Ab Aayega Mazaa – an odd (and oddly enjoyable) little relic of the 80s

After Farooque Shaikh’s passing late last year, I watched some of his old work – Gaman, Saath Saath, other reasonably well-known (by “parallel cinema” standards) movies. But a few days ago I found a DVD of the 1984 Ab Aayega Mazaa lying about (I think I had bought it after Ravi Baswani died a few years ago) and started watching it, only to be gobsmacked by what an unusual little film it was.

It begins with the actor Raja Bundela dressed in a black cloak, prancing about a graveyard with a crucifix, talking about how the dead have to reserve their "plots" in advance because things are getting crowded. This is revealed to be a nightmare: the film’s hero Vijay (Farooque Shaikh) awakes suddenly to find he has overslept and is late for office as usual, and wouldn’t you know it, his old grey scooter isn’t starting again. While waiting at a bus-stop (this, boys and girls, is what people used to do in the pre-liberalisation days – you know, before India became all shiny and Lamborghinis and iPhones dropped from the sky into the backyard of every house) he meets a sweet girl named Nupur (Anita Raaj). She lives in Golf Links and has three phones in her house (in 1984 even the prime minister didn’t have three phones) while Vijay occupies PG quarters in Patel Nagar, which is a pointer to their very different social statuses. But romance begins, as it did in those distant days, with a glass of water bought from a roadside stall, and an argument with a vendor who doesn’t have change for 50 paise. 

At this point Ab Aayega Mazaa seems set to be your regular early 80s middle-class romance centred on two of the most un-starry leading actors of the time. But the story soon heads down a garden of forking paths, and it turns out that the dream scene in the graveyard wasn’t an anomaly – it was representative of the film's overall madcap tone.

For anyone interested in the non-mainstream cinema of the time, this movie’s title credits have many points of interest. It was the directorial debut of Pankaj Parashar, who would helm the popular TV show Karamchand shortly afterwards, and go to make Jalwa, Peechha Karo and (the relatively big-star, big-budget) Chaalbaaz, all of which had traces of the manic energy one sees in Ab Aayega Mazaa. More amusingly, this very youthful film was co-produced by two actors who would soon acquire an “old man” image through their work in television: Alok Nath, who would play Haveli Ram in Buniyaad (and who has been enjoying a late-career resurgence recently, after being the subject of Twitter jokes about his “babuji” image), and Girija Shankar, the doddering, self-pitying Dhritarashtra in BR Chopra’s Mahabharata (a good performance, but one that annoyed my generation of viewers who wanted to watch battle scenes instead of endless self-mortifying conversations between the blind king and Vidura).

Shankar acts in Ab Aayega Mazaa too, in a part that reminded me a little of Pankaj Kapur’s oily Tarneja in Jaane bhi do Yaaro: he is the boss in an advertising agency that is really a front for the wicked activities of a Godman who uses incense sticks to peddle drugs. Which is a logical (or illogical) extension of the more straightforward early scenes that detail corruption and self-interest in the advertising industry: someone even proposes a soap made of adrak because consumers appreciate “natural” things. (“Zaroorat ke hisaab se aadmi ko phasao”. Cheat a man according to his needs.)

That isn’t the only JBDY connection: the tone of this film – especially in the scenes that play like deliberately thrown together college skits – is often similar to that of Kundan Shah’s movie. And that probably has something to do with Satish Kaushik writing the dialogue (and also playing a small, amusing part), as well as with the presence of Ravi Baswani, whose excellently over-the-top America-returned accent and defective Hindi makes Satish Shah’s DeMello seem like a Bharatiya ladka. Rajesh Puri is here in a short role too, and the young Pawan Malhotra – an assistant on the earlier film – has a weird little part as one of the Godman’s minions, who wears a bright purple robe and sits atop trees commenting on proceedings. There are funny sight gags (like a lamp that switches off and on if you make a coughing sound near it), throwaway lines (a “dying” man tells his friend “Meri motorcycle bech kar apne scooter ko paint kara lena, dost”), and some non-sequiturs, as in the scene where Sidey (Baswani) creeps up on a saucy ayah thinking she is Nupur, throws his arms around her and asks her to guess who he is (“Main tumhaara bachpan ka saathi hoon”), and she exclaims “Badri? Par tum toh aam ke ped se gir ke mar gaye thay.” Little moments like these make up this salad bowl of a film.

