In Vino Veritas -- II

My Mirror column:

In Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's An Off-Day Game (2015), a drunken day unmasks a society intoxicated with its own sense of power.

Four men gather for a day of drinking in Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's harrowing An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali, 2015).

Last week's column on The Mosquito Philosophy was about what truths might emerge when a group of men get together to drink. This week, too, my subject is a film about an all-male drinking session – An Off-Day Game (Ozhivudivasathe Kali) directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. Sasidharan is best known outside Kerala for his internationally award-winning film Sexy Durga (2017); An Off-Day Game won him the 2015 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film and is currently streaming on two platforms.

and is currently streaming on two platforms.

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/in-vino-veritas-ii/articleshow/79345533.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The film is adapted from Unni R's Malayalam short story 'Holiday Fun', available in J Devika's wonderful English translation as part of the collection One Hell of a Lover (Westland 2019). Barely nine pages long, Unni's tale begins with a reference to Boccaccio's 14th century Italian classic in which seven women and three men gather in a remote villa to escape the plague-stricken city of Florence - an interesting aside in a pandemic year. “They were like refugees from the plague in The Decameron,” writes Unni. “Only, they were escaping the monotony of work, the four of them... gathered in Room No 70 of Nandavanam Lodge, that Sunday, as usual, around a bottle of liquor.”

Unlike Unni, though, Sasidharan does not launch straight into the action. Instead, as he would do two years later in Sexy Durga, he begins his film with a semi-documentary prelude: footage from a real-life by-election in Kerala, where we see red Communist flags challenged by a rising wave of saffron BJP ones. We also see a Kathakali dance performance as part of the election campaign: this is a state where art and politics are allowed to cross-fertilise each other. It is from the assembled crowd at a rally that the camera first picks out two of our protagonists, following them as they join the other two at a little bend in a stream: a picturesque spot for daytime drinking. Another man driving by is tempted to join them, and a plan is made for another drunken assignation on Election Day.

The electoral backdrop serves Sasidharan well, allowing the film to fit in both India's official dry day rules, that bar the sale of liquor on polling days, and the simultaneously ubiquitous unofficial fact that liquor changes hands during almost all Indian elections: as a bribe, or more categorically in exchange for votes. It also works beautifully as a way of working up to the conversations between his characters – and to the 'game' of the film's title, in which four players pick chits labelled 'King', “Minister', 'Police' and 'Thief', and the one who's picked 'Police' must then guess who the 'Thief' is.

But plenty happens before the game unfolds. Unni's story has an early paragraph laying out the quality of the men's weekends in Nandavanam Lodge: “The usual criticism of the government, the rant about bedroom squabbles, the description of the body of the young girl one brushed against in the street or on the bus...”. Among Sasidharan's achievements is the way he takes this bare-bones description and gives it flesh, adding dialogue, characters and subplots that make his film into the terrific, terrifying slow-burn watch that it is. There is no woman actually present in Unni's scenario, for instance -- but Geetha in An Off-Day Game is crucial. Right from the moment that the men arrive at the lodge, she is the cynosure of all eyes, and not in a good way. She tries her hardest to just do her job: preparing a meal for her boss's visitors. But being the sole woman in a remote location with an increasingly drunken group of men, as we will see, isn't quite conducive to just doing one's job.

The relationship of each character to their 'job' is, at a deeper level altogether, the subject of Sasidharan's film. Much before the 'game' plots each man into a 'professional' role, the film has begun the perspicacious process of observing how even within a circle of friends, every man is supremely conscious of social status – his own and that of the others. “The kind of places this Brahmin fellow digs out,” says one man as they approach the lodge. “He always howls when he sees the jungle,” says another. What may have felt like gentle ribbing turns darker and darker as the film proceeds, especially as everyone presses first the woman and then Dasa into unwanted tasks. “You need me to pluck a jackfruit and now kill a rooster,” says Dasa.

As befitting a film set in Kerala, politics is the matrix of all things – the idea of democracy, for instance, is the context for a sharp argument about the man-woman relationship, and an anecdotal history of Emergency for a discussion of the 'duties' of citizens: “the cops did cops' job, the scavengers did scavengers' job, the army men did army jobs...”. Caste, or its modern-day version, serves an authoritarian society perfectly: no-one is meant to challenge their socially-ordained roles.

Some of Sasidharan's long scenes are pure genius, and the long takes and the stunning forest soundscape create an atmosphere of menace that is unerring in both its sense of beauty and danger.

The 'game' may feel a little contrived, but the conversational fluidity the film achieves is astounding. Under the influence of alcohol, everything is laid bare. In vino veritas.

