Home on the Train

My column for TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror:

What the 1956 Ava Gardner starrer Bhowani Junction tells us about the British, Anglo-Indians and the railways in colonial India 

In last week's column, I drew on Awtar Kaul's film 27 Down to evoke the way that India's train network can sometimes stand in for the country itself. But of course, the Indian Railways were not always so Indian. Along with cricket and the English language, trains are often spoken of as one of the 'gifts' of British colonialism. Such imperialist phrasing remains fiercely debated, as it should be, given that the British certainly didn't create the railway network to connect Indians with one another, or even primarily for passengers. The railways were built to help transport raw materials and finished goods, to speed up the opening of the Indian market to the colonial economy -- and British private investors were guaranteed returns by the government, based on Indian revenues.

But what was created was something that endured, and became the lifeline of the empire. It isn't surprising, then, that the British colonial imagination identified deeply with the railways. One of the films to display this most vividly was the 1956 MGM extravaganza Bhowani Junction, directed by George Cukor (Gaslight, The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady) and based on a bestselling 1954 novel of the same name by John Masters.

Masters, who had served in the British Indian army, set his narrative just before Independence, crafting a classic colonial story in which the noble British are only trying to pull out peacefully while the Congress leadership is intent on the non-violent but continuous disruption of peace, and a violent Indian Communist organiser is trying to make sure there is a “bloodbath” when the British leave – so that “Moscow” can take over. And fascinatingly, almost all the action in the film revolves around trains. Some sequences make only incidental or dramatic use -- such as a passing train hiding a murder. But in most, the railways have a starring role: The action involves either letting a train through (to rescue dangerous explosives), rescuing victims from a deliberate train accident (caused by the villainous Communist straw man), or preventing a train from blowing up with Gandhi on board (an artfully colonial postcolonial narrative, in which it is a British colonel who keeps the great Indian alive).

Whatever one thinks of this portrayal of India (with not a single Indian in the primary cast, of course, and white actors in blackface spouting a bizarre range of accents), Masters had enough experience of India to get some things right. He knew that colonial policy had staffed the railways, especially at the lower rungs, with Anglo-Indians – a mixed-race community that was equally a creation of empire. And so Bhowani Junction's heroine is an Anglo-Indian. Played by the striking Hollywood star Ava Gardner, Victoria Jones makes her cinematic entry getting off a train -- in uniform, but on leave. After four years at headquarters in Delhi, she's coming home – to her sleepy old town, her Anglo-Indian engine driver father and her waiting Anglo-Indian boyfriend Patrick, who also works in the railways.

But 'home' seems harder and harder to define. The British are preparing to leave India for good, leaving the Anglo-Indians vulnerable to both political and social upheaval. Their unspoken position in the social hierarchy is articulated in the film in Patrick's rather sad sense of racial superiority -- below the colonial masters, but striving to be somehow above the vast mass of Indians. Meanwhile, there are European villains -- British men who see Anglo-Indian girls as fair prey game; Western in tastes and dress, but not deserving of the same moral niceties as a genuine English memsahib. Victoria – despite her unsurpassably colonial naming for the late queen -- doesn't identify with the British, but she doesn't feel Indian either. So she spends much of the film trying to become 'truly' Indian, which seems to involve exchanging her skirts for diaphanous saris and contemplating conversion to Sikhism to marry her seriously dull suitor.

Victoria doesn't succeed. But what's incredible is how much Bhowani Junction, despite its impeccable Hollywood credentials, feels like an Indian melodrama. The slipping sari pallu, of course, but also a film told entirely in flashback by the hero – on a train; and sequences like the one in a gurdwara, where Gardner's character, with a dupatta on her head, has a dizzy spell while replaying all the film's previous important dialogues loudly inside her head, complete with imaginary echoes, in a way that would have fitted right into Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki.

Running (literally) from this crisis of identity, where does our Anglo-Indian heroine go? She turns up at the railway yard, to fall gratefully into the arms of her estranged engine-driver father – whom she calls Pater – and climb into the driver's cab with him. Like 27 Down's Sanjay, 20 years later, Victoria is a child of the railways. The trains she once childishly imagined as taking her to England, are now her safe space. India may be complicated, but the railway is home.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 11 Apr 2021.

Under the influence

My Mirror column:

The under-watched classic Bigger Than Life turns family drama into almost-horror, with prescient warnings against modern medicine and delusional masculinity

 
The first 20 minutes of Bigger Than Life seem to paint a picture of the perfect family man, who’s also a hard-working, pleasant colleague. A schoolteacher in suburban 1950s America, Ed Avery (James Mason in a career-defining performance) is the nice guy you ask to help push your stalled car, the guy who lets the kid in detention go if he can name one Great Lake out of the five, the guy who sprints on to the last bus after school to work a second job at a garage.

But those first 20 minutes also show us that Ed is also the sort of guy who thinks he can handle everything, and do so alone: he hasn’t told his wife about the garage job because she’ll think it’s beneath him, nor mentioned the pains he’s had for six months because he thinks they’re nothing. So it doesn’t seem surprising that when he’s forced to go to hospital after a blackout, his first instinct is to instruct his little son Richie to be “the man around here” and “take care of your mother”.

On the surface, Nicholas Ray’s film is about the dangerous mental side effects of a miracle drug for the body. Ed is diagnosed with a rare inflammation of the arteries, and treated successfully with cortisone – until he starts to take it in excess. The mood swings, paranoia and manic depression that result only reinforce his impaired judgement, making him take still more pills. Screenwriters Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum based the script on an article called ‘Ten Feet Tall’ by Berton Roueché, medical staff writer for The New Yorker, about a real schoolteacher’s experience with high-dosage cortisone. And though this is 1950s America, and patient and doctor are well-acquainted, even friendly, the film clearly indicates how alienating hospitalisation is: the non-stop tests, the solitary confinement, the ghostliness of barium meal, the unrecognisable medical jargon in which you hear your own body described.

But Ray, a director more famous for films such as Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place, was a man both ahead of his time and able to see into the depths of it. Released in 1956, when much of America was watching the era-defining sitcom Father Knows Best, Bigger Than Life revealed the frightening cracks in that idyllic ’50s family picture. At one level, Ed Avery’s symptoms are those of a mentally ill man, but he can certainly also be viewed as a barely-exaggerated version of the ordinary neighbourhood patriarch, the father who thinks he knows best even when he clearly doesn’t. This is the man insecure about being a “male schoolmarm”, who also has delusions of grandeur about schooling the nation. He insults his wife (“What a shame I couldn’t have married... my intellectual equal!”) and pushes his child beyond breaking point in the name of prepping him for the real world (“If you let it at ‘good enough’ right now, that’s the way you’ll be later on.”).

