonic/sub-human enemies (inspired at least in part by
the White Walkers from Game of Thrones). Even here, though, many of the
film's critics miss the point: on the Mahishmati-side, the Rajmata camps out next
to a statue of Durga, and I found the linkage of the opposing side with the
<i>asuras</i> that goddess defeated in Hindu mythology unmistakeable. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> represents the enemies as
demonic precisely because it seeks to evoke the specter of Durga's forces in
battle with the armies of Evil: there is certainly a broader discussion to be
had about the metaphysics of blackness in Indian and Western cultures (why,
that is to say, "black" stands for "evil" or
"sin"), a metaphysics <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i>
uncritically perpetuates -- but this is a very far cry from the naked racism of
Bollywood "blackface" in the 1970s, or the threatening
African-Americans of the NRI films of the 1990s, or the crude mockery of East
Asians in films like <i>Kal Ho Na Ho </i>(2003).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A word
on the cast: Prabhas is certainly the right physical fit for the part of Sivudu,
but his pleasantly blank face is devoid of intensity, and I do consider him a
weak link here; I certainly would have preferred the impish charm of NTR Jr.
(admittedly he is too scrawny for this role).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rana Daggubati as Bhallal Dev is splendid, showing us how much fun a
one-dimensional performance as a baddie can be (indeed, he looks so good here I
was mildly irritated at the use of CGI to bulk him up in his entry scene), as
does Ramya in her authoritative role (she isn’t the only woman here to dominate her
husband, as she does Bijjaladeva (Nasser); even where Sivudu’s adoptive parents
are concerned, it’s clear who runs the show).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tamannah Bhatia as Avantika made me eat my words: I’ve never been a fan
of hers (a feeling reinforced by seeing her in the songs in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i>) but she is very good in her
warrior get-up – I found myself missing that Avantika once she is somewhat “domesticated”
by the relationship with Sivudu, and would have liked to see some more action involving
her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sathyaraj as Kathappa, the
warrior-slave sworn to serve Mahishmati's royal family, even when he knows it’s
rule is illegitimate, was another surprise: he has a lot of screen-time here, and creditably
acquits himself in a role painted with broad brushstrokes.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Baahubali</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> has other charms too, ranging
from a superbly choreographed "item" song -- <i>Manohari</i>,
deploying genuine, sensuous, dance moves, rather than the stripper shimmies
that too many Hindi films have gotten addicted to -- to Sudeep's fun cameo as
the Afghan Aslam Khan (the fleeting role will, I suspect, assume significance in the
sequel). Indeed, nothing suggested the good ol' fun of something like
<i>Dharam Veer </i>more than this figure, trying to hawk the ultimate sword to
Kathappa. Aslam Khan is an adversary of sorts, ultimately bested in a
sword-fight by Kathappa, but he is a certain type: the enemy who both gives and
merits respect. It isn't a coincidence that Aslam Khan is from
Afghanistan (the only real place-name in the film); that detail situates him
within a specific <i>Hindi</i> film-tradition of noble Indo-Islamic warrior-types, "others" the audience is expected to esteem.
(I consider Feroz Khan the patron saint of this sort of figure, both because of
films like <i>Dharmatma</i> (1975) and the public persona he cultivated, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">reflected even in late – and degraded – offerings like <em>Janasheen</em> (2003) and <em>Welcome</em> (2007); the likes of Jackie Shroff (in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Palay
Khan</i> (1986)) and of course Amitabh Bachchan as the Afghan Badshah Khan in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Khuda Gawah</i> (1992) offer other variants,
as does Pran as Sher Khan in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zanjeer</i>
(1973).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One might even say that this
figure's turn towards evil, beginning with Lotiya Pathan (Kiran Kumar) in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tezaab</i> (1988), is a watershed moment, symptomatic
of a turn in Hindi cinema towards the less capacious understanding of
difference that so scarred the cinema of the 1990s.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It’s all
a sign that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> is very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indian</i>, with deep roots not just in
Indian culture, but in Indian popular cinematic culture: you just don’t see
<i>filmi </i>heroes anymore with a playful, even at times competitive relationship with
their Gods, as Sivudu does here in a long sequence early on in the film vis-à-vis
the village Shiv lingam (this sort of thing holds a special place in my heart, given
that Hindi films served as my introduction to Hinduism as a child; Bachchan in Deewar had more to do with my excitement at first visiting a Hindu temple than anything else did); these days,
the archetypes of the Mother; the Messiah/Prince; the Foundling; the Usurper,
and the rich signification they enable are, at least in Hindi cinema, barely
ever deployed in overt fashion (and are acceptable only under the cover of either
a neo-Hollywood aesthetic, or the sort of consumption vehicle Bollywood has
made its own where mainstream commercial films are concerned; under both, the sign of the Hero is perhaps the only one that is left. and not surprisingly, the feminine iconic mode has withered away). These sorts of tropes are
used fantastically well in <i>Baahubali</i>.<i> </i>The
commercial success of this film, including, most remarkably, the scale of the
Hindi dubbed version’s success, surely owes something to the chord it has
struck, by satisfying a craving for deeper, more resonant storytelling that
many of us had forgotten. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali</i> is magnificent.</span></div>
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Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-83474789549380060702015-07-26T15:46:00.001-04:002015-07-26T15:51:22.227-04:00MASAAN (Hindi; 2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://drop.ndtv.com/Movies/images/reviews/big/newmasan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://drop.ndtv.com/Movies/images/reviews/big/newmasan.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">By the end, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> (“Cremation Ground”) was very
different from the film I thought I was watching after the first fifteen
minutes: the opening sequence, involving a sexual encounter violated and
sullied by policemen intent on cruelty and extortion, is one of the most
riveting, and nauseating, representations of the police in years (only the
sequence in Anurag Kashyap’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ugly</i>
(2014), where the father of a missing girl tries to register a missing person-complaint,
comes close). I was filled with loathing, and wanted to hurt someone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That feeling stayed with me – Bhagwan Tiwari
as Inspector Mishra has an important and continuing role over the course of the
film – but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> turned out to be
about something other than misogyny or the workings of a corrupt and oppressive
state machine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What that something is
I’m not quite sure, but in its moodiness, its air of mystery, its poetry, I am
confident <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> heralds the arrival
of an exciting, reflective new directorial talent in Neeraj Ghaywan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the extent Vikramaditya Motwane’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Udaan</i> (2010) may be said to have spawned
successors, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> is among the
worthies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At one level,
the film is a coming-of-age story, a genre that relies on assumptions that the
protagonists will be typical in some way (the Lover; the Student; the Prince;
even with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait of The Artist as a
Young Man</i>, a category – the Artist – is immediately and explicitly
invoked).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i>, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Udaan</i>, wraps
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bildungsroman</i> into a narrative of
exception: Deepak (Vicky Kaushal) seems like a typical Polytechnic student in
Varanasi, until you appreciate that he is from the Dom caste, traditionally
associated with cremating dead bodies on the Varanasi <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ghats</i> – as caste hierarchies go, it’s hard to think of anyone lower
down the totem pole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Deepak’s father
has ensured an education for him, one that estranges him from the family’s
traditional profession (the estrangement personified by his sullen brother
Sikandar, who hasn’t been able to do what Deepak has done) – it’s not an
impossible story, merely a remarkable one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Devi Pathak (Richa Chadda), the young Brahmin woman who, along with her
father, is ensnared by the police in a manufactured sex scandal and resulting
extortion, is remarkable for her inner strength and poise: her conviction that