Ab Aayega Mazaa is hit and miss, but a notable thing about it is how it takes many of the clichés of mainstream Hindi cinema – the lovers separated by an authoritarian parent, the foreign-returned swain who becomes the third corner of a love triangle, a villain trying to pinch diamonds hidden in a statue, even a lost-and-found narrative involving a daughter who went missing in an accident years earlier – and treats them with a mix of parody and homage. On one hand there are many droll, deadpan scenes where it is obvious that the film is winking at its audience. On the other hand, it does seem to wholeheartedly throw itself into some of the tropes of commercial cinema: straight romantic songs (gaane bhi do yaaro?), a scene in a bar where Farooque Shaikh has fun playing a Bachchan-like comic drunk, a couple of fight scenes that are milked for humour (but that could simply be because people like Baswani are doing the fighting). There is some tongue-in-cheek “filmi” dialogue too: those who are used to standing in bus lines get a cold when they travel by AC cars with rich people, says Vijay sadly, when his love life turn sour. And though Nupur’s father - another Tarneja-like character - is a slight figure who speaks in a mannered tone, he says the sorts of things that would sound beautiful in Amrish Puri’s booming voice. “Insaan sab se jeet ta hai, par haarta hai toh sirf apni aulad se. Tumne mujhe jeete jee maar diya. Aaj ke baad tumhaara ghar se nikalna, sab bandh.”

Actually, given that much of this story is about how to “present” or “advertise” yourself (Nupur, who works with a theatre company, points out that "Zindagi mein bhi toh hum acting karte hain" – we behave differently depending on whom we are with), one could suggest that this low-budget film with lunacy in its DNA is occasionally disguising itself as something more mass-audience-friendly. That results in a tone so erratic that it definitely isn't for all tastes, but much like the Jaane bhi do Yaaro crew they must have had a grand time putting it together.

A memory of Farooque Shaikh

Less than a week before I heard the saddening – and most unexpected – news of Farooque Shaikh’s passing, an SMS written in a familiar style lit up my phone screen. “Adaab,” it said. “Wish u a Merry Christmas, a Joyous New Year and a v happy life ahead. Best luck, always.” A few minutes later, the same message arrived again. This could have been a network glitch, but having seen Mr Shaikh (or Farooque saab, as it seems more apt to call him) a few weeks earlier, wrestling with and frowning at his handset – something I can often relate to – I could picture him having re-sent it accidentally.

Either way, I had become used to the courtliness of his SMSes (even when written in shorthand) in the previous two months, ever since I first contacted him in connection with a writing project. In mid-October I had texted him – in the supplicating tone of a journalist seeking a few minutes of an Important Person’s time – asking if we could speak for a short while; on the phone would be fine. He replied with an “Adaab sir”, adding that he happened to be coming to Delhi at the end of the week, and it “wd be a plzre” to meet then “at a mutually cnvnnt time”.

We met, and it was a pleasure – for me, at least – even though the conversation was short and unexceptional. He was everything you’d expect from his screen persona, warm and unfailingly polite in his direct addresses, though he did get a little agitated when he spoke more generally about falling standards in popular culture. I had a couple of specific talking points to cover, but we were quickly done with those, and for the next half-hour he talked mainly about how commerce had completely taken over the film world, and expressed annoyance about the hegemony of the Rs 200-300-crore cinema. “Vaahiyaat filmein agar 300 crore ka business kar rahe hain, toh aur log aa jaayenge, and they will go down the same route.”

