Freeing Films

My Mirror column:

A delightful new online film festival to mark South Asian Women's Day defines feminism as “a politics based on principles of equity, equality, justice and peace”

A still from If You Dare Desire (2017), directed by Debalina.

Anantha Ramanan's short film Ticket Please (Sri Lanka, 2018) begins with an older woman preparing a younger man, who might be her son, on how to get to a particular part of town. “The bus conductor speaks Sinhala only,” she says, speaking from the kitchen where she is washing something at the sink. “Give ten rupees exactly. It's very difficult to get the balance from him... If the conductor asks you again whether you have paid, say “Dhunna”. Dhunna means “I have given”.” Before he leaves the house, she instructs him to carry a newspaper in English, saying it will help. I felt a mild sense of irritation. Wasn't the older lady overdoing the multiple instructions, I wondered? And why force the young fellow to pretend to be something he's not? But from the second the young man got to the bus stop, I started to realise that she had been right. Sometimes when you don't fit in, it just makes it easier to pretend that you do.

The young man in Ticket Please is marked by his inability to understand Sinhala; his being a Tamil speaker is cause for irritation. And yet the strapping young bus conductor, so impatient with him for not knowing Sinhala, is only indulgent and excited when an Indian passenger gets on – speaking bad Hindi, gushing about Salman Khan and singing 'Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam'.

Linguistic politics in Sri Lanka may not seem, on the surface, to have much to do with feminism. But what is feminism really about? Ticket Please seemed to me to make the point quietly but clearly -- it isn't our differences from each other that are the problem, it's whether we've been brought up to regard that difference as either threatening or inferior.

Organised by well-known documentarian Reena Mohan, Aanchal Kapur of the Kriti Film Club and Sangat (a network begun by veteran feminist Kamla Bhasin in 1998), the exciting new South Asian Feminist Film Festival expands the meaning of feminism to make us think about difference and equality in a variety of South Asian contexts. Among the host of wonderful films and panel discussions at the festival (streaming free on http://www.doculive.in/ until 30 November) are Prateek Vats' brilliant debut feature Eeb Allay Ooo!, Vaishali Sinha's Ask the Sexpert (2017), Saba Dewan's Sita's Family (2002), the Ektara Collective's Chanda ke Joote (2011) and Nirmal Chander's Dreaming Taj Mahal (2010).

A good film festival always lets you connect the dots in expected and unexpected ways. From linguistic differences made visible on a busride, I moved to gender difference made visible on a metro ride in Please Mind the Gap (2018), a wonderful short film directed by Mitali Trivedi and Gagandeep Singh. An affectionate documentary portrait of transman Anshuman Chauhan as he negotiates the Delhi Metro, Please Mind the Gap never rubs in its metaphors. Anshuman is an effortlessly engaging subject, though, bringing his wry, laughter-filled gaze to bear upon everything he speaks of. In one early conversation, for instance, he maps his personal sense of space onto the world of public transport with a marvellous lightness. “I instinctually create a gap and maintain it,” he tells the filmmakers, going on to describe how he keeps a distance from everyone, men and women, choosing for himself the space between metro compartments, where the wall has his back, as it were. “Kisi se touch nahi hoge”.

But no matter how much he may want not to be touched, or even just to pass unseen, it isn't always easy. Men who have mistaken him for a man jump up apologetically when they see his face and think they have accidentally touched a woman. Security queues, public toilets, the metro's own Ladies compartment -- every space seems insistent on compartmentalising by gender.

In If You Dare Desire (2017), Debalina's fictional telling of the lives of real-life couple Swapna and Sucheta, their difference is less visible on their bodies -- but that doesn't make it easier. Swapna and Sucheta committed suicide by consuming pesticide together in Nandigram, West Bengal, in 2011, with Swapna leaving behind a six-page suicide note. As the film puts it, “Only this much is fact in the film. The rest, fiction.” The poetic urban interlude Debalina creates for the two young women is no idyll, but it allows us to see how it might have been for them if they had escaped to the city, how it probably is for the many South Asian women whose love seems invisible to the heterosexual worlds they inhabit. Until it becomes visible, is instantly interpreted as difference, and that difference as grave and present danger.

But sometimes when you don't fit in, you can no longer pretend that you do. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Nov 2020. 

The context of power, the power of context

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant web series I May Destroy You opens up all the conversations we need to have on sexual assault, and its commitment to context illuminates a great deal about the contemporary moment

In a world where writing is unironically referred to as ‘content’, like some pre-flavoured filling for your social media sandwich, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (IMDY) feels not just rare but exceptional. The 12-episode series is actively genre-repellent. The awe-inspiring Coel, who is the show’s writer, co-director and lead actor, takes us on a semi-autobiographical journey through a Black millennial London world akin to her own, filling each riveting episode with enough emotional and intellectual energy for a whole show.

Coel plays Arabella Essiedu, a young British woman of Ghanaian heritage whose sharp Twitter voice made for a hit first book. But when we meet Bella, she has just spent a publisher-sponsored writing retreat in the arms of a dreamy-eyed Italian drug dealing lover. While pulling an all-nighter to produce a draft for her deadline, she takes a break to meet friends at a bar. The next morning, having delivered up a manuscript she can barely remember writing, she finds herself with a bleeding cut on her forehead and the choppy memory of a white man’s face.

IMDY has been described as a show about a woman processing the deeply disorienting effects of a sexual assault that she doesn't really remember. And it is very much that, with Bella's tale of slow recollection, relapse, recognition and eventual recovery offering us one of the most fine-grained accounts of what it's really like to live through something like this.

But it is also a show about a lot of other things: things not often seen on screen, things that have certainly never been treated with the sort of multiple POV complexity that Coel's writing achieves here. IMDY is such a powerful intervention because it embeds what others might have seen as an isolated sexual assault in a brilliantly thick description of its context. That context is illuminated by a nuanced politics of race, class, gender and sexuality, and yet the sociological irradiates without overdetermining, always allowing another possible reading, acknowledging the reasons for suspicion while pushing us to dislodge our fixities.

