Good Fans and Bad Fans

My Mirror column yesterday:

Watching Fan made me think about the lives of Indian film fans, both on and off the silver screen.

Narcissism is integral to stardom. But in Fan, Shah Rukh Khan has gone where no superstar has gone before: he has played, in the same film, two versions of himself. As Aryan Khanna, the superstar, he looks like his contemporary self (and the footage supposedly from Aryan's early years in the industry is Khan's own). As Gaurav Chandna, the fan, Khan presents a persona that echoes his own screen self from an earlier era, the crazed young stalker of Darr and Baazigar.

The figure of the film fan has appeared in Hindi cinema before, but in every previous instance I can think of, fandom has been a route to romantic fantasy. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi (1971) cast debutant actress Jaya Bhaduri (who had just graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India) as a schoolgirl besotted with Dharmendra. Bhaduri's Guddi is a charming mix of precocious and innocent - confident enough to use filmi acting as a way of tricking the adults around her, and yet so dumbstruck by Dharmendra's screen image as to decide that she will be a lifelong adoring Meera to his unseeing Krishna.

Mukherjee's tone is gently pedagogic about the psychological impact of films on society - there's the sly scene in the beginning where the teacher tells Guddi's class to produce a "paanch pannon ka lekh" on 'Janta ka swabhaav, us par cinema ka prabhaav' and then promptly opens her copy of a Hindi film magazine to read while they write it. Dharmendra plays himself, with his friend Gulzar's script enabling him to add to his public persona this additional layer of the socially concerned film star who goes out of his way to undo the impact of his reel life on his fans' real lives. Gulzar and Mukherjee want us to see Guddi's emergence from fandom as a painful but necessary coming of age.

Fandom is an infantile state of being in the 1999 release Mast, too - just not one from which escape is encouraged. Instead director Ram Gopal Varma creates an infantile star to match the infantile fan. The schoolboyish Kittu (Aftab Shivdasani) runs away to Bombay to meet his idol Mallika (Urmila Matondkar). When he discovers that the superstar is actually a sweet, sad orphan kept under lock and key by her evil mamaji, the scene is set for the ultimate fan fantasy - the fan rescues the star, and she recognises him for the wonderful creature he is, and they live happily ever after.

Rajat Kapur's 2003 Raghu Romeo also features a crazed fan 'rescuing' his heroine. But if Mast entered entirely into the fan's imagination, Kapur's film is a sharp and often hysterically funny takedown, presenting the fan as someone unable to differentiate image from reality. Vijay Raaz, playing the eponymous Raghu with a perfect hangdog expression, kidnaps an uppity television star (Maria Goretti) ostensibly to save her from a hitman. He keeps the actress in captivity for days, driving her up the wall by insisting on treating her as the pious housewife she plays in the daily soap he watches obsessively. Many things happen, but Kapur's resolution to Raghu's fixation with 'Neetaji' involves not just her clear romantic rejection of him, but also her screen death.

Fan is different from these, because Gaurav's relationship with Aryan cannot be subsumed easily under the category of romantic love. He does not only love Aryan -- he wants to be him. Fan's premise is much closer to the real-life phenomenon of organised fandom in India, which is overwhelmingly made up of all-male fan associations focused on male stars. Many such fans model themselves on their heroes; those who manage 'duplicate' status can sometimes build a career out of performing the star's hit dances, just as Gaurav does in the film. It is a strange combination -- a mode of self-promotion that the fan presents as altruistic support of the star. (One such group of Salman Khan lookalikes in Nagpur featured in the insightful 2014 documentary Being Bhaijaan.)

Narcissism apart, Fan plays too much to its imagined audience of fans, with unending chases and fisticuffs between the two SRKs making the film drag. But its plot taps astutely into what the film scholar SV Srinivas, in his superb book about the Chiranjeevi phenomenon, has described as "conditional loyalty". "The fan is a loyal follower and devotee only if the star lives up to the expectations the fan has of him..." writes Srinivas. "This [sense of entitlement] results in a situation in which fans become the guardians of the star's image and resort to drastic actions in his name."

The irrationality of fans -- usually jobless young men -- is linked to potential criminality: black-marketing tickets, rioting or 'rowdyism'. Srinivas documents attempts by Telugu stars to school the fan into becoming "a responsible admirer committed to socially purposeful activities". It is this spectre of the criminalised fan that Fan summons up. It makes some token gestures towards suggesting the star's fallibility as a human being. But by presenting Gaurav as an infantile fan gone rogue, the film becomes another part of the pedagogic machinery by which SRK the star wants to 'reform' his fans.

Gaurav spends his whole life duplicating his hero, and when his hero finally talks to him at length, it is only to lecture him about living his own life. But Gaurav, it seems, can only step away from Aryan by dying. Is death the fan's one original act?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 April 2016.

