This Dappled Light

My Mirror column:

Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut eschews high drama for a gentle chiaroscuro of abandon and watchfulness.

The blue Ambassador that transports a Calcutta family into the semi-rural wilderness of 1970s McCluskieganj places Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut in a longstanding tradition of Bengali holiday fictions. One of the earliest parts of India to be colonised and enter into capitalist time, Bengal’s employed white collar denizens treat the chhuti (vacation) with almost as much reverence as the chakri (office job).

So although the dialogue is mostly in English (a fact that fits Sen Sharma’s smoking-drinking-Auld-Lang-Syne-singing assemblage of Anglophone Calcuttans perfectly), A Death in the Gunj clearly draws on the particular historical relationship between the middle-class Bengali vacationer escaping the urban chaos of Calcutta and the unspoilt nearby hinterland of not-too-distant locations in Orissa and Bihar (now partly Jharkhand). Many of Satyajit Ray’s short stories – and several of Saradindu’s Byomkesh Bakshi ones – used journeys to these milieus to presage the unfurling of a mystery. Leaving the city for the jungle or some remote rural outpost, as is seen in so many of these stories, is a fictional trope that enables the emergence of suppressed selves.

Sen Sharma’s film, unlike in the above instances, makes her cinematic travellers a family group: complete with an eight-year-old child, a slightly slutty cousin and a poor relation who is a rather pretty boy. In a beautifully observed set of vignettes, we see how the dynamics of power, class, sex and age are at work within the family, often being set into motion by the arrival of non-familial male visitors – Ranvir Shorey’s belligerently charming Vikram, and Jim Sarbh’s mild-mannered Brian. 

Vikram, in particular, is the catalyst for many reactions. Kalki Koechlin’s Mimi amps up her sexiness in an ever-so-carelessly careful way around him, the older woman of the house (Tanuja) is somewhat flattered by his gift-giving, and even the married Bonnie (Tilottama Shome) can feel mildly slighted by his attention to Mimi. More crucially, though, Vikram embodies a certain masculine aggression: something to which Nandu (Gulshan Devaiah) responds by wanting to match up to him, to prove he’s just as fearless – while the gentler Shutu’s reaction is to retreat into his shell.

Shutu – played to perfection by Vikrant Massey – is the emotional centre of the film. He’s the poor sensitive cousin who spends much of his time with his notebook, sketching frogs and making private lists of words he likes beginning with ‘e’, when he is not hanging out with the actual child in the group, Tani. He is 23 and has just lost a father and failed an exam, but his vulnerability seems to work like some kind of taunt to the older men, who couch their bullying of him as some kind of initiation ritual that will force him to “toughen up”.

I recently watched another film about a troubled young man at the cusp of adulthood – the Marathi film Kaasav (Turtle), directed by Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar, which won a National Award for Best Feature last year. Kaasav’s plot, such as it is, feels much more contrived: a young man in bermuda shorts and a backpack tries to slit his wrists, is rescued, escapes from the hospital and coincidentally washes up at the doorstep of an older woman (Irawati Harshe) who is just in the process of recovering from her own experience of suicidal depression.

A painfully repetitive pattern of brattish behaviour on the part of the young man and selfless acceptance on the part of the older woman ensues, made somewhat watchable by the presence of a beautifully calming Konkan coastline and a rather sweet child who offers the innocence quotient. The film is wonderfully well-intentioned and finally leads us out of the impasse by making the protagonist recognise something of his own strength.

Unlike the sanitised, asexual matrix of pure humanity within which Kaasav operates, A Death in the Gunj offers a fleshed out universe of characters, none of whom are evil – yet we are forced to grapple with their darker sides. Along with the companionable lightness and warmth that the family offers, it can also force its less forceful members into preconceived slots, too quick to judge, too preoccupied to pay attention, neglecting to give them the space they might need to be – or become – themselves. 