For instance, Bella is black, and all she really remembers of the man who raped her is that he's white. The show doesn't flag this, or at least not obviously – but IMDY is a powerful engagement with the politics of race in an ostensibly egalitarian society. There is, for instance, the flashback depiction of how white teachers in a mixed-race school instantly respond to a white girl charging a black male classmate with rape: “White girl tears have great currency,” says a younger version of Bella's friend Terry. Now, in adulthood, Bella's circle of friends is almost all Black and non-posh: an exclusivity that could be self-defence. That fear of white or brown or upper-middle class often turns out to be at least partially justified: the white girl who brings Bella into a vegan NGO turns out to have earned a commission on her Blackness, the Cambridge-educated South Asian boy gaslights his way out of an act no less horrific for being supremely common: stealthing (removing a condom secretly during sex).

For the non-Black viewer, watching the show often has the quality of being invited into a closely-guarded circle, offering much-needed perspective on what it's like to be Black in a society where white people still have cultural hegemony. Yet, and this is crucial: there is none of the ridiculous unidimensionality that plagues so much politically correct writing in our times. Being a Black person in IMDY is no more a guarantor of moral certitude than it is in real life. So within these twelve episodes, a Black man cheats on his Black wife with a secret girlfriend – also Black; another Black man forcibly humps his Grindr date – also Black; a publisher that Bella imagines solidarity with because of her being Black, proves just how instrumental the use of racial identity politics can be.

I've used the racial lens until now because it is one Coel foregrounds, her character's most strongly felt identity from which she must partially break in order to forge a sense of unity with other women. But the sharpness of IMDY is its ability to see that all solidarities are partial, often only extended until it suits someone to extend them. Coel's characterisation and subplots indict the gaslighters and victim-shamers – the Italian lover who blames Bella for carelessness when her drink is spiked, or the Black policeman who can't quite see beyond his heterosexual judgement of Grindr sex. But what makes the show so unusual and compelling is Coel's insistence on letting no-one rest in perpetual victimhood, to constantly show how the wheels turn, depending on context. So for instance, someone who is in a racial or sexual minority might still be able to have a certain gendered power over someone else – like Bella's best friend Kwame not telling a woman he sleeps with as an experiment that he is actually gay.

Equally significantly, IMDY unpacks the disturbing effects of call-out culture in real life: the addictive high of social media validation; the exhibitionism and distraction that allows people to not focus on the work they really need to do on themselves; and most of all, the unreflective high moral ground that can sometimes make the wokest people the most insensitive, because black and white allows for no forgiveness.

 

In the India of 2020, where we all seem terrifyingly keen to tag people as either victims or exploiters; where the display of fake victimhood has become the toxic malaise that defines our society, from our topmost political leadership to publishing to Bollywood; where even the best-intentioned wokeness often seems to merely insert itself into our centuries-old culture of hypocrisy, in effect overturning nothing – in this world, I May Destroy You might be the best thing you can watch to challenge your preconceptions.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Sep 2020.

The Reel Life of MS Sathyu - II

My Mirror column (a sequel to last week's piece):

In honour of his 90th birthday earlier this month, a look back at MS Sathyu's under-watched 1994 film Galige, currently streaming online.

At the very start of Garm Hava, Balraj Sahni's Salim Mirza waves goodbye to a train at the station and sits himself down in a horse-drawn cart. The Agra of the 1940s is small enough for the tangawalla to be acquainted with each customer. Who have you dropped off this time, he asks. “My elder sister,” says Mirza, adding a gloomy metaphorical remark about how thriving trees are getting cut down in this wind. Yes, agrees the tangawalla, those who refuse to uproot themselves will dry up. Then he adds a Hafeez Jalandhari couplet, rendered in its most charming street avatar: “Wafaaon ke badle jafa kar riya hai/ Main kya kar riya hun, tu kya kar riya hai?” (I'd translate that as “You torment me in exchange for my loyalty/What am I doing, and what are you doing?”)

What's remarkable is the spectrum of moods that the sequence encompasses. There is the sombre farewell, the meditative remark, the deep sense of living through a eventful time -- and yet all of it is leavened by the comfortable chatter of the everyday, by casual acquaintances who make up one's sense of home, and an ear for humour in the minor key that keeps one from dipping into the doldrums. Galige, which Sathyu directed in 1994, attempts to create the same kind of energy.

The film has two narrative threads, both with immense potential for melodrama -- but Sathyu staves off all maudlinness. Currently playing in the Indian section of an international film streaming platform, Galige centres around a young Bangalorean woman named Nithya. She lives alone in a rented house and has a job in the HMT factory, riding a two-wheeler to work each day. One day, the orphanage where she was raised calls her. An old couple has arrived from a North Karnataka village to claim her as their long-lost granddaughter.

Now this is a theme that doesn't just animate popular cinema in India, it forms the matrix for it: the family separated by a calamity and reunited at the end, the pauper who is really a prince, the enemies who are really biological brothers. Whether as the basis of a comedy of errors (think of every single double role film you know), or the underlying theme of the family melodrama from Waqt to Trishul, or even when ostensibly subjected to questioning by the plot -- as in Awara's nature vs. nurture debate, or Yash Chopra's unsuccessful but fascinating Dharamputra, in which a Muslim orphan grows up to be a Hindu fundamentalist, blood ties are assumed to be the ties that bind.

But unlike the hundreds of film orphans we have all grown up on, Nithya does not hanker for a family. She is guarded, unsure if she wants to be co-opted into an identity she has thus far escaped. The orphanage manager's reminder that she was brought in by a fakir, on the other hand, makes the wannabe grandmother baulk: what if she's actually a Muslim? They part company – but on her way back home, Nithya feels bad for the stranded old couple and decides to invite them to stay with her for a while.

A still from Galige (1994)

What Sathyu does is quietly subversive at many levels. By making the young female character financially independent, and the old couple needier than her, he shows how easily existing power equations of age and gender can be reversed. The 'family' becomes something chosen, contingent on mutual desire and supportiveness, rather than a unquestionable given. Within this new space of equivalence, the young woman makes her own decisions, refusing to kowtow to either neighbourly gossip or 'grandparental' interference. She looks out for the old people, and enjoys their companionship, but feels no obligation to live by their rules. The old couple, for their part, learn that their opinions are simply that – their opinions.

Galige's other subplot is even more surprising – the Khalistan movement, and the fate of a reformed terrorist. Girl does meet boy, even in an MS Sathyu film, and Nithya meets hers in a thoroughly charming Antakshari scene on a train. As a girl without a family, she is perfectly comfortable with a boy without a past. And by bringing a Punjabi boy into a relationship with a local girl, of course, Sathyu plays on Bangalore's insider-outsider tensions. In the film, though, the locals' suspicions turn out to have some basis in fact – not all unknown pasts are equally benign.