Much of what he said – if you simply transcribed it – would read as relentless complaining, and I didn’t agree with all of it. Some of it mixed deep idealism, a yearning for a fabled past where things were always so much better than today, and a narrow, subject-oriented view of “good” and “bad” cinema. There were capricious asides: while making the (reasonable) point about Hollywood’s technical excellence masking deficiencies in content and not allowing any other type of film to get breathing space, he suddenly brought up films “jiss mein spaceship yun zor zor se awaaz karti hai, phir girne lagti hai – whereas it is a basic fact of zero gravity that a spaceship will not fall like that even if it breaks up.” And he clearly wasn’t a fan of Jaws and the summer-blockbuster culture it spawned: “Ya toh ek machli aisi hai jo logon ko khaamakhaa marne lagti hai. This kind of stupidity has to stop.”

But the discontent came from his strong views on the relationship between a society and its popular culture, and his keenness to fix responsibility. “Cinema is a willing or unwilling appendage to society, so we may as well have some quality in it. Otherwise it’s like saying ‘Naashta toh mujhe karna hi hai, sada hua bhi chalega.’ But why not have a good meal, even if it is a small one? You risk your health if you eat chaat all the time. And then we complain ‘hamaaray society mein auraton ke saath yeh hota hai.’ You can’t pretend that cinema doesn’t have an effect on our minds – it’s a big thing.”
 
It wasn’t all about venting though. The meeting reminded me of conversations I had had with other, very likable men of integrity of his generation, Kundan Shah and the late Ravi Baswani – a tone that combined irritation and frustration with the ability to step back after a while and crack a quiet joke about one’s own irritability. And a genuine, boyish curiosity about what the younger person sitting in front of them felt about these things. (I have memories of Kundan, Ravi and Farooque saab – separately, of course – pausing for breath after a rant, then chuckling and asking a version of the question “Do you agree with any of this? Or could it be that I feel this way only because main budhaa ho gaya hoon?” And the question was asked sincerely, not rhetorically.)

Farooque saab spoke with pragmatism (“it is unreal, and perhaps even unfair, to expect that a filmmaker is going to do good to society at a loss to himself”) but perhaps had an unrealistic view of the power wielded by the “thinking” audience (“...and so the discerning viewer has to make his presence felt. With the internet you can get back to the filmmaker immediately if he has made a bad or bawdy film, and tell him off. He will take that seriously. He depends on the ticket that the viewer buys.”) He moved between optimism and cynicism (“But as is the norm all over the world, the major audience is males aged between 15 and 25 years. They are the ones who decide whether a film will run or not”) and used humorous analogies: “Aaj kal ke movie reviews mein star ratings aise bikhte hain jaise langar mein khaana bikh raha ho.” And “You know the Sea Link in Mumbai? It cuts down travel time dramatically while you are on it – but when you exit it you’re in trouble again. That’s how the industry today is. Film toh complete ho jaati hai but then the intelligent, sincere filmmaker is in a surrounding that he cannot control: agar 3,500 screen kisi big-budget film ne le liye hain, then you get the one or two remaining shows, and the show time is such that your own wife won’t go for it.”

Near the end of our chat, he – consciously or otherwise – used an analogy closely linked to the plot of one of his most beloved movies. “There are two people in the race – the sprinter and the evening walker,” he said, marking the difference between money-obsessed filmmakers and the ones with a social conscience. “The promenade walker will not get ahead because he isn’t in it for the race, he’s out for a stroll – the sprinter is the one who wants to get ahead, and he will always win.”

In Sai Paranjpye’s Katha, based on the hare-and-tortoise fable, he was cast against type as the wily hare (or the sprinter). I alluded to the film and he merely nodded and gave a quick smile, not pursuing the point – he wasn’t much interested in talking about his own movies, or at least his contribution to them. When he brought up Listen…Amaya – as another low-budget film that was released in only a couple of halls – this is what he said: “Recently ek film thi, Listen... Amaya, jiss mein Deepti ji aur Swara Bhaskar thay...” No mention of himself. 

Which may be a reminder that he wasn’t “in it for the race” himself. I have no doubt that he took a project seriously once he had committed to it, but he came across as being blasé about his own career, unconcerned with such things as staying in the public memory. Still, he had done some fine work in the past couple of years – in Shanghai, Listen…Amaya, even in his short part in Yeh Jawani hai Diwani – and there may have been more to come. 

