At the scene of the crime

My Mirror column.

Watching Kahaani 2 triggers a retrospective look at the city’s role in Vidya Balan’s actorly career.

Vidya Balan as an urban working mother in Kahaani 2

The new Kahaani 2 is nowhere near as good as 2012's Kahaani: its mystery is less mystifying, its cops are less attractive, its villains are caricatures who fail to chill. The plot is not a continuation of Kahaani's, and nor do the two films have any characters in common.

There, now, that's out of the way, we can get on to the real business of this column — which is to try and understand what Vidya Balan is trying to do with her star persona. I can hear the surprised reaction already: “But Vidya Balan isn't a star. She's an actor.”

I agree. Balan is indeed one of the few A-list female stars in Mumbai who does not seem to care at all about appearances — by which I mean not that she isn't good-looking, but that she isn't always striving to look her best. In fact, as I wrote in a 2014 op-ed, “Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else.”

Roles like ones she held in The Dirty Picture (in which Balan played the Southern sex star Silk Smitha with rare physical ease) or the hilarious, sadly underwatched Ghanchakkar (where she appeared to revel in the OTT outfits worn by her fashion-addicted housewife character) would seem to suggest that the actor's plan is to not have a plan.

And yet, since watching Kahaani 2, I have begun to see a distinct pattern in Balan's cinematic appearances. There is a kinship among many of her recent characters that can only be explained as the slow, perhaps organic — and perhaps inevitable — crafting of a star persona.

For one, Balan — in conjunction with her directors, most energetically Sujoy Ghosh, but also Ribhu Dasgupta and Samar Sheikh — seems to have taken it upon herself to craft for the Hindi film heroine a new relationship with the Indian city. (The cities chosen for this project so far are interesting, too: Calcutta in Kahaani, Te3n and Kahaani 2, and Hyderabad in Bobby Jasoos.) Again and again, Balan plays female protagonists who get to traverse the streets of Indian cities with an abandon that is rare in real life — and practically unseen on screen.

Second, unlike the many mainstream heroines whose on-screen explorations in urban space are limited by class and the protective company of men, Balan's indefatigable female characters walk the city alone, and with purpose. What is fascinating is how frequently this purpose involves a crime.

Vidya Balan tracks her sister's killers in No One Killed Jessica (2011)

As far back as Raj Kumar Gupta's No One Killed Jessica (2011), as Sabrina, the sister of murdered real-life model Jessica Lal, we saw Balan slice fiercely through Delhi's fog of fakery, crisscrossing that city's party venues and police stations in search of an elusive justice. As the marvellous Vidya Venkatesan Bagchi in 2012's Kahaani, she pounds through the streets of Calcutta on a mission to find her missing husband, her pregnant belly both attracting attention and deflecting it. With that wonderful double-edged mechanism in place, “Bid-da Bagchi” — as the movie's Bongs pronounced her name — runs riot, using her ingenuity to open doors across the length and breadth of the city, from seedy hotels to government offices, Park Street to Kumartuli.

From the grieving family member who finds herself on a mission against the city's obfuscations, it was a short step to playing a professional solver of urban mysteries. In Bobby Jasoos (2014), Balan enjoyed herself thoroughly, playing a roza-keeping Hyderabadi women whose uber-enthusiasm for her job as a newbie detective also involves a series of disguises: turbans and moustaches, false bosoms, Kanjeevarams and burqas all treated with the same nonchalant panache.

Vidya Balan as a cop on a case, in Te3n (2016)

In Te3n, produced by Sujoy Ghosh, which came out earlier this year, she graduated to becoming an investigator in uniform. Although she landed with the film's least fleshed-out part, Balan's turn as Sarita — the policewoman handling the kidnapping case on which Te3n turns — certainly added to her particular actorly repertoire as that rare Indian woman who traverses the city with ease, so comfortable in her own skin as to seem to our unfamiliar eyes almost belligerent.

From Poe and Conan Doyle, until the present day, the idea of the detective as an urban explorer and guide has run parallel to the idea of the city as a site of criminal imagination. So it was likely only a matter of time before Vidya's urban trajectories turned full circle: from unravelling the city's secrets as an investigator of crime, to becoming the investigated. Kahaani 2, in fact, allows us glimpses of three of these female flaneur selves: the do-gooder urban detective, the heroic everywoman and the potential criminal mastermind. Sadly, Balan's age-old good-girl persona (think Parineeta, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Jessica) prevents her Kahaani 2 character's potential doubleedged-ness from being convincing.