The film is also a powerful indictment of the pressures of life in a consumerist era, for a man trying to give himself and his family a good life on a single schoolteacher’s salary. The Averys’ house is filled with posters of faraway European holiday destinations, and there are wry, hopeful conversations about vacations and “getting away from it all” – while the camera often focuses on James Mason’s watch, and time and lateness is a frequent topic. The tight budgeting that makes Ed work a secret second job has as its flip side the grandiose display he indulges in when under the influence of the cortisone: hustling his wife into a fancy designer store, being rude to the saleswomen, and insisting on buying her two expensive dresses with a cheque that eventually bounces.

The more unbalanced Ed gets, the more he is convinced that he is the only smart person around. The milkman’s jangling of a bell seems to him deliberately designed to annoy him “because I work with my mind”, the other drivers on the street irritate him, his son and wife disappoint him, and the children he teaches for a living seem to him idiots. “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets,” he declares at a PTA meeting, eliciting mostly gasps of disbelief – but also a couple of votes for future school principal.

Watching Bigger Than Life in 2020, the self-aggrandising family man who thinks the country needs to do away with “all this hogwash about self-expression, permissiveness and emotional security” and focus on inculcating “a sense of duty” feels terrifyingly familiar. He might be your neighbour, your uncle, your father or your boss. And his condition is getting worse, under the influence of a collective drug called nationalism, being doled out for free at a counter near you.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 February 2020.

The Lord of Light: Robert Richardson

A short Q&A with renowned cinematographer Robert Richardson, for India Today. 

Photo credit: Yasir Iqbal, India Today

Robert Richardson, 63, has won the Academy Award for cinematography three times, for JFK (1991), The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). He received a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in March. We caught up with him on a brief visit to Delhi. 

Q: You’ve been a cinematographer for nearly four decades. The technology has changed a fair bit. Has what makes a good cinematographer changed? 
The techniques have changed. The speed of film altered first. In the studio system, with highlighting, to trying to do no lighting, yet having slow speed so you had to do lighting. And then you moved into digital, which had a higher speed, so lighting started to disappear altogether. It’s more about shading than lighting. Composition altered. You got the handheld shot. All changes created by technology.

Q. Almost all ‘films’ are now shot in the digital format. Do you see this more as a loss or a gain?
I could take both those perspectives. Film has been developed for years as a way to capture human skin tone more naturally. It has a softer resonance. But digital’s moving into a larger space of comfort, a wider range of capture. Also, you have to use less light to achieve the look.

Q. So would one argument for the digital format be about being closer to life, more natural? 
That’s where they’ve gone. But, in a film, you’re telling a story. Even a writer can’t do that in a ‘natural’ manner. Why should a cinematographer?

Q. You’ve had close working partnerships with great directors like Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. Have you ever been tempted to direct? 
I’ve been tempted. But it didn’t fall into the well.

Q. Do you have a favourite film among your own? 
I can never do the favourite film thing! There’s films I don’t like. But the ones I do love, all happened for different reasons: Salvador was my first film, Platoon my most emotional, JFK was what I wanted to move forward to. Between The Aviator and A Private War, how can one be judged better?

Q. You’ve often shot on a grand scale, but you became a cinematographer after watching more intimate work: Sven Nyqvist on Ingmar Bergman’s films, and Nestor Almendros on Eric Rohmer’s films. Does scale matter to you, personally?
Scale is a complicated thing. When you do something on a very large scale, say, a tentpole film like World War Z, that has a more commercial aspect: you have to move within studio requirements. But with, say, A Private War, or Wall Street, the studio makes no demands. A powerful director who can keep control, that’s more important than a film’s scale.

Q. What’s it like to shoot in India? 
I have shot here before. Eat, Pray, Love, and commercials: Microsoft, and now Absolut. Today was 114 degrees F! But I love the concern, the movement. It’s chaotic. The chaos is what’s beautiful.

Published in India Today, 24 June 2019 issue.

A Star Implodes

My Mirror column:

The newest version of A Star is Born updates the classic to our times — but its central narrative remains, more than ever, that of a man destroying himself.

Remakes are fascinating things, so long as you aren’t profoundly attached to the original. The first two versions of A Star is Born (1937 and 1954) revealed the underbelly of the Hollywood studio system, while the 1976 film and the newest one are set in the music industry.

Other differences abound. The pioneering grandmother figure who provided the 1937 heroine both inspiration and monetary backing, for instance, vanished from the 1954 and 1976 films, only to be reworked in the 2018 version into the heroine’s proud father — a chauffeur who talks of how he could have been a bigger crooner than Frank Sinatra.

But characters and setting apart, the new film directed by Bradley Cooper (and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga) retains the narrative core of the previous three iterations — a legendary male artiste with addiction issues discovers and helps promote a younger woman, only to find his career collapsing as hers begins to soar.

There’s something inescapably gendered about both parts of this premise. First, the supremely talented young woman who needs the older male star to tell her she’s good before she can even begin to see herself as an artist of any worth. And second, the man’s inability to deal with the fact of his romantic partner’s success, leading to jealousy and depression and growing substance abuse, ending in tragedy. Given that the first film was made over 80 years ago, it seems striking that this dual narrative — of female empowerment by a man and of the man’s consequent decline in the face of that empowerment — has stayed so substantially the same.

It isn’t, of course, that there have been no shifts in the dynamic. The 1937 Esther Blodgett first catches the 1937 Norman Maine’s eye based on her looks, not her talent. This despite the fact that their meeting is part of a scene that’s one of the only times we actually see Janet Gaynor’s Esther ‘act’: as a waitress at a big Hollywood party, she does slightly exaggerated comic imitations of various stars while serving hors d'oeuvres. But Fredric March’s Norman Maine begins a flirtation and decides she is star material without even having seen her do that little act.

By 1954, things are a little less shallow: James Mason’s version of Norman Maine starts flirting with Judy Garland’s Esther Blodgett after she has rescued him from a public drunken spectacle, and only pronounces on her talent after having heard her sing in the small band of which she is a part. In the 2018 film, real-life musical star Lady Gaga puts in an incandescent performance as Ally, a waitress who often performs among friends in a drag bar, but has never had the confidence to sing her own lyrics in public until literally dragged on stage by rockstar Jackson Maine (Cooper), who has secretly done an arrangement for a song she sang for him in private.

