Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

Seeing each other home

My Mirror column:

Ghar, released 40 years ago, is usually remembered for its delightful songs, but it remains a most unusual treatment of love in cinema.

There are three good reasons to remember Ghar this week. One, the film was released on 9 February 1978, which means it just turned 40. Two, the late Vinod Mehra, who starred in it opposite Rekha, would have turned 73 on 13 February. And three, we’re just emerging from Valentine’s Day which, even if it’s meant to sell flowers and soppy cards, makes it a good time to talk about a film that takes love seriously.

Ghar opens in a setting that was once a fixture of popular Bombay cinema: the opulent two-storied mansion with the grand staircase and the vast dining table, at which the businessman father sits, absorbed in a newspaper. But almost as soon as Vinod Mehra, playing the young protagonist Vikas Chandra, comes downstairs to join Madan Puri at breakfast, it becomes apparent that Manik Chatterjee’s 1978 film is going to fill this familiar world with rather less familiar things.

The first sign of this is the quietly cinematic way Chatterjee captures the distance between father and son. Mehra sits down at the place laid for him, quite far from Puri. A neatly-clad servant brings him toast. Puri passes him the butter dish – not by leaning across the table, but via the servant who carries it between father and son in a tray. Screenwriter Dinesh Thakur’s dialogue, too, experiments with realistic pauses and an economy unusual for a Hindi film of the time: in response to his father’s questions about arranging his marriage, Mehra responds with a half-hearted “Papa main... abhi kya...”, trailing off into silence.

The film goes on to sketch the contrast between Vikas’s home and that of his girlfriend (Rekha). The easy intimacy of Aarti’s home underscores the echoing silence between Vikas and his father. When the doorbell rings at Aarti’s, it is her mother who answers, and Vikas is nearly hit in the eye by a ball from Aarti’s little brother Raghu.

Aarti’s, too, is a single-parent home, but her bespectacled sooti-sari-wearing mother, whom she calls “Mamma”, laughs easily with her daughter’s boyfriend. That relaxed, intimate vibe isn’t ruptured even by Raghu’s cheeky sasural jokes.

The mood of banter extends into Vikas’s office, where the film serves up another rare character in the shape of Prema Narain: a female colleague who is aclose friend to the hero without being a vamp or a threat. Her flirtatious chatter – introduced to Aarti as Vikas’s “would-be wife”, she immediately names herself as the “could-be” – is never misconstrued by either him or Aarti.

Ghar offers a rare Hindi film example of the love marriage achieved without drama. The expected objections from Vikas’s father count for little when our hero has a job and makes up his mind.

The court registry marriage, with the carload of colleagues and the friendly boss as a father figure, is followed by a period of domestic bliss, achieved first in a borrowed house and then finally a rented flat of their own.

The second thing that makes Ghar’s portrayal of these newlyweds rare for Hindi cinema is the warm sexual intimacy that is gestured to: the relationship seems friendly and loving, and Aarti’s participation in it extends happily beyond the coy refusals and sidelong glances that were afforded to many heroines of the time.

It probably helps that the white kurta-pajama-clad Vinod Mehra with dishevelled morning hair can make even puffing cigarette smoke into Rekha’s face seem like a charming romantic gesture.

But what makes the film truly remarkable, of course, is the traumatic event that ruptures this cosy togetherness. After a late night show at the cinema – the film is Loafer – the couple are walking home when a gang of drunken louts descend on them. Unlike in the many versions of this scene that Hindi films have shown us, four armed men overpower the hero easily: Vikas is beaten up badly and Aarti gang-raped.

The scenes showing Aarti under observation in hospital are perhaps the film’s weakest – Rekha’s unseeing eyes as she turns her head and seems to look past Vikas, her repeated attempts at suicide are realistically conceived but badly executed. Thakur’s screenplay also elides the difficult terrain of the police case. But it deserves applause for its focus on the pressures an incident like this places on even the strongest relationship. The rape is front page news, and that media exposure – even forty years ago – makes the couple profoundly vulnerable. Concern-trolling neighbours, stupefied awkward colleagues, and callously gossiping strangers all take their toll, especially on Vikas.

With Aarti, his reaction to the rape has been one of grave sorrow and loving concern. But so entrenched is the social construction of sexual purity that Aarti now needs to be convinced of his love, over and over. The film marks the shift of body language beautifully – the traumatised Aarti suddenly seems like a child, afraid, in need of hand-holding. But the more patient and loving Vikas is to her, the more disconcerted she becomes. She tells him not to pity her. Then she accuses him of being excessively loving to make up for the fact that what happened happened to her and not him. These are difficult conversations. He snaps. He slaps her.

Neither Ghar nor its hero is flawless. But there’s something warm and honest and courageous about both that makes one want to look beyond their failings. And that, one might say, is what love is about.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Feb 2018.