A woman who really wants to accompany a search party is left behind because she is perceived as too emotionally fraught to be taken – while a man who really does not want to go along is hijacked into the expedition. Sen Sharma’s film is full of moments like these, making us watch as people ignore each other’s needs, or worse, blithely use another person to fulfil their own. Watching it is an exercise in sensitive observation; its particular tragedies may unfold in the slow time of a long-ago vacation, but they could so easily be our own.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 June 2017.

Sunny Side Down

My Mirror column yesterday:

Kanu Behl's superb 'Titli' marks the debut of a filmmaker who is unflinching in a way we rarely see.

There's a moment in Titli when a gun emerges from a mithai ka dabba, and one is accosted by the thought that there could be no better way to conceal a weapon. That standard-issue yellow-and-red cardboard box, so familiar and so familial a constituent of North Indian life that it could never be an object of suspicion, seems to me to function as a perfect metonym for what the film is doing at every level -- toying with our expectations, constantly and without prelude. 

First, the name. Titli means butterfly, a word whose automatic association with gardens and spring and flowers in bloom conjures up a natural idyll -- an imagined paradise which couldn't be further removed from the grim urban underbelly the film in fact inhabits (there is more than one reference to feeling caught in a narak, hell). The Hindi word, moreover, is a feminine noun, with a particularly bouncy, childlike quality, and there is something sweetly incongruous about naming a young man that. It is also protean -- with a name like Titli, you think, how bad can he be? And that question does, in some ways, animate our watching of the film, down to the very end. 

Then there are the characters: Kanu Behl's exemplary cast of lower middle class Delhi folk might lull us, in the first few moments, into believing that what we have here is another of those colourful, dysfunctional, lower middle class North Indian families that the Hindi film industry is fast turning into some sort of budget comic formula. But you learn fairly soon that this is no mild, easily digestible form of dysfunction, no collection of quirks that might be milked for wry humour or even affectionate laughter. This is the great Indian family turned inside out, revealing not just the ugly seams but the stuffing. 

Titli (Shashank Arora in a remarkable debut role) lives with his father and two elder brothers in a depressing little gali house "past the Mother Dairy, behind the nala", somewhere Jamna-paar (meaning in one of the Delhi colonies that lie beyond the Yamuna, in the direction of Noida). The interior has a sense of unrelieved gloom, a burnt-out quality that also has something to do with the lack of female presence. The mother is long-dead. Only the eldest brother Vikram (Ranvir Shorey in a stunning performance that gave me goosebumps) is married. But his wife Sangeeta (incredibly effective in her couple of scenes) has already left the house with their little daughter Shilpi. During the course of the film, another woman is persuaded to enter the space as a new bride. Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi, superb) comes with a dining table as dowry, gesturing both to the yearning for family togetherness and the gaping hole that sits in its place. 

What Behl's film does most powerfully is to charge the banality of lower middle class life with the shock of violence. The brothers refer to the car-jackings they do as "kaam" (work), wrapping the blood and gore of it in a coat of chilling everydayness. So comfortably do they adopt the skin of "normal" domesticity that we are surprised every time. But Titli can surprise us even in reverse - the hand-breaking scene might be the most tender act of violence I've ever seen. 

Behl and Sharat Kataria's screenplay seems to me to distil the world into two categories of people. Some, for whom the status quo is working well, have no desire to rock the boat: The corrupt policeman, the smarmy builder. As Prince says to placate Titli, "Jo jaise chal raha hai, woh chalne do". So those who hold the reins of power are loath to let them go, while others are caught in a criss-crossing web they can barely see. Titli seems the only one who can see it clearly, this cycle of poverty and violence, brutality and despair -- and his desperate bid to escape from its clutches forms the film's narrative core. 

The unwavering focus of Titli's desire is a parking lot in a new mall, which he hopes will be a permanent source of income, a way out of criminality. The half-built mall in which the film opens sets the tone for the film's other theme -- money. Titli's is a world in which money seems to come so easily to some, and so very tortuously to others. Some people print five-hundred-rupee wedding cards, while others must scrounge for years together to save three lakhs. 

