The arc of appearance

My Mirror column:

Amar Kaushik’s Bala takes a witty Kanpuriya route to show Indian viewers that our preoccupation with surface-level qualities runs depressingly deep

 
Bala in Bala is a pun on the Hindi word for hair, as well as the nickname of its hero Balmukund Shukla. What’s remarkable about Bala is that its hero is not a nice guy. And no one in Amar Kaushik’s film is trying to tell us that he is. Once the teenaged Shah Rukh Khan of his Kanpur school/gali/mohalla, Bala in his twenties is experiencing a massive crisis of confidence. As he loses his once-luxuriant mane of hair, he also loses the head-tossing arrogance that came with it.

Once the sort of cocky upper caste boy who could effortlessly cast himself as hero of his North Indian small-town universe, the balding Bala is now assailed by self-doubt in greater measure than those who haven’t had his level of entitlement. Far from being an action-packed vehicle for his starry antics, Bala’s life is now a tragicomedy: a series of misadventures with ever more outrageous hair-replacement tactics.

Coming after 2018’s Stree, in which Kaushik sneaked a snide gender angle into a ghost-centric comedy, it isn’t surprising that in Bala he uses the male balding plot as a way to hold up a mirror to our lookist universe. But not just any universe. Bala’s second plotline, featuring Bala’s childhood friend Latika, is about India’s constricted ideas of beauty, particularly for women. It holds up to the light our bizarre obsession with “fair” skin, which does especially widespread damage to self-esteem in a country where almost everyone would be considered “dark”. And it illuminates how these ridiculous casteist, subliminally racist ideas, far from being smashed by a more inclusive ‘global’ modernity, are being reinforced and amplified by a social media explosion that feeds on ever-greater exhibitionism and display.

In fact, we might think of the film as deriving its premise from a semi-conscious recognition: that women have been judged primarily by their looks pretty much through history, but the image-focused quality of the selfie era has finally started to get to men, too. Bala’s particular form of vanity gives him long-term aspirations – he does stand-up comedy on the side. But his need for outlets for more immediate gratification leads him down the TikTok path. Which leads into the arms of his dream girl Pari Mishra: a TikTok celebrity and the ‘face’ of Pretty You, the mass market fairness cream for which Bala is a marketing agent.

Having first cast Ayushmann Khurrana, Bollywood’s current patron saint of North Indian masculine vulnerability, as Bala, Kaushik goes on to give his hero a great deal of screen-time so we might learn to sympathise with him. Having seen the preening boy Bala at his worst – mocking his teacher for being takla, or jeering at Latika for her dark skin, we see those frailties turned inside out in the adult Ayushmann, when the character’s own fixation on good looks comes back to haunt him. You may still not like the fellow, but there’s definitely something about his honest appeal for help that works to make him human.

The female leads are both actors who have been paired with Khurrana before: Yami Gautam in Vicky Donor, and Bhumi Pednekar in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Gautam aces the part of Pari, the perfectly turned out social media queen, whose primary desire on her wedding night is to make a suhaag raat TikTok video. Her purpose is primarily to entertain, but she gets one powerful dialogue moment in which to introduce us to the interiority of the surface-level character. Latika is played controversially by Pednekar in unfortunately varying degrees of black-face make-up. Pednekar gets a well-intentioned but not very fleshed-out role as the strong girl who refuses to be defeated by her complexes. She is meant primarily as a mirror for Bala to begin to see himself. But it seems to me significant that the film is self-aware enough to flag that fact – and that Latika has several moments to point out Bala’s self-absorption to him.

What makes the film transcend its inherently lecture-like core is the consistently well-crafted surround sound, achieved by a great ensemble cast who take the superbly written dialogues and produce a pitch-perfect rendition of a contemporary Kanpur milieu. Particular mention must be made of Abhishek Banerjee as Bala’s friend Ajju, Javed Jaffrey back in fine fettle as the Amitabh-impersonating Bachchan Bhaiya, and Seema Pahwa as Latika’s marvellous upbeat mausi, who has had her own look battle to fight in the form of being identified as “moochhon wali” (Ritesh Batra’s recent Photograph also contained a reference to a moustachioed aunt). The film has a brilliant soundscape, in which the base physicality of “kantaap” bounces effortlessly off the Shuddh Hindi register of “guru upahaas”. It also gives us an infectious Tequila song – and the potentially viral coinage “babyu”. We may not believe in Bala’s redemption speech entirely, but the film keeps us listening.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Nov 2019.