she has done nothing wrong seems unshakeable, not only in the face of sexual
predators who want to sleep with her because, well, she’s done it once before
with someone else, but also in private, before her father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A story about
the coming of age of two people who are self-consciously atypical is not a
problem per se (Ghaywan and writer Varun Grover are surely entitled to tell any
tale of their choosing), but does raise wider questions of meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That the stakes are higher than those
involved in the story of two remarkable young people is not in doubt, given the
metaphysics of death and re-birth self-consciously deployed by the film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there is Varanasi itself, loaded with
meaning (and its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ghats</i> wonderfully
shot by cinematographer Avinash Arun), sought by both the pilgrims and tourists
who visit (the former are obligated to go in some sense, out of religious duty,
but even the latter – of whom I was one for five memorable days in 2009 at a
small guesthouse near the Kashi Vishwanath temple – are convinced that they are
visiting a special place, one like no other: the city’s proximity to death has
by now become a cliché, although no less true for it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perhaps that is
the place to begin: is the cremation ground of the film’s title Harishchandra <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghat</i>, where Deepak’s family lives and where
it plies its trade?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might be the city
itself, where dying can sometimes seem easier than living (recall the opening
sequence, at the end of which Piyush kills himself; Devi is stronger, and it’s
clear that option has never occurred to her). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The parallels between the two leads might
offer some clues: the fathers of both, albeit at opposite ends of the caste
spectrum, make their living from death and the rituals associated with it, on
the banks of the Ganges (Devi’s father is a pandit and former professor of
Sanskrit who now advises people on post-death rituals; Deepak’s family cremates
corpses); both Devi and Deepak have had lovers from Bania backgrounds (Aggarwal
for her; Gupta for him); both work for Indian Railways at some point (indeed
the rail as metaphor for arrivals and departures is a recurring motif in the
film); both are born into families at the end of a long tradition, but one that
doesn’t sustain them any longer, and is instead something to get away from, its
weight felt like that of a carcass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On
this reading the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> of the film’s
title might be the milieu itself: life, if it is to be, must be elsewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Away from the
two leads, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> gets plenty other
things right: a host of other characters populate the film, and just about
every one – ranging from Deepak’s friends to the man who baldly and offensively
propositions Devi to Deepak’s lover Shaalu to the foul-mouthed boy Jhonta who
works with Devi’s father, to Piyush’s mother, and the two leads’ fathers– is
well-etched and aptly cast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They seem
like people who might be real, and are very far from types.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deepak’s friends are a case in point: in most
other films (especially multiplex films, where middle-class men have
increasingly been stereotyped as little better than swine – the charming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Queen</i> offers a great example in Raj
Kumar Rao’s character, who is not just awful but awful in a way that suggests
he is meant to stand in for a whole class of Indian male) they might be
stereotypical louts or lechers; here they are awkward but well-meaning, and
surprise us with their sensitivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Don’t
get me wrong, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i> isn’t short of
assholes, it’s just that the film represents many more hues than one.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is the caste angle one-dimensional, with
privileged upper-castes on the one hand and the Doms on the other: the latter’s
lot is grim, but in Devi’s father and his pathetic feebleness before Inspector
Mishra, we also encounter how wretched upper-caste poverty can be as well
(indeed at one point Vidyadhar Pathak naively mumbles that he thought he could
rely on the Inspector’s sympathy – “Mishra” is also a Brahmin last name – only
to be met with derision).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No position
atop the Hindu caste hierarchy will save the Pathaks: only money will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Vicky Kaushal
makes the role of Deepak his own, in a winning performance that brought more
than one smile to my face: his shyness is irresistible, and his wooing of
Shaalu more disarmingly natural than any number of representations of boys from
the “Hindi heartland” over the last decade (compare this to Vivek Oberoi
crooning Lionel Richie songs in Omkara and you’ll appreciate what a
condescending representation is all about).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But the most arresting acting in the film comes from Richa Chadda, who
uses inscrutability as both woman’s shield and weapon in this film: her tightly
impassive face conveys in precisely the proportion that it conceals (indeed,
one might even criticize the film for making too much of this: Devi’s
motivations are all but opaque, not only to her father but also to us, and
perhaps even to the director), and compels attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not to mention that she is insanely hot; the
combination means great screen presence (oddly enough not showcased as well in
Gangs of Wasseypur as here, or in Fukrey or in a blink-and-miss role in the
Indian TV version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">24</i>) that anchors
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Someone get her more roles!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Masaan</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> only features three tracks, but each is memorable: Indian
Ocean’s soulful music works very well here, not least because each song serves
primarily as vehicle for very fresh lyrics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Varun Grover’s adaptation of Dushyant Kumar’s poem is unforgettable and
jarring – I don’t think I’ve gotten over these most odd of romantic lyrics, in
“Tu kisi rail si guzartee hai / Mein kisi pul sa thartharaata hoon”; Grover
does even better with the simple “Mann kasturi re / Jag dastoori re / Baat hui
na pooree re”, and Sanjeev Sharma’s lyrics in “Bhor” are also very good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps what I enjoyed was also the feeling
that here were writers who like the rhythms of spoken Hindi in Eastern U.P.,
who are able to make poetry from a very popular and unpretentious idiom <o:p></o:p></span>(another quality that links Masaan to Udaan).</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masaan</i>, leaving is no clean break (and
not just because, as Devi’s Railways colleague Sadhya (Pankaj Tripathi) tells
her, 26 trains stop at Benares, but 64 don’t, showing that it is easy to get to
the city, but hard to leave): the Ganges is the site not just of death but of
rebirth, and the films closing sequences make that explicit: Devi and Deepak
achieve some kind of closure by casting the last physical objects tying them to
their dead lovers into the water, and then meet each other and embark on a
journey that signifies a beginning on the same river.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The connection has already been
foreshadowed: the ring Deepak casts away, then tries to find but cannot, ends
up, unknown to Devi, playing a crucial role in her liberation.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kashi must be fled, but only with what Kashi
gave you, with traces of what Kashi took away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-55888146642290259542015-07-25T07:07:00.000-04:002015-07-25T11:45:54.327-04:00BAJRANGI BHAIJAAN (Hindi; 2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4vnu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1st-Day-Bajrangi-Bhaijaan-Friday-Box-Office-Collection-Report.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4vnu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1st-Day-Bajrangi-Bhaijaan-Friday-Box-Office-Collection-Report.jpg" height="191" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The term "masala" has been much bandied
about in recent years, all-too-often by people with scant respect or
understanding of its rhythms, of the precise contexts it grew out, indeed of
how vanishingly brief its efflorescence was -- essentially coterminous with the
arc of Amitabh Bachchan's and Manmohan Desai's careers, more accurately with
the intersection of the two careers in the 1970s and 1980s. At some
point, "masala" became a lazy stand-in, for films from any period
prior to this century, for anything that pre-dated the Hollywoodization of the
Hindi film aesthetic, for anything outlandish or spoofish, for films we were
embarrassed about, for films we didn't just make any more. Until, that
is, we did, when, after the path breaking success of 2008's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghajini</i>, a particular variant of popular
(primarily Telugu) cinema was able to be married to The Big Bollywood Star, and
has been a fixture of Hindi screens ever since -- in a particular way.
