A Punjab state of mind

My Mirror column, on the film you must watch in theatres this week:

Chauthi Koot unfolds as an atmospheric, deliberately elliptical journey into 1984 Punjab. But it keeps you on edge.

There are few parts of India so powerfully embedded in the popular cinematic imagination as Punjab. This mythical Bollywood Punjab is all mustard fields and aloo parathas, brimming with bubbly girls whose hands in marriage must be won by boring a heart-shaped hole through some Punjabi patriarch's rough-and-tough exterior.

In recent years, there have been occasional departures from this image: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012) unpicked the smooth surface of the rural Punjabi family to reveal something charmingly bumpy and dysfunctional; earlier this year Udta Punjab produced a nerve-jangling portrait of the prosperous state as wracked by drug addiction. Outside the mainstream Hindi cinema context, Anup Singh's beautifully shot Qissa (2015) offered an unsettling window into Punjabi masculinity, potentially tying it to the trauma of Partition.

Men on the train: a still from Chauthi Koot

Another vision of Punjab can be seen in theatres this week, in Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction). Having premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year and won the National Award for Best Punjabi Film, Chauthi Koot is the second feature film directed by Gurvinder Singh, whose bleak but atmospheric portrait of rural Punjab, Anhey Ghore Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse, 2011), won awards internationally as well as in India. Based on a novel by the famous Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh, Anhe Ghore followed the fortunes of a lower-caste family of landless farm workers in a Punjab that had reached the fag-end of the Nehruvian era with many of its inhabitants left out of the state's fabled progress into modernity. Chauthi Koot also draws on the work of a well-known Punjabi writer, Waryam Singh Sandhu, combining two of his short stories to craft a tense, absorbing take on the Punjab of the 1980s, when the Sikh militant movement for a separate state of Khalistan was at its peak.

Singh's exceptionally assured filmmaking makes no attempt to take on the violence head-on, instead circling around the horrific moment of crisis in 1984 when militants holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar were gunned down by the army, bringing the confrontation between Indira Gandhi's government and the militancy to a head. The closest we get to Operation Bluestar is a BBC radio broadcast ("Rama Pandey se Hindi mein samachar suniye"). Yet so carefully calibrated is the film's feeling of constriction that right from the start, when we see two men on a bus, waiting to get off, we are drawn into their anxiety.

They walk at a frenetic pace through a crowded gali lined with shops, almost run through a wedding procession, and climb the stairs to a railway station, but as soon as they look out over the platform, we know that they are too late. They wait. They watch as uniformed men walk around the station, getting their boots polished till they gleam. They watch as the train trundles in, and men draped in shawls get off, bundles in their hands. And we watch with them, on tenterhooks, having absorbed the slow menace in the air.

The genius of Singh's film is that we don't actually know what we're waiting for. But it doesn't matter, because we're hooked, watching. And watching this film, unlike the process of watching Hollywood-style suspense, does not involve speed. So we have time, somehow, to look at the poster of Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh selling glucose biscuits, or the Campa Cola sign that glows dully in red and white, the same colours as the station's plaster arch. And yet the pace does not slack. With every unexplained urgent request, every unannotated new presence, we push our imaginations to work: who are these men? Why are they in such a rush? Who are the strangers already sitting in the compartment? Why did the guard let them in and not these two?

Let me not, however, make it seem that watching Chauthi Koot is like watching some detective story. Because Singh's cinematic technique, redolent as it is of mystery, has little interest in resolutions of the sort we are used to. One of the most striking ways in which he demonstrates this is when halfway through the first narrative, he decides to introduce another. It is framed as what we might ordinarily call a flashback: one of the men on the train remembers something that happened a few months ago. But Singh refuses to stick the narrative rules of cinema -- one man's memory leads us into another man's life, producing an elliptical account that might puzzle viewers who are adamant on knowing how we know what we know.

In the courtyard: a still from Chauthi Koot

The second narrative, involving a family who find themselves endangered by their dog's natural instincts, brings us face to face with both militants and police. But again, the tensest moments are not those in which either militant or police violence seems imminent. The film reaches its acme in the relationship between man and dog, forcing us to complicate any easy notions of innocence and victimhood.

But a simple moral resolution is not Singh's style. There are no villains, no heroes. In collaboration with Satya Rai Nagpaul's arresting cinematography and Susmit Bob Nath's brilliant sound design, he makes every lined and unlined face on screen form part of this Punjab that but for him, we would never see. And yet, for me the film's most transporting sequence was a storm — during which 'nothing' happens. In an interview, Singh told me that while filming, he replaced a crucial bit of drama in the script with the storm. This is pure cinematic magic, where images and sounds that have no obvious connection come together to create the film — in our minds.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7th August 2016. 

