Post Facto - Beauty is the beast

My Sunday Guardian column for March 1st:

Suchitra Sen

In a sketch that's part of the Tadpole Repertory's superb play Taramandal, a nervous young woman arrives at the office of a Bollywood agent. She nods when asked if she wants to be a star. But she doesn't speak Hindi — and for the most part of her time on stage, doesn't speak at all. The more he talks, the more terror-stricken she looks. Eventually he suggests, not unkindly, that she sign up as a Junior Artist, commonly known as an extra. "It'll be work. And with your looks, you'll get slotted as A-Class."

The aspiring star is played by a strikingly attractive actor, and to hear that fact referenced in the dialogue — "aapki looks" — seems appropriate, even necessary. It both acknowledges her beauty and dismisses it as not being enough. But is it really not enough, one wonders? And suddenly that idea — that beauty isn't all it takes to become a star — begins to seem a little bit like the wishful thinking oftheatre-wallahs. Because in fact, the film industry seems to declaim from rooftops that beauty is all. Talent, if at all it counts, is secondary.

The young Suchitra Sen — then plain Krishna Dasgupta — apparently once sat on a school bench and announced that she would be remembered long after her death. An ordinary middle class girl who was one of nine siblings, and an average student bereft of any artistic talent, all Sen had was her looks. But apparently, that was enough. "She was conscious of her great beauty... and behaved as if she... deserved every bit of the natural selection," wrote Susmita Dasgupta in a thoughtful Facebook note. At the time, a wealthy groom was the biggest prize a middle class girl could expect for her beauty. Krishna got that, too. But her stardom, says Dasgupta, came about because she believed she was meant for bigger things. Beauty was her claim upon the universe. Hindi film star Juhi Chawla recently described entering the Femina Miss India contest when in college. "I knew I was good," she said, but "there were prettier girls in my class and that always kept me grounded."

Women are constantly being rated on grounds of beauty — and rating ourselves, too. The sad thing is that it isn't just those who aspire to be models or actors, professions that overtly reward bodily perfection, who buy into this hierarchy. Seemingly, it's everyone. And that ingrained sense of superiority or inferiority, based on how you think other people think you look, can coexist with an otherwise well-formed intelligence. I was distressed to hear recently of a bright, high-achieving woman being thrilled that a college reunion still rated her among the hottest girls in her batch.

Men are rated on other things: intelligence, talent, wealth, power. Looks, not so much. That criterion, seemingly, they reserve for us. Off the top of my head, I can think of a boy in high school whose unsolicited rating of three female friends as "cute", "pretty" and "beautiful" I have never forgotten. Another male friend introduced someone a decade after college as "one of the hot girls in college". What's worse is the enshrining of this stuff as popular culture — in university fests, college mags and so on. In St. Stephen's College, premier educational institution of the land, it was long considered a "fun" thing for male students to regularly produce "chick charts" — a list of the top 10 "chicks" in college, based on their physical attributes. In 1984, soon after the pogrom against the Sikh community, they produced a "Sardine" chart — the top 10 female Sikh students rated on their looks. Filmmaker Saba Dewan, then a student there, wrote in 2012 of the uproar that followed, the all-out gender wars in which the authorities sided with the male "pranksters" against women students protesting objectification, who were termed troublemakers. St. Stephen's College in the late 1990s, when I went there, no longer had "chick charts", or at least not public ones. But very similar issues existed, and came to a head around "Miss and Mr Harmony". Ostensibly gender-neutral, it was, in practice, a contest of wit for boys, but looks for girls. The gender wars of my time ended with the entry of women into residence at St. Stephen's, for the first time in its history.

Re-watching Imtiaz Ali's Rockstar the other day, I had a moment of shock. Ali — who went to Hindu College himself — had decided that the best way to introduce his Stephanian heroine to us was to show her topping the chick chart. And the only woman we see respond to it says merely, "Dekhna kya hai? Jab tak yeh St. Stephen's mein hai, yeh hi hogi na No. 1". There it was — a thing so many women had fought so hard to get rid of, shorn of all its history, reinstated as instigator of the beauty myth.

A day after that, a friend said to me she identified with much of the rule-breaking fun that Ali's heroines had, but his actresses were too pretty. "They do what girls want, but they look like what boys want." Ah, no surprise there.