For the likes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ready</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kick</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rowdy Rathore</i>, are not mainstream movies in the sense that they set
the pace for the industry, exemplars of a tradition at its prime; rather, these
films only make sense in the context of an industry that (commercially
speaking) has moved on (to an extent because of changing tastes; but also, in
no small measure, because of its ability to pitch products to smaller and
smaller demographic groups. Unlike the industries all over the world that
seek to broaden their footprint, Bollywood, wittingly or no, prefers to focus
on smaller groups of more affluent consumers). Contemporary masala makes
sense, and can be successful, only because there isn't very much of it, and
what there is harkens to a general sense of Bollywood's history; it is thus
essential that it be married to a veteran star, whose long career itself imbues
him with an aura of authenticity. That context paradoxically means that
the masala movie, however well-made, simply cannot mean what it used to: its
excellence vis-a-vis other films might have brought success once upon a time
(think of Sholay, as opposed to Khotay Sikkay); today, its rarity, its status
as a kind of specimen (the Hindi/Urdu word <i>namoona</i> does come to mind) is
crucial.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The above accounts for many of Salman Khan's recent
films: unquestionably Southern masala in one sense, films like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dabangg</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dabangg 2</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ek Tha Tiger</i>
or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kick</i> were also careful not to
alienate the multiplex audience, packaging what they were selling in
tongue-in-cheek humor, and Hollywood length (Dabangg, for instance, was <i>under</i> two
hours in length). They were easy to consume, both for an audience that
wanted "this sort" of film but couldn't get it anywhere else, and for
an audience who needed escapist fare but was embarrassed by itself for being so
silly. Kabir Khan's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ek Tha Tiger</i>
offered a fascinating glimpse of the potential and pitfalls of this sort of
film could be: shorn of sexism or even the overt nationalism that one might
have expected from its subject (an Indo-Pak romance between two spies), just as
the film gets interesting, with the star-crossed lovers fleeing with RAW and
the ISI in hot pursuit, it, um, ends, almost as if the filmmakers knew that you
couldn't risk getting <i>too</i> serious, too, well, masala anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Everyone deserves a second chance, and in retrospect, <i>Ek Tha Tiger </i>was
the appetizer to the main course that is Bajrangi Bhaijaan: and a damn good
meal it is (and, it must be noted, one not without some Andhra spice, written
as it is by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._V._Vijayendra_Prasad">K.
Vijayendra Prasad</a>, a man credited with more blockbusters – including the
continuing phenomenon of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baahubali </i>--
than most have hits). By now everyone knows the plot -- good-hearted
Hanuman <i>bhakt</i> Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi finds a mute Pakistani girl lost in
India, and resolves to cross the border to re-unite her with her family -- but
let's pause to acknowledge that this itself is a welcome relief from the
nauseating flood of routine love stories packaged as something different; or
the clothes, fashion, and lifestyle ads that masquerade as films in Bollywood. And
then there is the question of the social milieu the film is set in: I found
myself rooting for the fact that this film isn’t populated by people toting
D&G and acting as if progressive cinema consisted of ripping off off-beat
American filmmakers, rather than plagiarizing other sources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bajrangi
Bhaijaan</i>, people take the bus, eat at dhabas, drink tea from roadside
stalls, not because the director is trying to tell us something (in far too
many contemporary Hindi films, these representations would mean either that we
are talking about the hinterlands of UP and Bihar, with crazy violence sure to
follow; or that it’s a question of a film about some “them”, made for some “us”
that is assuredly not “them”), but because that’s simply where his characters live
and how they commute to work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
delightful because it’s so normal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(That
I have to make this point at all testifies to the sad pass the industry has
come to.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[In fact, Kabir Khan’s
representation of the film’s worlds has led to some off-screen confusion with <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/salman-khan-bajrangi-bhaijaan-director-kabir-khan-hanuman-doesnt-belong-to-only-one-community/2/">more
than one urbane Bombayite puzzled over the use of terms like “Mohammedan” in
the film</a> – a sure sign of one’s unfamiliarity with certain North Indian
milieus.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">There are other signs of a new normal: Pawan isn’t just a Hanuman <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bhakt</i> but a rather closed-minded Hindu:
he’s the son of a RSS <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shakha pramukh</i>,
is shocked by even the smell of meat wafting over from a Muslim neighbors
house, and is completely disgusted to see the child he’s so fond of wolf down
chicken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s also communal, pleading
for Hanuman’s forgiveness upon entering a mosque, is shocked that the child in
his care even wants to tie a thread at a dargah, and further evidenced by his
desperation to come up with an explanation of the girl’s meat-eating ways that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doesn’t</i> have her be – shudder – a
Muslim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kshatriyas eat meat, he reasons,
an addendum to his earlier reasoning that the girl’s light skin means she must
be a Brahmin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then there’s his
literal-mindedness: much of the film’s comedy is centered on Pawan’s attempts
to live his life according to the precepts of Lord Hanuman: never lie, deceive,
or do anything under-handed. All this isn’t just director Kabir Khan and writer
Vijayendra Prasad looking down at some simple-minded bigot who makes the rest
of us feel better about our own “tolerance”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On the contrary, the representation of Pawan’s bigotry as completely,
banally, normal, so much so that it’s Pawan’s lover Rasika who seems odd when
she snaps that all this stuff about staying away from those of “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">paraaya dharm</i>” is nonsense, stays with
the viewer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pawan’s attitudes aren’t
abnormal or unusual, they are all too common across large swathes of Indian
society, and the film doesn’t let us forget it precisely because it evokes that
reality in a seemingly non-judgmental way. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">This isn’t the syncretic Hindu that we are familiar with from a long
line of Hindi films, but almost the first post-Modi Hindu film hero, one with a
communal identity so clearly demarcated, so abundantly policed and vigilant of
borders (witness Pawan about to step into a dargah for the first time – and
this is on the Indian side of the border), one might mistake him for a
monotheistic fundamentalist. The jibe against the Sangh is subtle, but
unmistakable: what the new normal – an ignorant one, I might add: a second
after Rasika asks Pawan if he’s read the Mahabharata she remembers who she’s dealing
with, following it up with “you must have at least watched the TV serial?” – amounts
to isn’t anti-Muslim so much as it is un-Muslim, a conception of India and
Indianness that has nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of Muslims.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new normal, that is to say, aims at
fulfilling the logic of Partition, by creating a Hindu Pakistan to mirror the
Muslim one across the border.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So while I
celebrate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i> for its
insight and appreciation of the stakes here, my appreciation is tinged with sadness:
because the film also reminds us, in a way no Indo-Pak bonhomie at film’s end
can undo, how complete the logic of Partition is for so many people, whether
they live in India or Pakistan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed
that cross-border bonhomie reinforces the stability of the border, a point that
seems to have eluded the filmmakers: stated differently, a more daring film
would have tackled the Hindu-Muslim “borders” within a city like Delhi, and the
challenges those frontiers pose to sustaining a genuinely pluralistic polity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Wagah border can be oppressive, but it
doesn’t upset either Hindu or Pakistani nationalism because it keeps everyone
in their place (to be fair, this film does have a brilliant sequence where
things are out of place, when India loses a cricket match to Pakistan and everyone in the
house Pawan and Rasika stay in is distraught, with only Munni jumping up and
down in excitement, and then kissing the Pakistani flag on the TV screen).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">But -- and this is perhaps the best thing about this film -- <i>Bajrangi
Bhaijaan</i>'s magic lies in the sly way it upsets expectations by making an
"other" of its lead protagonist, and, by extension, of the audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film’s second half is set entirely in
Pakistan, and at one fell swoop it is Pawan who sticks out like a sore thumb:
his name, the words he uses, his religiosity, makes him seem as aberrant in
Pakistan as, well, a Muslim guy at a RSS shakha.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t think of another Hindi film that does
so much with this trope, in the sense that Pawan isn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oppressed</i> in Pakistan for his religion, it’s just that his oddity