This is the second part of a two-part column. The first part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Nov 2020.

 

Fictional motherlands, real relationships

My Mirror column:

Some recent fictions illustrate how totalitarianism thrives on turning on real people into mythical enemies – and pitting an attachment to family and friends against the love of an imaginary nation

A still from the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit

A third of the way through the sadly aborted Leila, the series’ protagonist Shalini (Huma Qureshi) finally manages to trace her lost daughter to a school that looks like a prison. Her fake ID gets her past the gun-toting security-men into a cavernous grey interior, where stiffly-dupatta-ed girls are learning the call-and-response of new nationhood. “Hum kaun hain?” demands the teacher. “Aryavarta ke nanhe sipaahi!” comes the response. As Shalini’s anxious gaze travels along the children and finds Leila’s familiar features, her face uncreases into a joyful smile. Almost unconsciously, her feet begin to move towards the child she thought she might never see again.

But is this really the same child as the one who was abducted from her parents’ arms, only two years before? “My name is not Leila, my name is Vijaya,” the little girl says to a stunned Shalini. She pronounces the words carefully, like she’s learnt them by rote. The scene’s emotional kicker comes when a big car draws up, with a woman in it that Shalini knows well from a previous life, and Vijaya runs to embrace her – this time, with an unrehearsed “Mummy”. But as the finale of Leila makes indubitably clear, that woman is only a placeholder. The entity that has really replaced Shalini is so powerful that there is no way a mere human even try to compete - the nation-state. To quote the slightly dubious gendering chosen by Leila’s makers, “Tum meri maa nahi ho. Aryavarta meri maa hai.”

The idea of a nationalism that pits children against their parents is one that has appeared in another Indian webseries, Ghoul, where the ultimate betrayal of a parent is committed by an adult protagonist who has tragically learnt to trust the nation-state over and above family. I was reminded of these shows this week, as I watched Taika Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, currently free to stream, in which a single mother (Scarlett Johansson) has to deal with her only child being indoctrinated by a state she isn't exactly enamoured of.

Instead of a chilling dystopian future, though, Jojo Rabbit takes us on a madcap fantasy ride into the past. Ten-year-old Johannes Betzler is as cuddly a protagonist as you could ask for. He is also an incipient Nazi, who spends a lot of time talking to his imaginary best friend Adolf: a goofball version of Hitler who's alternately sulky and encouraging. Right from the opening sequence, which splices its fictional boy hero's frenzied self-motivation for a Jungvolk training weekend with historical black and white footage of Hitler's screaming youthful fans to the Beatles iconic anthem I Wanna Hold Your Hand, you know this film isn't traditional fare. Jojo's repeated 'Heil Hitlers', getting louder and crazier as he bursts out of his front door and careens in faux-aeroplane mode through his small-town streets, aren’t scary so much as ridiculous. The same could be said of the cast of characters that have assembled to turn the town's little boys into men and little girls into women – the hipflask-swigging Captain K, demoted from active wartime service by the avoidable loss of an eye, and the pudding-faced Fraulein Rahm, who seems a little young to have had “eighteen children for Germany”.

Waititi ups the tenor of ridiculousness even further when it comes to Nazi indoctrination against Jews. The descriptions proffered by the camp leaders, complete with chalk sketches, reminded me of Roald Dahl's checklist for witches in The Witches. Jews look deceptively like human beings, but they have horns under their hair and scales on their bodies and they smell like Brussels sprouts.

But of course, the film's whole point is that Jojo – like the entire brainwashed German nation -- believes in this mythology. So when, in a nice doffing-of-the-hat to Anne Frank, a teenaged Jewish girl turns out to be hiding behind the wall of his dead sister’s room, Jojo is baffled when she doesn’t fit the criteria. In return for keeping her secret, Jojo demands of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) a detailed insider's account of Jewishness, taking notes as she speaks. Their evolving relationship lets us walk the tightrope fantasy does, between wish-fulfilment and danger. An illustrated ‘expose’ full of ‘facts' about Jews, fictitious letters from a boyfriend who may or may not exist – these are the flip side of a real world in which Elsa can only survive if she can successfully parade her dead classmate’s papers.But it is in Jojo’s relationship with his mother Rosie that the film's heart lies. Johansson is pitch-perfect as the single mum who can blacken her face and turn into an imaginary ‘Daddy’ to indulge her little boy’s demand for his missing father – but who also refuses to let him avert his eyes from the bodies of ‘traitors’ strung up in the town square. She is happy to let him be part of the masquerade of Nazi boyhood, but draws the line at a real gun. Jojo Rabbit, like Rosie, knows the magical power of fiction, but also knows exactly when reality counts.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Apr 2020.