Film Review: The Attacks of 26/11 is trite, bloody, and asks no tough questions

My review of Ram Gopal Varma's film The Attacks of 26/11:

At around 8.30pm on Wednesday, 26th November 2008, fishermen at Mumbai’s Machhimaar Colony saw ten young men with large rucksack disembark from an inflatable Zodiac speedboat. An hour later, armed with hand grenades and automatic rifles, they had created terror across the city and grabbed the attention of the whole world. By midnight, over a hundred people, including three of Mumbai’s top cops, lay dead. It would be three days before the attacks of 26/11, as they came to be called, were brought to an end.

Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, who infamously managed to gain access to the Taj Hotel—the most well-known site of the Mumbai attacks—a mere three days after, has now directed a film that recreates the events of that first fateful night. Varma’s terror-tourism may have been in shockingly bad taste, but as he has repeatedly said, his visit has had no role to play in the making of the film, which contains absolutely no actual footage and relies instead on the dramatic recreation of events.

Varma’s last outing, Department (2012), was shockingly adulatory in its approach to its policemen protagonists: two encounter cops thoroughly corrupted by bloodlust and power. Graphic violence, of course, has long been the director’s forte, with its gratuitousness having peaked in recent years: whether he’s making a political drama like Rakthacharitra (2010) or a sex-crime thriller like Not a Love Story (2011). It should be no surprise, then, that The Attacks of 26/11 is both gratuitously violent and completely uncritical in its depiction of the police.

In fact, Varma leaves absolutely no doubt as to where his affiliations lie: he tells the story not through the eyes of any of the hundreds of victims or survivors, but through those of the Joint Commissioner of Police (the real-life Rakesh Maria, here given a fictitous name and played by the dependably theatrical Nana Patekar). No matter that Maria was not actually witness to any of the events he is “describing” to an enraptured investigatory committee – which, conveniently, never asks a single question, allowing Patekar to hold forth in a series of magisterial monologues, interrupted only when Varma shifts to showing us people dying, at Leopold Café, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and the Taj Hotel. The Leopold segment offers up the bizarre frisson of reenactment, because Varma has managed to get the café’s actual owner Farhad Jehani to play himself during the shootout. This yields one memorable cinematic moment, when the havaldars outside pitch pebbles into the café to check if the terrorists are still there. But at the other sites all we get is the sight of merciless killing, with Varma either focusing on wounded bodies and crying babies or zooming in to the faces of the killers to show how much pleasure they seem to be taking in the act.

The unstintingly gory recreation of these tragic deaths seems especially a pity because Varma was once gifted enough as a filmmaker to be able to grip us without it. Even this film manages a few moments of soundless menace. The opening sequence, for instance, with the fishing boat Kuber tricked into stopping by another boat’s request for help, achieves a sinister sense of foreboding merely by showing the two boats scraping against each other, lashed by the waves. By the time the Kuber crew is tied up and its genial-looking lungi-clad captain forced, at gunpoint, to take the ten young gunmen on board his boat, we are already cringing inwardly at the knowledge of what is to come. But Varma doesn’t  just show us the sight of the four dead fishermen, trussed up and lying in a row – he gives us a verbal exchange between the terrorists that is entirely of his own making: “Humne apne bakre kha liye hain, tum bhi kha lo (we have eaten up our goats, you eat yours too)”

Varma has made much of the fact that he does not intend his film to be read as an indictment of Muslims as a community, but this sort of ‘cinematic liberty’—plying the audience with references to halaal and a (beeped out) Allah-u-Akbar as they do the deed – is dangerously construable as exactly that. Varma’s rather strange way of balancing this out is to incorporate a long homily on the real message of the Koran. This might have been easier to take if it weren’t put into the mouth of our supposed hero, Patekar-Maria, and delivered to the film’s villain, Ajmal Kasab (debutante Sanjeev Jaiswal), as he cowers amid the corpses of his fellow gunmen on the filthy floor of a morgue.

It is not anyone’s case that Ajmal Kasab and his fellows be depicted as anything but the murderers of innocents. But it is not at all clear what we gain from having him depicted as some kind of caged animal, tearing off pieces of food with handcuffed hands, looking crazed and walking with the shuffling gait of some ape-man. Or indeed, what we gain from watching a trite, bloody rehearsal of the events of that terrible night that neithertakes us into the lives of any of the ordinary people affected (beyond the desperate moment of their deaths), nor asks any of the difficult questions that need asking about the role played by politicians, the police and the media. The police here are uncritically feted as heroes, while the media and politicians do not even make an appearance.