is reinforced at every turn (the scene where Pawan asks for vegetarian food at
a roadside dhaba was hilarious, and rang true, reminding me of more than one
Muslim acquaintance), and he has to cope with being strange in a milieu that
otherwise includes plenty of the familiar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is a double estrangement, not simply borne of alien-ness, but of an
alien-ness that also feels, in many ways, familiar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Perhaps I should speak of a triple or even
quadruple estrangement here, given that Pawan is played by Muslim Salman Khan;
but a Muslim who can recite the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hanumanchalisa</i>
with no trouble at all, and one who is himself, in a perverse twist that would
have done Proust proud, closer to the Hindu Right than just about any other
Muslim celebrity in India.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The second half of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bajrangi Bhaijaan</i>
introduces us to Nawazuddin Siddiqui, playing the rather shabby Pakistani
journalist Chand Nawab, who becomes smitten by the story of the big-hearted
Indian on an odyssey to re-unite Munni with her parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Salman Khan’s character is strangely passive
and quiet in the second half, and Nawazuddin propels the action here, with
wonderful comic timing and that ever-present misery in the actor’s eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It isn’t often that one speaks of another
actor in a Salman Khan film (Nawazuddin himself had no more than ten good
minutes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kick</i>), but it must be said
that he has tons of screen time, and holds the film’s second half
together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could see this film again
just for him. That’s not a knock on Salman, but merely an acknowledgment that
Kabir Khan hasn’t been as flattering to him here as he was in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ek Tha Tiger</i>: there are fewer great
dialogs, only one crowd-pleasing action sequence, the music – as one would
expect from Pritam – is pedestrian, and no Sallu song choreography worthy of
the name (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E le le </i>is not a patch on,
for instance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hum ka peeni hai</i> from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dabangg</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">; although the <i>Kukdu ku</i> song celebrating the charms of non-veg food, features delightful lyrics by Mayur Puri</span>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">What is the film’s message (apart, that is, from, <a href="https://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/bajrangi-bhaijaan-a-surprisingly-effective-return-to-masala-roots/">as
Baradwaj Rangan has noted</a>, the notion that Salman Khan is a wonderful human
being)? That we should all get along, for sure, but there’s another, more sly
thread here: what happens to Pawan illustrates the limits of literal-minded
adherence to religious or moral precepts – if you keep admitting you crossed
the border illegally into Pakistan, expect to be beaten by the police and
border security personnel, however pure your intentions – and on more than one
occasion, Prasad and Kabir Khan evoke the Mahabharata: Rasika does it most
explicitly early on, trying to explain to Pawan that he needs to add some
Krishna to his Hanuman <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bhakti</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Never tell lies” is not just a moral
precept, it’s a sure way to make one’s life unlivable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By film’s end, Pawan seems to get it: he
still won’t tell lies or deceive, but will mislead and enable others to do so
to serve a good end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chand Nawab has
never heard of the Mahabharata, but the writer ensures we are reminded of it in
the latter half of the film: as every good Hindi film fan knows, Natwarlal
is the most masala-friendly of all Deities.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-52571713790788172402015-05-07T03:09:00.004-04:002015-05-07T04:49:02.339-04:00UN Musings...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A Thursday morning rant in response to <a href="http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/modi-and-the-world-wars-india-hasnt-yet-understood-its-own-role-as-international-security-provider/">this piece</a> by Ashok Malik in the Times of India; in particular to this excerpt:<br />
<br />
<i><span data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">The
[UN] Security Council is not merely a microcosm of the General Assembly; it
was never intended as such. The idea that the permanent segment of the
Security Council must mirror ethnic and regional diversity, with a sort
of diplomatic affirmative action, is ridiculous.</span></span></span></span></i><br />
<br />
<span data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0"><span data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".9x.1:4:1:$comment10155572539850512_10155577389400512:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">The
idea that calls to make the permanent membership of the Security
Council more representative of the world's diversity is "a sort of
diplomatic affirmative action" is offensive. Malik is certainly right
that the Security Council wasn't set up to be a microcosm of the General Assembly, but he doesn't
explain why it's a bad idea for the permanent membership of the Security Council to be more
democratic; this isn't about "affirmative action", but about
credibility: the UN's mission might have more credibility if it weren't
just seen as a collection of rich bullies, and hold-overs from a war won
seven decades ago at that. More broadly, of course, arguments like
Malik's point to the increasing convergence of what passes for
realpolitik with the Indian establishment, and an identification with
the world-view and aims of the world's <i>status quo</i> Western powers. Malik
refers to India "under-selling" its role post-independence (it seems
the dig at Nehru is obligatory in India these days); to paraphrase
Malik, the notion that this had anything to do with India not getting a
permanent seat on the Security Council is "ridiculous", and only makes sense in the
context of the usual right-wing charge that "we would have been great had
Nehru not happened". Malik and his ilk ignore the ideological dimension
to this: in the 1950s India had a very different conception of itself
and "who it stood with" than it currently does -- in the former instance
the self-image was of standing in solidarity with the world's
underdogs; today there is no such conception, and in fact the obsessive
anxiety is that we <i>not</i> be confused with any of those underdogs (Africa?
Heck that's affirmative action!).</span></span></span></span> </span></span></span></span></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-63559562905550247172015-04-19T16:34:00.000-04:002015-04-20T02:21:26.395-04:00O KADHAL KANMANI (Tamil; 2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://urbanasian.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-18-at-2-00-31-am.png?w=357&h=157" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="140" src="https://urbanasian.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/screen-shot-2015-04-18-at-2-00-31-am.png?w=357&h=157" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
An hour into Mani Ratnam's latest film, I realized I was enjoying myself quite a bit, even as the skeptic in me wanted to yell that there wasn't much to the film, in terms of either plot or theme: nothing much happens in the film, nor does it take us anywhere the director's earlier love stories -- principally <i>Alai Payuthey</i> and <i>Mouna Raagam</i>, released, respectively, fifteen and nearly thirty years ago -- haven't already taken us. There is, as expected, a sensational background score -- credited to, apart from AR Rahman, <a href="http://scalingpeaks.com/">Qutub-e-Kripa, the students of the KM conservatory associated with Rahman</a> -- and a winning performance by Nithya Menon in the female lead role, but no real meat or edge. If Ratnam's films are divided between those that aspire to "more" than popular cinema (<i>Iruvar</i>, <i>Dil Se</i>, <i>Aayutha Ezhuthu</i>/<i>Yuva,</i> <i>Raavan</i>/<i>Raavanan</i>) and those that aspire to make the popular film as classy as it can be (<i>Thalapathi</i>, <i>Alai Payuthey</i>, <i>Thiruda Thiruda</i>), <i>O Kadhal Kanmani </i>definitely falls in the latter category. But even in that category, it is a slight film, its love story and the protagonists at the heart of it no more than mere sketches, their tribulations the result of purely internal hesitations and reserve (neither believes in the idea of marriage with its permanent commitment and the cost it entails to one's autonomy; but since films could barely exist without forming couples, the viewer knows to pay no heed to Aditya's and Tara's words), and not evoked in the most compelling fashion. Some of this might be attributable to the actors -- Dulquer Salmaan, for instance, is charming as the male lead (a video-game developer recently arrived in Bombay), but compared to <i>Alai Payuthey</i>'s Madhavan, he seems shallow -- but not all of it: Nithya Menon is a lot better than the earlier film's inert Shalini, but her character (a student of architecture, originally from Coimbatore) makes much less of an impact. <i>O Kadhal Kanmani</i> is, like more than one Ratnam film, not the most tightly written (and as is also true of more than one Ratnam film, its first half is better than its second). The film is a bit of a soufflé, light and fluffy but without much of an after-taste, at least one that isn't provided by the older couple played by Prakashraj and Leela Samson.<br />
<br />
