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 - II

My Mirror column:

Hindi films in 2017 made more space for sex than ever before, but there’s still a self-fulfilling hierarchy to be overcome. (Second of a two-part column.)

2017, as I wrote last week, was a year in which sex got more screen space than ever before. Films like Lipstick Under My Burkha, Haraamkhor, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Tumhari Sulu, Anaarkali of Aarah and others gave us a whole host of characters, many female, for whom sex was a factor in their lives. Its role in these films was as varied as in real life.

But whether sex appeared as a painful yearning, a trigger for excitement, a source of anxiety or a comfortable anchor, after a near-century of watching butterflies alighting on flowers, it felt remarkable that it was allowed to appear at all. Having finally made its entry into an area reserved for romance, however, sex remains a second-class citizen. This hierarchy was expressed over and over in what the Hindi film industry put on our screens.

One way in which the hierarchy appeared was the traditional one — to pretend that romantic love has no sexual component. Tu Hai Mera Sunday, which I mentioned last week, did this in all the relationships it wanted us to root for. The test of love was doing things for the other person: Rashid’s connection with his neighbour (Rasika Dugal) involved watching out for her disabled children, Barun Sobti’s romancing of Sahana Goswami took the route of babysitting her ageing father, a third relationship blossomed over being on the same side in an office battle. All very heart-warming, but there was something incongruous about the way the film kept the erotic at bay — as if the appearance of sex would make these loves less true.

Another instance of this in 2018 was Bareilly ki Barfi. For all its sharply-observed portraits of masculinity, there was a deeply asexual quality to the film. Its old-fashioned romance, produced by the old-fashioned means of handwritten, hand-delivered letters, unfolded with zero erotic charge.

The hierarchy becomes clearer when you compare Bareilly’s chaste world of Mishras and Dubeys with another 2017 film set in the Uttar Pradesh small town: Babumoshai Bandookbaaz. If Bareilly’s Brahminical universe has not a smidgeon of sexiness, Kushan Nandy’s thriller (which also had a Dubey) seems wholly propelled by it. Right from the first scene where a man gets off on watching his wife receive a massage, to the heroine Bidita Bag’s ‘intro’ scene demanding that Babu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) pay her double for the privilege of having checked her out as she repaired his sandal, all the way through to the lust-fuelled denouement, this is a film intent on delivering a sock in the jaw to old-school romance. It is of a piece with that ambition that Nandy makes ‘Kucch toh log kahenge’ the soundtrack to Nawaz taking a shit in the open, and has ‘Maine tere liye hi saat rang ke sapne chuney’ playing in a butcher’s shop. In Babumoshai’s world, love is fuelled by lust — but so is violence. And the lusty woman’s loyalty is always suspect.

The suspect-ness of sexual passion is clearly a powerful narrative in our heads, appearing even in what was the year’s most programmatic attempt to frame female desire as a legitimate thing. In Lipstick Under My Burkha, Aahana Kumra’s Leela broke from a long lineage of coyly resistant Hindi movie heroines when she showed up at her lover’s room proposing a bout of passionate make-up sex. But Lipstick also shows how easily all the power of that openness can be turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.

Even in a film with as risk-taking a heroine as Simran, the old separation between sex and love has not left us. Despite the non-judgemental calm with which Kangana Ranaut’s Praful deals with her friend’s and her own sexual escapades, the film’s only depiction of a loving, potentially-long term relationship for Praful is one in which there is only conversation, and the conversation isn’t even flirtatious. The having of sex, it seems, is now allowed, but it is a marker of non-seriousness. Of non-love.

So it should be no surprise at all that the year’s self-proclaimed big romantic release, Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal, turned on precisely this hierarchical division between lust and love. The film’s plot, such as it is, turns on a whirlwind journey through Europe, during which Shah Rukh Khan’s tour guide character Harry becomes unwillingly, unwittingly involved with his sort-of client, Anushka Sharma’s Gujarati heiress Sejal. Harry is the textbook hero of modern romantic fiction aimed at women: cocky on the outside, unhappy on the inside, the man for whom flirtation is a game in which he always wins, until he loses his heart — to you. But what’s relevant for our purposes here is that even when the man is a player — or perhaps especially when he is one — and the relationship hinges on a tantalising sexual chemistry more than anything else, sex must be removed from the equation, to prove it is love.

I’d be the last person to suggest that sex must be necessarily tied to love, or even to a relationship. Sometimes sex is about pure erotic thrill, and that can be a wonderful thing. But it is the converse that worries me. As long as Hindi cinema continues to insist that true love must be produced independent of sex, all lust will continue to remain suspect.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Jan 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.