Many other parts of the romantic connection between the two protagonists have remained constant through all four films. For instance, the male star’s attraction to the younger heroine is expressed at least partly in assuring her that she is fine the way she is, and that her hair or face or nose doesn’t need to be altered in order to make her marketably attractive. That stress on Esther/Ally’s ‘naturalness’ is part of the vision of her character as ‘unspoilt’, a study in contrast to the artifice that is presented as the norm within the entertainment industry. Allied to this is the whirlwind romance, with the desire for a secret elopement and a quiet wedding coming up against the business interests that would benefit from making the star couple’s lives a media event, rather than letting them live out their fantasy of everyday domesticity.

But what seems to me particularly interesting about the heroine’s ‘unspoilt’ status is the way in which her freshness and her outsider status become ways in which the man seeks to rejuvenate himself. In the 1937 and 1954 films, that sense of rejuvenation is only personal, not professional: Norman Maine does not actually seek to recharge his actorly creativity by working with Esther. In 2018, though, Ally’s first appearance on stage is with Jack, and the video of their performance goes viral — making her instantly famous, but also giving him a new lease of life.
At many levels, Cooper’s 2018 hero is more sympathetic than the previous versions. Unlike in the 1937 and 1954 films, for example, Maine's drunken appearance at his partner’s award ceremony does not actually involve him snatching her microphone and taking over her acceptance speech to make a derisive or depressed one of his own. Male entitlement is not quite as vocal as it used to be. But the embarrassment Cooper’s character makes of himself is as bad, made worse by today's digital amplification. Also, his nasty jealous rage expresses itself in private, couched as accusations of selling out creatively.

It as if the more deeply intertwined their creative lives are, the more he actually draws artistic validation from her, the more sophisticated his competitive equation with her becomes. Somehow even the reconstructed man is still making it all about himself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Oct 2018.

A brief guide to Guide

My Mirror column:

60 years ago, RK Narayan wrote a novel that became a Hindi film classic. But he was not happy. Ahead of his 112th birth anniversary, let’s ask why that might have been.

Most readers of this column have probably seen the 1965 Guide: Dev Anand plays a dapper tour guide who falls for an unhappily married Waheeda Rehman. But this Hindi film classic was based on an even earlier literary classic: RK Narayan’s 1958 novel The Guide.

The film retains most elements of Narayan’s narrative, and yet it is almost unrecognisable. For instance, the Waheeda we first meet in the film is a sad lady in a big car; all we know is that she’s the hero’s love interest. In the book, Rosie has more scope for surprise: because we learn about her slowly, she comes into her own in remarkable ways.

Reading The Guide, one can see why Dev Anand, who set things in motion by reading the book in London, was entranced. Railway Raju, as his character is called in the book, is a disarming layabout who runs a shop at Malgudi Station, but soon finds himself in demand as a tour guide. He falls for Rosie and helps launch her as a dancer before landing in jail, and eventually being anointed a saint.

The novel is already a fifth of the way through when Raju says: “There was a girl who had come all the way from Madras and who asked the moment she set foot in Malgudi, ‘Can you show me a cobra — a king cobra it must be —which can dance to the music of a flute?’” Within four pages, the resourceful Raju fulfils this whimsical farmaaish, and the two are face to face with the snake. “The whole thing repelled me, but it seemed to fascinate the girl...” writes Narayan. “She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm — for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.”


In Vijay Anand’s Guide, this half-a-page encounter between the cobra and Rosie (for that, of course, is who she is) became the sequence described on YouTube as “Serpent dance by Waheedaji”. Like the men in the scene, two generations of Hindi film viewers have gaped admiringly as Waheeda Rehman turns from primly elegant memsahib into a woman seemingly possessed by the sapera’s flute. Things delicately suggested in the novel — Rosie’s dancing talent, her repressed passion, the snake as sexual symbol — become full-blown in the film. The heroine’s suppressed erotic energy is channelled into the popularly understood naagin theme.

Otherwise, too, the sequence is emblematic of how the English novel was altered to make the popular Hindi film. What in Narayan’s tragicomic description was a forlorn place — bare-bodied children gaping at the arriving car, the poor snake charmer wearing nothing but a turban and “a pair of drawers” — gets amped up into Hindi cinema's familiar ‘tribal’ setting: thatched huts around a convenient circular clearing, with a ghaghra-choli-clad dancer present so that the heroine can join in.



An English version was also made, with the famous novelist Pearl S. Buck collaborating on the script with director Tad Danielewski, and the Indian cast speaking in English. (Buck apparently helped Rehman with her English.) RK Narayan described his brush with cinema in an essay called 'Misguided Guide'. The tone is characteristically mild, but the sarcasm is palpable. Danielewski and his crew requested the writer to show them the locations that had inspired his book. After the tour, however, Narayan was informed that the film was now to be shot a thousand miles away, in Udaipur and Jaipur. He tried to suggest that Malgudi, the imaginary South Indian small town in which he had set all his novels, was nothing like those places. His brother RK Laxman, the cartoonist, tried to suggest that real, filmable monuments on screen would undercut Raju’s character, since his talent was conjuring up historical grandeur out of nothing.



But the filmmakers would have none of this. “We are out to expand the notion of Malgudi,” they told a nonplussed Narayan. “Malgudi will be where we place it, in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi, even Ceylon.” In the Hindi film, this national tableaux idea gets underlined when Dev Anand's Raju takes groups across Rajasthan, speaking Punjabi to the Punjabis, Gujarati to the Gujaratis — and of course, farraatedaar English to the British.



The English film version is hard to find. Though screened at Cannes in 2007, I've never seen it, nor met anyone who has. But a contemporary review by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther suggests why it sank in America. “The script is sluggish and uncertain, and Mr. Anand, who seems throughout to be modeling his style of acting on one of the more romantic Hollywood stars, bouncing about in boyish fashion and wearing his hat on the back of his pompadoured hair, is stumped by the staggering requirement of acting the weird, ironic twist,” wrote Crowther. “He leaves us feeling that we, as well as the people of this poverty-stricken area, have been hoaxed.” The externalised quality of Hindi film emotion clearly did not translate for an American audience.