The film gets the soundtrack it needs -- it is, by now, hard to tell which of Ratnam and AR Rahman is the muse, and to whom -- and the very texture of <i>O Kadhal Kanmani </i>is suffused with Rahman's magic, by way of both songs and background score. The fanboy in me certainly missed the videos of earlier Ratnam films (<i>Parandhu Sella Vaa </i>is the only choreographed set piece here, cute but hardly one of the director's most memorable), but perhaps that is fitting, given that the director has arguably taken the Tamil and Hindi song-video to its limit. In exchange Ratnam scatters snippets of the songs throughout the film, making of them an aural Siamese twin to the film's theme of young love in Bombay (the moody and beautiful cityscapes on the CD jacket best make the point). It might be churlish -- although no less accurate for that -- to observe that the film is not the equal of Rahman's music, but that music undeniably works best in the context of this film (at least where tracks like <i>Mental Manadil, Hey Sinamika, </i>and <i>Kaara Attakaara </i>are concerned; the classically-inspired masterpiece <i>Naane Varugiraen</i> stands on its own, and perversely isn't done justice to in the film): more than one song had grown on me before I watched the film, but was rendered indelible after I'd done so, in a manner reminiscent of my encounter with <i>Rang de Basanti</i>. <br />
<br />
And yet, by the end of <i>O Kadhal Kanmani</i>, I realized that I might have been missing the point of the film: Bombay, beautiful Bombay, in its real and cinematic avatars, appears to be the raison d'être of this film, and perhaps the most plausible <i>kanmani </i>on offer. Not for nothing does the film begin with Dulquer's Aditya Varadarajan disembarking at CST/Victoria Terminus, and catching sight of Nithya Menon's Tara, her image framed, de-stabilized, and finally obscured by passing trains in possibly the best train shots of even Ratnam's long career. Indeed, over the course of the film the couple seems to meet more often in BEST buses and local trains than seems plausible for the iPad and iPhone wielding yuppies these two seem to be, and the reason is surely that <i>O Kadhal Kanmani</i> is Ratnam's paean to a city that he loves, in the manner one loves a city one has discovered later in life, too late, that is, to take for granted. As with so many films from decades ago, the city's lodestars are (apart from CST) the Gateway of India, the Worli sea-face, and the public transport system, each of these sites charged with years of not just social but cinematic meaning that made the experience of watching them on-screen moving in a way quite independent of the unfolding love story. The romance, in short, serves as backdrop to Ratnam's representation of a city he clearly loves. <br />
<br />
Stated differently, things happen in this movie -- a sudden rain shower, a frantic car ride through a crowded bazaar, bus-rides after dark and during the day, encounters in local trains -- because they are opportunities to represent the city, more accurately opportunities to represent aspects of the city depicted in the films of an earlier era. And there's no doubt his city is Bombay: Ratnam seems to bear no rancor over the change to Mumbai -- Aditya (a video-game developer whose city -- and next game -- is "Mumbai 2.0") corrects Leela Samson's Bhavani (diagnosed with Alzheimers) when she refers to "Bombay," with a glib (albeit not mean) "It's Mumbai, not Bombay" -- but Ratnam cannot resist an implicit reproach: "When did they do that?" Bhavani wonders, and it's not hard to pick up a note of bewildered regret that isn't just Bhavani's Alzheimers talking (the director is less convincing in "Mumbai 2.0" as well, and the film's anime sequences, while bold, seemed to belong in a different film). Ratnam has the film's leads stick to old Bombay when they're outdoors: with the exception of a scene or two on what appeared to me to be Juhu Beach, an underpass out of the Bandra-Kurla Complex, and the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, the film does not venture into the "suburbs" except by implication (Aditya and Tara regularly meet and shop in the city's new malls, most of which are north of Bombay's old core). <br />
<br />
But, as befits a director who has been preoccupied with domesticity for decades, <i>O Kadhal Kanmani </i>is just as lavish in depicting Bombay's interior spaces, principally the grand old apartment in Gamdevi that Ganapathy (Prakashraj) and Bhavani live in, suffused with the grace and love intrinsic to Ratnam's idealizations of married couples -- so much so that the elderly couple serves as the movie's scene stealers, making their younger twins (who board with them) seem callow or narcissistic. And if there has always been more than a little idealization of a certain kind of Tamil middle-class man and woman in Ratnam's work, represented here in the form of Ganapathy and Bhavani, it is important to remember that the director does not (unlike most contemporary Hindi filmmakers) merely represent the social privilege of a particular class (much less celebrate its consumption patterns) but asks more of "his" people: by way of culture and a commitment to liberalism, by his nudges to them to stand for something (it is unclear if Aditya will ever pass muster on this front, and Ratnam is naturally more interested in Tara). You see it in that Gamdevi flat with its high ceilings, old french windows and musical instruments -- I can't think of another film set in Bombay with a more lovely dwelling -- and there's more than just the apartment voyeurism of big city dwellers operating here: a life with grace is possible, Ratnam seems to be telling us, and while it needs love for sure, it also needs sensibility.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-22211054207044800972015-03-20T16:59:00.003-04:002015-03-20T17:21:38.502-04:00A Note on NH-10 (Hindi; 2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://static.ibnlive.in.com/pix/slideshow/02-2015/nh10-trailer-launch/mh1002-feb6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.ibnlive.in.com/pix/slideshow/02-2015/nh10-trailer-launch/mh1002-feb6.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
There was a fair amount in the NH-10 trailers that I find off-putting about contemporary Bollywood: the utterly (and to me, somewhat alienating) Hollywood cinematic idiom, the sense that the film's audience must share the socio-economic aspirations of the two lead characters, the sort of de-racinated upwardly mobile Indians presented as normal, almost the only "normal" in a milieu where to be "ethnic" is to be associated with violence and deprivation's dark heart. Director Navdeep Singh's film (his second, after the atmospheric Chinatown remake Manorama Six Feet Under) certainly pushes those buttons, but there's much more to the film, making it one of the best (and certainly the most harrowing) Hindi films of the last few months.<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
First, NH-10 is completely gripping, pervaded by violence that is raw, and completely human-scale. In fact, most of the film's suspense is tied up with the prospect of such violence being visited on this or that character: it isn't the plot twists that hold us (rule of thumb: if a lead character has spent a lot of effort evading baddies, she isn't going to get caught) so much as the fear and nausea that (yet more) punishment might be in store for Meera (Anushka Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam), the preppie couple from Delhi who find themselves entangled in an ugly situation involving an "honor" killing in rural Haryana. And it is to Navdeep Singh's credit that <em>NH-10</em> evokes this atmosphere in a way that never lets the prospect of rape (i.e. the titillation that is all too often inextricable from representations of rape on-screen) distract us from the pain and brutality involved: you won't see goons foisting themselves on the heroine here -- but you will see her and others get viciously beaten, in ways that will stay with you long after the film has ended.<br />
<br />
But by film's end, it's clear that Singh is getting at something more than a run-of-the-mill thriller: NH-10's two hours are littered with signs that Meera and Arjun's world shares some of the same codes as that of the Haryanvi village, even as the former cannot pick up on any of the latter's signals (even benign ones). Looking back one may chuckle at Meera's powerpoint on the "rural consumer" of contraception and the right marketing strategy for him/her -- she is at once spot on and hopelessly naive -- but NH-10 won't allow its viewers the smugness of distance. Arjun's own patriarchal codes contribute heavily to the mess the couple find themselves in, and he isn't the only one: witness the snide remark from Meera's male colleague about how women find it easier to impress their bosses; and then there's an excellent scene early on in the film when Meera and Arjun are in a Delhi police station to file a complaint about a night-time attack on Meera; the kindly-looking policeman spends most of his time talking to Arjun, and finally asks him how he can allow his wife to go out unaccompanied late at night -- we all know the sort of city this is. Indeed we do, and Navdeep Singh reminds us that the world of rural Hissar and Rohtak aren't as far away from New India's great urban centers as we might like to imagine. (Conversely, we don't often encounter female characters in action films with as vigorous a sense of agency as Meera -- sadly, even in American cinema this sort of indomitable spirit is typically associated with the likes of the super-heroine goddesses of Kill Bill and Lucy -- and that is reason enough to take notice of co-producer and actress Anushka Sharma here.)<br />
<br />
Mahatma Gandhi's phrase "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" haunts this film (mostly because no-one subscribes to the credo), and as <i>NH-10</i> narrows its focus onto Meera, we see that she has more than a little in common with the iron sarpanch (played with scene-stealing competence by the unexpected Deepti Naval) who combines in her person great tenderness as well as unspeakable cruelty. "<i>Jo karna tha, so karna tha</i>" is the motto of more than one person here, and the line is no throwaway, embodying the film's darkest insight: that we can inflict great cruelty on others when we feel there is no other choice; more accurately, that cruelty can be just as natural as breathing if it is woven into the texture of our immediate experience so finely that its ideological underpinnings may no longer be seen as anything other than natural.<br />
<br /></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-48730076437341429552015-01-26T09:16:00.004-05:002015-01-26T09:16:49.558-05:00A thought on Shamitabh's Trailers...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Shamitabh trailers <a href="https://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/shamitabh-trailer/">HERE</a><br />
<br />
When I think of Balki’s work I am reminded of those painters, like
Picasso or Turner, who take something we all take as a given– light,
shape — and bring it into issue by making it the subject of the work
(thereby changing our perception of the world). Balki has something of