I don’t usually get too affected by the deaths of public figures, even those whose work or achievements I admired. But this was a little different, because of the immediacy of having met him so recently, and because he was too young. Notwithstanding his own indifference to fame or plaudits, with the right mix of subject, writer and director he might easily have had a notable second innings as a screen actor. For now, we have the past work: old favourites like Chashme Buddoor and Katha, of course, but also films like Gaman (now available in a restored NFDC print) and Saath Saath, which deserve to be revisited and rediscovered. And I have the rueful knowledge that despite having had opportunities, I never got around to seeing a performance of Tumhari Amrita.

[Related posts: a tribute to Ravi Baswani, Shaikh’s co-star in Chashme Buddoor; a review of Sai Paranjpye’s Katha; a piece about Listen Amaya, and about watching Shaikh and Deepti Naval on screen together after all these years. And on two excellent films in which Shaikh had small parts, 40 years apart: Garm Hava and Shanghai]

About Listen... Amaya

Memory, the many forms it can take and the different ways in which it moulds lives and relationships – this is a theme of the new film Listen... Amaya, which centres on a paradox: on one hand there is a young woman – described as “free-spirited” and leading an apparently modern, forward-looking life – who is trapped by the past, idealising her long-dead father to the extent that the thought of someone else sharing her mother’s bed is sacrilege; on the other hand, there is a much older person who believes – perhaps because his mind has begun playing tricks on him and his memories are slowly drifting away – that life is not just the sum total of your yaadein (“yaadein zindagi nahin hoti”), it is also about what lies ahead. And that memories can even be stored in photos and then tucked away for a bit while one sets out to create new experiences.

This tension between the young and the old – the girl is Amaya (Swara Bhaskar), the man is a photographer named Jayant/Jazz (Farooque Shaikh), friend and eventual lover to Amaya’s widowed mother Leela (Deepti Naval) – supplies the film’s main narrative arc. In Leela’s quaint little cafe-cum-library, the sort of place that has lately been mushrooming in the more hipster (or wannabe-hipster) quarters of Delhi, Amaya bonds with Jayant and they decide to do a coffee-table book together (she will write, he will take the pictures) - but things get complicated when the young woman realises that the two older people are more than just friends.

That Listen...Amaya will probably be a likable, charming film is something a viewer might guess beforehand. Much of its initial appeal, for a generation of Indians with fond memories of the so-called Middle Cinema of the early 1980s, lies in seeing Deepti Naval and Farooque Shaikh together after all this time, and it is a whimsical, possibly unintended detail that a film about memory can be so enhanced by a viewer’s nostalgic relationship with these actors’ past work (it even tosses in a “Miss Chamko” reference, as if the point needed to be underlined). But to focus too much on the casting and the associations it creates in our minds might be to ignore how good Shaikh and Naval are here, in these roles, and how beautifully they have aged.

They are reasonably well-served by a film that acknowledges the value of its three principal performers (all of whom are terrific, though Bhaskar struggles with an under-written part in the second half) by giving each of them respectful long takes and held shots – including some shots where two people are in the frame, not “doing” very much, simply observing and reacting. Some of the best of these scenes are the ones with little dialogue (or little over-expository, “meaningful” dialogue), where a glance or gesture becomes an insight into the changing shades of a relationship. We see how the buddy-buddy rapport between mother and daughter (Amaya tells her mom about slapping a boss who made a sexual proposition, and Leela reacts stoically) gives way to friction when the young woman is unable to cope with the idea of her mother as a romantic or sexual person. We sense the emotional bond between the lovers – a bond that probably began with shared tragedy and loneliness but deepened into a love so clearly founded on friendship that one flinches at Amaya’s insensitivity when she asks her mother “Is it just about the sex?” – and we see the complex relationship between Amaya and Jazz as they explore the physical bazaars of Delhi, from Chandni Chowk to Hauz Khas Village, while also exploring their own private memory palaces. There is often a real sense for the small, throwaway moment, as in a scene where Jazz calls Leela from his landline to tell her “Mera phone kho gaya” and she reflexively responds “Kahaan?” before shaking her head at the silliness of what she’s just said (and meanwhile we see him silently spread his hand out in a “what the...” gesture, even though he knows she can’t see him).

