Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

The Year of Sex - I

My Mirror column:

Looking back at what sex has meant in 2017, both onscreen and off. The first of a two-part column.

Looking back at Hindi cinema in 2017, it seems to me that the theme of this year was sex. I’m not suggesting at all that we’ve suddenly got it all figured out; no, that we certainly haven’t. In the world outside the screen, the anxieties of politicians and principals alike coalesced around matters sexual – condom advertisements on television were banned as “indecent”, two teenagers were suspended from a school because they were seen hugging…. These anxieties reached ridiculous heights when it came to the silver screen. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) tried to block Lipstick Under My Burkha for its “lady-orientedness” and delayed the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, When Harry Met Sejal because its trailer contained the word “intercourse”.

Later in the year, the international award-winner Sexy Durga was rechristened S Durga and then unceremoniously dropped from the Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), along with a Marathi film called Nude. A censored version of S Durga was later screened for the jury following a directive from the Kerala High Court.

But such anxiety is a barometer of cultural transformations. It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that what did manage to reach our screens revealed a society in the midst of unbuttoning – and so intent on the task at hand that it no longer cares if some people are gaping.

The year began with Shlok Sharma’s wonderfully rich and strange debut, Haraamkhor, with a radically nonjudgemental portrait of sexual comingof-age that was buoyed by Shweta Tripathi’s simply stellar turn as the teenaged schoolgirl Sandhya. Less stark but equally significant was Vidya Balan’s thoroughly charming portrayal of the non-posh, non-svelte housewife in Tumhari Sulu. Balan’s channelling of her character’s warm, enthusiastic, sari-clad self into a public persona as radio jockey on a late-night-show gave us a rare model of sexiness based on being comfortable in one’s own skin.

Other female characters speaking of sex and actually acting on their desires appeared in Alankrita Shrivastava’s imperfect but pioneering film Lipstick Under My Burkha. The radicalness of these depictions came from their wrenching frankness about the body’s yearnings, forcing viewers to think about how the possibility of pleasure is suppressed by an overarching social discourse of shame.

Sex and shame were also on the menu in one of the year’s chirpiest films, Shubh Mangal Savdhan, with director RS Prasanna serving up the unspeakable subject of erectile dysfunction with remarkable warmth and wit. Ayushmann Khurana and Bhumi Pednekar followed up their previous pairing as a just-married-and-havingproblems couple in Dum Laga Ke Haisha with an often hilarious turn here, aided in no small measure by Seema Pahwa’s magisterial comic timing and Ali Baba, gufa and Chaalis Chor euphemisms.

Irreverent humour was crucial to another of the year’s most ambitious bad girl films, Simran. In one of the film’s emblematic dialogues, Kangana Ranaut’s Gujarati-American heroine Praful tells a joke. A small girl asks her mother, “What is a boyfriend?” “If you become a good girl, you will get one,” the mother says. “And if I become a bad girl?” the little girl asks. “Then you will get many!” concludes Praful, laughing hysterically. Praful’s guilt-free pursuit of the good life includes a happy hook-up with a stranger at the bar, made even more fun by her abandonment of the proceedings when she discovers he has no protection.

Something particularly pleasing about this year’s crop of films was that it wasn’t only bad girls who made out: whether it was Parineeti Chopra’s Bindu Shankar Narayanan in Meri Pyaari Bindu’s 80s Calcutta, or Anushka Sharma’s rural Punjabi poetess from a century ago in Phillauri, the good-girl-fromgood-family is now allowed to sleep with a lover without being disqualified from niceness.

Sex scenes of charm and intensity also appeared in films that weren’t necessarily ‘about’ sex at all – I think, for instance, of the spontaneous erotic encounter that sets Sandeep Mohan’s quirky road movie Shreelancer off in an atmospheric new direction, or the moving seduction of Rajkummar Rao’s bespectacled hero in a ratty bedroom in Trapped.

Sex in a ratty Mumbai bedroom also made an appearance in Tu Hai Mera Sunday, with Avinash Tiwary’s Rashid as the player who brings home a stream of attractive young women. But Tu Hai Mera Sunday, despite having several unexpurgated discussions of all sorts of things, seemed to me to hold back when it came to sex. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the film judges Rashid or his sexual partners as immoral (in fact it makes a point of having Rashid tell us – and his male buddies -- that these young women are all “decent”), I wondered why it needed to shake love apart from sex. Because sex, then, seems naturally to fall to the bottom, emerging somehow as the inferior of the two.

The question of sex versus love is of course, the great chestnut – and I shall return to it next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 Dec 2017.