What is remarkable, though, is that the American critic found the film authentic precisely for the “Indian scenes” that Narayan had so cringed at: “a succession of colorful views of sightseeing spots, busy cities, temples, dusty landscapes and crowds”. As Railway Raju says: “One thing I learnt in my career as a tourist guide was that no two persons were interested in the same thing.” Our satisfaction depends, I suppose, on what we most wish to see.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Oct 2018.

God is in the details

My Mirror column:

Satyajit Ray would have turned 97 earlier this week. Looking back at what we might learn from him.

An early scene in Satyajit Ray's marvellous 1966 film Nayak has the bespectacled heroine Aditi Sengupta (Sharmila Tagore) go up to Uttam Kumar – Bengal's reigning matinee idol, whom Ray had cast as his film star hero Arindam Mukherjee – for an autograph. It's for her cousin, she says carefully, leading Arindam to make some backhanded remarks about her not watching Bengali films. “They lack realism,” says Miss Sengupta. “Yes, you're right,” says Arindam, looking up at her. “Heroines with BA degrees must not sing songs of separation.” “And heroes need not be godlike just because they're heroes,” is her sharp comeback.

Returning to her seat, Ray's rationalist heroine spins her argument out. “Have you seen Joy Porajoy?” she asks. “The one where he plays tennis?” responds her train companion eagerly. “Not just plays it: he's a champion. He's a tennis champion, swimming champion, knows how to sing, how to dance, progressive, gets a First Class in his MA, great lover... all at the same time. Is that plausible?”

Miss Sengupta's is a fairly standard critique of Indian popular cinema. But thinking about Satyajit Ray in the week of his 97th birth anniversary (he was born on 2nd May 1921), I caught myself giggling at the thought that in reality, Ray was just the sort of multi-talented figure that his heroine had dismissed as implausible.

Not only did Ray write and direct a lifetime's worth of films that are counted among the classics of world cinema, he was also a prolific and gifted writer of Bengali fiction for both children and adults. For many years, he ran the superb children's magazine Sandesh, a publication originally begun by his grandfather Upendrakishore Raychaudhury in 1913 and then edited for many years by Satyajit's father Sukumar Ray, the stupendously talented author of the nonsense verse and fantasy classics Abol Tabol and Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La. As a young man he had cultivated an interest in Western classical music, and as a filmmaker he displays an unerring grasp of the power of Hindustani classical as well – not as a pedant, but as a craftsman who can tap into the enormous emotional reserves of a particular instrument or raag to create the mood he wants – the shehnai standing in for the human wail in Durga's death scene, or the astounding bucolic perfection of Ravi Shankar's Pather Panchali soundtrack, or the swing between performative excess and melancholy in Jalsaghar, to name just the first three things that come to mind.

His talent as an artist, of course, preceded his filmmaking career – and in many ways, foreshadowed it. Having always had a natural talent for drawing, Ray had already decided – after three not-so-happy years studying science and then economics at Presidency College, Calcutta – that he was going to get a job as a commercial artist. It was only at his mother's urging that the city-bred Anglophone, Hollywood obsessed boy decided first to study art at Vishwabharati University. Ray's two and a half years at Shantiniketan were shaping, providing him access routes not just to what he later described as “the magnificence of Oriental art” — from Ajanta and Ellora murals to Japanese woodcuts — but to the rural Bengal countryside.

These influences were crucial to Ray's first choice of project – Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay's classic Bengali novel which Ray called “something like an encylopaedia of rural life”. In that same statement, Ray also wrote: “While I learnt a lot about the craft of filmmaking from watching Hollywood films of the '40s and '50s, my primary influences when I stared my first film were Jean Renoir and the De Sicas Bicycle Thief & Umberto D. And yet, soon after I started shooting, I realised that the form, rhythm and texture of my film would derive from elements that were deeply rooted in my own culture, which had little to do with the culture of France or Italy.”

A page from the Pather Panchali Sketchbook, showing Ray's sketch of what would be the train sequence

A handwritten version of this statement is reproduced in a remarkable publication brought out by HarperCollins India in 2016, The Pather Panchali Sketchbook, which offers Ray enthusiasts (and anyone interested in the links between cinema and painting) a delightful gift – Ray's immensely detailed storyboards for what would be his first film. The sketchbook – which was donated by Ray to the Cinematheque Francaise – consists of a series of watercolour sketches which almost exactly presage the film in its final form. Looking at a sketch in which the ancient Pishi reaches up to caress Durga's face when she brings her a stolen guava, or Apu and Durga dwarfed by a darkening stormy sky, gives one goosebumps. Ray's plan leaves nothing out, it seems: fades, dissolves, long-shots and closeups, minor scenes and characters including even birds flying in the sky are already there in the painter's eye.

Not many filmmakers can duplicate Ray's graphic technique of working – simply because not many filmmakers are also painters. Nor do most have a musical and literary talent to match their visual imagination. We cannot all be godlike. But as I pored over the Sketchbook, it seemed utterly clear that what we can all learn from Ray is an attention to detail. As the world hurtles ever more towards the grand gesture, instructing us not to get “bogged down by the details”, being able to observe Ray's mind at work is an inspiration: because the fragments he is laying out are really pieces of a grand jigsaw, whose final form he already sees – in his mind's eye.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6th May 2018.

Dressing the Part

My Mirror column:

Phantom Thread, nominated for six Academy Awards, is a disturbing portrait of the relationship between an acclaimed 1950s designer and his muse.

"Try these, they’re delicious,” says the good-looking young woman at the breakfast table, holding out a plate of Danish pastries and cinnamon rolls. The striking older man she is addressing barely looks up: “No more stodgy things. I told you.” “I didn’t know that,” the woman says, looking dismayed. And then, softly, defeatedly, “You may have told it to someone else.”

The young woman, Joanna, having made a last, desperate plea for attention, soon disappears from Phantom Thread, leaving us to our dismissive hero, Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis in an unsettling performance that he has declared will be his last). But this early scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film (nominated for six Academy Awards this year) holds the key to much more than might at first appear.

In her few moments on screen, Joanna offers a distressing glimpse of what it’s like to be in a relationship with a man like Reynolds: fastidious to a fault, his perfectionism requiring everyone in his orbit to spin just so. To be his lover is really to be his willing student, thrilled to receive instructions – and to expect censure for failing to follow them. It is also to remain forever on tenterhooks, waiting for the moment when he will tire of her devotion. Because of course, devotion can get boring; casting someone in one’s own mould is only fun until the cast is complete.