But there could have been more of these moments, rather than the clunky psychoanalysis that weighs the story down. The film is also stifled by its tonal unevenness. There are jarring asides where side-characters play Greek chorus in increasingly annoying ways (starting with the guitar-wielding, coffee-loving, so-cute-you-want-to-strangle-them kids dancing in the cafe in the opening sequence, carrying on to a dead-on-arrival subplot about a couple who become entangled in the problems of the central trio). The often-intrusive background music is among the worst I have heard recently: what is with that terrible, ululating sound when Jazz recalls the accident that killed his wife and little daughter? (In any case, even at the level of the dialogue, the scene is prolonged and static.) The tribute-remix song “Ek Ladki Bheegi Bhaagi Si” – the fantasy of a goofy, over-helpful young man with his Heart in the Right Place – is pleasant on its own terms (and nice to watch in a context removed from the film, such as on a music channel), but what is it doing here? (In a sense, of course, that question is as old as Hindi cinema, given the episodic structures of even our best commercial movies. But Listen... Amaya’s strengths lie in very different terrain, and if one comes to feel – as I did – that the sole reason for the existence of a song is to provide a marketable number for promos, well, it breaks the fourth wall in a not-very-good way.)

More than anything, and though I liked this film on the whole, I wish it had trusted its lead performers to carry it all the way through, and paid a little more attention to character development rather than piling on the cutesy side-shows. “There’s some magic in your coffee today,” those kids warble at “Mrs K” in that opening sequence. Yes, but also a little too much artificial sweetener.

Some thoughts on Shanghai

Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai begins with a prologue of sorts – a scene where casual chatter between two lower-class men slowly gives way to something more intense and shadowy. The younger man, Bhagu, is brash and excited about the assignment that lies ahead; the older one, Jaggu, is reluctant, wary and more concerned about the safety of his small truck than anything else. Bhagu is played by the diminutive Pitobash Tripathy, who was so good in another fine film Shor in the City – he is well cast here as a loose cannon, capable of temporarily unnerving even the smug people who give him his orders. And yet, both men are basically patsies for larger forces that they cannot begin to understand. (One might, at a stretch, say they have been shanghaied.)

Together they will engineer the fatal incident that lies at the heart of this story – the mowing down of political activist Dr Ahmedi (Prosenjit Chatterjee) shortly after he makes a speech denouncing the high-profile International Business Park (IBP) project. “They’ll take your land and call it pragati,” Ahmedi has been telling the poor people who gather to hear him speak (“they” meaning the government, which has started the project in collusion with big business houses). The parable he relates is that of an unfortunate man visited by big-shots who usurp his property, build a mall on it, charge him money for water and behave like they are doing him a favour. Naturally this activism makes him a controversial figure, and when the truck “accidentally” hits him, his former student and sometime lover Shalini (Kalki Koechlin) sees the attack for what it is. But she may need the help of a small-time maker of sleazy films (Emraan Hashmi) if she wants proof that can hold up in court.
 

Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar have done a solid job of adapting Vassilis Vassilikos’s 1967 novel Z (a story situated in a very specific political context) to the contemporary Indian situation – this film is a tightly knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a messy, many-layered society. Though the genre is that of the political thriller (complete with the “what really happened?” narrative that marked such movies as Blow Out and The Manchurian Candidate), this is also a slice-of-life depiction of a world where there is no lasting solution to the hegemony of power, where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, pages routinely go missing in reports, and the rich and their merry men rob from the poor. (No wonder the descriptor “Robin Hood” is sarcastically used at one point to describe someone who tries to go against the grain of things.)