Why You May Not Want to Join the Imtiaz Ali Finishing School for Girls

My relationship with Imtiaz Ali's films is… uh, complicated. An essay I did for Yahoo! Originals 

In the defining first act of Imtiaz Ali's 2007 film Jab We Met, the impossibly talkative Geet (Kareena Kapoor) gets off a train to help out the mysteriously laconic Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) – and finds herself left behind in a small town in Madhya Pradesh. It is night, and the only people on the platform are a few overly concerned men. Geet's gathered Patiala salwar and T-shirt, unremarkable enough on the train, now seem too fetching by far: a magnet for attention of the unwanted kind. The scaremongering station master insists on framing the moment in calamitous mode: “Meri bhi kai trainen chhooti hain. Lekin...akeli ladki khuli tijori ki tarah hoti hai. (I, too, have missed some trains. But...a girl on her own is like an open treasure-chest.)” The bottled water seller who seemed comic a moment ago transmutes into a sleazily threatening presence. The frazzled Geet takes refuge with a group of women on the street, only to have a man draw up beside her on a scooter and say, “Chal.” It turns out she is standing in a line of sex workers.

The theme begins earlier, when Aditya retorts to Geet's endless chitchat about hostels she's lived in with an irritated “I don't care if you live in a hostel or a brothel.” It carries on now, as Geet, fleeing her persistent would-be client, latches on to Aditya and checks into a seedy lodge. “Room for the whole night, or by the hour?” asks the man at the reception with a wink and nudge at Aditya. “Oh, three hours should be more than enough for us,” says the blissfully oblivious Geet.

Ali plays the situation for laughs, even as he ends the sequence with a police raid that drives all Hotel Decent's occupants out the back staircase in various stages of decency. But the fact that being out at night – on a street, on a platform, in a certain sort of hotel – means that a woman either is, or is assumed to be, a sex worker, points us to one of Ali's pet themes: the great unfreedom of the respectable Indian woman.

Imtiaz Ali (right) with his stars Randeep Hooda and Alia Bhatt, on the sets of Highway.

The cocoon that ostensibly protects her from the dangers of the universe is also a prison that keeps her from its pleasures. And to the extent that Ali's heroines realize this, their desires do provide us something like resonance in a film industry that gives so little space to its women characters. “Ratlam! I can't believe I'm actually here, I've only seen the name from the train,” says Geet with a shiver of excitement, even as she has narrowly escaped from the men at the station. She has already spoken of her joy in the crowd, thwarted as it is by her family's fears: “I like to travel by normal train, but my family says I'm a girl so I must take the AC train. Ab yeh ladki aur AC ka kya connection hai, mujhe toh samajh mein nahi aaya...(What the connection is between girls and airconditioning, that I can't understand...).”

But Ali's chosen adventure test for his heroines, appearing in film after film, can feel ridiculously reductive. In Rockstar (2011), the “neat and clean, hi-fi” heroine Heer must prove her craziness by going to watch desi porn in a cinema and drink desi daaru. If Heer transforms to being cool in JJ's eyes by having Jungli Jawani and Prague's red light district on her to-do list, expressing her desire to watch a striptease in America pushes the gentle Aditi up a notch in Viren's scale of things in Socha Na Tha(2005), Ali's directorial debut. Meera in Love Aaj Kal (2009), too, must pass the test by getting drunk on desi liquor, letting it pour out to a row of men at a dhaaba in the song “Chorbazaari do nainon ki”.