Maybe we need another Ishqiya to bring her dark-black mojo back.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Dec 2016.

Woman, Uninterrupted

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Vidya Balan's free-spirited performances have opened up a space in our cinema where not just she, but other women, too, might begin to be comfortable in their skin.

In most Indian cities, it is still a rare joy to see a woman out and about on her own terms: walking, working, eating -- just being; a woman who sits comfortably in her skin, not 'adjusting' by squeezing into the smallest possible space simply because the men on either side have spread themselves out, as men do. 

And for me, at least, that joy is amplified when that woman isn't obsessively chronicling her every look, her every laugh and eyebrow twitch in some imagined mirror that is a man's face. 

Within the world of Hindi cinema, Vidya Balan is that woman. And in Bobby Jasoos, you see Balan do again what our film industry, like our public spaces, rarely let its women do: take the centre seat, settle in, and thoroughly enjoy herself. 

After the slow drying-up of Priyanka Chopra's A-for-Ambition appearances (Fashion, What's Your Rashi, Saat Khoon Maaf) -- and up until Kangana Ranaut's Queen (and the disappointing but risk-taking Revolver Rani) -- Balan has been the only heroine with commercial billing to test the Lakshman Rekhas the industry draws around its female actors. 

Having bid a loud and lusty goodbye to her good-girl reputation with Ishqiya and The Dirty Picture, she went on to carry a thriller like Kahaani entirely on her shoulders. 

After some years of grief, Balan has also figured out that her performances are enough to soar above the low-level depredations of the KJo-led fashion police. That liberation from starry compulsions translates into Balan's roles as well - can you think of anyone else in contemporary Bollywood who wouldn't have balked at doing a whole film with a big pregnant belly? Or embraced Silk Smitha's larger-than-life physically, literally spilling out of her clothes, with such joyous lack of inhibition? Or jumped with such gusto into the atrociously loud outfits of fashion-magazine-obsessed Neetu in Ghanchakkar? 

Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else. And in Bobby Jasoos, she gets to do it in the most enjoyable way possible. As an intrepid, if somewhat inept female detective, Balan's Bobby gets to walk the crowded alleys of Hyderabad's Mughalpura as everything from a turban-wearing beggar man to a young bangle seller with a wispy moustache. Balan looks like she's having as much of a good time as Bobby is meant to -- and I certainly revelled in watching Bobby, disguised as a large Kanjeevaram-clad mami with an impressive shelf of a bosom, suddenly start jumping with joy upon receiving her largest payment cheque ever. 

But it isn't just playing dress-up. For most Indian women, the idea of being able to melt invisibly into the -- inevitably male -- crowd is a pervasive fantasy. Bobby Jasoos taps into that often unarticulated yearning by having its heroine achieve, in multiple forms of masquerade, the freedom she might not have otherwise. 

By making Bobby a roza-keeping Muslim woman who's never without her dupatta, the film aims for a social realism of sorts. This is a conservative lower middle class milieu, in which a woman who hasn't married and borne children by thirty is beyond the pale, and a man having a serious chat with his son sends his wife -- who's massaging his head -- into another room. It is no surprise that Bobby's father can only respond to the gift of his daughter's first salary with the pronouncement that "This household doesn't run on women's earnings." 

Yet when Bobby wears a burqa, it is only as another form of disguise. Her usual uniform is a loose salwar-kameez, her hair escaping an untidy plait and a packet of Parle-G biscuits peeping out of her satchel. Her workaday look is also a reflection of her priorities: we have here a woman whose response to having the car door opened for her by a personable young man is to say caustically, "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna". Bobby is the elder sister who, when she needs to enter a five star hotel on assignment, gets one of her more feminine younger sisters to do her make-up. 

And yet, even while Bobby (and it's important that she insists on being called that, instead of the more feminine Bilqees) does largely what she wants, she continues to crave approval from her father (and in an interesting mirroring, from the life-changing older man who becomes her mystery client). 

The other remarkable thing about Bobby's character is that she's too busy working to bother chasing men -- and when love does appear, it is gentle and unbombastic. 

Especially for a film that returns us, after an aeon, to an all-Muslim milieu, Bobby Jasoos almost makes no concessions to romantic nazakat Muslim Social style. In fact, it sustains its tenor of comic mystery quite remarkably: if there's any gazing at feet in this movie, it's to look for a man with a missing toe. 

With Bobby Jasoos, Balan gives us a reel-life heroine who's neither a doormat nor a head-tossing rebel without a cause. She'd be a treasure even in the real world.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Picture This: Who is Miss Lovely?