Director Kanu Behl has worked with Dibakar Banerjee on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (OLLO) and Love Sex aur Dhokha (which he co-wrote with Banerjee). Titli seems in conversation with Banerjee's oeuvre in interesting ways. This Delhi-under-construction, with its dreams dominated by real estate, has much in common with the world of Banerjee's own debut, Khosla ka Ghosla. But of course, instead of that film's gentle middle class protagonists - "decent people" who only get sucked into criminality because the evil guy screws them over -- what we have here is closer to OLLO's view of the world: "gentry jo boltein English hai, kartein desi". In fact, the gentry in Titli, such as it is, is one step up from even OLLO: they order sherwanis in one breath while doling out murder contracts in the next. Here it is the poor who are sucked into criminality, the poor for whom even escape involves betrayal. It is not a sunny view -- but the shadows do contain the possibility of redemption.

Published in Mumbai Mirror

Rajat Kapoor's filmi foolscape

Starting this month, I'll be writing a weekly column on Hindi cinema for the Mumbai Mirror. The first one -- on the tragicomic films of Rajat Kapoor -- appeared yesterday.

Rajat Kapoor's brilliant new film Ankhon Dekhi (2014) is about a man who decides one day that he has been living life all wrong. From now on, he announces, he will no longer trust other people's versions of reality. That world was a hazy photocopy. Based on the evidence of his own senses, reality begins to come sharply, often painfully into focus. 

I see Ankhon Dekhi as the third of a series that Kapoor began with Raghu Romeo (2003) and followed up with Mithya (2008). All three films are finely wrought tragicomedies: drolly funny, always thoughtful and often startling meditations on the nature of reality. And at the centre of each one is a fool. A fool, not in the common understanding of the term, but in the Shakespearian sense of the seeming simpleton who speaks and acts without fear, and thus seems to arrive at a truer understanding of the world. 

Vijay Raaz's Raghu in Raghu Romeo seems, at first glance, a besotted fan who cannot seem to tell life from television. Or does he just not want to? Perhaps real life, as his soliloquies remind us, is just too cruel. While the "Nita ji" of his television daydreams is the receptacle of all worldly goodness: she who cannot hate. When a hilarious turn of events forces him to confront the reality of the waspish actress who embodies his adored Nita, Raghu remains reluctant. 

Eventually he concedes that the object of his worship may appear to be 'Reshma, television actress' "from the outside," but there's a Nita ji hidden inside her. "Aapke andar koi Nitaji chhipi baithi hain," he insists to a stupefied Reshma. "Aur jo aapke andar hain woh aap toh dekh nahi paate. Lekin main dekh paa raha hoon. (And what is inside you, you can't see. But I can.)" 

That mismatch between the visible and invisible self, the gulf that appears on the 'outside' and what might exist 'inside', is another of Kapoor's persistent themes. At one level, it flags yet again his interest in performance as reality, opening up the never-ending question of what constitutes identity. Fatso (2012), one of Kapoor's flawed efforts, used a comic supernatural device to explore that idea - a young man who has died manages to come back to 'life' by taking over the body of his fat friend.But to return to the fool: Ranvir Shorey's VK in Mithya is another stellar instance. A bit-part actor with very little talent but a profound belief in the life of the artiste, VK puts his heart and soul into every role he gets, obsessing over whether his 'expression' was right even when he's playing the corpse in an action scene. 

What Kapoor's clever script does is to take this hungry performer and give him the role of a lifetime. But it's not a film or a play in which VK must take his greatest test as an actor - it's real life. In what is in many ways a droll tribute to Don, VK is the lookalike simpleton sent to replace the mafia don Raje Bhai.

But Kapoor is concerned with much more than plot, or the pleasure human beings always seem to take in doubles. 

If VK is the fool who picks out the police boss in the identification parade, he is also the fool who cannot seem to stem his natural affection even when it puts his life in danger. Then, in a tribute to the classic Hindi film twist, VK hits his head and loses his memory. 

Now he is truly a fool: the powerless pawn who believes he actually is a don. And yet there is a way in which his emotions are true -- truer perhaps than those of the dead man he has replaced, as Raje Bhai's wife and children seem to instinctively recognize. 