There are many other moments when the film touches on the question of identity – Nithya's Japanese boss at the HMT factory, the Sikh dhaba owner or the play within the film where Ekalavya's birth becomes the cause of his tragic fate, while Guru Dronacharya shifts all blame onto him: “How can you hold me responsible for your low birth?” In an early aside, the film's resident commentator, one Narhari, asks the rhetorical question: “Do we lack temples, mosques, churches, gurdwara here? Must slap Urban Ceiling on gods – only so many temples per god.” Nithya herself speaks often of not needing to have a religion, of being free to believe in people.

All the threads of Galige don't necessarily come together. The music can feel tacked-on, as can some of the attempts at comedy, and the Punjab segment has the rushed quality of nightmare. The film's uneven tapestry benefits from being woven of low-intensity conversations, like the Bangalore in which it unfolds. In one lovely odd little moment, a drunken Narhari sings a Kannada song by the poet Rajaratnam to a companion in a prison cell: “If you wish to live, escape from this world. Create your own, forget this one.” Words to live by, now more than ever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jul 2020

From Tejimola to Cinderella

My 'Shelf Life' column for November:

Clothes that fit and people that don't: reading Aruni Kashyap’s retelling of a classic Assamese folktale

 

In Aruni Kashyap's story 'Skylark Girl', part of his recently published collection His Father's Disease, a young Assamese man is invited to an international conference at a Delhi-based university. There are other writers there from the Northeast, but Sanjib gets the feeling that they already know their way around—they know each other's names, the editor of the journal, how to negotiate the Mexican items at the conference lunch.

Kashyap weaves Sanjib's experience in and out of the story he has submitted to the conference: a retelling of the Assamese folktale 'Tejimola'. There is no obvious overlap between Tejimola and Sanjib. Her tragedy is of a different order from his discomfort at the conference. And yet, if you read carefully, clothing is crucial to both narratives: clothing as identity. So Sanjib notes how the young men on campus turn up in shorts and the women wear their cotton saris “as if they were in bed till a moment ago”. They are the epitome of ease, while he feels “like that classmate who came to school with long nails and smelly clothes and got bullied”. Sanjib's sense of impostor syndrome is reiterated in a scene from his past that he has turned into a visual metaphor: his only visit to a well-off girlfriend's house, where his tattered chappals seemed to “permanently taint” the gleaming marble floor.

Meanwhile, Tejimola's mother dies in childbirth, and the baby girl is saved and raised by the midwife Aghuni. But then one day Aghuni dies. Soon after, Tejimola's father—a silk merchant called Dhaniram Saud—sets off on a long journey, leaving her at the mercy of her stepmother Romola. Romola has waited a long time for this moment. When Tejimola wants to attend her friend Sokhi's wedding, her stepmother takes out a particularly fine mekhela-sador, “an expensive golden muga-silk dress from Sualkuchi”.

Tejimola is very surprised, because she hasn't known her stepmother to be so generous—especially when she has only asked for“good cotton”. But she accepts, doesn't think too much about it, and sets off with the clothes in a jute satchel. Unbeknownst to her, though, the stepmother has slipped in a piece of burning charcoal and a little rat. By the time the girl reaches her destination, the clothes are half-burnt and rat-eaten. Sure enough, upon her return home, the stepmother uses the ruined mekhela-sador as an excuse to put her to work grinding rice. And then, in one of those scenes of horrific graphic violence that punctuate folktales, she crushes the trusting Tejimola to death with the rice grinder, one limb at a time. 

Buried in the backyard of her own home, the young girl's body sprouts into a gourd-bearing creeper. When a beggar woman tries to pick a gourd, the plant sings out in Tejimola's voice. The stepmother chops it down in fury, but its remains grow into a plum tree—in Kashyap's version, an elephant lime plant. Uprooted and thrown in the river, Tejimola's next incarnation is as a water lily. When her returning father encounters the lily's lament, he coaxes her: “If you are my Tejimola, be a mynah and eat the betel from my hand.”

In Kashyap's telling, the mynah is a skylark and the coaxing is an order. When he returns home, the father takes “a long piece of red-bordered sador”, walks up to the skylark's cage and says, “My daughter, now I command you to take your real form and wear this.”

There is a core idea Kashyap seems to be juggling, of clothes being a good fit—and consequently perhaps clothes as the means that reveal when things are not a good fit. When Sanjib tells his posh girlfriend that his school uniform khaki trousers were the only ones he had before moving to Guwahati, she says “it sounded like a fable”. And in Sanjib's retelling of the classic folktale, the stepmother's too-fine mekhela-sador is a trick, one which Tejimola should have recognised as being too good to be true. She doesn't. She suffers. And she returns to human form by wearing the clothes brought for her by her father.

To fit the clothes you wear is to know who you are. The motif is not uncommon to the folktale. The French Cinderella is identified by her foot fitting the glass slipper. In his pioneering anthology Folktales From India (1991), the legendary scholar-translator AK Ramanujan points out that tales of the Cinderella cycle are told from China to South America, with a central female character being found and lost and found again.

In another Assamese folktale, that of Teja and Teji, the evil stepmother turns Teji into a mynah, dresses her own daughter in Teji's clothes and sends her to the king instead of his wife. “When the stepsister sat at the loom and made a show of weaving, the mynah cried: Whose cloth is it? Who weaves it? She breaks the threads and leaves them knotted.” The king finally notices—a little late, like most men. Like Tejimola's father, he enables the mynah to return to human form, and all is happy again. The story is steeped so deep in the fabric of Assam that the heroine is identified not by the clothes she wears, but the cloth she weaves.

 
Published in The Voice of Fashion, 5 Nov 2019.

The Life Support Machine

My Mirror piece: 

Ruchika Oberoi's Island City pushes our technologised reality to its starkest logical conclusions.

No man is an island,/ Entire of itself,/ Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main," wrote the seventeenth century English poet John Donne.

Filmmaker Ruchika Oberoi's directorial debut is a thoughtful triptych of tales that suggest that we may have drifted very far from Donne's vision of humanity.

The protagonists of Oberoi's film — whether single or married, with well-defined social identities or without — are increasingly unmoored from their surroundings, and sometimes from themselves. To stay with Donne's words for a bit, each is "a clod... washed away by the sea", but the loss appears to go unnoticed. Nothing and no one is the less.