My new film column Picture This will appear every month in the Hindu Business Line's new weekend paper: BLink. 

Films about sex stars need to show how desire is intertwined with desperation

An early scene in Miss Lovely has Nawazuddin Siddiqui walk into a C-grade film set where some women, dressed in the scanty animal skins and feathers that served ’80s Hindi cinema as ‘tribal costume’, are performing some heavy-breathing dance moves. As Siddiqui’s Sonu looks on, there’s an attempt to make one of them get her kit off. She puts up some muffled resistance. “Madras mein toh saari public ke saamne nangi hui thhi! (In Madras you got naked in front of the whole public!) What’s your problem now?” demands the long-haired man in charge. “That’s why I say these husbands should never be allowed on the set!” Then he switches gear to address the befuddled man standing in the corner: “You! Explain things to your wife.

What is it about the woman in a tribal costume that makes us uncomfortable? Is it her being forced into displaying her nakedness? Is it the way her boss appeals to her husband, showing us that entry into the world of paid work has neither freed her from the surveillance of family, nor failed to create new shackles?

Set on the fringes of the Bombay film industry in the late ’80s, Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely follows the fortunes of two brothers — the sleazy, ambitious Vicky and the purist, naive Sonu — who, as the Duggal Cine Combine, produce low-budget horror sex films; films that play surreptitiously in cinemas in lieu of the official feature. There are men in these films, too, but the focus — both for cogs in the wheel like Vicky and the larger sharks he aims to work for — is on the women. “Ladkiyan khoobsoorat honi chahiye, aur besharam bhi (The girls should be beautiful, and also shameless),” as one lascivious distributor puts it.

For a film so self-consciously arthouse in its nuanced recreation of milieu — the art direction, sound and cinematography produce a pitch-perfect sense of ’80s grime — Miss Lovely contains surprisingly tabloid villains. But perhaps these men making innocent young women swill whiskey from cut-glass tumblers fit right into this pre-liberalisation world, where raids are televised on grainy Doordarshan, with commentary about ‘rampant immorality’ that sounds like it’s coming from another planet. Maybe the underbelly of state-sponsored repression is necessarily debauched excess.

But what is more worrying is the way Miss Lovely seems to serve up female victims and vamps for our righteous delectation. The newbie starlet participates gleefully in the unceremonious ouster of the has-been star, and then swiftly progresses along her own trajectory of decline. Meanwhile, the idealised, mysterious Pinky, in whose apparent innocence Sonu places his faith, emerges as the femme fatale.

Is there no way out of this dialectic of innocence and corruption? The industry elicits shamelessness, rewarding women who can produce it with work and sometimes a certain fame — and then turns around and crushes them. They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

Even empathetic narratives about these women — a bit like older courtesan films — seem to reproduce a moral order in which unapologetic female sexuality (and unapologetic ambition) must receive punishment. The recent Malayalam film Kanyaka Talkies (2012) uses the transformation of a porn movie theatre into a church to make explicit the link between sex and sin. The female protagonist’s desire to be an actress draws her into the porn film industry. An explicit clip finds its way to her hometown; she is forced to leave, not being able to return even to her father’s deathbed. It is hard not to read this as punishment. A more mainstream narrative was The Dirty Picture (2011), which drew on the life of an ’80s actress to make a flashy film that titillated as much as it lectured. A broad-strokes rant about the hypocrisy of a sex-starved society coexisted with the telling of Silk Smitha’s life as inevitable tragedy.

One wishes that these films allowed one to see more of the way desire is intertwined with desperation, ambition with extraction. As the saying goes: the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.

A simple exploitation narrative also leaves unasked the question of how women experience the transformative presence of the screen. What is the relationship between the shy girl in The Dirty Picturewho watches incredulously as audiences whistle at her on-screen persona, and that on-screen persona itself, of the heaving bosom and archly bitten lip?

The question of pleasure in the performance of the sexual is a difficult one. And like with much else, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. In Ahluwalia’s film, a plain, middle-aged woman walks into a film production office. “Main sexy dance bahut achha karti hoon (I’m great at sexy dance),” she says ingratiatingly, breaking into a set of belly-swishing moves. For many, the scene produced embarrassment, distaste, or pity. But if we do not judge our friends — or ourselves — for posting photos to elicit compliments of hotness on Facebook, should we judge this woman, or anyone else hankering for a screen image? The self-affirmation involved might not be that different.

Published in BLink.