Ankhon Dekhi steps away from the cinematic meta-ness of the previous two films into an immaculately un-filmi Old Delhi milieu. The overwhelming noise of the lower-middle-class life - what Bauji calls "wohi kaain-kaain, chik-chik, bak-bak" -- was evoked in Raghu Romeo, too, and the harried mother has remained more or less the same from Surekha Sikri to the superb Seema Pahwa (Hum Log's Badki fits perfectly into this world, which sometimes feels like an updated, keenly funny version of Hum Log's '80s joint family.) 

But unlike Raghu, who sought solace in fiction, Bauji's epiphany drives him further towards fact. He demands "pramaan", not "anumaan". But no abstract mathematical or scientific truth will do. Experience is the only acceptable proof. 

Bauji's new principle of sensory truth turns him first into a figure of fun, then worry, then threat -- and then hero-worship. His insistence can expose the profound limits of his experience - as when he refuses to book tickets to Amsterdam because he's never been there, and his travel agency boss angrily demands to know where he has been. Bauji hangs his head. As Rafey Mahmood's camera frames him with tragic irony against the luridly fake fall colours of the travel agency poster, he has to admit he has been nowhere. Yes, he is a frog in a well. But it is his well, and he insists on getting to know it. "Sab kucch yahin hai, aankhen khol ke dekh lo," says the placard Bauji starts holding up at junctions. 

"Everything is here, open your eyes and look." That is the crazy, transformative truth of Ankhon Dekhi: when you have the eyes to see, everything can be beautiful. That way lies new experience, and the fool goes fearlessly forth towards it.

Film Review: The Trouble with Being Fatso

Fatso has several things going for it: a clever idea at its centre, some super performances, some nice set pieces and Rajat Kapur’s gentle but firm hand at the wheel. It’s fresh and often funny. The trouble is, it also wants to be profound.

The plot has great potential. Good-looking yuppie couple Naveen (Purab Kohli) and Nandini (Gul Panag) are very much in love and planning to get married. Then Naveen dies in a car accident. Nandini is distraught. So far, so tragic. But this is a comedy, remember? So Navin arrives in the other world and discovers that it’s all a mistake: it wasn’t him who was meant to die, it was his fat friend Sudeep (Ranvir Shorey). Having discovered that he’s lost out to a clerical error, Naveen sets about getting a new life. Literally.

Fatso’s most memorable bits don’t unfold on Planet Earth. They happen in the afterlife, which – in Rajat Kapur and Saurabh Shukla’s mordant imagination – is a crazed sarkari office, stretched to the limits. As in life, so in death. White-painted boards proclaim special sections for ‘Senior Citizens’ and ‘Natural Deaths’, stacks of dusty files climb to the ceiling and hassled officials try to pass the buck onto each other. The dead jostle each other in long, untidy queues, trying to complete their unending paperwork so they can move on to the next stage. But the bade sahib is always in a meeting.

This section of the film is superbly done, with a host of top-notch actors making every character memorable. I’d single out the hassled but placatory afsar played by Rahul Vohra, the tea boy Chhotu who tells a baffled Naveen, “Hum toh last station par ruke hue hain, moh maya ke chakkar mein” – and of course, the cynical (but good-at-heart) peon of death, brilliantly played by Brijendra Kala, last seen as the nervous journalist in Paan Singh Tomar (and who also appears in this week’s other release, Jannat 2, as Randeep Hooda’s right hand man).

Unfortunately we don’t get to stay stuck at this “last station”, because Naveen figures out a way to get back to earth: by having Sudeep die instead of him, and entering Sudeep’s body. The murky morality of this decision – pretty much orchestrating your friend’s death so you can live – seems entirely lost on the self-obsessed Naveen, and on the filmmakers, too.
Before we know it, the ghostly Purab Kohli has disappeared and the cinematic spotlight has shifted to Ranvir Shorey. Which is no bad thing, really, because Shorey’s wonderfully credible Sudeep is about a hundred times better than the annoyingly cocky performance Kohli puts in here. Shorey brings the amicable, rotund Sudeep brilliantly to life, whether he’s playing football with kids on the beach, clumsily trying to prevent old friend Yash (Neil Bhoopalam) from sneakily wooing an apparently clueless Nandini, or talking his suicidal friend Tanuja (Gunjan Bakshi) out of the idea of killing herself.