the same vibe, of an experimenter, of someone who wants to play with his
material, except his material isn’t some universal given, but Amitabh
himself (although that choice speaks volumes about Amitabh’s role in
Bollywood). So these films are exercises in distorted Bachchan effects —
more accurately, exercises in what happens if everything remains the
same, but Bachchan is distorted (a child of his own child in Paa; a
disembodied voice in Shamitabh). All this could be fascinating (perhaps
as an oeuvre, when one looks back at it a few years later, rather than
film-by-film), but Balki also gives off the vibe of an ad man, and as
such, the risk is that it won’t amount to anything more than mere
effect. That is, does Paa tell us anything about the nature of the
Amitabh phenomenon, or of the wider world when the world’s Amitabh is
distorted? Not to detract from the film’s enjoyability, but I would say
that it does not. Shamitabh from the trailers seems even further along
the path of the gimmick (Paa at least had a moving story of loss,
fatherhood as its narrative core).</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-17531765548105295882015-01-10T04:34:00.001-05:002018-08-11T17:50:38.642-04:00A quick note on PK...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
The biggest intellectual issue I take with PK is one I often have with very many "well-intentioned" Hindi films, namely that it re-characterizes a straightforward political position into notions of fact/falsehood, even more so sincerity/insincerity. Thus the trope of the two-faced politician is a common one in Hindi films, but also in Indian society (I couldn't even begin to count the number of times people have told me that communal statements by politicians don't matter because what these chaps are "really" interested in is making money); the resulting cynicism has the virtue of not accepting the authority of those in power as a given, but is associated with the vice of paralyzing any kind of political thinking -- since the practice of politics ends up viewed as essentially the deployment of a kind of hypocrisy. PK's godmen suffer from the same problem: although the narrative arc initially seems to target the un-reasonableness of religious practice (and, delightfully, its complete relativism: the wine that is the blood of Christ itself becomes disgusting when transposed to a Muslim context), by the end it muddles into questions of fraud, and these take over the film. Any number of other issues are also loaded onto the charlatan (played with trademark comical nastiness by Saurabh Shukla), and before too long we also find in him the Muslim-baiter, the media manipulator -- in short, he becomes the very bete noire of the (imagined?) liberal audience. <br />
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But this doesn't logically follow: any number of Hindu godmen are anti-Muslim fanatics, but they aren't anti-Muslim BECAUSE they are charlatans. Perversely, by drawing an equivalence between illiberal, bigoted politics and sincerity, Hirani's film lets the godmen of all religions off the hook: the problem, we are made to see by film's end, is the "wrong number" of fraud, an incorrect connection tied to all sorts of ills. There is nothing in this to discomfit too many, either believers or godmen, since they can always resort to the place where PK doesn't go: the abode of the sincere (and what, after all, is fanaticism but sincerity taken to great extremes?). It's a bit of a cheap shot, the cinematic equivalent of Anna Hazare's movement: who, after all, is FOR corruption? [That the likes of the VHP and Bajrang Dal have nevertheless found this film objectionable is almost comical: they have demonstrated that however modest it may be, in them the film has found its target, not for charlatanry but for bigotry, the very raison d'être of these groups.] A progressive politics founded on such easy notions of truth and falsehood is building on sand -- what if Sarfaraz had in fact been a cad and a cheat? Would that have vindicated the godman's bigotry? It certainly SHOULD not, but the film points to a different direction.<br />
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I don't mean to be harsh on the film: the experience of watching it was very enjoyable, and PK can sustain numerous repeat viewings, on the strength of good dialog, some great scenes, the smooth staging of a relatively gentle, cartoonish world that is by now Hirani's forte, and an excellent, utterly convincing performance by Aamir Khan. But it lacks the edge it might have had (imagine a film that targets the bigotry of Shukla's character more directly, rather than the fact that he is also duping people) -- frankly, I wish Hirani had explored a different possibility inherent in this script about an alien stranded on Earth and forced to learn our ways, namely the utterly provisional nature of just about every social convention (whether pertaining to food, drink, dress, or religious practice). There are a few sequences early on that touch upon this theme (the temple-church-dargah juxtaposition with Aamir showing up with bottles of liquor at the last of these is my favorite), but the film isn't interested enough in this vein, treating this comedy as appetizer for the main course. A pity: it would have offered a surer, funnier base from which to mock India's bigots (of any religious persuasion, or of none).</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-23309083507183970162014-10-06T03:59:00.001-04:002014-10-06T08:07:13.183-04:00HAIDER (Hindi; 2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider</i> is at once the strongest
and weakest of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare adaptations: most of the film has
little to do with Hamlet, except in the loosest sense, and focuses on the
efforts of one Kashmiri Muslim youth (Shahid Kapoor, the Haider of the film’s
title) to find his father Dr. Hilal (Narendra Jha), who has joined the ranks of
the disappeared after he secretly treats a militant leader in his home, even as
Haider’s mother Ghazala (Tabu) draws closer to her brother-in-law Khurram (Kay
Kay Menon) in the wake of the tragedy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Paradoxically, these are in fact the strongest portions of the film,
which is perhaps the only popular Indian film “on Kashmir” to be made for
adults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freed of the need to draw cartoon
characters (the Good Kashmiri Muslim oppressed by the state; or the Good Indian
Army Officers protecting the state from evil jihadis), writers Basharat Peer and
Bhardwaj give us human ambiguity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
would have been easy to have Dr. Hilal treat the militant because of his
devotion to the Hippocratic oath – but the doctor is coy about his political
sympathies (even to his wife), and it is entirely possible that he is a
sympathizer; his son Haider is more openly hostile (and nor is this a function
simply of his father’s disappearance, as a flashback shows); and his wife
Ghazala isn’t ideologically committed to either side so much as fearful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the Claudius of this tale is not
hateful: Khurram’s name is well-chosen, the writers preferring to evoke the
specter of the Mughal Empire’s most glamorous fratricidal monarch, Shah Jahan,
rather than its most infamous, Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This concern with his characters’ irreducible
humanity, be they Kashmiri militants or ruthless local politicians (but not, it
must be said, Indian soldiers), is perhaps the most Shakespearean thing about
Bhardwaj’s adaptation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As homages to the
Bard go, one could do worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
One could also do better: the movie degenerates as it starts to hew more
closely to the plot of Hamlet, until, by the end, we are left with a farce that
has little to do with either Hamlet or good cinema.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a great pity, because through the first
two-thirds of the movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider </i>is Bhardwaj
at his most cinematic: the pacing is fantastic, the narrative grabs you and won’t
let go, to the point where I realized on multiple occasions that I was
half-holding my breath while watching the movie unfold – it didn’t seem to
matter just what was happening on screen, I couldn’t keep my eyes away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And oh, those visuals: this isn’t the Kashmir
of picture postcard valleys, but possessed of a more ordinary beauty, shabby
and wild.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Crucially for the film’s
texture (and perhaps for its politics), this beauty isn’t merely natural, but
cultural: we see the insides of wonderful old Kashmiri houses, intricately
carved woodwork (in one scene, a jaw-dropping headboard serves as backdrop to
Tabu’s face when she wakes up), and fabrics so lovely the heart aches to reach
out and touch them (the stand outs for me were a shawl Kulbushan (playing
Haider’s grandfather) wears in a flashback sequence at his home; and Tabu’s
black kurta with green embroidery at a public meeting: these are objects so
lovely they wound).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maqbool</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Omkara</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaminey</i>
prepared me for the open spaces and trees in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider</i>, and while cinematographer Pankaj Kumar surely deserves a
lot of credit, the memory of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Blue
Umbrella</i> suggests that Bhardwaj might have an especial affinity for the
Himalayan winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not since Mani Ratnam’s
“Satrangi” video from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dil Se</i> has
anyone captured any part of Kashmir so memorably – and that song was all of
seven minutes; Bhardwaj’s visuals demand more patience here, and their rewards
are gentler.<br />
<br />
Tabu deserves all the accolades she has been receiving for her performance,
and then some: her wary eyes, with shadows under them, make the movie
worthwhile on their own; and when we see her running after Haider after he sees
her singing and laughing with her brother-in-law, her fully covered bosom
disturbing the luxuriant kaftan she wears, we almost sympathize with Khurram:
if ever a woman was worth betraying your brother for, surely this is the one.