So Joanna is packed off. Immediately after, as appears to be his wont, Reynolds meets and begins to court another young ingénue. Alma (Vicky Krieps) is a waitress at a small country hotel, and it seems of significance that their very first meeting involves her serving him.

Soon after she has been brought into the household, unsurprisingly flattered to be the muse of so great an artist, we get another scene at the breakfast table. Alma is merely buttering her toast and pouring her tea, but to Reynolds’ oversensitive ears, it is as if she had ridden a horse across the room. He goes off in a huff. Alma holds out briefly. Then Cyril –Reynolds’ sister, aide and housekeeper rolled into one – tells her that if breakfast goes badly, his day can get ruined.

“I didn’t know that,” says Alma finally, deflated. The words are the same as Joanna’s. It is as if knowing what Reynolds likes and dislikes is a secret, one that gives the women in his life the only power they have. He is a man, and even his most unreasonable demands need only be known in order to be fulfilled. Even attempts to pamper him can backfire without this ‘knowing’. So when Alma plans to cook a surprise dinner for Reynolds, saying she must get to know him in her own way, we know it isn’t going to go well.

We have had rather too much of this dynamic in heterosexual romance: the man fully-formed, someone whose peculiarities are a privilege to know, and the woman who is trying her hardest to get to know him, a formless creature, only too happy to assume the shape of his dreams.

This idea – of the man giving shape to the woman – assumes more than metaphorical weight in Phantom Thread, because Reynolds is a highly regarded fashion designer in 1950s London: his work is crafting women’s silhouettes. He is dressmaker to the very well-off – as long as they are very grateful. His creations are tailored to each woman who comes to him. And yet somehow it is he who retains power over those he chooses to dress. “You have no breasts,” he announces drily to Alma, as he takes her measurements the first evening he has taken her out. Her response, of course, is not offence but apology: “I know. I’m sorry.” Having extracted that expression of less-than-confidence, Reynolds changes tone: “No, no, you’re perfect,” he says. “My job to give you some. If I choose.”

One of Alma’s few statements about what she gets out of her relationship with Reynolds is about how the clothes he puts her in make her forget her youthful dissatisfaction with her body: “in his work, I become perfect.” His control – and her powerlessness – is total.

In this iteration of love, Alma can only be strong when Reynolds grows weak. His illness – mysteriously unexplained – is what changes his mind about marriage to Alma. And her fantasy of their romance is articulated precisely in terms of power: “I want you helpless, with only me to help you, and then I want you strong again.”

Phantom Thread is a painstakingly crafted film. Despite its deliberately excessive air of mystery, there is pleasure to be derived from its sensual attention to detail: the stunning confections of lace and silk and taffeta that are Reynolds’ world, and the mingling of egg and mushroom, the sizzle of butter that are Alma’s. The film gestures ever so slightly to Alma’s cooking as a form of private artistry, a reply of sorts to Reynolds’ féted, public one. And yet how can we see it as a reply, when he does not? When he barely condescends to consume the fruits of her labours?

This is a film that sets domesticity up against artistry, and believable as the final settlement between them is, one wishes for it no longer to be called love.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Mar 2018.

Alone in the Urban Jungle

My Mirror column:

Trapped is a harrowing survival movie, but it also takes a sharp look at the Indian city and our particular isolation in it.

On the face of it, Trapped is a Hindi film experimenting with the survival genre so beloved of Hollywood: a man is stuck alone without food or water and must find the resources to keep himself alive until help arrives. But the classic Hollywood survival narrative tends to place its protagonist at the mercy of the elements: brutal cold, wolves, the ocean, a tiger on a ship in the ocean, you get the picture. The question in those situations is usually a simple one: can we human beings still survive the universe, once the safety net -- or plush carpet -- of modern-day comforts is pulled out from under our feet?

Vikramaditya Motwane's film flips that narrative in two related ways. First, it abandons its hero not in a snowbound mountain crevasse or terrifying tropical wilderness, but in an apartment bang in the middle of the city, fully provided with the basic upper middle class accoutrements of modern Indian urban life: kitchen with built-in cabinets, bathroom with WC, gas cylinder, fridge, airconditioner, television. The space looks familiar to anyone who's lived in a highrise, and Motwane uses the familiarity to his advantage, lulling his protagonist – and us – into a sense of safety, before turning that recognizable 'normal' interior into a site of near-horror. Second, it reverses the role of the elements. Nature, in Trapped, is not something to be conquered, but in fact the only thing that comes to his aid.

In some ways, of course, this film could be set anywhere, in any big city that has tall residential buildings. But on second thoughts, I'd argue that the film works with our knowledge of a dysfunctional urbanity quite specific to India and perhaps particularly to Mumbai. We have seen the frightening isolation of the Mumbai highrise apartment in Hindi cinema before – Ram Gopal Varma, in particular, has explored it in the genres of both horror (Bhoot) and crime (Not a Love Story), as has Kiran Rao in the Aamir Khan section of Dhobhi Ghat. But the narrative bedrock of Trapped is Mumbai's longstanding problem of homelessness, something that has been with us since the 70s with films like Gharonda and was perhaps most recently given cinematic shape in another Rajkummar Rao starrer, Hansal Mehta's 2014 CityLights. CityLights chose a distressed rural family to suffer the malice of the big bad city; Trapped focuses its attentions on a single young man, but in both cases it is the ordinary innocent with dreams of home whom the city seems determined to torture -- down to the exact plot device of a cheating tout who takes the money and hands over a home that isn't.

There's also something particularly third world about how the plot amps up the danger. Instead of the dramatic breakdown that it takes to shatter the edifice of Western modernity -- a shipwreck, or a plane crash -- Trapped's modernity malfunction, the moment which really tips things over the edge, is an electricity connection that can't actually handle the load of the gadgets it has wired to it.

But Motwane's script also goes beyond the survival genre by giving us an emotional landscape, although that also seems intent upon testing our hero. The deftly-sketched romance with which the film begins is in fact pivoted on tests: the girl says he should stop calling her unless he can guess her favourite food on the count of five. (He does. And perhaps that superhuman moment of success is the first sign of his being not quite the dull, ordinary creature he seems to be.)