Cinemascope: The Dirty Picture; Land Gold Women

Much masala, little meat
THE DIRTY PICTURE
Director: Milan Luthria
Starring: Vidya Balan, Naseeruddin Shah, Emraan Hashmi, Tusshar Kapoor
***1/2

Flamboyance is everything in the Milan Luthria universe. Carrying on where he left off with One Upon a Time in Mumbai (2010), Luthria takes the often gut-wrenching life of the South's most enduring sex-symbol and makes of it a breezy, masaaledar film that never stops churning out the one-liners.

If you hoped that the remarkable trajectory of Silk Smitha's life – a poor girl running away from a forced early marriage and eking out a living in Madras, fending off the greasy overtures of pawing men while doing the rounds of studios, and then achieving unexpected stardom before commiting suicide in her mid-30s – might elicit a film of some depth, you can think again. While constantly underlining how fraught fame was (and still is) for a woman who chose to be as brazenly sexual as her in a country as repressed as ours, The Dirty Picture never answers – or even asks – the question of what made Silk the unapologetically sexual being she was. What is it that reconciles the shy, giggly girl who sits in the dark hall incredulously watching audiences whistle at her on screen, with the in-your-face seductress of the heaving bosom and archly bitten lip? Was the overtly sexy persona one she consciously set out to create, was it thrust upon her by an exploitative industry, or – as the film vaguely suggests – did it just happen? Was there something specific about the Tamil film industry in the '70s and '80s that led not just Silk, but several other actresses, to suicide? We never quite know, and apparently, we don't need to.

Instead, Luthria creates a flashily enjoyable, broad-strokes sketch of something he's decided sells – "the '80s" – and fills it with a cast of caricatures. Some, like Tushhar's wimpy writer Ramakant and Emraan Hashmi's megalomaniac arty director Abraham, don't convince even for a minute. Others, however, are thrillingly larger-than-life, like Naseeruddin Shah as the ageing superstar Surya and Vidya Balan as Silk herself. Naseer revels in the role, moving with ease between an overt predatory display of ownership over new heroines when on filmi terrain and an amusing sense of propriety when under the eye of Madras society. But the real revelation is Vidya Balan, who fills out the outlines of her character with a joyful abundance that's both emotional and physical. Balan's uninhibited embrace of Silk makes for a riveting performance that has more nuance than everything in the rest of the film put together.


Earnest but not convincing

LAND GOLD WOMEN
Director: Avantika Hari
Starring: Narinder Samra, Neelam Parmar, Chris Villiers, Hassani Shapi
**1/2

Avantika Hari's supremely sincere film takes the hot-button topic of honour killing from the places that we think of as its usual terrain – the "remote" hinterlands of Haryana, Rajasthan and UP – and places it squarely at the centre of the developed world. The father who orchestrates the murder of his daughter in this film is no jaahil ganwaar given to violent displays of masculinity. Nazeer Khan is a mild-mannered professor of history from Birmingham, with a predilection for old Hindi movie songs. He jokes with his (white) colleagues, flirts charmingly with his wife and is proud of his daughter's cleverness at school, encouraging dinner table debate about Antigone.

What makes a soft-spoken, seemingly peaceful man like that commit a crime like this is the question the film – and the team of British defense attorneys assigned to the case – sets out to answer. One sees how establishing the character as a recognisable, likeable one rather than painting him as villain is a conscious decision, forcing viewers to grapple with the possibility that their own beliefs, too, might contain the seeds of such a drastic about-turn. But it also makes Nazeer's character a difficult one to pull off, and director Hari doesn't quite manage the feat. We are left with a rather unconvincing portrayal: a man who seems bizarrely able to reconcile his enormous love for his first-born (complete with soppy Urdu poetry dedicated to her) with a staunch and implacable belief that she does not deserve to live.

The acting is nicely low-key, but for the villainous traditionalist Uncle Riyaz (Hassani Shapi) – and the failed attempt that the adults make to sound convincingly conversational in Hindustani. The scenes between the teenaged Saira (Neelam Parmar) and her British boyfriend David (Chris Villiers) – thankfully shorn of such linguistic fakeness – are quietly effective.

The film makes a commendable attempt to achieve complexity in its understanding of tradition, insisting that honour killing is not condoned in Islam (or any religion, for that matter) and tackling the question of how dangerous a cultural defense – that the accused may have done what he did because it was encouraged by his religion/culture – can be in terms of the political future of the community. It's not scintillating cinema, but it does make a genuine effort.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.