MANMARZIYAN (Hindi; 2018)

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.  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.  One is almost tempted to say it doesn’t belong, except that in India, it sort of does.

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.  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 enfant terrible.  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. 

Kashyap doesn’t waste time, establishing locale and character with great economy in the film’s opening sequences.  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.  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.

One cannot go much further without talking about the performances, for these make the film, sustaining it even when the writing flags.  The free-spirited “small town girl” (recently spotted in Bareilly ki Barfi, 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.  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.  (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.  The implication, that violent misogyny is to blame, hangs in the air, discomfiting the viewer.  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.)

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.  “Difficult” in that Dhillon and Kashyap give him only one note to hit, and he could easily have lapsed into cartoonish buffoonery.  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.  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.  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 Masaan, Raman Raghav 2.0, and Raazi.

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 Laaga Chunri Mein Daag; and Umraaojan’s Nawab Sultan come to mind).  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 his.  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.  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.  (Nor, one must concede, does Robbie: I wondered why he continues to be drawn to Rumi.)   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.  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.  Just watch him as he stumbles out onto the street with the film’s best song, Halla, playing in the background.  One might think the fate of the world hung in the balance. (The rest of Amit Trivedi’s album is quite a ways below Halla, and nowhere near Dev D, but is reminiscent of the latter in its centrality to the film.  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.)

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.  Many actors can do justice to their roles, but few add dimension the way Sachdeva does here.

The first half of Manmarziyan 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 Gangs of Wasseypur’s opening sequences than of the standard-issue Punjabi love story), it perhaps should have been the film.  Heck, Kashyap even displays a hitherto unsuspected talent for staging masala-style songs in the lovable “Dhyaan kithe Dhyanchand?” video.  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 Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam).  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. 

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.  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.  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.  Indeed, it is hard to think of a more sympathetic bunch of cinematic parents and relatives than the ones in this film.  This is bolder than it seems, and I laud Kashyap and Dhillon for it.  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.  Manmarziyan 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.  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 shaadi to save; even if we presume one will follow off-camera, it isn’t clear everyone can root for this couple.  For this genre, on this terrain, that will have to be enough.

A Brief Note on THE SHADOW EMPEROR (2018)

The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III by Alan Schom
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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.


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Requiem for Test Cricket

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 canceled a home test series against Bangladesh  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.)  Coming on the heels of England’s recent announcement of a 100-ball format, 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). 

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.  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?  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.  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).  It wasn’t so many years ago that fans worried about the devaluation of test cricket, with the likes of Australia’s Matthew Hayden scoring 380 against an anemic Zimbabwe. 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.  (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.)

Maheshenthe Prathikaaram (Malayalam; 2016)

The charms of Maheshenthe Prathikaaram, 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.  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.

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.  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.  

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 masala 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 masala while re-affirming its central gestures, as shown by the likes of Vikram Vedha; 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).  Malayalam cinema is itself no stranger to crude masala 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.  I enjoyed the likes of Bangalore Days, Ustad Hotel and Kammatipaadam quite a bit, but too many of these risk the permanent displacement of Malayalam cinema in favor of Hindi and Tamil cinema.

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).  Maheshenthe Prathikaaram is a worthy addition to this tradition, drawing viewers in with a painstakingly constructed sense of place and character.  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.  

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 Maheshenthe Prathikaaram, 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).  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.

[Added 3/1/18:

Fahadh Faasil is excellent in the title role, and one really has to have seen him in other films (Bangalore Days, for instance) to appreciate how immersed he is playing the part of a small-town photographer specializing in weddings and passport shots.  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).]

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. 

Hard, but not impossible: Anthony Kochi deserves especial attention for his turn as Mahesh’s mostly silent father, Vincent.  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.  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).  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.

Maheshenthe Prathikaaram 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.  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.  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: Maheshenthe Prathikaaram 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.  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.

Book Review: Kashmir's Contested Pasts

My review is up on H-Net; thank you Professor Guha for commissioning it!

A Brief Note on "A Colony in a Nation" (2017)

A Colony in a Nation by Christopher L. Hayes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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.)



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PHILLAURI (Hindi; 2017)

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.

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 Kannathil Muthamittal, 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.  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?

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.  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.  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?”).  The result is that they become ridiculous, devoid of the dignity of either the unembarrassed believer or the proud rationalist.  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.   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?  That is, Kanan can act as if 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.

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.  Phillauri 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 Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara could be a poet?  Or that Siddharth Malhotra's and Fawad Khan's characters could have collectively written four novels between them in Kapoor & Sons?)

It’s also easy to take Roop Lal’s music seriously when the film features two songs as memorable as “Dum Dum” and “Sahibaan”.  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).  Neither song is imaginable without the disarming freshness of Anvita Dutt’s romantic imagery: if you don’t respond to “O Sahibaan, O Sahibaan / Hijr ki chot hai laagi re / O Sahibaan / Jigar hua hai baaghi re” or “O tere bina saans bhi / Kaanch si, kaanch si, kaate, kaate re”, you might need to be punished with a diet of Badshah forever.

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 Udta Punjab, he steals almost every scene he is in.  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.  (I found myself wishing Rakeysh Mehra had cast Diljit Dosanjh rather than Harshvardhan Kapoor in Mirzya.)  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: not at all), and less impressive as the ghost in the comic scenes set in the present.  (Among the other actors, Salima Raza stood out as Kanan’s perennially drinking grandmother, with some wonderful comic timing.)

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.  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).  That sort of problem – and it is a huge problem – would have sunk most other films; but Phillauri’s heart is in the right place, its old-world charms too potent to be completely wasted by “new Bollywood” badness.  The same might be said of the producer Anushka Sharma, who has now followed up the relentlessly grim NH10 with this (uneven) charmer: I can’t wait to see what she gets behind next.

Why I Have Nothing to Say About Dangal

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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.  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.

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.  The “nothing” is symptomatic of a wider issue, namely that Dangal is a very impressive film – just not a very interesting one.  Is that a high bar?  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.  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 in order to make us feel good about ourselves. 

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.  What is, after all, the “message” of Dangal?  That girls and women are just as good as men?  But who could disagree with that?  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?  And that is 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.  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.  Nothing should be off-limits simply because one is female.

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.  This matters because, in today’s day and age, sexism and other forms of discrimination do not announce themselves as such (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.  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.).  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.

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.  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 “…dekh taj ke paap Raavan Ram tere mann mein hai” pointing to a more complicated, more suggestive link).  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.  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).  From this perspective Bajrangi Bhaijan 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.

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.  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.  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.  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. 

(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.  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.)

What could be less feminist than this double move?  For Dangal, feminism isn’t even worthy of standing alone as something worth striving for – the something that is worth striving for, that is valuable in and of itself, is nationalism, and women’s empowerment can help that goal.  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?  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)?  What happens, in short, when the quest for justice does not bring national glory?  On that, it seems, Dangal has nothing to say.

A Brief Note on Visaranai (Tamil; 2016)

I just saw Visaaranai, 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 Visaaranai 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.

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).