Screening the World

A personal report from this year’s edition of IFFI: the first of a two-part column.

A still from Beatriz Seigner's haunting new film Los Silencios (The Silences)

I write this column from the middle of the International Film Festival of India, the 49th edition of which is currently on in Panjim, Goa. The festival got under way with its usual quota of frustrating glitches — the shiny new interface for online ticket booking worked smoothly for about a day before giving many users (including myself) trouble; the stated categories of manual ticket booking counters were defied in practice (e.g. numbers of non-media people, even students in film school T-shirts, insisted on standing in the media ticketing queue); the redemption of online bookings on Day One was limited to a single counter, effectively punishing those who’d actually made bookings online. That has thankfully changed, and the young people working the ticketing machinery at Inox, Maquinez Palace and Kala Academy are getting slightly better at it with each day, thus making the queues move faster.

The festival’s programming this year appears to have surrendered more space than usual to Bombay filmdom. Two of these sessions have been dominated by filmi families: producer Boney Kapoor appeared with his and Sridevi’s daughter Jahnvi, who made her debut with Dhadak this year, while David Dhawan will have a session today called Dha-One with his son Varun Dhawan. Singer Arijit Singh, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and actor Kriti Sanon have also had sessions at the festival. These sessions are apparently intended to lure in Bollywood fans who have little interest in the world cinema or regional Indian fare that the IFFI is meant to showcase. But it’s not clear to me what the festival is doing to bridge the gap between Kriti Sanon watchers and arthouse cinema watchers. Merely bunging both categories of people into the same venue only rubs everyone the wrong way. And it’s not about dissing popular cinema: I’m a Hindi film buff, but I don’t see why one particular industry gets so much play on what ought to be an equal platform for all our many cinemas.

For any serious film festival goer, though, the main business of the day remains the choosing of the next day’s films. Many are here to catch Indian Panorama screenings at Inox Screen 2. Others might be tempted by a chance to see the late Vinod Khanna on the big screen (A well-chosen mix of his films features Achanak, Dayavan and Lekin, though Mere Apne would have been even nicer), or watch a (very small and predictable) selection of Ingmar Bergman classics, timed to commemorate his birth centenary this year.


The greater proportion of screenings, happily, remains recent international cinema. Beyond the fiction features in the International Competition section, there is the non-competitive World Panorama section, also consisting of international films made in the last year. The Festival Kaleidoscope section presents films made this year by the world’s most eminent filmmakers — this is where you go to catch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning moving through occasionally mawkish tale of fictive kinship, Shoplifters, or agent provocateur Gaspar Noe’s frenetic dance-and-drugs cocktail Climax, or the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest leisurely three-hour outing, The Wild Pear Tree.


For me personally, this year’s festival has been a revelation for the number of female directors whose superb work I’ve encountered for the first time. The very first film I saw was Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988, a portrait of German singer Christa Päffgen, who shot to fame for singing briefly with the Velvet Underground and later had a son with legendary French actor Alain Delon. Nicchiarelli’s film is equal parts melancholy and fierce, like its heroine. I knew nothing about Nico or her music, but Danish actress Trine Dyrholm makes Paffgen’s dark, heroin-fuelled energy a thing of beauty — even as Nico revels in having aged beyond the prime age of physical attractiveness: “I was never happy when I was beautiful.” It is a bravura performance: what we get is a woman who seems gloriously intense but also casually deranged, seemingly unseeing of the risks people around her take to enable her life. Her preoccupation with herself, the bubble in which she seems to live, is only really punctured by her tenderness for her teenaged son.

Another of my favourites so far has been Beatriz Seigner’s Los Silencios (The Silences). The film opens with a small boat edging slowly towards a jetty, in an inky darkness where water merges into sky. A mother and her two children — a girl and a boy — embark. As Seigner’s film proceeds, we learn that they are “migrants requesting refugee status”, a family fleeing the violence of the Colombian civil war and looking to settle down on this Brazilian island rather too fittingly called La Isla de la Fantasia.


The island is both surrounded by water and built upon it, and the atmosphere is hauntingly evocative: the draughty wooden houses standing on stilts, the women looking out of the square windows in their slatted wooden walls, the row boats gliding silently between them, the rain outside and the hearth fires within. Seigner, whose previous film Bollywood Dream tracked the Hindi film ambitions of three young Brazilian women, has produced here a slow, immersive work of beauty. The simplicity of its approach to its political context did not seem to me to take away from the film in any way. The warmth and attentiveness with which the camera treats both place and people — letting us absorb not just the faces of the central characters but also people who appear briefly, like the boy with one leg —seemed to me emblematic of a politics we need much more of: a humanising politics which sees each missing person as a person.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Nov 2018.