Island City's disturbing portrait of a present-day Indian city — it is Mumbai, but it could be anywhere — is made up of three segments. In the first, 'Fun Committee', an employee is sent on a forced "day off" because company research has shown that productivity is down because employees are not having enough fun. 

In 'The Ghost in the Machine', a housewife and her children find their lives much lighter in the temporary absence of the head of the family. In 'Contact', the last segment, a young woman stuck in a rut finds sudden hope when she receives a letter.

The film opens with shots of the gleaming, glassy surfaces that make up so much of the contemporary city -- the city in which we ought to see ourselves reflected, but which seems strangely opaque. We bounce off its high-gloss exteriors.

The eerie dawn silence is punctured by an alarm clock, and its faux-cheery wake-up announcement is the first of the many machines in Island City that seem to have replaced human contact. The disembodied female voice in which the company speaks to its employees on the public address announcement system; the office elevator announcing the day's temperature; even the microwave in the kitchen tinnily urging you to 'Enjoy Your Meal' seems to know that there isn't a human being around to make sure you do.

While the machines are increasingly trying to get us to believe they're human, human beings are becoming more machine-like. The corporate floor in the Fun Committee segment is a bit like an updated Metropolis: everything is neat and ordered, people file into a bus, and file out of the bus into their office, swiping their cards with exactly the same gesture.

Even the yoga stretches done by the hapless Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak's sad-faced protagonist in the first segment) seem like they're being performed by an automaton. It is a short step from the physical enforcement of order to the naturalisation of a world in which we all do what we are told — no matter if our hearts or minds aren't in it. It is a deliberately excessive, tragicomic vision of late capitalist society — and yet Oberoi's deft handling makes sure we know when to stop laughing.

The film's second part, starring the always wonderful Amruta Subash, also places technology at its centre. Here, however, it appears in a much more recognisable, ordinary form: television.

The story's setting, too, is much less starkly atomised than that of Pathak in the first part: we have a fully-formed family unit: the husband and wife with two small children, and the husband's mother living with them.

But the existence of socially legitimised bonds, the filmmaker seems to suggest, is no guarantor that they mean something. The family that ought to be grief-stricken finds itself oddly liberated, and the television becomes the expression of their collective sigh of relief.

The mirroring between their lives and the TV serial they become obsessed with can seem heavy-handed. But Oberoi achieves something remarkable here — she shows us how powerfully we are formed by fiction, while simultaneously suggesting that we can use it to suppress what we feel in our real lives.

The last segment is perhaps the most chilling. There is more of the dirt and noise and clamour of the city here than in the previous two sections, and we might think of that as offering more human connection. But the young woman protagonist is oppressed by the crowd. Society seems to press in on her from all sides — she has no privacy in which to even read something, no friends with whom to share her unarticulated imaginings, and certainly not the security which men have to lay claim to the city.

The city here alienates with its masculinity, with the pressure it exerts on women to accept their fate — a milieu so thoughtless that it can blame women for not participating joyfully in our own everyday subjugation. The surrounding characters are perhaps less fully realised than in the second part, but Tannishtha Chatterjee is deeply believable as the ordinary girl holding out hope that she isn't as ordinary as everyone thinks; for one other human being to prove to her that she's worth something.

The anonymous letter-writer urges Aarti to believe: "Is machini duniya mein tumhari insaniyat salaamat hai [In this mechanical world, your humanity is still intact]". Island City wants to tell us quite the opposite.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Sep 2016.

The murderer as hero

My Mumbai Mirror column: 
Rustom's lurid, overblown courtroom drama turns the 1959 Nanavati trial into a showcase for pop-patriotism.

The trial of Commander Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati for the murder of Prem Ahuja began on the afternoon of September 23, 1959 in the city then called Bombay. The accused was a Parsi naval officer who lived in a Cuffe Parade flat with his British wife Sylvia and their three children. The victim was a wealthy Sindhi bachelor who lived with his unmarried sister Mamie and three servants in the posh Jeevan Jyot Apartments on Nepean Sea Road, Malabar Hill.

Despite their shared upper-class lives, the dead Ahuja became a sordid symbol of the immorality of the rich, while Nanavati emerged as a patriotic hero. As historian Gyan Prakash has shown fascinatingly in his 2010 book Mumbai Fables, the groundswell of popular support for Nanavati was largely engineered by the tabloid Blitz. Editor Russi K Karanjia managed to spin an elite sex-and-murder trial into "a spectacle of patriarchal honor and law in the modern cosmopolitan city". Prakash writes: "In its framing of the story, the rich did not just oppress the poor but threatened the very moral fiber of the nation, which Blitz identified with the armed services."

It is remarkable to what extent the Akshay Kumar-starrer Rustom, which released last week, 57 years after Nanavati's trial began, takes up and amplifies elements of this same narrative to suit our contemporary pop-patriotic zeitgeist. The faux-grand sets and technicolour shipboard sunsets are a vehicle for Akshay Kumar-style nationalism. As decorated naval officer Rustom Pawri, Kumar gets a stylised hero's entry alongside the Indian flag, and dialogues like "Meri uniform meri aadat hai, jaise saans lena, niswarth bhaav se apna farz nibhana... [My uniform is a habit. Like breathing, like selflessly doing my duty...]".

The film entirely fictionalises his battle with man-about-town Vikram Makhija (Arjun Bajwa), taking their rivalry much beyond Makhija having seduced his gullible wife Cynthia (a tearily soft-focus Ileana D'Cruz). It turns out that the upright Pawri sabotaged Makhija's corrupt shenanigans, hatched in conjunction with his own navy superiors. Poor Cynthia, in this version, is a mere pawn in Makhija's payback.

Gyan Prakash claims that in the years the case unfolded, Sylvia's being British "never raised an eyebrow. There was no insinuation (one very likely today) that she lacked the cultural values of India and exhibited the lax morals of Western women". This may have been true of Blitz and its English-language public - a function, perhaps, of the surviving colonial cosmopolitanism that still had hegemonic hold over the city's culture. But the form in which the case was first consumed in popular fictional form -- the 1963 Hindi courtroom drama Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke -- departed from that neutrality.