By hook or by cook

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Unlike most male cooks, in real life and reel, Aman Sachdeva's Kuku Mathur doesn't cook only to impress.

By the time you read this column, Kuku Mathur and his small-time problems would have disappeared off the few cinema screens they were allowed onto last week. Which is kind of sad. Because Aman Sachdeva's small-time film had a big heart. And not just that: Kuku could cook. 

Producer Ekta Kapoor apparently handpicked Siddharth Gupta for Kuku's role after watching him in a play at Prithvi, and it's a perfect casting. I have no idea why she then saddled him with a film title that most people think is something obscene. It isn't. 'Jhand ho gayi' is just a Delhi expression for someone being humiliated, or stuck in a bad situation. 

Kuku Mathur is stuck in a series of bad situations. He's just finished his 12th boards, he's even managed an unexpected 90 per cent -- but he can't get into any colleges in Delhi. Not even on Sports Quota. His mother is dead, his father thinks he's an ass, and he's screwed up his chance with Mitali from Seema Didi's Tuition Centre. Meanwhile, his bumchum Ronnie Gulati (Ashish Juneja) doesn't need to go to college at all. His grandfather, who has a sari shop, has gifted Ronnie a Matching Centre - a shop selling material for sari blouses. Ronnie's life looks set, while Kuku's is coming unscrewed. To top it all, Ronnie doesn't even have time for Kuku any more.  

Aman Sachdeva's film, naturally, must solve Kuku's problems. But how it does so is not really the subject of this column. The subject of this column is Kuku -- and all Kuku really has going for him is that he can cook. While the film insists on giving us some pointless shots of the let's-swish-around-the-gleaming-veggies variety, what's great about Kuku's cooking is that it isn't an event. Unlike almost all of the few men I know who cook, Kuku's cooking is not meant to impress people. We don't hear very much about what he cooks, but from what we see, it seems like regular ghar ka khana - and not even the chicken-mutton parts of it that male home cooks seem to inevitably gravitate towards. The only big deal about Kuku's cooking is that he likes doing it. And remarkably for a teenaged boy in a regular Dilli macho world, he doesn't seem the slightest bit affected by Mrs. Pasricha or anyone else telling him that he is "the mahila of his house". 

For a country of self-declared gluttons, our cinema is starved for films about food or cooking. On the other hand, since a woman cooking is no news, what exists of the genre is stuffed with men. The Hindustani chef-as-hero first appeared in Salaam Namaste (2005), with Saif Ali Khan playing his standard party animal role, and then came of age, literally, with Amitabh Bachchan in the May-December romance Cheeni Kum (2007). The figure had another youthful outing as Imran Khan's Abhay in Break ke Baad (2010). Of course, lest their mardaangi be threatened by their interest in such terribly female things as food, all three heroes had to channel their interest into restaurants rather than homes -- and those, too, in London or Australia. A restaurant here in India was still too low on the coolness quotient. 

In fact, none of these three films I just mentioned are really about the food at all. The idea of a chef has somehow acquired a cachet: a cool sounding new-agey job that somehow fits into the film industry's imagined sense of hat-ke-ness, without showing us any of the labour that goes into it. We've come a very long way from the homegrown pleasures of Bawarchi, in which Hrishikesh Mukherjee cast the biggest superstar of the moment - Rajesh Khanna - as the mysteriously adept domestic help who turns out to have remedies to all the household's ills. Bawarchi treats food as it should be treated, as the basis of our sense of wellbeing. And while never less than supremely entertaining, the film does not achieve this by shying away from labour. Food is an opportunity for the hero to display his skill-set, sure -- but that skill-set doesn't only include chopping vegetables at eye-popping speed. The khaki-shorts-clad Raghu scours filthy floors (also at eye-popping speed), while offering up bon mots about the joy of doing the work of others. He anticipates the desires of old men and young women alike. And he turns the ultimate budget housewife trick, too, making feasts out of what seems like nothing. 

Bawarchi certainly has moments when you know that the modern Indian housewife is being gently (and not so gently) chided for refusing to be the perfect drudge she once was. Every time the family patriarch wants to praise Raghu, he says Raghu reminds him of his wife. But by making his hero a servant, Mukherjee achieves an interesting class dimension. Rather than some nasty infliction of male discipline, the film comes across as a paean to the dignity of labour. 

Another charming food-related film that slipped under most people's radars when it came out in late 2012 is Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana. The film earned points in my book for its warm, crackpot humour, but also for having its young Punjabi hero Omi decide to learn to cook with no shosha, nor any obviously foregrounded gender reversals.  