Friend and Lover

My Mirror column:

Vinod Khanna’s star persona combined sexy shirtless masculinity for the female gaze with an intense rendition of male friendship.

A male film star, people might assume, is a man whom women like. By that account, all our heroes ought to be sexy. But of course it isn’t so simple. One, because plenty of Hindi film heroes are men whom other men like. In Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur II, Tigmanshu Dhulia, playing the mining mafia don Ramadhir Singh, offers a pithy rendition of this gendered history of film heroes: “First men liked Dilip Kumar, and women liked Dev Anand. Then men liked Amitabh Bachchan, and women liked Rajesh Khanna." In more recent years, it’s been men liking Salman and women liking Shah Rukh. And two, because Indian women for many years weren’t quite allowed to confess to liking sexy men. It was more socially legitimate to like the sweet, enthusiastic good boys, or the dramatically tragic ones.

The late Vinod Khanna seems to have managed the rare feat of being both: a man’s man, as well as the sexy creature that women couldn’t stop looking at. Watching Qurbani after Khanna’s death this week, I was struck by how clear Feroze Khan seems to have been about the sexiness quotient of both the film and his friend Vinod. The highest grossing film of 1980, Qurbani is filled with the hotness of Zeenat Aman, and the camera caresses her curves in exactly the way you’d expect, in song after song as nightclub dancer Sheela. It was only two years after Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Khan ensured that he got Aman into a drenched sari: in Qurbani the excuse is an innocent little girl spraying her with a garden hose. In the legendary Hum tumhe chahte hain aise song, the already betrothed Aman looks sadly and sexily away as Khanna’s Amar turns upon her the full blaze of his yearning look.

But director Feroze Khan makes sure that in his film, Khanna is not only the owner of the lustful gaze, but also its object. Qurbani has at least two sequences that have passing women characters giving Khanna’s fit bod the once-over: one is a Parsi lady who casts appreciative glances in his direction even as her husband picks a faux-fight with him (Bawa masculinity is comically derided); the other is a youthful nurse who gives Khanna the most loving spongebath ever (when he’s recovering from grave injuries in the hospital).

Qurbani also homes in on the other crucial aspect of the Vinod Khanna persona: the loyal friend. In Qurbani, having been twice the recipient of Feroze Khan’s life-saving skills, it is Khanna who performs the film’s titular sacrifice – giving up the girl as well as his life. In Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), where he played second lead and loyal friend to Amitabh Bachchan, it was Khanna’s character who got to save Bachchan’s life early on, in exchange – this might be the necessary way the trope worked – receiving both the love of the heroine (Rakhee) and the longer life.

Friendship and loyalty also had a crucial role in Khanna’s persona in at least two of the star’s important earlier films, both directed by Gulzar – Mere Apne (1971) and Achanak (1973). In those though, it was the reverse side of it –betrayal – that made the character what he was. In Mere Apne, Shyam’s neighbourhood friendship with Chhenu (Shatrughan Sinha) turns sour and their enmity becomes a defining feature of his life. In Achanak, based on a KA Abbas story somewhat inspired by the Nanavati case, Khanna plays a loving husband and army man who murders his best friend in cold blood when he discovers that his wife has been having an affair with him. In both these films, the women are disloyal – one is weak and leaves his side out of family pressure, while the other’s actions are minimally explained as those of an incorrigible flirt.

To cynical postmodern eyes, films like Muqaddar ka Sikandar or Qurbani may seem to brim over with an emotional excess most of us think we’re too cool for. Think of Farooq Qaiser’s lyrics to the film’s titular song about friendship as sacrifice, sung by the two heroes, Khan and Khanna – in real life, one a Muslim and one a Hindu, both playing Hindus on screen and yet shown dancing on Eid in the house of a character called Khan Baba:

“Yaar khadein hain seena taan,
Aandhi aaye ya toofan
Yaar khadein hain seena taan,
Yaari meri kahatee hai
Yaar pe kar de sab qurbaan
Ho qurbani qurbani qurbani
Allah ko pyari hai qurbani”

And later, in extending its ode to friendship to
the bond between religions:

“Do haathon ki dekho shaan
Ye allah hai yeh bhagwaan.”

And yet, clearly we imbibed something from those filmi definitions of friendship, something that continues ineffably to shape our understanding of reality. No wonder that the death of Khanna on April 27 was remarked upon, over and over again, as having taken place on the same date as that of his friend Feroze Khan, eight years ago. In life – which is to say in death – Khanna seemed to prove, yet again, that he was the extraordinary friend.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th April 2017.