A Place in the Crowd

My Mirror column:

A new film looks at our striving for space in the city — and the solidarities that might help us find it.

Those of us who live in cities spend most of our time being unhappy in them, and about them. Tu Hai Mera Sunday sets out to show us how we might reverse that, if we try. It’s a goal worth striving for — the happiness, as well as the idea of a film that tries to spark city-love in us — and Milind Dhaimade manages to take us with him much of the way.

It's true that the premise is a little too obviously metaphoric: a group of middle class Mumbaikars are aching to play their Sunday football game, but suddenly find all their options closed off. The search for a space where they can play together provides the literal and emotional underpinning of Dhaimade's narrative. And since his intentions are clearly warm and fuzzy, one probably shouldn't grudge him the by-the-numbers representativeness of the all-male gang he places at the film’s centre. There’s one Muslim (Avinash Tiwary), one Goan Christian (Vishal Malhotra), one Parsi (Nakul Bhalla), one Gujarati Hindu (Jay Upadhyay) — and a fifth (Barun Sobti), whom we assume to be Hindu and North Indian precisely because he is presented as unmarked by community or region to the point where he can be coded merely as “accha aadmi”.

The way to watch this film is to stop being cynical, and summon up instead that moment of wonder you have in the Mumbai local or the Delhi metro, when you look around you and see yourself as part of the marvellous mixture that is our urbanity: the sabzi-chopping working women heading to the end of the line, the graceful Gujarati matriarchs with their seedha palla saris, the burkha-wearing young woman on the way home from college, the salwar-kameez-clad officemates venting about their terrible boss. It doesn’t happen often, true, but surely you’ve had those moments, too — in which strangers come together for purposes great or small, and make the city seem, for that infinitesimal instant, a place we all inhabit together.

Dhaimade chooses sport as his unifier across community and to a lesser extent, across class, age and gender — and frankly, it isn't a bad narrative device through which to examine both the possibilities and the limits of our togetherness. It seems quite believable that the Muslim man about- town Rashid, who could never marry his Hindu sweetheart, can have two Hindus (and Parsis and Christians) as football buddies. Or that Gujju family man Jayesh, running from his family, might spend his Sundays with a bunch of unattached younger men. Or even that Arjun, the self-proclaimed “accha aadmi”, might woo a potential love interest by taking her aged dad off her hands and into his football game every Sunday.

But the film is juggling many things, and so at some point the football is abandoned in mid-air, while we follow each of our protagonists into their particular struggles. Some of these individual tracks are spelt out as romantic — such as the sweetly winsome one between Barun Sobti’s Arjun and Shahana Goswami’s hard-to-impress Kavi, or the awkward but heartfelt rescue attempt by Nakul Bhalla’s Mehernosh when his colleague is being mistreated by their asshole boss. Others contain unspoken questions, and are the more interesting because of that: like the connection between the very single Rashid and his mother-of-two neighbour (the sparkly-eyed Rasika Dugal); or Dominic, so used to his mother’s anxiety and his brother’s antagonism that he finds himself confused by the easy warmth of his brother’s new girlfriend.

Spatially, too, the film alternates between private or domestic spaces where class particularities are invariably more marked — the posher variety of cafe that keeps unground coffee beans on the table, a chawl where loud quarrels are the norm, a joint family home overrun with children and rituals — and the sort of gathering-places that would make up an ideal Habermasian public sphere: a city beach, a relaxed Irani cafe, a train station, a dive bar.

Dhaimade's film makes quite clear his attachment to these free or at least not-too-expensive public spaces, sites that also represent the culture of a pre-liberalisation era.

There is nothing wrong, exactly, about such a desire; many middle class people share it, which is why the closure of a Samovar in Bombay or a Volga in Delhi is greeted with a flood of nostalgic reminiscences. But perhaps we ought to look unequal access in the eye: an Arjun can choose to go to the Irani cafe or the expensive new one, a Rashid or a Jayesh Bhai, not so much. And there is something striking and sad about the fact that the search for space in Mumbai must eventually land the characters — and the film — in Goa.

Still, this is fiction, after all, and several happy endings are provided. One of them makes what is, I suppose, a practical suggestion: find a terrace from which to gaze out at the city skyline, and the height might make it seem less oppressive. But well, as Shahana Goswami's character tells us, even to access a building rooftop like that you need to know the name of someone who actually lives there.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Oct 2017.