Unlike the fashionable chefs in the other films I mentioned, both Omi and Kuku have a financial imperative for their restaurants. Omi must discover the lost secret of his grandfather's famous chicken to revive the family fortunes he's helped sink; Kuku because he knows nothing else. Both films recognize that love isn't enough to make the world go round. And yet they also seem informed of that corny but undeniable truth: whether you're male or female, food is a form of love.

PS: My review of Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana is here. And here's a column about the disappearance of servants in Hindi cinema in which I talk about Bawarchi, among others.

5 November 2012

Film Review: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana

In an industry so stuffed to the gills with Punjabi families and NRI homecomings, a film like Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana could easily have felt stale or repetitive. But debutante director Sameer Sharma manages to create a version of rural Punjab that is somehow quieter, gentler, sadder and yet funnier than those that have gone before. 

Family black sheep Omi (Kunal Kapoor in a quiet, largely winsome role) who’d stolen the family jewels and run away to England as a teenager, comes back after a decade to the family home in Lalton village, Punjab – not because he misses it, but because he needs money to pay back dangerous London gangster Shanty (Munish Makhija). His grandfather Daarji (Vinod Nagpal), the strong family patriarch Omi once drugged to allow Omi to make his getaway, is now a pale shadow of his former self: an old man who doesn’t recognise anyone around him, spending his days in a haze of memories where all he sees is his beloved long-dead wife and more recently deceased but equally beloved dhaba. 

The dhaba—and its legendary Chicken Khurana—were the source of the family’s fortunes, but Daarji’s secret recipe seems destined to go to the grave with him. No amount of pleading or haranguing from the family’s resident nutter Titu Mama (an absolutely marvelous Rajesh Sharma) (“Kucch toh yaad hoga, darling?”) can apparently bring the old man to wake up and hand it over. 

A secret recipe, like the secret papers in a spy story or the secret formula in a sci fi thriller, is a plot device that could make for a grand food-and-family mystery. But Luv Shuv isn’t really aiming to be either a mystery or a family drama, so what surrounds the Macguffin of Daarji’s recipe is neither a tightly-written thriller, nor a solidly weepy sarson-da-saga but a slice of life in which the most serious things – love, sex, age, loneliness, failure, death – are served up warmly leavened by a layer of absurdity. 

The film might be joyfully irreverent about most things – the middle-aged chachi (a perfect Seema Kaushal) assembles an on-the-spot family conference to discuss the underwear sizes of the men in her household, a deranged old man who sits around staring into space evokes the comment “Dekh le silent picture”, a suicidal young chap is saved from death by a crow – but it never feels flippant. There’s an unspoken affection that tempers our laughter, making everything – from the loony Titu Mama’s peeing contests and sex obsession, to the almost sugary sentimentality of Omi’s cousin Jeet (Rahul Bagga), even the ostensibly murderous hitman Manty who shows up to reclaim his boss’s debts – seem simultaneously ridiculous and moving. 

This is a film that is realist enough to want to justify why the doctor heroine – the radiant Huma Qureishi in an affecting performance as Omi’s childhood flame, Harman – has her hair cascading down her shoulders on a particular day, when it’s tied into a sober, tidy plait the rest of the time. But it is also a film which revels in the fortuitous, the accidental, the almost miraculous. 

Disease and death are not kept wholly at bay, but they arrive when they are meant to—and we know that untimely threats will be staved off in time, not so much by wit or wisdom as by the air of magical well-being hanging over the proceedings. (There’s that life-saving crow, for instance, who is incorporated into this vision of the world via an explanation you don’t need to believe to be charmed by.) 

It is, admittedly, a little slow. The threat meant to be hanging over Omi’s life seems unconvincing in its menace and repetitive in its execution; the faux-documentary format in which Daarji’s old associates are asked for clues to his Chicken Khurana doesn’t have enough spark; Omi’s self-imposed cooking lessons with Harman are a little tamer than they could have been. Kunal Kapoor, though he tries hard and does fairly well, is not quite talented enough to pull off a role as layered as this. As the good-for-nothing scoundrel who’s only slowly coming to see the error of his ways, Kapoor manages to convey a whiff of the requisite kameenapan occasionally, but at other times his good-boy persona is too overwhelming. 

Still, the rest of the performances are pitch-perfect, with Rajesh Sharma’s Titu Mama leading from the front. Mention must also be made of Dolly Ahluwalia (the beauty-parlour-owning mother from Vicky donor), who puts in a superb turn as the dhongi buaji who eloped as a girl and is now a canny television guru with a secret or two of her own. But the real star of this film is the writing: Sumit Batheja has crafted a screenplay that’s original and heartfelt, with dialogue that is both pungent and hilarious. The Chicken Khurana may seem a little lost as the film meanders homewards – but there’s definitely enough luv-shuv to make up for it.

This review was published on Firstpost.

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