(Bhardwaj appreciates this fully: his Hamlet is post-Freudian, and the erotic
charge when the boy Haider applies ittar on his mother’s neck, or when the
adult Haider kisses it, is un-mistakable. One might speculate – although Bhardwaj
doesn’t do much with it – that Khurram’s trespass with Ghazala is unforgiveable
precisely because it gives flesh to Haider’s own traitorous desire.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shahid Kapoor does well as Haider (far better
than I had given him credit for after the first trailer), although Kay Kay,
while his usual enjoyable self, doesn’t imbue Khurram with the sort of nuance
the role demands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shraddha Kapoor’s
Arshia is under-written and inadequate as any kind of Ophelia, but (and this is
a compliment) she is barely recognizable as the actress from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ek Villain</i>, reminding us that few
contemporary Hindi film directors are as interested in female characters – or at
least their eyes – as Bhardwaj is.<br />
<br />
A number of viewers have objected to the film's politics as
"one-sided", that is, as sympathetic to the views of those in favor
of Kasmir's secession from India. The reality is a little more
complicated: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider</i> simply underscores
that every other popular Hindi film about Kashmir has been about abstractions,
about the Big Ideas of Peace, Love, Terrorism, and Indian nationalism, that is
to say about debates that the wider Indian public might or might not be engaged
in; while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider</i> throws in its lot
with representing the fabric of life in Kashmir for a certain kind of person at
certain moment in time. That is, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider</i>
offends inasmuch as, and precisely because, it insists on showing what the
world might seem like to a Kashmiri Muslim during the state's wretched 1990s,
replete with gross human rights abuses, black sites, state repression, and
militancy (both Pakistan- and India-sponsored), without embedding this into any
kind mainstream narrative. If the rest of us are offended by this
representation's indifference to how central Kashmir is to our notions, that
testifies to our political narcissism; indeed, Haider's (understandable)
narcissism -- his father's absent body embodies Kashmir to him -- unsettles us
precisely because it is the local reflection of our own, more national
self-regard. Haider is uninterested in any other story but that of his
father's betrayal by both his uncle and mother, and is indifferent to Ghazala's
pain in being trapped in a love-less marriage; to us, who have been similarly
indifferent, in the sense that we have for far too long been interested in
ideas of Kashmir, and what those say about the ideas of India (or Pakistan, for
that matter), rather than the people of Kashmir, Bhardwaj's mirror is
discomfiting.<br />
<br />
As an aside, there is something more than a little perverse on this
insistence on "balance", on pairing State atrocities with those
committed by militants, Kashmiri or otherwise. But such
"balance" yields not fairness but an equivalence between the Indian
state and non-state actors, an inadvertent concession of sovereignty's
attributes to those who cannot be deemed to legitimately possess them. In
their devotion, nationalism's adherents turn treasonous. More bluntly: the sort
of "fairness" that would lead one to invoke the specter of militant
abuses every time violations by arms of the State are discussed undermines the
position of the Indian state's adherents. There can't be any
"fairness" or "balance" because there isn't any counter to
the Indian state in Kashmir (to say that there is defeats the whole purpose,
which is why official channels, more sensitive to the attributes and
pretensions of sovereignty, prefer to deny claims of abuses, not, as Twitterati
and bloggers do, cite justificatory atrocities by the other side).<br />
<br />
I don’t mean to be coy here: the Indian Army is not the good team in this
movie, and nor are the soldiers we encounter fully realized characters the way
they would have been in a Shakespeare play; they serve here not as people but as
threatening manifestations of a power that is malign because it is
unaccountable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is bitterness at
this unaccountability, rather than any question of whether or not the
filmmakers are “anti-national,” that serves as the appropriate frame for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haider</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The very atrocities the film focuses on – extra-judicial killings and “disappearances”
too well-documented to be denied; torture; the government sponsoring of
militants to fight militants (amply reported in the mainstream media itself);
the power over life and death afforded by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (“AFSA”),
a statute that blights life in several states, not just Kashmir – testify to
this, marking out the contours of a grievously injured liberalism and political
culture, of which Kashmir is merely one symptom. (Likewise, I am not
insensitive to the fact that this film cleared the censors, and despite the
rumored cuts and alterations that entailed, the fact that it was cleared at all
is striking, and does the Board a lot of credit.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, the injustice of this
unaccountability is a better frame for the film than even Hamlet is, as
Bhardwaj and Peer re-work a number of the play’s tropes into commentary on
Kashmir: thus, “to be or not to be” is here not an expression of any
interiority, but the state of limbo the families of the disappeared find
themselves in; the same is true of the disappeared themselves, the ghosts who
haunt Kashmir from beyond the grave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
doesn’t help illuminate Hamlet for us, but it does serve to shed some light
over Kashmir.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-23214854317498807092014-09-09T00:20:00.000-04:002014-09-09T00:23:52.905-04:00BOYHOOD (English; 2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boyhood </i>– which I saw earlier this evening – has to be one of the most satisfying cinematic experiences of my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was initially skeptical of the central device that has garnered most of the attention since the film’s release, namely Richard Linklater’s tracking of his actor Ellar Coltrane (the boy in the film’s title), over the decade that he made the film, as Coltrane grows from six- or seven year-old to college freshman; but this move, along with wonderful editing and Linklater’s mastery of unhurried narrative that is always engrossing, enables the director to represent the passage of time in a more meaningful way than just about any other film I can think of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So completely did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boyhood</i> draw me into its world, so thoroughly did the film evoke the rhythms of ordinary lives in early twenty-first century Texas, that I found myself caring for the film’s characters – not just Coltrane’s Mason but his parents, Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), each also played by actors whose real-life aging is captured on-screen – more deeply than is true of other movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the time the viewer feels he has spent with these people, Boyhood is reminiscent of great nineteenth century-novels, or contemporary television series – yet the film is short of three hours, and, given that it has been shot over such a long period, remarkably compressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In this, it is the opposite of the director’s Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight trilogy, each of which represented a relatively short period of time drawn out over the film’s time at greater length than is typical for movies, creating the illusion that the films captured the characters’ encounters in something close to “real time”.)<br />
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Coltrane’s wistful eyes and furrowed brow – at every age – anchor the film, even as the effect of his gesturality changes from melancholy early on to a charmingly laid-back form of cool by film’s end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But both Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are outstanding as well, the latter as the absent-but-loving father who changes from a left-leaning young man into a middle-aged pillar of the bourgeoisie; and the former as his ex-wife, who makes more than one disastrous romantic decision but emerges strong and successful – hers is the character you really root for.<br />