Speak, memory

My Mirror column:
 
Ritesh Batra’s Photograph is an underappreciated gem of a film, gleaming with quiet revelations about the stories we tell ourselves.

Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019), much like his acclaimed 2013 film The Lunchbox, is based on a particular idea of romance: two people from very different worlds united by happenstance. In both films, that unexpected connection is forged by the big city, the vast anonymous wilderness suddenly letting two people see each other. In The Lunchbox, Batra used a mix-up by Mumbai’s much-feted dabbawalas as the device that brought a neglected housewife in contact with an office-going widower. In Photograph, the unlikely bond that Batra wants to us to believe in, between a street photographer called Rafi and a modest Gujarati girl prepping for her CA exams, is tied to something just as iconic in the city: the Gateway of India.

Yes, perhaps there’s a kernel of reality there. Where, except at the Gateway of India, would a working class Muslim man from a village in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, living five to a kholi in Mumbai, have a chance to speak to a fair, English-speaking, academically-inclined girl from an upper middle class Hindu family? But for Miloni to have her photo taken by Rafi is one thing; to have her actually respond to a personal request from him days, even weeks later, is quite another. It is in making us believe in their slowly unfurling connection that Batra wins, and in the ever-so-delicate performances he draws from Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the watchful Rafi and Sanya Malhotra as the almost painfully quiet Miloni.

The gulf between them has been described as “cultural”, and I suppose that is one way to put it. But the financial inequality is stark enough to ensure that even a simple transactional moment between them is experienced completely differently by both parties. Miloni can forget to pay the Rs 30 for her instant photo not just because she is distracted, but because the amount is so little as to not even register in her mind. Meanwhile, for Rafi, who counts out even his petty change to send home, one disappeared client can turn a good day into bad.

What Batra does beautifully is to show us these quiet people, both adamant to resist the paths laid out for them. For Rafi, the prospect of marriage is not entirely unattractive, but he thinks pining away for a wife in the village will make him a “softy”. It is soon clear that he resists because he is the sentimental grandson who revisits his childhood in story after story, recognising in his grandmother’s childhood stories the power of fiction (“She made us laugh so much that we wouldn’t even know if the stove had been lit that day”) – and returning her gift now with an elaborate fiction of his own. For Miloni, life so far has been defined by her parents: home to tuition and back, the CA examination, arranged marriage to an eligible boy, America. She is so unused to choosing anything that even the colours of her clothes are of no consequence to her. Spending days with Rafi and his dadi becomes the furthest she has strayed from the straight and narrow.

At the centre of the film is the photograph of Miloni that Rafi takes. But Batra’s style is literary, in the best possible ways, and so it is no coincidence that we don’t ever properly see the picture. The image here is but a prop for stories – for Rafi’s story that he has a fiancée, and later for Miloni’s story of how she and Rafi got together. She makes it up for Dadi’s benefit, as she does her dead parents. But what she sees in it is true: a happier self, now invisible to her, that Rafi’s gaze seems to capture.

There is nostalgia here aplenty – the breeze on the ferry, the old Hindi film song in a kali-peeli taxi on a rainy Bombay night, Campa Cola as the taste of a childhood self. But the quality that felt slightly contrived in The Lunchbox – handwritten notes, the repeated error of the dabba delivery, no mobile phones – has also been smoothed into something more convincing here, something in which the past is not a simple refuge. The pleasure of the ice gola is destroyed by a stomach upset, the old single screen theatre by a rat. The old lady urges Rafi to let go of the past: to forget the mortgaged house, the deprived childhood. In a darker subplot, the story of the man who hung himself in the room where Rafi and his four mates live is told and retold in their drunken sessions: now with humour, now with pathos, but most of all with a kind of desperation – as if telling and retelling the tale might exorcise the ghost of the past.

Perhaps what makes Photograph so rewarding is its recognition that we live in the past and the present simultaneously, and that it isn’t necessarily the end of the story that matters most, but what you remember of it. In the words of Rafi’s marvellous sales pitch to prospective customers: “Saalon baad jab aap yeh photo dekhenge, toh aapko aapke chehre pe yahi dhoop dikhai degi, aapke baalon mein yeh hawa, aur aapke kaanon mein hazaaron logon ki awaazein. Sab chala jayega. Hamesha ke liye sab chala jayega. [“Years later when you look at this photo, you will see this very sunlight on your face, this breeze in your hair, and the voices of thousands of people in your ears. Everything will go. Everything will be gone for ever.”]. Everything will end, but a memory can still be a gift.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Nov 2019