In it, the guilt-stricken Mrs Nina Sahni is cross-examined by prosecution lawyer Ali Khan (the superb Motilal) precisely about having grown up in Paris, where "women are free to drink and smoke in the company of men other than their husbands", and "even divorce them if they are unhappy". The actress Leela Naidu, half-French in real life and raised in Europe, tries hard to claim 'Indian' values as the sad-faced Nina, her plain white sari draped modestly over her head: "Auraton ke liye main sharaab ko bahut bura samajhti hoon [For women I consider alcohol to be very bad]," she says, insisting she was forced to drink by the late Ashok (Rehman). Her husband Anil (Sunil Dutt) defends her, testifying that he and his wife occupy a happy mid-point between traditional mores and new-fangled freedoms. The lawyer, however, declares Anil mistaken, because his wife "is a highly liberated woman, a hundred yards ahead of our time, as Western women usually are".

While painting her as this fiend of freedom, the film simultaneously makes Nina a non-agent in her sexual life: the villainous Ashok flatters Nina, gets her drunk, and rapes her when she passes out. But the traumatised Nina must still ask her husband's forgiveness -- ostensibly for having put herself in a position to be raped.

Meanwhile the wronged hero (and his father) gain in moral stature from forgiving: "You can find a thousand girls, Anil, but not the mother of [your children] Rita and Pawan," advises Anil's father. But in that old Hindi-movie moral universe, forgiving men are never faced with the prospect of actually taking the 'fallen' woman back: Nina dies inexplicably as soon as Anil is free.

The real-life Kawas and Sylvia had three children, and the filmic Anil and Nina two. Rustom 'modernises' by making the couple child-free. Cynthia is also allowed to feel flattered enough by Vikram's attentions -- and angry enough at her husband's absences -- to embark on an affair. But Vikram's unspeakable villainy -- now not just seducer of innocents, but traitor to the nation, insulter of the uniform -- overshadows her misguidedness. She can live to be forgiven.

Cynthia's Englishness is never remarked upon in Rustom. What it does foreground is the Parsi-ness of Pawri and Bilimoria, the tabloid editor who makes him a cause celebre: Kumud Mishra in a roly-poly, comic, money-grubbing version of the tall, patrician Karanjia. Their Parsi-ness is pitted against the Sindhi-ness of Vikram and his sister. But it steers clear of mentioning the real-life Sindhi lobby that had to be placated before Nanavati's connections could earn him a Governor's pardon from Vijaylakshmi Pandit.

Rustom is tacky and often unintentionally hilarious. The 1963 film's sharp-tongued lawyerly repartee (between Motilal and Ashok Kumar) here becomes an over-the-top exchange between Sachin Khedekar and our hero, who argues his own case. The real-life Mamie Ahuja becomes Priti Makhija — Esha Gupta as a bizarrely excessive version of that era's Nadira-style vamp, complete with cigarette-holder. The machinations of these cardboard characters are of interest only because the Nanavati case still holds our attention.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 August 2016.

The Strength of the Pack

Today's Mumbai Mirror column: 

A sparkling new adaptation of The Jungle Book is a chance to take a fresh look at Kipling.

The latest version of The Jungle Book hit Indian screens on April 8, a week ahead of the US. The fact that we get first dibs on the film, however, is about the only concession to 'Indian-ness' here. (I'm not counting the fact that the only actor on screen is a 12-year-old Indian-origin New Yorker called Neel Sethi.) 

Perhaps my brain has been permanently warped by The Jungle Book I grew up on (a lovely hardback with Disney images), but it seems to me a bit absurd to expect Indian-ness from something originally written by a white man in 1895, filmed in English as early as 1942 (by Alexander Korda), and successfully Disney-fied in 1967. 

What we think of when we think of The Jungle Book is Mowgli, a thin brown boy making the forest his own, accompanied by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. But Kipling's Jungle Book was actually several tales, first published serially in newspapers, and only some featured Mowgli. And even those didn't necessarily follow from each other: they had to be stitched into a single narrative. 

In some ways, it was the films that did this work. Korda spent most of his dramatic energy on Mowgli's ambivalent relationship to human society - in Kipling's memorable phrase, the "man-village". It was Walt Disney who created The Jungle Book most of the world now knows: the tale of Mowgli's battle with Shere Khan the tiger, encounters with the Bandar-log and Kaa the snake providing adventurous sidelights. 

Jon Favreau's version, in glorious live action 3D, remains largely faithful to the 1967 Disney film, though it darkens the tone and ups the pace considerably. It is Shere Khan who bookends this version, snarling and sneering to terrifying effect in the voice of Idris Elba, and asking the question that is at some level, at the moral centre of the Jungle Book: "How many lives is a man-cub worth?" Favreau gives the angry, embittered man-eater of the previous film a sharper identity as a tyrant, a power-hungry creature who wraps his unlawful activities in a cloak of hypocrisy and violence: "You did not respond to reason, so now you will know fear." 

On the other hand— not driving Mowgli out of the jungle but trapping him into self-doubt—is Kaa the snake: "Don't you know what you are?" 

And what is Mowgli - this creature who cannot ever be a wolf, no matter how much he tries, but who is too free, too wild to inhabit the world of men?
The idea of a feral child has long fascinated us. Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of Rome, were raised by a she-wolf, and famous cases of wolf-men have been the subject of films by European auteurs like Truffaut and Herzog. 

The appeal of Kipling's tale is that it reverses the perspective to that of the jungle: so not wolf-child, but man-cub. Instead of a return to human society, Kipling imagines what it would be like to be taught the ways of the wilderness. And what has made his text persuasive for generations of children is the richness of his conviction that the wilderness has ways. The Law of the Jungle seems, if anything, more clear, more just, and infinitely more navigable than the changeable codes of human societies. The idea of a Water Truce that would allow all animals to access the river in dry season, or the resounding call to togetherness in "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack": these explain why The Jungle Book's evocation of loyalty, honesty and codes of honour were a huge influence on Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. 

Sure, Kipling was a British imperialist in whose eyes there was no possible equivalence between brown people and white ones. But our response to that doesn't have to be a bar on reading him. It's much more profitable to read him critically but carefully, to read him and marvel at his ear for language, and his eye for the Indian world he grew up in. For one thing, he could often be funny. Here he is talking about small boys in Indian villages being sent out to graze the herds: "The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses." And here he is making a snarky comparison between human dispute settlement and the jungle version: "One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward." 