Alone in the Urban Jungle

My Mirror column:

Trapped is a harrowing survival movie, but it also takes a sharp look at the Indian city and our particular isolation in it.

On the face of it, Trapped is a Hindi film experimenting with the survival genre so beloved of Hollywood: a man is stuck alone without food or water and must find the resources to keep himself alive until help arrives. But the classic Hollywood survival narrative tends to place its protagonist at the mercy of the elements: brutal cold, wolves, the ocean, a tiger on a ship in the ocean, you get the picture. The question in those situations is usually a simple one: can we human beings still survive the universe, once the safety net -- or plush carpet -- of modern-day comforts is pulled out from under our feet?

Vikramaditya Motwane's film flips that narrative in two related ways. First, it abandons its hero not in a snowbound mountain crevasse or terrifying tropical wilderness, but in an apartment bang in the middle of the city, fully provided with the basic upper middle class accoutrements of modern Indian urban life: kitchen with built-in cabinets, bathroom with WC, gas cylinder, fridge, airconditioner, television. The space looks familiar to anyone who's lived in a highrise, and Motwane uses the familiarity to his advantage, lulling his protagonist – and us – into a sense of safety, before turning that recognizable 'normal' interior into a site of near-horror. Second, it reverses the role of the elements. Nature, in Trapped, is not something to be conquered, but in fact the only thing that comes to his aid.

In some ways, of course, this film could be set anywhere, in any big city that has tall residential buildings. But on second thoughts, I'd argue that the film works with our knowledge of a dysfunctional urbanity quite specific to India and perhaps particularly to Mumbai. We have seen the frightening isolation of the Mumbai highrise apartment in Hindi cinema before – Ram Gopal Varma, in particular, has explored it in the genres of both horror (Bhoot) and crime (Not a Love Story), as has Kiran Rao in the Aamir Khan section of Dhobhi Ghat. But the narrative bedrock of Trapped is Mumbai's longstanding problem of homelessness, something that has been with us since the 70s with films like Gharonda and was perhaps most recently given cinematic shape in another Rajkummar Rao starrer, Hansal Mehta's 2014 CityLights. CityLights chose a distressed rural family to suffer the malice of the big bad city; Trapped focuses its attentions on a single young man, but in both cases it is the ordinary innocent with dreams of home whom the city seems determined to torture -- down to the exact plot device of a cheating tout who takes the money and hands over a home that isn't.

There's also something particularly third world about how the plot amps up the danger. Instead of the dramatic breakdown that it takes to shatter the edifice of Western modernity -- a shipwreck, or a plane crash -- Trapped's modernity malfunction, the moment which really tips things over the edge, is an electricity connection that can't actually handle the load of the gadgets it has wired to it.

But Motwane's script also goes beyond the survival genre by giving us an emotional landscape, although that also seems intent upon testing our hero. The deftly-sketched romance with which the film begins is in fact pivoted on tests: the girl says he should stop calling her unless he can guess her favourite food on the count of five. (He does. And perhaps that superhuman moment of success is the first sign of his being not quite the dull, ordinary creature he seems to be.)

Expanding outwards from the difficulties of romance in an instrumental world, Motwane gives us a bleak portrait of the urban landscape we now inhabit. This is partially evoked in ways recognizable from recent films like Ruchika Oberoi's Island City – that world of anonymised offices in which human interaction is minimised or automated, where a man must woo his office colleague by making secret, hushed calls to her desk across the maze of identical cubicles they enter each day, and where the person on the other end of a phone directory service has lost the human ability to respond to the panic in the voice of the caller whom he's paid to 'help'.

Trapped also makes the necessary metaphorical gestures towards the ways in which we fail to see or hear each other anymore – but it does so gently. The watchman hanging out under the empty building is almost deaf, he spends his days with his ear to a transistor radio. The building in whose empty upper floors our man is marooned is called Swarg (literally heaven). Most noticeable for me, but perhaps unintended by the filmmakers, was that all the attempts Rao's character makes to communicate with the Indian city around him, he makes in English. He spells 'HELP' out in a million different ways, but it never seems to strike him to write the Hindi word 'Bachaao', or the Marathi equivalent. The moment when the watchman turns his cardboard sign upside down before abandoning it – that was for me a chilling moment of recognition about how precisely how marooned we are, because we have given up on the languages in which we might communicate with most people around us. 

But perhaps I am burying the film under the weight of its metaphors. Trapped preserves lightness amidst melancholy, and that is its achievement.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Mar 2017