The Art of Dress in Isherwood's Berlin

My Shelf Life column for the website The Voice of Fashion looks at literature through the prism of clothes. 

This month, it's about people living on the edge in a city turning Nazi: Germany at the end of the Weimar era in Christopher Isherwood's much-adapted Goodbye to Berlin.

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

So wrote Christopher Isherwood in 'A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)' -- the first of the six interlinked stories that made up his 1935 book Goodbye to Berlin, a brilliant document of a city turning Nazi, a world changing shape before one's eyes.

Isherwood was both stylist and storyteller, gifted with an authorial voice that convinced you that things happened exactly as he wrote them, even as he categorically forbade readers from assuming that his sparkling characters were “libellously exact portraits of living persons”. Whether Sally Bowles and her many friends and lovers ever walked the decadent streets of 1930s Berlin, Isherwood's “camera” kept them running in readers' minds long after. Over the next several decades, as Goodbye to Berlin was adapted first into a play called I Am A Camera, then into a Broadway musical, and later the brilliant 1972 Bob Fosse film Cabaret, they shapeshifted, acquiring new nationalities, sometimes new names and new emotional lives.

Sally Bowles, for instance, went from being the 19-year-old daughter of a Lancashire mill owner who sings at an arty bar called The Lady Windermere to an older American cabaret dancer with daddy issues (the father who's “practically an ambassador” never actually shows up). Sally's rich lover, who in the original story was an American called Clive became, in Bob Fosse's film, a married German called Maximilian. The book's narrator, Chris, became Brian in the film, his relationship with Sally going from platonic to not.

Christopher Isherwood (centre) with the poets WH Auden (left) and Stephen Spender (right)

Among the things that stayed constant, though, was the crucial role of clothes. In what might now be seen as a predictable trait for a gay man, Isherwood paid attention to what people wore. And his characters dressed well for members of a 1930s demimonde. Or perhaps precisely for that reason. So we meet Sally first “in black silk, with a cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a pageboy's stuck jauntily on one side of her head”: befittingly theatrical, aided by cherry lips and emerald green nail polish. Meanwhile Sally and Chris's common friend Fritz Wendel has a “usual coffee party costume” that evokes summer even when it is cold and grey: “thick white yachting sweater and very light blue flannel trousers”.

Clothes are the first external sign of the self in this world – and looking respectable can take you a long way. For Frl. Schroeder, the landlady of Chris's lodging house, that means having her “flowered dressing gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of bodice or petticoat is to be seen”. For Chris, it is keeping his overcoat on because it hides the stain on his trousers. In Cabaret, Fritz surreptitiously pulls his coat-sleeve down to cover his frayed cuffs.

More than most people, Sally Bowles understands the value of looking fine. She constantly performs an exaggerated femininity – at the club, but also in life. And yet under all the high drama lies a childish make-believe, and you realise that her primary performance is for herself. She paints her toenails because it makes her feel sensual. During one of her frequent break-ups, she and Chris spend a lot of time sitting on benches. People stare at Sally “in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog”, while she only thrills to the thought of “what they'd say if they knew that we two old people were to be the most marvelous novelist and the greatest actress in the world.”

Michael York as the English protagonist Brian with Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972)

When she takes up with Clive, Sally accepts as gifts four pairs of shoes and two hats. And when Clive wants to get Chris a gift, she persuades him that six silk shirts would be better than a gold cigarette case. “Yours are in such a state,” she tells Chris with her usual cheerful brutality. In the book, these items of clothing are all that the two supposed gold-diggers get out of Clive – and 50 marks to be saved towards new nightdresses. The film makes everything more outré. Sally's rich lover Max actually gives the narrator that gold cigarette case – and lends him fancy clothes.

In Isherwood's last piece in the book, an ex-lodger called Fraulein Kost returns to visit the landlady in a fur coat and genuine snakeskin shoes, gaining Frl. Schroeder's grudging but real respect, despite her knowledge of her profession: “Well, well, I bet she earned them!... That's the one kind of business that still goes well, nowadays...”. In the film, it is Sally who acquires a new fur coat from Max – only to have to later sell it for an abortion.

Meanwhile, beyond Isherwood's charmed circle, other people are changing their clothes. Groups of young men in brown shirts and armed men in S.A. black uniforms have begun to attack solitary passers-by perceived as Communists. In one description that should resonate perfectly with present-day India, a young man is lynched and his eye poked out while dozens of people look on, and heavily armed policemen, “hands on their revolver belts...magnificently disregard the whole affair”.