There is much else that repeats itself in Imtiaz Ali's films. Clearly still a believer in the janam-janam wala love that we and our cinema are supposed to have graduated from, Ali likes nothing so much as creating cool modern-day characters who scoff at it – only to find themselves sucked inexorably into its maelstroms. His men and women fumble along in their relationships, mistaking love for friendship, lust for love. Most of the time, the men are more confused. The exception is Jab We Met,whereKareena takes ages to figure out that she isn't actually in love with the hot boy she ran away from home for. And perhaps Shivam Nair's Ahista-Ahista (2006), for which Ali wrote a script that rehearses the central premise of Jab We Met (2007) – the runaway girl, destroyed by being stood up by her lover, finds support from a helpful stranger and begins to wonder if she's in love with him. Usually, though, it's the man who's dating the hot woman and doesn't get that he's really in love with the quiet one. Until things get messy – think of Abhay Deol's unending confusion in Socha Na Tha, and later Saif Ali Khan's in Homi Adajania's Cocktail (2012), whose script Ali wrote. Sometimes, as in Love Aaj Kal, there's no other woman competing for his attentions – he's just blind to the power of what he has. This is the practical flirt, the platonic friend, the man who doesn't think love really exists. And in any case, how is it possible that the cool woman he's been spending time with might turn out to have such uncool ideas as lifelong love? The emotion is so ubiquitous to his characters that Ali has a standard line for it. Actually, two. “Tum mere pyar vyar mein toh nahi pad gayi? Shaadi kar ke bachhe paida karne ka plan toh nahi bana chuki?(You haven't gone and fallen in love with me or something, have you? Hatched a plan to marry me and have my children?)” Saif Ali Khan's Gautam says it in Love Aaj Kal, Ranbir Kapoor's JJ says it in Rockstar, even Randeep Hooda's Gujjar kidnapper gets to say a version of it in Highway. Later, of course, that incredulity comes full circle: the man who falls tragically, uncontrollably in love can scarcely believe it has happened to him.

The girl's rich family is always a caricature. In Socha Na Tha, in Rockstar and now in Highway, they function only as placeholders for tradition/'honour'/patriarchy, guards to her prison. And the girl, unquestioning until now but secretly yearning to break free, finally finds the courage to do so in that final moment before her arranged marriage. The mild “Time hai, toh masti kar lo” philosophy of Ayesha Takia's Aditi in Socha Na Tha has become a little more desperate by the time we get toRockstar, when Nargis Fakhri's simpering Heer takes off to Kashmir with Ranbir Kapoor's JJ days before marrying another man. Jab We Met, where the primary journey is not the bride-to-be's planned escape but simply happenstance, was the exception here, too. But now, with Highway, Ali has returned to the theme – and how.

With Highway, Ali takes his 'sheltered girl' character and pushes her out into a real world she has never even imagined. Alia Bhatt's Veera is, like all Ali's previous heroines, on the brink of an arranged marriage, but her desire for freedom has not gone beyond idle fantasy. She speaks, like so many posh urban PYTs, of leaving the stifling city and going away to live in the hills. But when she steals out the night before her wedding, it is only on a drive along the highway with her uninterested, irritated fiance. However, if Veera has barely understood her own impulse for freedom when the film starts, she is also the only Imtiaz Ali heroine to embrace it when it seems to appear, in however unlikely a form. In the form, in fact, of an abduction.

Ali has always understood that romance needs frisson. In almost all his films, he underlines the pleasures of the clandestine meeting, chhup chhup ke milna – the danger of being discovered is half the fun. So when Socha Na Tha's protagonists meet in an arranged marriage scenario, there can be no romance. It's after the boy rejects the girl that he decides he rather enjoys talking to her. And when the families turn against the idea entirely is when it begins to seem like real love. Love Aaj Kal is a paean to old-style romance, juxtaposing the contemporary Jai-Meera affair – so amicably practical that they can throw a party to mark their break-up – with the remembered romance of Veer and Harleen, built entirely of fragments: the stolen glance, the fleeting touch, the secret assignation in the Purana Qila, with the girl's friends on one hand and the guy's friends on the other. Ali spends much of the film showing us the great gulf that divides the old world and the new, and his attempts to sculpt a bridge between them are often unsuccessful. The farewell at the airport can no longer feel earthshaking if you're going to be on the phone to each other in about ten minutes. But in having Jai and Meera discover the joys of the secret rendezvous, Love Aaj Kal feels like it's on to something. As they steal away from their current significant others, they also steal away from the older 'proper' relationship version of themselves, and suddenly everything is a lot more fun.