Expanding outwards from the difficulties of romance in an instrumental world, Motwane gives us a bleak portrait of the urban landscape we now inhabit. This is partially evoked in ways recognizable from recent films like Ruchika Oberoi's Island City – that world of anonymised offices in which human interaction is minimised or automated, where a man must woo his office colleague by making secret, hushed calls to her desk across the maze of identical cubicles they enter each day, and where the person on the other end of a phone directory service has lost the human ability to respond to the panic in the voice of the caller whom he's paid to 'help'.

Trapped also makes the necessary metaphorical gestures towards the ways in which we fail to see or hear each other anymore – but it does so gently. The watchman hanging out under the empty building is almost deaf, he spends his days with his ear to a transistor radio. The building in whose empty upper floors our man is marooned is called Swarg (literally heaven). Most noticeable for me, but perhaps unintended by the filmmakers, was that all the attempts Rao's character makes to communicate with the Indian city around him, he makes in English. He spells 'HELP' out in a million different ways, but it never seems to strike him to write the Hindi word 'Bachaao', or the Marathi equivalent. The moment when the watchman turns his cardboard sign upside down before abandoning it – that was for me a chilling moment of recognition about how precisely how marooned we are, because we have given up on the languages in which we might communicate with most people around us. 

But perhaps I am burying the film under the weight of its metaphors. Trapped preserves lightness amidst melancholy, and that is its achievement.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Mar 2017

Back to the Jungle

Watching the new Jungle Book movie in Hindi made me think again about its Indianness.

Last week I did something I have never done before (or at least not voluntarily): I watched a Hollywood film dubbed in Hindi. I'd already seen Jon Favreau's new Jungle Book (and written about it in this column). But the Hindi version had a special tug. There seemed a homecoming double bill experience to be had, what with the refurbishing of Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj's 'Jangal jangal baat chali hai' song, and the added miracle of Bagheera and Baloo becoming conjoined with Om Puri and Irffan Khan. 

And despite everything I knew about the Hollywood production, my subconscious mind clung to a notion that a Hindi-speaking Mowgli would be coming home - to the Seeonee (Seoni) hills, where the wolves and the tigers still roam the banks of the river Waingunga (Wainganga), in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Because Kipling's original Jungle Books were set in the grand old central Indian forests of Satpura, later immortalised by the Hindi poet Bhavani Prasad Mishra as "Satpuda ke ghaney jangal. Neend mein doobey huye se, Oonghte anmaney jangal". 

Although of course Mowgli would be 'returning' to a language he never spoke. Kipling's dialogue did not lack for dramatic resonance, but it was the full-bellied English of its time. Here is Mowgli, speaking to his wolf-sibling to plan his revenge against the absent Shere Khan: "So long as he is away do thou or one of the four brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out of the village." 

Yet this was most definitely a text located in an Indian world - Kipling may or may not have acquired it from life, but he conveys a sharp sense of the terrain and the vegetation. The flaming dhak tree, the lush creepers and the steep ravines animate a very particular kind of jungle -- that very word, of course, was acquired by English from the Sanskrit/Hindi word for wilderness. When Kipling describes the Cold Lairs, the lost city where the Monkey-People take Mowgli prisoner, you can practically see the ruins of a Mughal-Rajput palace: all red sandstone reservoirs and milky-white fretwork. Calling the king of the jungle Shere Khan is a stroke of genius, as is having the wolves mock him as Lungri, the lame. 

Jon Favreau's English dialogue, of course, is nothing like Kipling's. And as it turns out, the Hindi version follows closely on the chatty contemporaneity favoured by Favreau. There are a few instances when the ease of the English is belied by a Hindi term that has too much grandeur about it - the Water Truce becomes Sandhi Kaal, the Peace Rock becomes Shanti Shila. The Sanskrit-heavy words achieve heft effortlessly, but they're also slightly impenetrable, I imagine, to many thousands of the Indian children who watched the film this month. Sometimes a translated term is weighed down by clunkiness and connotations the original didn't have - "insani pilla" entirely strips away the clean, unforgettable beauty of "man-cub". 

But on the whole, screenwriter Mayur Puri has done an admirable job, creating not just appropriately translated dialogue, but sometimes whole new characters on the strength of accent and vocabulary. Many of the ordinary jungle folk speak in Bambaiya street-lingo: the rhinos, the comically big-eared rodents, the porcupine. The porcupine is scurrying through the dry forest ticking off stone after stone as "apun ka patthar" when he realizes that the water level in the river has dipped enough that "Shanti Shila dikh rehli hai". 

Bagheera speaks a more proper Khadi Boli, allowing for an occasional thaw into the familial: "Main kanoon jaanta hoon, chhote," he deadpans to the deer at the water's edge, who seem skittish and ready to scatter as the panther comes to drink. There is a slight metallic tang to Om Puri's voice, which I thought worked very well for Bagheera's snappish, no-nonsense air. And he pulls off some most ambitious Hindi wordplay: "Shere Khan ki dhamki koi geedad-bhabhki nahi thhi (Shere Khan's threat was no jackal's bluster)". 

The hypnotic rock snake Kaa has Priyanka Chopra at her sultriest, but the dialogue doesn't give her enough of a persona. "Vishwas karo mera" can't match Disney's "Trusssst in me". The one sentence of Chopra's dialogue that worked for me is "Mehfooz rakhoongi tumhe", with the "mehfooz" emerging as a slow hiss. Perhaps if Kaa kept to this Lucknawi nazaakat register, we might have had a real character. 

Which Baloo gets. Mayur Puri's dialogue turns the happy-go-lucky bear into an amicable, lazy-ass Punjabi, who calls Mowgli "puttar" and "yaara" and is only too happy to let the man-cub lagaao his "jugaad" (one instance where the Hindi is much meaningful than the English "tricks") while he ambles alongside. 

The only thing about Baloo that moves quickly is his tongue, and the Hindi version does wonderfully well with his crackerjack conversational style, such as when Baloo adapts a 1963 melancholy classic song to inform Mowgli that he owes him a favour - "Jo waada nahi kiya woh nibhaana padega..." - or explains the stinging bees with innuendo-laden ease as "Kudiyan dank maarti hain". 

Perhaps the most significant Hindi rewording is that of Kipling's "Red Flower" ["...Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name."] into the rather more dramatic "Rakt Phool", literally 'blood flower'. And unlike in the original Kipling tale, where he is trampled by a herd of buffaloes, in Favreau's film it is the Rakt Phool by which Shere Khan meets his death: burnt to a cinder, bhasm, like some evil Hindu demon.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1st May 2016.