On the eve of his return to England, the winter of 1933, Isherwood hears Frl. Schroeder talking reverently of 'Der Fuhrer' to the porter's wife. She voted communist last November, but she would probably hotly deny it. She is merely acclimatising herself, writes Isherwood, “like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.” Isherwood doesn't say it, but those animals are preparing for a long hibernation.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 15 February 2020.

A Student of Resistance

My Mumbai Mirror column:

As India's students speak out, it seems worth recalling a film about a student who defied another regime

Sophie Scholl was 21 when she was executed by the Nazi stateCharged with having distributed leaflets co-authored by a non-violent political resistance group called the White Rose, she was guillotined after a trial on 22 February 1943. The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, directed by Marc Rothermund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer, dramatises her interrogation, trial and execution. Though perhaps “dramatises” is not the best word for a film so deliberately spare, choosing to rely almost entirely on the historical transcripts left behind by the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) and the “People's Court” -- and thus unfolding, to a great extent, within the confines of an investigator's office and a courtroom.

Calling themselves the White Rose, the student group to which Sophie belonged brought out six different leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943. Distributed mainly in Munich, with copies also appearing in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg and Berlin, the pamphlets warned Germans that Hitler was leading them into the abyss, and called for people to speak out against Nazi terror. “Support the Resistance Movement!” they urged, for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”.

Those words from eight decades ago leap off the page in a month in which India has seen massive protests against a new Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA), which together with the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), introduces religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship for the first time in the history of our republic. Watching Sophie Scholl, it seems no coincidence that the resistance to the CAA and NRC, which has gone far beyond criticism of the letter of the law to a sorely-needed defence of the secular spirit of our Constitution and of our democracy itself, has been spearheaded by students.

The power of Sophie Scholl: The Last Days is in the details – especially as you watch it in 2019 India, where everything from the aesthetic remodelling of middle class fashion to the lines of 'argument' used by Fascist officials in the film are chillingly recognizable from our real-life political situation today. The junior officer of the Third Reich who hustles the film's 21-year-old student heroine into the custody of Investigator Mohr, for instance, has a moustache clearly modelled on Hitler's. Later, as Sophie (Julia Jentsch) is led into her cold prison cell, we hear in the background one of the Fuhrer's numerous speeches to the nation on the radio, his rasping voice rising to the familiar nationalist frenzy as he identifies an internal enemy. “Total war is the demand of the hour,” he proclaims, to loud clapping from his audience. “We must also put an end to the bourgeois attitude which we have also seen in this war. The danger facing us is enormous. The time has come to remove our gloves and use our fists...”.

Many of the arguments levelled by the Nazis against anyone who criticised their government are voiced in the film by Mohr and later, the infamous judge Roland Freisler. Over and over, we hear them berate these students as “parasites” and “spoiled brat[s] who foul [their] own nest[s], while others are dying on the front.” They are painted as ungrateful wretches who do not appreciate that they are only able to be students “thanks to the Fuhrer.” Time and again, too, Sophie's refusal to buckle under pressure drives Mohr off the deep end. “How dare you raise your voice!” he shouts at her, the irony of the statement clearly invisible to him. “The Fuhrer and the German people are protecting you.”

Reading a pamphlet in which Sophie's brother Hans argued that the war needed to be brought to an end and expressed his hatred for “the way we treat the Occupied Territories”, Mohr yells: “This is troop demoralisation and high treason!” The insistence on celebration of the army, and the idea that being critical of militarisation is antinational will sound familiar to anyone who has lived through the last five years of BJP rule.

Some of the film's best moments come when Rothermund focuses on the bafflement of the fascist in the face of openness: familial, but also individual. It is a fascinating fact that Scholl had been, for a time, a member of a Nazi youth group, before she and her brother and his friends began to question what the regime wanted them to believe, based on things they had witnessed on the Eastern Front as well as information they had begun to access – about institutionalised violence against Jews and disabled people, among others. Asked why her father – a known critic of the regime who had served a sentence for describing Hitler as “God's scourge to mankind” – had even let Sophie join the Nazi Girls Organisation, she replies, “Our father never influenced us politically.” “Typical for a democrat,” sneers Mohr, lighting another cigarette. “Why did you join?” Sophie's reply should resonate with all Indians who live with the promise of Acche Din: “I heard that Hitler would lead our country to greatness and prosperity and ensure that everyone had work and food and was free and happy.”

I will leave you with what to me is the film's most important exchange. Mohr insists that what he is doing is only to execute the law of the land. “What can we rely on if not the law?” he says. Sophie's answer seems simple, but it is one all of us need to hear: “On your conscience!”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Dec 2019