In most of Ali's earlier films, though, the frisson of the illegitimate is achieved with mere token transgression. Rockstar, perhaps, went the furthest in this regard, extending the posh girl's desire for ‘slumming it’ with desi porn and desi daru to the shock of finding herself in love with the desi Pitampura boy, a boy whose very name is so irredeemably unfashionable that she must turn Janardhan Jakhar into Jordan. But that reluctance, the posh girl's refusal to allow that she might actually be in love with this most unsuitable boy, remains buried deep within Rockstar – a subtext that dare not speak its name. It's possibly what made the film so utterly frustrating – the fact that Ali seems to want us to believe that what holds the alabaster-skinned Heer back for so long is some inexplicable, unshakeable fidelity to her cipher of a husband, rather than simply her inability to deal with herself.

With Highway, Ali refashions all his pet themes into something bolder and more fantastic than anything he's done before. He launches his heroine on a journey not of her own making, in circumstances that ought to make her very afraid. Kidnapped by a gang of rough-tongued Gujjars, Alia Bhatt's Veera Tripathi is indeed terrified to start with. But as the film progresses, she starts to find herself revelling in the journey. That's the other favourite Imtiaz Ali theme, of course – the journey, working in the most obvious way as the road to self-discovery, and for his women, to discovering the possibility of freedom – necessarily in the company of a man. These tropes might seem tired, but at least in Highway Ali seems finally to push them further. The poor little rich girl here isn't just slumming it with a slightly inappropriate boyfriend – she is entering into a relationship with her properly subaltern abductor. And simultaneously with a country she has never quite looked at before.

Ali's use of natural locales has always tended towards the  picturesque, and here, too, Anil Mehta's cinematography creates an enchantingly lovely landscape that aids the film's dreamlike quality. But again, Highway is a departure of sorts, because Ali tries for elemental instead of pretty. When, early on, Veera is desperate to escape, Mahabir Bhati – an impressive Randeep Hooda, full of suppressed rage – lets her loose at the edge of the desert. She breaks into a run, not even stopping to think, and before she knows it she is deep in the cruel Thar, the ground cakey with salt beneath her chapped feet. There is a sense of terrible fatality in Veera's moonlit return to her abductors, and the half-collapsing embrace with which she falls upon Mahabir. It is a disturbing moment if you choose to read it that way – the world itself is too harsh for the woman, even when set free: she can only negotiate it with the aid of a man.

Later, Mahabir plays protector again, by driving away his creepy gangmate Goru (Saharsh Kumar Shukla, absolutely stellar as the caressing harasser). Eventually, Ali puts the words in his heroine's mouth. She wants to stay on with Mahabir, Veera says, because with him she feels as she has never felt before – that she can do anything at all, and he will take care of things (“tum sambhaal loge”). The feeling is a powerful one; it tugs at the heartstrings. But it cannot enthuse me that the deepest emotion Ali attributes to his otherwise brave heroine is a desire for protection (and it feels even more manipulative that her buried hatred for the world she grew up in involves a buried memory of child sexual abuse). Yet if it is true that Ali's heroines almost always need a man to find their freedom, it is equally true that his heroes only come into their own by falling in love – with a woman.

Highway's romance can never be, of course. Ali does what he did in Rockstar, choosing to gratify his audience's presumed sense of discomfort with the love affair at the deepest level by killing off one partner. Still, it is a long way to have come from Socha Na Tha, where the lovers are Oberois and Malhotras, Punjabi Khatris from the same mall-hopping world, and the 'wrongness' of the match a fiction that had to be constructed from slivers of plot. In Highway, when the apple-cheeked rich girl with a Brahmin surname begins to see the Bhati extortionist as a man with a difficult childhood, the Hindi film begins to return to what it once did as a matter of course: to let us imagine that such connections can be made; that another world is possible. 

Cinemascope: Rockstar; The Adventures of Tintin

Published in the Sunday Guardian on 13th November:


Long hard road to art

ROCKSTAR
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Starring: Ranbir Kapoor, Nargis Fakhri, Shammi Kapoor, Aditi Rao Hydari
***

The first half of Imtiaz Ali's new film is wonderfully endearing. There's the guitar-playing, dil ka saaf Pitampura boy who wants to be a great musician and can't understand why the cool kids are laughing at him. There's the stunningly lovely, unattainably upper-class girl from St. Stephen's College who he contrives to confess undying love to, really only because his canteen-running mentor Khatana (the brilliant theatre actor Kumud Mishra) has told him that a kalakaar must have his heart broken: "Jab tukde tukde hote hain dil ke tab nikalti hai jhankaar." It's long after she's told him to bugger off ("Burger off?" he wonders) that they have their first real conversation. The unlikely friendship that blossoms – based though it is on the "neat and clean, hi-fi" Heer's desire for slumming it by watching desi porn and drinking desi daaru before her fully arranged marriage to a suitable boy in Prague – at least has the virtue of believability. (Token transgression seems to be the thing for these supposedly sassy heroines with minds set on Marriage with a capital M: think Tanu Weds Manu, Mere Brother ki Dulhan.)