If we are to insist on mapping the Jungle Book onto Kipling's real-life surroundings, then the "man-village" would have to be the British, and the jungle representative of Indians. But then we would need to account for the fact that Kipling's man-village, although armed with the ultimate weapon ("the red flower", i.e. fire), is prone to fear and exaggeration. It is the jungle folk who are heroes - not just because they live simply and keep their word, but because they are able to take a man-cub in.

Regardless of whether it challenges or confirms colonial stereotypes, much of the power of the Jungle Book lies in Mowgli's learning how he can belong to the jungle, yet not fear the things that come naturally to him as a man. What Mowgli offers, eventually, is a model of accepting the different parts of oneself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 April 2016.

The Procedural Is Political

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Neerja's heroism flows from 'farz', something we have lately forgotten how to honour, in cinema and in public life.

Neerja released in the middle of February. I avoided watching it for weeks. I was worried I'd go the cinema and get hit by more of the chest-thumping nationalism currently bombarding us off-screen. Or at least injected with a saccharine-sweet version of it. 

I was wrong. Neerja -- starring Sonam Kapoor as the late Neerja Bhanot, a Pan Am flight attendant who was killed by terrorists during a hijack in September 1986 -- is about heroism, not nationalism. It's about helping other human beings, not caring whether they belong to the same community/race/country as you. 

In Madhvani's vision, Neerja tries her level best to safeguard all passengers on her flight. If American passport-holders seem the most vulnerable at one point, she tries her best to shield them; when it is children who need her, she goes to their aid. 

In this regard, Neerja's impetus is different from another recent film about an unlikely Indian hero -- Airlift. The two films are premised on strikingly similar scenarios - a group of ordinary people placed in a precarious predicament while outside their country of citizenship, with one among them catapulted by circumstances to a position of leadership. 

But Airlift's protagonist takes the initiative to save these helpless people because they are his countrymen. In fact, Raja Menon makes Akshay Kumar's heroism turn on the emotional tug of something called 'the nation', while in fact mocking the procedural inefficiencies and powerlessness of that entity called 'the state'. 

Ram Madhvani's film, in contrast, makes its heroism flow from something very ordinary; something we have lately forgotten how to honour, both in our cinema and in our public life: duty. And duty in Neerja is not to an abstraction called the nation, but simply to the responsibilities of your job, to correct procedure. And beyond that, to all human life. 

Duty isn't too fashionable an idea these days. Unlike in the days when Hindi cinema was filled with stern-faced police officers doing their duty to their vardi by handcuffing their brothers, farz isn't a word we hear very often now. The law-abiding Nehruvian hero of a previous era had already been placed in a dilemma in the 70s and 80s, by pitting his duty to the law against his duty to family - that division lies, in some sense, at the core of most justifications for corruption. 

But in our post-liberalisation times, the idea of simply doing one's job has come to be associated with being boring, playing by the rules rather than thinking 'out of the box'. Perhaps it isn't entirely a coincidence that a film that seeks to recuperate the meaning of 'farz', to rescue it from its stodgy, stick-in-the-mud associations and turn it into something worthy of our greatest admiration, is about an event from the 1980s. 

Madhvani builds up his protagonist's believability carefully. Why would an up-and-coming model, already appearing not just on TV advertisements but also on big hoardings for bridal-wear and on the back covers of magazines, stick with a job with terrible timings and a rather fraught social standing? 

Shabana Azmi, in an outstanding turn as Neerja's pillar-of-support Punjabi housewife mother, often asks her daughter the same question. The only answer we hear Sonam Kapoor give in the film is the near-banal "I love my job". But by offering us brilliantly-timed glimpses of Bhanot's ugly (and thankfully short-lived) arranged marriage, the film's writers Saiwyn Qadras and Sanyukta Shaikh Chawla produce a powerful sense of what else might have driven this young woman. 

To take your work seriously, Neerja implies, is crucial to achieving independence and identity— no matter whether that work is seen as work by others. In one telling scene, we listen to a nasty letter from Neerja's husband, about how no "izzatdaar" (honourable) father would get his daughter to work as a model, and we are forced to think of how often female flight attendants deal with disrespectful male passengers, even today. 

But the stand-out dialogue about duty in Neerja comes when the 22-year-old flight attendant's insistence on serving water and a snack to the hungry, thirsty passengers on board earns her the wrath of the armed hijackers. As one of them tries to physically stop her, she looks straight into his eyes and says, "Sir, main sirf apna kaam kar rahi hoon. Apna farz nibha rahi hoon. Jaise aap nibha rahe ho. (Sir, I'm only doing my job. I'm doing my duty. Just like you are.)" 

Something truly remarkable happens in this scene. An act of dull, everyday labour is suddenly lit up with the radiance of something extraordinary — and simultaneously, the violent act of the terrorist-hijacker is, for one infinitesimal moment, charged with a sense of duty. However reprehensible his means might be, Neerja manages to suggest, the terrorist's ultimate goal is one he considers moral. 

In a film that otherwise displays little doubt about its heroes and villains, this is a rare moment of rupture, a chink in the wall. But dialogue can only take place across such a chink. It is only by insisting on humanising those who seek to dehumanise us that any war can ever truly be brought to an end.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

The Age of Discovery

My Mirror column this week:

Two films based on women's memoirs of their teenage years offer rich, nuanced accounts of sexuality, selfhood and what it means to be grown-up

Among the things that made Masaan's opening sequence so memorable was Richa Chadda's striking depiction of a young woman yearning to begin her sexual life. We watch her hungry eyes as she watches a porn video, and then see her stride purposefully towards the sexual rendezvous that will change her life. Devi has shrugged off the cloak of morality that makes female sexuality a burden, and yet her youthful eagerness comes without coyness or giggles.

 

The frankness of Devi's sexual exploration made Masaan most unusual, especially in the Indian context. But even Masaan focused less on that process of exploration and more on its wider social ramifications. And Devi is a fully grown young woman. What would be truly remarkable would be to see the world through the eyes of a young girl (and not in the thoroughly exploitative manner of Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd).

 

Marielle Heller's directorial debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl does exactly that, though in San Francisco, circa 1976. Based on an autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, Heller's film casts the marvelous Bel Powley as Minnie Goetz, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who embarks on an affair with Monroe, a 35-year-old man who also happens to be her mother's (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård).