The Strength of the Pack

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

A sparkling new adaptation of The Jungle Book is a chance to take a fresh look at Kipling.

The latest version of The Jungle Book hit Indian screens on April 8, a week ahead of the US. The fact that we get first dibs on the film, however, is about the only concession to 'Indian-ness' here. (I'm not counting the fact that the only actor on screen is a 12-year-old Indian-origin New Yorker called Neel Sethi.) 

Perhaps my brain has been permanently warped by The Jungle Book I grew up on (a lovely hardback with Disney images), but it seems to me a bit absurd to expect Indian-ness from something originally written by a white man in 1895, filmed in English as early as 1942 (by Alexander Korda), and successfully Disney-fied in 1967. 

What we think of when we think of The Jungle Book is Mowgli, a thin brown boy making the forest his own, accompanied by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. But Kipling's Jungle Book was actually several tales, first published serially in newspapers, and only some featured Mowgli. And even those didn't necessarily follow from each other: they had to be stitched into a single narrative. 

In some ways, it was the films that did this work. Korda spent most of his dramatic energy on Mowgli's ambivalent relationship to human society - in Kipling's memorable phrase, the "man-village". It was Walt Disney who created The Jungle Book most of the world now knows: the tale of Mowgli's battle with Shere Khan the tiger, encounters with the Bandar-log and Kaa the snake providing adventurous sidelights. 

Jon Favreau's version, in glorious live action 3D, remains largely faithful to the 1967 Disney film, though it darkens the tone and ups the pace considerably. It is Shere Khan who bookends this version, snarling and sneering to terrifying effect in the voice of Idris Elba, and asking the question that is at some level, at the moral centre of the Jungle Book: "How many lives is a man-cub worth?" Favreau gives the angry, embittered man-eater of the previous film a sharper identity as a tyrant, a power-hungry creature who wraps his unlawful activities in a cloak of hypocrisy and violence: "You did not respond to reason, so now you will know fear." 

On the other hand— not driving Mowgli out of the jungle but trapping him into self-doubt—is Kaa the snake: "Don't you know what you are?" 

And what is Mowgli - this creature who cannot ever be a wolf, no matter how much he tries, but who is too free, too wild to inhabit the world of men?
The idea of a feral child has long fascinated us. Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, were raised by a she-wolf, and famous cases of wolf-men have been the subject of films by European auteurs like Truffaut and Herzog. 

The appeal of Kipling's tale is that it reverses the perspective to that of the jungle: so not wolf-child, but man-cub. Instead of a return to human society, Kipling imagines what it would be like to be taught the ways of the wilderness. And what has made his text persuasive for generations of children is the richness of his conviction that the wilderness has ways. The Law of the Jungle seems, if anything, more clear, more just, and infinitely more navigable than the changeable codes of human societies. The idea of a Water Truce that would allow all animals to access the river in dry season, or the resounding call to togetherness in "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack": these explain why The Jungle Book's evocation of loyalty, honesty and codes of honour were a huge influence on Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. 

Sure, Kipling was a British imperialist in whose eyes there was no possible equivalence between brown people and white ones. But our response to that doesn't have to be a bar on reading him. It's much more profitable to read him critically but carefully, to read him and marvel at his ear for language, and his eye for the Indian world he grew up in. For one thing, he could often be funny. Here he is talking about small boys in Indian villages being sent out to graze the herds: "The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses." And here he is making a snarky comparison between human dispute settlement and the jungle version: "One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward." 

If we are to insist on mapping the Jungle Book onto Kipling's real-life surroundings, then the "man-village" would have to be the British, and the jungle representative of Indians. But then we would need to account for the fact that Kipling's man-village, although armed with the ultimate weapon ("the red flower", i.e. fire), is prone to fear and exaggeration. It is the jungle folk who are heroes - not just because they live simply and keep their word, but because they are able to take a man-cub in.

Regardless of whether it challenges or confirms colonial stereotypes, much of the power of the Jungle Book lies in Mowgli's learning how he can belong to the jungle, yet not fear the things that come naturally to him as a man. What Mowgli offers, eventually, is a model of accepting the different parts of oneself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 April 2016.

Reeling in the Boxing Ring

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Saala Khadoos reframes a story we know from many sports films: the coach plagued by controversy takes on an unlikely candidate and trains him or her to success. The most well-known example of this narrative in recent decades is probably Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning 2004 film starring Hilary Swank as a Missouri waitress who becomes a prize-winning boxer under training from a crusty old coach (Eastwood himself). The sports film is relatively new in Hindi cinema, but we, too, have had this narrative appear in Chak De India (2007), in which Shah Rukh Khan plays a discredited (Muslim) hockey captain who regains nationalist credibility by coaching an underdog Indian women's hockey team to a World Cup victory.

Unlike Swank's character in Million Dollar Baby (or Priyanka Chopra's in 2015's Mary Kom), in Saala Khadoos it is not Madhi (Ritika Singh) who hankers after the idea of being a boxer. It is an otherwise dismissive boxing coach Adi Tomar (Madhavan) who zones in on her as an unpolished diamond, one he's certain will shine if he can hone her natural talent.

A former boxer who's been 'demoted' from Delhi to Chennai by long-time rival Dev (Zakir Hussain), who is now head honcho of the women's selection team, Adi is a jaded character who stands around delivering cynical comebacks even as the results of trial bouts are being clearly overturned by nepotism right before his eyes. Madhi - the loyal younger sister of the boxer being passed over - attacks the selection committee in a rage, letting fly a series of punches and kicks before she is dragged away. Something about Madhi's energy intrigues Adi, and he offers to train her, but she only agrees to show up for four hours a day when he promises to pay her an allowance of 500 rupees a day.

The dynamic here -- the reluctant wild child pupil and the committed, mature coach -- is one of the interesting things about Sudha Kongara's screenplay, especially because Madhavan's Adi is by no means the calm level-headed guy in other parts of his life. When we first meet him, he is in bed with a married woman. (When accused of this by the snooping Dev, he announces - quite rightly - that it is no business of theirs). Minutes after, told he is being transferred on a fictitious sexual harassment charge, he completely loses it, grabbing Dev's crotch in a graphic display of violent anger. With the uncontrollable Madhi, he plays the disciplined foil. Yet it's apparent that his connection with her is one that is founded on a certain identification, the recognition of a younger self in this youthful, slightly crazed creature who has not been broken in.