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What’s the film about?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What are all coming-of-age books or movies about? But just when I thought that the film’s ambition was to represent a young, creative consciousness, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boyhood </i>surprised me: “I thought there would be more” are an anguished Olivia’s last words in the film, articulating both her drive and the naïveté underlying it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There isn’t, really, but that doesn’t make the ending bleak: the film’s last shot is of Mason and a new friend after they’ve just agreed that life isn’t about seizing the moment, but about the moments seizing you, because they’re all there is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The insight retrospectively structures the movie, studded as it is with scenes – father and son on a hike; an unlikely testimonial as to how Olivia has changed someone’s life; Mason Jr. and his girlfriend’s night out in Austin – that remind me, despite my own preference in recent years for the best of American TV when it comes to storytelling, of just what is possible in cinema: beauty. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-76469986481151937482014-03-08T09:58:00.001-05:002014-03-08T09:58:35.180-05:00A Note on QUEEN (Hindi; 2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It would be easy to dismiss director Vikas Bahl's <i><b>Queen</b></i> as the sort of movie one has often seen in Hollywood, and that is increasingly common in Bollywood: suffused with a kind of cheap liberalism that makes one root for a sympathetic and intensely imagined female character, in a world populated by a number of men who are, not to put too fine a point on it, assholes, and who in some way, shape or form will get what's coming to them. <i>Queen</i> certainly is that, but it is also quirky, charming, and at times very funny, so much so that by the end I was reminded that cheap liberalism isn't the worst thing in the world. If movies had hearts, this one -- about a bride-to-be who won't let a little thing like having a wedding called off get in the way of a "honeymoon" to Paris and Amsterdam, each city with gurus ready to initiate her into "real life" -- would have its in the right place, even if there's never any doubt about what you'll find there.<br />
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The film is a triumph for Kangana Ranaut, who not only carries it off, but almost HAS to, for the film to be even remotely credible. (The other actors don't have very much to do beyond play assigned stock characters -- there's a smattering of assorted Punjabis; Raj Kumar Rao's Vijay is Rani's fiancé and a prick; Bokyo Mish's Olik is the sensitive European roommate; Lisa Haydon is well-cast as a Paris hottie with a heart of gold; and the ensemble has more than a little affinity with <i>English Vinglish</i>, the nastiness of "Mind Your Language" smoothed into a cheerful multiculturalism.) Rani understands what even the filmmakers do not, namely that Rani is odd, a bit of a misfit in the world, not because she is an "ordinary middle-class girl" from Delhi (the condescending way in which far too many slice-of-life films -- including this one -- are made and marketed these days), but because she is simply odd (to that end, the actress' mumbling dialogue delivery, an irritant in other films, works wonderfully well here). Ranaut plays Rani as standing out even in her own family, a bit of a wounded bird in a stereotypically raucous Punjabi brood, more child than adult. Ranaut is right to do so, enabling her to serve as a more effective vehicle for the film's representation of female liberation than any number of ideologues. Stated differently, Rani isn't liberal or progressive -- she simply suspends judgment on the new people and experiences and encounters, poking gentle fun at a bourgeois tendency to the opposite. <i>Queen</i> eschews many of the usual Bollywood stereotypes about Westerners (none tries to rape her; no-one is racist; and Paris (far more than Amsterdam) seems like a real place), at least occasionally turning its lens toward desi complacency.<br />
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A word about the music: the maddeningly inconsistent Amit Trivedi is in good form here, and not only with the superb remix of <i>Anhonee</i>'s Laxmikant-Pyarelal "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anJQ5MOl5Y8">Hungama ho gaya</a>" (the choice is a clever one: that song's lyrics are also about a (gendered?) double-standard, even if the video is good old-fashioned Bindu sleaze): "Badra Bahaar", "O Gujariya", and "Harjaaiyan" seem promising, although I'll have to spend some more time with the album (I came to the film unfamiliar with its sound, barring the remix).<br />
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Films like <i>Queen</i> do run a certain risk: commercial realities mean that they can end up pandering to the very audience they satirize, and there is a bit of that in this film too: thus, culinary xenophobia, a staple of both Bollywood and bourgeois Indian culture, is barely questioned here, despite the open invitation in the form of an Italian chef who sneers at Rani's preference for "Indianizing" every kind of food (rather than engaging with it on its own terms). This particular story arc ends predictably: with the triumph of Indian food over other kinds of cuisine, staged in a manner that confirms prejudices rather than undermines them. This isn't a huge deal, but is symptomatic of the unspoken taboo that Hindi films, because of Hindi film audiences, adhere to: don't make people uncomfortable (otherwise-commercial films like <i>Dum Maaro Dum</i>, <i>Delhi-6</i> or <i>Raavan</i> ignore this at their peril; while even films safely couched in "art-house" idiom -- <i>Gangs of Wasseypur</i> comes to mind -- can be accepted if their disturbing representations are normalized at an anthropological remove: someone, somewhere out there, is this way, not us). But while watching <i>Queen</i>, I didn't think any of those things, because I was too busy rooting for Rani, the woman at the center of the film, and for the underdog story underlying the casting: once an also-ran, Kangana Ranaut has left Bollywood's queens in her wake. </div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-87819093921277806232014-02-22T17:31:00.004-05:002014-02-22T17:36:09.139-05:00Phir se aaiyo...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I just saw <i>Namkeen</i>, a film I hadn't previously seen, and nor had I heard any of its songs. The highlight was undoubtedly "Phir se aaiyo, badariya bidesi," a song of heartbreaking loveliness. Asha and R.D. Burman suffuse this song with great longing as well as restraint (the latter embodied in Asha's low vocal ranges here); this has to be one of the best songs from the 1980s that I've encountered -- it is simply bewitching:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-wG3o_z_vw">LINK</a><br />
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In both <i>Namkeen</i> and <i>Mausam</i>, Gulzar uses the somewhat discomfiting trope of the woman/women who need rescue, and can't be free unless and until saved by a man; that is hardly new, but in both films Gulzar also features the empathetic male figure who seems to be culpable precisely because of his engagement with the women stuck in a horrible situation; this commitment is in fact what enables him to be a traitor of sorts, to enable irreparable injury out of feebleness. The result isn't entirely satisfying, but perhaps Gulzar is best appreciated as an evoker of mood, of a nameless melancholia that pervades so many of his films: I don't find it the most successful aesthetic when married to the figure of the lost woman, but transplanted to the terrain of a ruined city -- the Mandu of <i>Kinara</i> -- it works a quiet magic. </div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15324170.post-88247994084051216352014-02-13T06:16:00.000-05:002014-02-13T06:16:04.068-05:00A brief note on WOLF OF WALL STREET (English; 2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I must confess this film left me a bit cold, at least insofar as it wasn't simply a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio to try and win an Oscar. Leo is pretty darn good as Jordan Belfort, the self-made millionaire stockbroker who never saw a corner he couldn't cut, playing him with just the right amount of obnoxiousness and arriviste air, but the film seemed indulgent, and tonally inconsistent. At times farce, comedy, and grim commentary on America's (and perhaps the world's) cult of money, the film is littered with brilliant moments -- a couple of DiCaprio's addresses on the Stratton Oakmont floor stand out -- but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. For that reason, it will be worth re-visiting in bits and pieces, on DVD.<br />
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But there is something Scorsese gets right, that no other such film does, certainly not in so comprehensive a way. Other films document a fall from grace caused by hubris, without disturbing the essential glamor of the central character. Scorsese and DiCaprio don't take this route, and the film is relentless in showing the degradation to which Belfort's character sinks (the final drug overdose; the sequence where DiCaprio gets violent with his wife, are cases in point). The easy titillation of Belfort's enjoyment of his wealth isn't where this film stops; it's where it starts to get interesting. It ends up some editing away from greatness.</div>
Qalandarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08822440676942755461noreply@blogger.com0