 

Given the undeniable controversiality of this plot, the film is remarkable for the freedom it gives Minnie. Heller has been very clear, in interviews, that her interest in Gloeckner's book (she has earlier adapted and performed it as a play) arose from the fact that there are so few honest representations of young female desire. “The media has endlessly told teenage girls that boys are the only ones who are going to want sex. Girls are going to be the ones that don’t want it. Girls are going to want to withhold it until they decide that they are willing to give it to the guy,” Heller has said. “What if you’re a teenage girl who wants to have sex?

 

She might be 15 and a virgin when The Diary begins, but it is very clear that Minnie's wanting is at the very centre of this narrative. And what makes the film so powerful is her joyous, unabashed sense of discovery – as well as her unaffected confession of her changing feelings. She might be dreamy-eyed to start with, and confused in the middle, but she is also the one with the sharpest view of things as they unfurl. 

The Diary of a Teenage Girl makes for an interesting companion piece to An Education (2009), another exploration of a relationship between a teenaged girl and a middle-aged man, also based on a real-life autobiographical account (journalist Lynn Barber's bestselling memoir) and directed by a woman: the Danish director Lone Scherfig.

 

Jenny Mellor, the 16-year-old at the centre of An Education, couldn't be more different from Minnie Goetz, at least on the surface. Minnie retains her child-like teariness and her shapeless dungarees, showing no external signs of her sexual awakening (even provoking her mother into suggesting that she might take a greater interest in boys). Jenny's (Carey Mulligan) encounter with the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), in contrast, soon results in a visible shift to adulthood: she starts to put her hair up and dress in fashionably grown-up clothes, and warns David against baby talk when they have sex for the first time: “Treat me like I'm a grown-up”. In fact Jenny's hunger is really for adulthood itself, rather than sex per se. It is her desire for beautiful things -- classical music concerts, glamorous restaurants and trips to Paris – that draws her to David, and simultaneously allows her to cast a cool, appraising eye at the dullness and poverty of the adult lives she sees around her: her poor, boring, money-grubbing parents, her closed-minded headmistress, even her fiercely hopeful English teacher.

 

Minnie doesn't do well at school, but she knows she is artistically talented. Jenny is the provincial girl with high culture aspirations—her grades might be perfect, but her sense of self is much more halting.

 

But much of the difference in the two narratives is also caused by the difference of social settings: in 1961 Britain, a middle class girl's confession of crisis is met by cups of tea and stern, solid advice; in 1976 San Francisco, it can devolve swiftly into a whirlwind of parties, sex and drugs.

 

Interestingly, in both films, the parents who discover an ongoing relationship between a teenage daughter and a much older man think of marriage as the next step. The difference is that in An Education, Jenny takes it seriously as an option, quick to exchange her dream of an Oxford education for the marital short-cut. In The Diary, set only fifteen years later, Kristen Wiig's angry proposal that Monroe marry Minnie elicits only disdain from the teenager (while the 35-year-old seems relieved, even happy, at this possible resolution).

 

What both films share, in fact, is a portrayal of adulthood as a layered, complex state in which people can continue to be both vulnerable and confused. Whether it is the surface sophistication of a David, which hides a hollow interior, or Monroe's drug-induced confession of neediness, or whether it is the profound gullibility of the parental figures in both films, it is the adults in either film who remain strangely infantile – and Minnie and Jenny who grow up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29th Nov 2015.

One for two, two for one

My Mumbai Mirror column today: 

Watching Tanu Weds Manu Returns set me thinking about doubles, and Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Tanu Weds Manu Returns opens with its most ridiculous scene. The pair united in matrimony (to the disbelief of many in the audience) at the end of Tanu Weds Manu, Manu Sharma (Madhavan) and Tanuja Trivedi (Kangana Ranaut), are receiving couples' counselling from a team of British psychiatrists, when Manu's hysterical outrage at his wife's version gets him put away in what looks like a Victorian dungeon-cum-prison, which is then consistently referred to as "paagalkhana". But after a few more minutes spent floating unconvincingly round British coffee shops, sylph-like in sari and trench coat, Ranaut and the film thankfully return to the territory that director Anand L Rai knows his way around so wonderfully: small town North India. 

The small town here is no mere colourful backdrop. It is crucial to the characters, the sparkling dialogue, the texture of the film. The way Rai stages Tanu's return makes immediately clear what paragraphs of complaining to the counsellors couldn't: how can the big fish from the small pond adjust to the anonymous sea of the foreign city? Within minutes of getting to Kanpur, she has flirted with a rickshawalla, fired up the children, and generally set the neighbourhood aflame. For such a heroine to be tucked away in some obscure London suburb, deprived of an audience for her karnaame, is social death. The shaatir young Rampuria who is a non-paying tenant in her parents' old house (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub, superb in a role that finally gives him something new to chew on) cottons on quickly: "Aap toh is mohalle ki Batman hain," he tells a preening Tanu. 

Ranaut is already at the top of her game as Tanu. But the film's masterstroke is to set her up against a version of herself. As Datto, the youthful Haryanvi sports quota student from Ramjas College, Ranaut absolutely steals the show. What's crazy is that she steals the show from her own double. 

In what is arguably the cleverest take on the old Hindi movie double role in years, Datto is the good girl to Tanu's bad girl. Armed with a hockey stick, short hair and a solid Haryanvi accent, she is tweaked so there's no chance of mistaking her for the docile, dabbu good girl of yore, a la Sita aur Gita or Chaalbaaz. But there is something moving about a young woman voicing the sentiments usually reserved for young men in our films: the pressure of family and community expectations, a bumbling sort of romantic inexperience. Add to that a disarming honesty, and you have an even more appealing character. In contrast, Tanu is painted as the irresponsible one, who lives to flirt and flirts to live, who proudly announces that she "never even gave her father a cup of tea", and who -- as Datto gets to point out in one rather harsh speech -- has never had to earn a penny. 

But watching Manu's Madhavan, in the process of divorcing Tanu, fall in love with Datto, made me think of a very different film about a double: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. At the emotional centre of that 1958 film is Scottie's (James Stewart) discovery of a look-alike of the woman he loved, after what he thinks is her death, and his obsessive desire to remake the new lover (Judy) in the image of the lost one (Madeleine). Scottie's discovery of Judy is very close to Manu's discovery of what he first thinks is Tanu with a boyish new haircut, in sportswoman's garb in Delhi. There is something deeply worrying about a man falling in love with the same face twice, if only because it suggests that there is nothing beyond the physical to fall in love with. 