With the second half of the film, however, Ali catapults us – and himself – into a sea of high drama where we flail desperately to find something real to hold on to. Ranbir Kapoor transitions beautifully from the buffoonish Janardhan Jakhar to Jordan, heartthrob of the nation, and almost manages to come off simultaneously as gruff, ganwaar Jatboy and gentle lover. But Ali's character arc for his talented hero is simply not detailed enough. There is no sense at all of what suddenly transforms the "upcoming star" who's difficult to trace even for a persistent journalist (Aditi Rao Hydari, who simply does not do justice to the possibilities of this role: think of what a Deepal Shaw might have done here) into someone who's mobbed everywhere he goes – unless a criminal charge slapped on him in a foreign land is deemed to be enough? Worse, despite the beautifully shot stint in the Nizamuddin dargah and the satisfying cameo by Shammi Kapoor, not to mention the powerful musical sequences themselves, we have not a glimpse of where Jordan gets his music from, what his sources of inspiration might be. "Image is everything, everything is image," recites Piyush Mishra in a very funny rendition of a music company agent called Dhingra. Perhaps that's all there is to it, then?

And then there's the love story, which starts off charmingly and goes steadily downhill. In a move that struck me as deep-down reminiscent of Jab We Met, the effervescent, almost childlike heroine of the film's first half is transformed into a silent, pale shadow of herself in the second. Gorgeous Nargis Fakhri, of the beestung lips and alabaster skin, does okay on bubbliness (though she does sometimes simper annoyingly in a way that reminded me of Neelam) but is simply awful at playing tragedy queen. Why, when there are so many kinds of love in the world, must we strain again and again to create the epic kind – and fall so desperately flat? Perhaps great art, as Khatana says to Janardhan, can only come out of great pain. Rockstar gets full marks for trying.


Old-school Pleasures

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Daniel Craig
***

Steven Spielberg takes a comic book character beloved of millions (except in America, which has apparently never heard of him) and does the sacrilegious thing only an American could: he mixes up at least three separate Tintin stories – The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure and The Crab With the Golden Claws are the ones I identified – to create a single film in which a lot of the pleasure of Herge's sidestories and minor characters is sacrificed to a fully-fleshed out plot. Since Spielberg's version will, to all intents and purposes, introduce Tintin to a whole new generation who might not ever read the comics themselves, this is more than a little tragic. On the happier side, if you're not an angry Tintinologist (I kid you not – www.tintinologist.org) The Adventures of Tintin rides piggyback on Herge's painstakingly put-together universe to create a film that is both a joyous old-school adventure of the sort one aches to find these days and a visual treasurehouse.

The glorious animation transports one into a past Western world recreated in loving detail – ghostly gaslit city streets, antique radio rooms aboard rusty old ships – and Eastern worlds that are no less vivid for being imaginary, like a Morocco of palaces filled with crab-shaped fountains on the one hand and bulletproof glass cases on the other. At one point we are even allowed to accompany one of our protagonists further back – via his imagination – into an earlier era of swashbuckling heroes and bloodthirsty pirates. There is much to savour in both narrative and visualisation: like a delicious scene which captures the inexplicable sensation of being alone in a huge silent library – and feeling yourself watched. Or the beauty of a plot twist in which a hallucination brought on by a parched day in the desert unlocks an alcoholic's long-lost memory. And there is of course the undeniable satisfaction of watching unlikely heroes win. Tintin is good to root for, and Snowy even better, but what's best is the scruffy drunkard Captain Haddock, who's always been doomed to failure, coming out on top of the spiffily turned out Ivan Ivanovich Sakharine (a character quite altered from his original harmless avatar as a collector in Herge's books).