In 2009, a 48 minute documentary titled Terror in Mumbai – Dispatches, co-produced by Channel 4 and HBO, and directed by Dan Reed, was released. Consisting of interviews with victims, actual CCTV videos of the terrorists at various sites, video testimony of the captured Ajmal Kasab soon after he was caught and most terrifying of all, actual audio intercepts between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, Dan Reed’s thoroughly disturbing film has never been shown (or excerpted or discussed) on Indian television. Which is no surprise, perhaps, because it contains chilling and irrefutable proof, among other things, of how unregulated media coverage actually aided the terrorists and their Pakistani controllers in stretching the ordeal out further by giving them a clear sense of what steps the Indian law enforcement agencies were taking. If you want to watch a gripping film on 26/11 that shows you what actually happened and leaves you with a lasting sense of unease – instead of letting us pat ourselves on the back for sacrifice and moving patriotically on – Terror in Mumbai is available on the internet. Watch it.

This review was first published on Firstpost. Read the whole thing here.

Film review: With Department, RGV tips over into the void

“Ram Gopal Varma on a roll is one of journalism’s guilty pleasures,” writes Meenal Baghel in her book, Death in Mumbai. I have no experience of RGV’s skills as a raconteur, but watching his films is swiftly becoming one of journalism’s forms of penance.

In Department, Varma casts Sanjay Dutt and Rana Daggubati as senior and junior encounter cops, Mahadev Bhosle and Shiv Narain respectively, in a sordid crime drama that he has recently described as “the other side of Company”. But it is difficult to believe they are the work of the same man. Comparisons to Company or Satya – films whose masterful characterisations and urban realist aesthetic made Varma the defining influence for a whole new genre of Mumbai underworld films – seem like a travesty when you’re watching a film as amateurish as Department.

Even at the height of his cinematic powers, Varma had a tendency towards excess. His penchant for deafening background scores, gravity-defying camera angles and menacing expressions was once put to more-or-less appropriate use in horror films, a genre he made his own with Bhoot (2003). Now these have become the unfortunate hallmarks of RGV’s cinema in general, whether he’s making a political thriller like Rakthacharitra (2010) or a sex-crime drama like Not a Love Story (2011). Since the mega-disaster of his supposed Sholay remake, Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag (2007), every film he releases sparks avid discussion on whether it will mark ‘a return to form’. With Department, Varma tips entirely over into the void.

First of all, the camera angles are outlandish, even by Varma’s usual standards. Instead of a single traditional camera, Department is shot using several Canon EOS 5D cameras, small cameras that can be fixed in the most unlikely places. In pre-release interviews, Varma has spoken of this technological innovation enabling him to “reinvent the cinematic language” in the hope that the audience “would feel the enhanced impact of what the characters are trying to express”. So forcing us to constantly look up at Rana Daggubati’s outsize torso as if we’re fallen at his feet is a way of experiencing the pain of being Shiv Narain? Well, my head certainly hurts.

Second, Department outshines most RGV films in the gratuitous violence department. Every scene – even an ostensibly emotional flashback in which Shiv Narain tells his betrothed Bharti how he first met his boss Mahadev Bhonsle (Sanjay Dutt) – is an opportunity to up the gore quotient. Bullets come whizzing directly towards us (blame those “enhancing” cameras), fresh fountains of blood spurt from every wound, character actors die like rats. And the more of this we’re shown, the less it matters.

Our total desensitisation is aided by the soundtrack, which could have skipped the details and simply overlaid the sounds of shattering glass and breaking brick walls over a regular stream of gunshots.

The worst part of the film, though, are its cardboard characters. It isn’t just that this is a world in which the ostensibly revolutionary female gangster character (Telugu actress Madhu Shalini) can only get screen space if she’s got something to roll round her tongue lasciviously, while the role of all wives – whether the yoga-practising Satya (an incredibly fake Lakshmi Manchu) or the bespectacled doctor Bharti (Anjana Sukhani) – is to swap recipes, chat prettily with their husbands’ political masters and defend what their husbands do, regardless of how many unarmed men they kill before dinner. It isn’t just that the police in this film are indistinguishable from the mafia, or that the mafia are indistinguishable from the politicians (represented here by Amitabh Bachchan as the caricaturish Sarjerao, who wears a tinkling bell on his wrist to – you guessed it – bajao everyone).

The problem with Department is that it takes this world entirely for granted; it doesn’t deem it necessary to provide any sort of moral compass at all, neither for its characters, nor for us. But as Sanjay Dutt says in one of Nilesh Girkar’s awful grandstanding dialogues: “Kisne kaha ki bekasoor ko sazaa nahi lagti?” Perhaps the moral of RGV’s tale is that there is no moral compass left.

But what we get is not a dark, self-conscious meditation on the internal rot within the Indian police. That is a film that is crying out to be made. Instead, Department is a strangely listless combination of adulatory policier and nudge-nudge-wink-wink tale about the corruption of power. The joke’s on us.

Published in Firstpost.

Film Review: Mumbai Cutting

Bombay Eleven

Read the Tehelka piece here. And the longer version below.