No time for a structured review just now, but here are a few notes:

– I watched Costa-Gavras’s film version of Z a long time ago and only remember it dimly (not having completely understood the politics of the story at the time), but I do recall the magnetic presence of Jean-Louis Trintignant as the investigating magistrate – very deadpan and very expressive at the same time as he tries to sift truth from fiction. Abhay Deol does a decent workmanlike job as that character’s equivalent, the conscientious bureaucrat Krishnan – a Naxal sympathiser (it is hinted) who understands the many ways in which power can be misused. For all the seriousness of Krishnan’s intentions, however, his “investigation” takes place in a shabby, mosquito-ridden hall with barely functioning coolers and dirty bathrooms. Some of the scenes here – the surreal appearance of a basketball mid-proceedings, a sight gag where first Shalini and then Krishnan slip on the just-washed floor outside the hall – are played for humour, but there is a subtext: this dingy, out-of-the-way setting (galaxies away from the fantasy of the posh business city “Shanghai”) is just the place for a token enquiry, the findings of which are likely to be swept under the carpet. (There is no actual carpet in the investigation room, but if there were you can be sure there would be plenty of dirt under it.) And this is a morally slippery place where people struggle – literally and figuratively – to maintain their footing. Krishnan may seem in charge, but even the policemen he interrogates regard him with a blasé eye. “When a chief minister, other politicians and Bollywood celebrities are in the city, the force has to be occupied elsewhere,” he is told when he asks about inadequate security arrangements.

– The screenplay has many neat little touches. “Mujhe interference na milay toh main aur andar tak pahunch sakta hoon,” (“If my work is not interfered with, I can make further inroads”) Krishnan tells the chief minister (played by Supriya Pathak) during his meeting with her. This is ironical because he is already sitting inside the private chamber of someone who probably orchestrated the events he is investigating – a fly in the spider’s parlour – and also because, a short while later, he will get an offer to become an “insider” in another sense. Incidentally Farooque Shaikh plays the CM’s principal secretary Kaul; it’s nice to see him and Pathak together after so many years, but it's also pleasing that these two actors – known best for playing likable, homely people in the Middle Cinema of the early 80s – are made to inhabit very different character types. Pathak looks positively sinister in her one major scene near the end, when the CM steps out of the shadows to greet Krishnan, asking him with fake warmth about how his wife is doing.

– As in his last film LSD, Banerjee makes effective use of the handheld camera, but here the handheld shots are “objective” (which is basically to say that there isn’t someone within the narrative holding the camera: it’s more a case of an invisible narrator juddering between characters, putting us in the middle of the action, creating a sense of claustrophobia). There are some fine compositions, as in a scene where the principal secretary speaks with Krishnan while huffing away on a treadmill. We see the two men’s reflections in the fitness room’s mirrors, but in the very centre of the frame is a third mirror, and in it is the silent, statue-like figure of a man holding a bottle of water and a hand-towel for Kaul. One wonders what “pragati” might mean to this anonymous minion.

There are other clever visuals: a shot of a large SUV being trailed by a small (but lethal) van; the irony of road traffic being stalled by a street celebration in honour of “progress”; the word “Dreemgirl” flashing on the Hashmi character Joginder’s cellphone. And the scary depictions of anarchy in the making include a morcha scene where you feel that the revellers are drunk on the idea of being part of something big and important, regardless of what it is. (The frenzied “Bharat Mata ki Jai” dance has a similar mood.) “Hum China ko peechhe chhod sakte thhe,” (“We could have left China behind”) someone ruefully says at one point. Presumably he means in terms of economic progress, but by the end we have seen the emergence – in the fictitious city of Bharat Nagar – of something that resembles a police state more than a transparent democracy.

– Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you...these are repeated motifs in this film. In a late scene, a character is asked to leave a building from the back-door because there are angry people outside waiting for him, and in the next scene another person (who has amusingly been portraying himself as a macho Rajput) recalls how he had to flee his home through the back-door because people were coming for him. This adds up to a study of individual scruples confronted with permanent threat of repercussion. And so, it makes sense that the ending is cynical and idealistic at the same time: on the one hand, a character does something that in a more simple-minded film might result in the cleaning up of the political order; on the other hand, we see that nothing has really changed. Perhaps the “pragati” being constantly talked about is a version of the principal secretary on his treadmill, running to stay in the same place.