But what’s really going on here? Nandini tells her old buddy Sudeep he should never change anything about himself – including the ridiculous laugh that is “so you”. But why is the fat boy suddenly able to to woo the pretty girl in his group? Isn’t it because he’s internally changed – on the inside, he’s no longer the complacent, unambitious, never-slept-with-a-girl, okay-with-his-potbelly Sudeep.

There are too many things left unexplored here. For one, it seems more than a little tragic that the fat boy character only acquires confidence once he’s a good-looking man who knows he’s only trapped in a fat body. Next, it’s deeply discomfiting that the “love story” that Rajat Kapur declaredly set out to make doesn’t involve letting the girl in on who she’s actually falling in love with. The film tries to play with complicated questions of identity and selfhood, without successfully grappling even with the most basic things, like honesty. Things are worsened by Gul Panag’s terribly written character: a woman whose first reaction upon seeing her dead fiance is to run her finger over his lips and say “Bite it, dammit” can only appear ludicrous. It’s hard even for the competent Panag to make such stagey lines and too-quick turnarounds seem entirely credible.

From the director of such first-rate films as the sadly underwatched sex comedy Mixed Doubles and the wonderful Mithya, Kapur’s previous meditation on identity, Fatso is a bit of a disappointment. Even when it’s making us laugh, it feels like there’s something hollow at the centre.

Thanks Maa - Film Review

Children Of The Underbelly


FILM >> THANKS MAA
DIRECTOR >> IRFAN KAMAL
STARRING >> SHAMS PATEL, BABY ALMAS, MASTER FAYAAZ, SANJAY PANDEY, RANVIR SHOREY
RATING >> * * 1/2

MOVIES STARRING CHILDREN in central roles can be difficult to pull off. Kids may tug at the audience’s heartstrings, but that directorial advantage — of being able to pull the viewer in with ease — comes with the danger of tipping over into maudlin territory.

Thanks Maa begins shakily, with a confusing title sequence that cuts between a nervous burqa-clad woman so distracted by her husband’s crankiness that she endangers their crawling baby, and street kids stealing a wallet under the pretext of polishing shoes. Debutant director Irfan Kamal seems to be setting the viewer up for an oddly overcooked morality tale, pitched somewhere between Amar Akbar Anthony and Boot Polish, with neither the zany humour of one nor the emotional kick of the other. Thankfully, Kamal recovers swiftly. Initial caricatures (like the bug-eyed seth from Surat) and amateurish acting are forgotten when we meet the film’s real subjects: a charming bunch of street urchins named Soda, Municipality, Cutting, Sursuri and Shana. Shams Patel’s star turn as the twelve-year-old Municipality Ghatkopar (named for the place where he was found as a baby) has garnered a National Award for Best Child Actor, but his co-actors’ performances are pitch-perfect too — fluctuating between jaded cynicism and wide-eyed vulnerability. Among the adults, mention must be made of Alok Nath and Ranvir Shorey's superb cameos as the smarmy head of a juvenile home and a nervous middle class husband, respectively.

The narrative centres on Municipality’s discovery of an abandoned infant and his determined effort to trace its mother, who he is convinced is grief-stricken and waiting to be reunited with it. The film teeters on the brink of a Madhur Bhandarkar-like sensational excess, but Kamal and cinematographer Ajayan Vincent use Municipality’s journey as an opportunity to shoot a magnificently varied set of urban locales. That old Mumbai cliché, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, is captured afresh and memorably, but the camera also manages to make us see a strange and startling beauty everywhere — in the hill-like slums of Parkside, Vikhroli, in the surreal space of a BPO as seen by a street child. That, in itself, is a remarkable achievement.


From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 11, Dated March 20, 2010