Saala Khadoos makes Dev a peg on which to hang pretty much all the problems that assail sports, particularly women's sports, in India -- third-rate facilities; inept, power-hungry trainers; corruption and nepotism; and sexual harassment. Thankfully Hussain is talented enough to make us believe entirely in this wholly nasty character.

Mumtaz Sorcar as Lux (short for Luxmi), the older sister who has been struggling to box her way into a police job for years cuts an interesting figure - unusual as her choice of boxing is, she doesn't have that fire in the belly, and is upstaged completely by Madhi when Madhi starts to take boxing seriously.

Kongara extracts affecting performances from her actors, but the film is often overblown and needlessly loud. And her constant use of musical sequences to do the storytelling leaves us feeling less for the characters than we might otherwise have done. Yet we stay with Madhi till that final scene in the ring that we all know is coming.

What is it about boxing that makes it so powerful as a cinematic subject? It has certainly been the most often-seen sport in American films, from as early as 1931, with King Vidor's The Champ, through Martin Ritt's The Great White Hope (1970), about a black boxer, and Martin Scorcese's classic Raging Bull (1980), down to David O. Russell's The Fighter (2000), about two brothers who're boxers. And of course there was Sylvester Stallone's immensely successful Rocky series, which traversed almost three decades. The most memorable boxing film in my book, though, is the Italian classic Rocco and His Brothers, with Luchino Visconti directing the incandescent Alain Delon.

The cinematic figure of the boxer, drawing from many real life stories, is often someone who rises from poverty through grit and determination. Hindi films, have used this particular trope to varying success - think of Ghulam, which adapted On the Waterfront, or more recently Bombay Velvet, where a miscast Ranbir Kapoor wins many a bloody prize fight. Saala Khadoos is as uneven as these. And yet we will stay on to cheer till the end.

Taking a new direction

Last Sunday's Mirror column:

Watching Mia Madre sets off a train of thought about an unspoken assumption that underpins most cinema.

In Nanni Moretti's superb recent film, Mia Madre (My Mother), a middle-aged film director must grapple simultaneously with the chaos of shooting a film and the impending death of a parent. Things are not aided by the American actor she has cast in the main role.

Stop. Did that "she" surprise you? When I said "a middle-aged film director", did you immediately envisage a man in the role? Well, if you did, you would only be subconsciously reiterating what pretty much every film industry in the world has been doing in practice.

The Celluloid Ceiling, an annual study of women employed behind the scenes in film, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, found that women comprised only 17 per cent of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 (domestic) grossing films in 2014. That is exactly the same percentage of women working in these roles in 1998. In the case of women directors, the 2014 figure of 7 per cent is actually lower than the 9 per cent figure recorded in 1998.

Another recent US study, looking at 1,300 top grossing films from 2002 to 2014, found that only 4.1 per cent of all directors were female. Among other findings, it appears that women are fairly well represented in shorts and documentaries, but seem to find it harder to break through when it comes to feature films. And the bigger the budget of the film, the more likely it is that it will go to a male director.

Last week, it made headlines that there were three films directed by women (Patricia Riggen's real-life drama The 33, Jessie Nelson's family comedy Love the Coopers, and Angelina Jolie's By the Sea) running simultaneously in US theatres. One commentator called it a 'Halley's Comet' moment for Hollywood, because of the time it would likely take to occur again.

There are all sorts of reasons why it would be a good thing for there to be more films directed by women. Recently, in this column, I wrote about two very different films, both about teenage girls who embark on affairs with much older men. It is the sort of tendentious subject that could, in the wrong hands, end up being exploitative, sensationalist, or deeply judgemental. But both An Education ( 2009) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2014), while recognising that the situations they're dealing with are less than ideal, evoke the excitement and vulnerability of sexual discovery. While starkly different in how much sex they show, both films are astute about young women coming to realise the power of their own sexuality. It seems to me no coincidence that both films are directed by women: An Education was made by Lone Scherfig, a Danish director who first came to international attention with the 2000 hit Italian for Beginners -- a romcom made in the characteristic Dogme style of hand held video cameras and natural lighting -- while The Diary is a powerful directorial debut from actress Marielle Heller.

Given how rare women directors are, however, it isn't surprising that historically, almost all films about film-making have featured male directors. Think of the great European auteurs: Godard's Contempt (1963) cast the famous director Fritz Lang as himself, Antonioni's characteristically elliptical Identification of a Woman(1982) centred on a director's search for the perfect actress (who would also be his lover), Fellini's 8 ½ was an autobiographical part-fantasy ostensibly seeking solutions for the director's existential crises. Right down to the present: think of Noah Baumbach's While We're Young, in which both Ben Stiller's documentary filmmaker character and the New York world of indie filmmaking are a partial evocation of a similar world seen in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989).

In India, the situation is even more skewed: we can count our women directors on the fingers of one hand. So of course, in any film featuring the film industry -- from Guru Dutt's Kaagaz ke Phool to Mrinal Sen's Aakaler Sandhane, from Shyam Benegal's stellar period piece Bhumika -- right down to last year's marvellously energetic Tamil release Jigarthanda -- the director on screen is always a man.

All of this means that the crisis of creativity has invariably been presented as a masculine problem. Which is why Mia Madre is so refreshing.

The display of masculinity appears in Moretti's film as either wounded or ridiculous. The director in the film (Italian actress Margherita Buy) is already dealing with what she sees as the clingy behaviour of her just-divorced husband, and now must also deal with the particularly masculine demands of her star actor, Barry Huggins (John Turturro in a truly memorable turn), walking a thin line between patronising sexism and hilarity. For instance, when Margherita drops him off at his hotel upon arrival, he says, "Eating alone is so sad. Stay, have dinner." And when she refuses, he says, "Then you stay to sleep with me. What's your name?" She is trying to process this when he adds quickly, "That was a joke."

The film is very much about cinema, but directing a film is allowed to feel like work - rather than necessarily existential. There is, for instance, a film within the film, a serious-looking drama about a workers' strike, but Moretti approaches the whole thing with a lightness of touch. The wonderfully funny scene in which Huggins is supposed to be driving a car, for example, works as a hilarious metaphor for filmmaking. Moretti also uses the power of the cinematic medium to transport us constantly between reality and dream, often tricking us into believing one is the other.

But the real emotional centre of Mia Madre is Margherita's unwillingness, or inability, to accept that her mother is dying. Things will never be the same again, and yet the world remains unchanged. The crisis is not that of cinema, but life itself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Dec 2015