Bombay has always been the metropolis of choice for Hindi cinema. As any self-respecting Indian film-goer could tell you, when watching a Hindi film, if the locale was urban, it was safe to assume that it was Bombay. Strangely, though, films set in Bombay weren’t always interested in the specificity of the city. Film scholar M. Madhava Prasad suggests that this may have been because ‘Bambai’ was always invoked in opposition to the village, as “the generic metropolitan other”. While other cities were too specific, Bombay somehow managed to be “Bombay plus The City”. But having to bear this burden of symbolic city-ness meant that it was only in the 1970s, with a film like Deewar, that Bombay came into its own on screen, with identifiable locales, language and street culture.

Since then, of course, there’s been no looking back. The fetishization of “Bambaiya” speech, specifically through films set in the underworld, has been the cinematic obsession of our times. The gritty realist gangster flick created by Ram Gopal Varma continues to thrive, while giving rise to comic riffs that play on our underworld fascination, like the Munnabhai films. Varma and his Factory have also been responsible for a series of tributes to Bombay as the city of cinematic dreams: Rangeela, Mast, Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, Naach. More recently, films like Life in a Metro have sought to rediscover a “middle class” Mumbai of office romance and failing marriages.

Mumbai Cutting makes this showcasing of Mumbai a self-conscious venture. Produced by Niyati Shah of White Cloud Films, the film consists of eleven shorts, with Mumbai as the common thread. Several films seek to capture something quintessentially Bombay by recourse to public hangouts: bars, cafes, clubs. Ayush Raina’s Bombay High revolves around the kind of seedy neighbourhood bar that probably doesn’t exist in any other Indian city – where small time gangsters share space with an after-office group that includes women. The only thing identifiably Bombay about Jahnu Barua’s badly-named Anjane Dost is an Irani Café that’s seems meant to serve as both locale and premise: but surely the meeting between strangers can happen in any city, anywhere in the world? Then we have Rahul Dholakia’s stylishly-shot Bombay Mumbai Same Shit, with Jimmy Shergill as a rich brat whose nocturnal wanderings weave the nightclub and the pavement together.

The two women directors, Revathi and Ruchi Narain, place women at the centre of their narratives. In Revathi’s tightly-edited Parcel, Mumbai appears as a series of insurmountable hurdles to a Bangladeshi woman en route to the Middle East – Sonali Kulkarni in a stellar performance. Narain’s quirky, part-animated Jo Palti Nahi Woh Rickshaw Kya shows an NRI woman’s relationship to Mumbai’s pleasures – and dangers – as mediated by auto-rickshaw rides.

Despite the genuine effort to depict different locations and social classes, several shorts end up recycling Mumbai clichés – mafia, the monsoon and local trains – without doing much with them. Sudhir Mishra’s The Ball has a child witness the gang murder of a man during an evening cricket match. Shot predictably in the thick of the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods (under the JJ flyover, going towards Bhendi Bazaar), the film never transcends its gimmicky opening. Manish Jha’s And it Rained, about two people brought together by the Mumbai monsoon is ambitiously dialogue-less, depending instead on Euphoria’s Jiya jaye na track, but ends up feeling like a music video. Kundan Shah’s Hero (also without dialogue) does better with its take on the daily battle to get on the local train: Deepak Dobriyal (of Omkara fame) plays the flagging commuter with an exaggerated Buster Keatonesque comic automaton-like quality that nearly works.

But for the large majority of Hindi film buffs, Bombay is not a lived space whose traffic lights and nakabandis we negotiate every day. It’s the mythical Bombay of mafia dons and glamorous starlets that we’ve seen on screen all our lives. So while some of these latter shorts are extremely watchable, the two that really succeed are the ones that set out, self-consciously, to play with the Bombay of popular lore and filmic memory.

The first is Anurag Kashyap’s Pramod Bhai 23, which does a brilliant job of showing you this mythical Bombay as it lives in the mind and heart of a 12-year-old juvenile delinquent. Mushtaq lives in a world defined by knowing someone who knows someone who knows Chhota Rajan, a world marked by traffic light encounters with a lady in dark glasses who’s definitely “Karan Arjun ki Ma”. The second is Rituparno Ghosh’s Urge, a gentle tongue-in-cheek look at Bombay’s place in the popular Indian imagination. The humour owes a lot to the self-referential treatment – the family seems straight out of a TV serial (clues are provided: the mother whines about having to give up her “last two serials”), and the Stardust-reading police inspector is clearly inspired to play detective by watching Bombay films. It is this ability to view the city bifocally, to see how the mythical Bombay feeds off the real one (and vice versa) that makes Mumbai Cutting a true benchmark in the long line of Mumbai films.

(An edited version of this article appeared in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 34, Dated Aug 30, 2008)