TWMR does make fun of it, with at least one hilarious line where Manu's sozzled friend Jassi says to him, "Phir se Tanu-jaisi le li? Kucch aur dekh lete, Aishwarya type, Katrina type, Deepika type". And thankfully Manu seems uninterested in re-making Datto into Tanu: it is the difference, the film suggests, that makes her appealing. 

But I see a homage to Vertigo in the fact that the two Kanganas are identical in looks, but completely unlike each other in manner, style, degrees of sophistication. Madeleine Elster is the sophisticated San Francisco woman with a platinum blonde topknot, while poor Judy Barton from Salina, Kansas wears her hair bright red, with tacky hoop earrings and a twang to match. 

Interestingly, it is the relatively sophisticated Tanu who tries, in a remarkable sequence, to make herself over to look like Datto, drunkenly waking a beauty parlour lady at midnight, to acquire a pixie wig. 

One could choose to read this moment in ideological terms, as many read the Deepika-making-biryani-to-woo-Saif moment in Cocktail, but it seems to me to turn on something that isn't just about what kind of woman you're allowed to be on the Hindi film screen. Perhaps more fundamentally, it's about what women are willing to do for love. As the teary Judy says to Scottie, "If I let you change me, will that do it? If I let you do it, will you love me?"

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Slice of life, served warm

My Mumbai Mirror column last Sunday: 

Caught between too much Bengali-ness and too little, Shoojit Sircar's 'Piku' mines dysfunction for gentle comedy.

By the time you read this, you would have heard and watched the PR machinery grinding away for days, anointing director Shoojit Sircar as the new Hrishikesh Mukherjee. While this is only a symptom of how desperate we are for labels (and maybe of how much we secretly miss 'Hrishi Da'), Sircar has done something that counts as a rather fun tribute to Mukherjee. He's taken Bachchan's original quick-tempered, reserved 30-year-old Bhaskar Banerjee of Anand (1971), and aged him into the crabbily eccentric, garrulous 70-year-old Bhaskor Banerjee of Piku. More amusingly, the hypochondria of richer patients like Asit Sen's Seth Chandranath, that so annoyed Bachchan as a young doctor in Anand, has now become his own. The new old Bhaskor, nursing his boxful of homeopathic tablets as close as his now-generous paunch, lives in Delhi's Chittaranjan Park and spells his first name with a deliberately underlined Bengali 'o'. (That 'o' is a sign for you to wonder: did Amitabh Bachchan make a better Bengali when he wasn't trying so hard to play one?)

This is Sircar's second cinematic take on Dilli Bangalis. The first, Vicky Donor (2012), which still remains his finest film by far, had Ayushman Khurrana's persistent Lajpat Punjabi boy woo Yami Gautam's gently dignified Ashima Roy, resulting in wedding negotiations that bring out each community's most ungenerous view of the other: superior, killjoy Bengalis believe they're being forced to deal with moonhphat money-minded Punjabis -- and vice versa. But despite Sircar's penchant for broad stereotype, his affection for his characters shone through, as it does in Piku.

Here, Sircar seems to suggest that Padukone is a Delhi girl, her Bengaliness expressed as culture and not as language—note the scene where she dismisses a potential suitor for not having watched any Ray films. But even if she were cast as a Hauz Khas Enclave girl instead of a Chittaranjan Park one, Padukone's Bangaliyana would be too little, and Bachchan's too much. Still, despite Bachchan's overdone accent, I didn't completely cringe at the jaanishes that occasionally punctuate the father-daughter conversations. And drawing my half-Bengali self up to the full height of its limited authority, I shall vouch for the joyful appropriateness of both the Bangla song references: the playfully romantic Hemanta-Sandhya Mukherjee song from the Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen classic Saptapadi (1961) 'Ei Poth Jodi Na Shesh Hoye' ['What if this road were to never end'], which Bhaskor breaks into on their already interminable road journey, and Manna Dey's cheerful 'Jeebone ki paabo na, bhulecchi shey bhabona' ['What I won't find in life, I've stopped thinking about that'] to which a tipsy Bhaskor shakes a leg in much the spirit of Soumitra Chatterjee's original twist in the 1969 film Teen Bhuboner Paarey.

But the Bengaliness in Piku is at its best when least remarked upon: such as the fact that 'Piku' is what Padukone's character is known by, not just to family and friends, but pretty much to everyone. Colleagues and cowering taxi drivers alike call her Piku Madam, anointing with respectable publicness what would otherwise be *just* a nickname. There is probably a long and impressive bhalo naam, but it's so long and impressive that no-one ever uses it. I also loved the non-underlined way in which Sircar uses a ridiculous battle over a knife: it was about an old man's stubbornness, but it was also a gentle suggestion that what Hindi belt masculinity might consider a way of keeping safe (having a weapon in the car) is, to the Bengali bhadralok, a source of clear and present danger.

Another aspect of Bengaliness that the film quietly demonstrates is the family conversation as argument, with people quite happy to cut across each other and squabble joyfully over pointless things. (I must mention here that Moushumi Chatterjee, as Piku's aunt Chhobi Mashi, is an absolute gem. I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know this grown-up, un-coy version of the actress in two wonderful Aparna Sen films, The Japanese Wife and Goynar Baksho, and I'm waiting for Hindi cinema to give her a truly meaty role to sink her teeth into.)

What's best about Piku, though, is not its droll Bengaliness, or its unending succession of alimentary conversations (which are not half as bad as I expected, and even contain some useful homespun wisdom on bowel-clearing from Irrfan Khan's fantastically wry Rana). It is the film's affecting ability to draw out our complicated feelings about our parents—the frustration at their embarrassing quirks, the reversal of positions that becomes inevitable as they age, and the fierce protectiveness with which we guard them from the criticisms of others. Piku's combination of annoyance and amusement, of being weighed down and standing tall alone, will strike a chord with every middle-aged person who's taken care of an irritable parent (often a parent irritable at having to be taken care of).

There is also the un-heavy-handed, thoroughly endearing way the film deals with the subject of ageing and death. Irrfan, playing a taxi company owner who ends up driving Bhaskor, Piku and their Man Friday Budhan (the servants in this film could do with a separate column) to Calcutta, gets some of the best lines: “Tapak gaye toh Banaras jaisi koi jagah nahin,” he announces as they drive past the city Hindus consider the holiest place to die. But to see how to meet death with a twinkle in your eye, you have to see the film. Perhaps it is an Anand homage, after all.