PK as a reworked Bawarchi, Aamir as oracle, other thoughts

For anyone who has been left fatigued by Aamir Khan’s messiah persona in films like 3 Idiots and Taare Zameen Par as well as in television’s Satyamev Jayate, the obvious joke about his role in PK is that this is inspired casting because in most of his recent films (notable exception: Talaash) he has played an extraterrestrial or an automaton or God Incarnate anyway, the only problem was the film itself didn't know it. (Here is a post demonstrating that Aamir’s intense character in Dhobi Ghat was really a Na’vi.) PK is different. It knows.

But jokes aside, I thought Aamir was quite good in this film, and that the first half had some lovely things in it, especially in the 45 or 50 minutes leading up to the interval. Its best bits, when “PK” tells his story to Jaggu (Anushka Sharma), do what good science-fiction writing does so well (and no, I’m not saying this film is sci-fi ): making the familiar very unfamiliar, providing a fresh look at things we take for granted (so that you may end up asking ‘what really IS so strange about a man pairing a formal shirt with a flouncy skirt?’ or ‘why shouldn’t cars dance?’). For PK, everything has to be learnt from scratch, and his childlike perspective on our vulnerable little world – our pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan put it – makes this part of the film very engaging. Plus there is the sweetness of the idea that an alien newly landed on Earth, and unused to verbal communication, might end up speaking exclusively in Bhojpuri because that is the language of the only person he succeeded in “transmitting” from. (Midway through the story, I was expecting that PK would tap into Jaggu’s linguistic reserves as well, thus allowing Aamir to spend the second half of the film moving between Bhojpuri, urbanite English and Hindi. Done well, that could have been light commentary on how our perceptions of and attitudes to people change depending on language and accent.)

In this post Baradwaj Rangan mentions the connection between Hirani’s and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinemas. For me, PK had very clear echoes of Bawarchi, in which Rajesh Khanna’s Raghu – the all-purpose cook and problem-solver, a version of the natkhat spiritual guide Krishna – shows a squabbling family the road back to love. That film announced its allegorical intentions from the outset, opening with a shot of a stage curtain that parts to reveal the inaptly named house “Shanti Nivas” – much like PK begins with a view of the cosmos, eventually homing in on our tiny planet, clouds parting to reveal the "stage". In one of the most self-consciously beautiful shots in Bawarchi (a film that does not, generally speaking, contain visual flourishes), Raghu walks out of the mist, from a sylvan Vrindavan-like setting – this is a still image that looks like a painting – towards the camera, on his way to the Sharma family’s house (in PK, the alien emerges from a cloud too, or from a spaceship hidden in one).

The bawarchi spends much of the story marveling at the Sharmas’ pettiness, at the little things that create gulfs between them, and the household with its disparate character types (the brothers played by AK Hangal, Kali Banerjee and Asrani don’t even seem like they could belong to one family) can without much trouble be seen as a symbol for a multicultural nation. (“Iss naatak ka sthaan hai Bharat” says Amitabh Bachchan’s voiceover just before the curtain opens in that first scene.) Raghu unites them (much as PK shows Indians of different religions that they are children of one God) but then there is a further union to be effected: Jaya Bhaduri is in love with a man who is not approved of by the family (in the same way that the Pakistani Sarfaraz in PK is an automatic figure of suspicion for conservative Indians). In Bawarchi, this boyfriend, woodenly played by a non-entity, is one of the film’s weak links; in PK, Sarfaraz is played by Sushant Singh Rajput who is a fine young actor, but cast here in a thankless, cipher-like role. In both films the protagonist’s final task is to bring the lovers together. Then he walks back into the mist, in search of other houses that need his intervention (or other planets with semi-intelligent life on them).

Bawarchi has the intimate, TV-drama feel of much of Hrishi-da’s post-1960s work, and needless to say it isn’t anywhere near as technically sophisticated as PK. But even in its weakest moments – when it fails to find a balance between big-picture lecture-baazi and telling a small-canvas story – it has nothing quite as heavy-handed as the Live TV show scene in the climax of Hirani’s film, where Tapasvi Maharaj (Saurabh Shukla) is exposed as a charlatan. This was one of the most tedious and stretched out sequences I have seen in a major film in a long while – it got so bad after a while that I was feeling embarrassed on behalf of the writers and director.

My problem wasn’t with the implausibility or lack of “realism”: the nitpicking questions like “how could they do all this on a Live show, shifting the cameras to Jaggu and bringing her romantic past into it?” Because it’s understood that the film is now in a symbolic, courtroom-like space where everyone gets involved, positions and counter-positions are furiously debated, and souls may be at stake. (Of all things, the framework reminded me of the climactic scene – the trial in Heaven – in Powell-Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death.) But the sequence is astonishingly static, has no regard for storytelling economy – there are far too many flashbacks and reaction shots – and invests too much time and dramatic energy in the supposed suspense around what really happened when Jaggu and her boyfriend were supposed to get married. Watching it, I keep wondering how an overwritten, over-performed scene like this even made it out of the editing room in this form, at a level where people like Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and “Mr Perfectionist” himself were involved. How could no one notice that the scene was sucking the life out of the movie? Even knowing that the film was trying to simplify a delicate subject for a mass audience (with the Parikshit Sahni character being a stand-in for the gullible Godman-junkie whose eyes need to be prised open), it could have been so much sharper.

And don’t get me started on the forced romantic track near the end. Or on poor, poor Sushant Singh Rajput, who does the crestfallen, St Bernard-caught-in-the-headlights expression so well even in his good roles, it can take a while to realise how poorly done by he is in this one.

****

While trying not to fall into the critic’s trap of reviewing the film he was hoping to see rather than the one the filmmakers set out to make, I’ll say this: given the available raw material and at least some of what is actually on screen, including Aamir’s strangely affecting performance, this film could have done other things. The whimsical, montage-like, tourist-guide-to-this-weird-planet tone of the first half could have been sustained. Yet, after those early scenes with the alien’s-eye view, it settles down into handling a Single Important Issue, and in doing this it becomes leaden and treats the audience as dolts. (Which, to be fair, many people in this country are when it comes to religion. And this returns us to the old question “Is it okay for a narrative film to occasionally discard subtleties like the Show, Don’t Tell principle and instead turn into a public-service show?” My instinctive answer is “No”, but I do sometimes wonder.)

Much like Chetan Bhagat, who has self-consciously moved from being “just” a storyteller to being a writer who Sets Out to Make a Difference and Herald Change, Aamir now has a clearly defined image. In an email exchange, a friend who is something of an insider in the film industry made this observation about the difference between PK / 3 Idiots and Rajkumar Hirani’s Munnabhai films: that the relatable, human qualities of Munnabhai and the detached, nearly omniscient status of PK and Rancho are offshoots of the personalities and approaches of the lead actors – Sanjay Dutt being a malleable, non-cerebral performer who won't ask many big, weighty questions like “What is the ultimate purpose of this scene?” and Aamir being a control freak who will try to ensure that everything he does is Meaningful in a clearly observable, quantifiable sense. With Munnabhai, we are invested in his own personal growth and we don't feel like the film is preaching at us through him; with the Aamir roles, it is hard to escape the sense that we are being talked down to. No wonder PK starts to slacken (at least for those of us who think we are already knowledgeable about the hazards of Godmen etc) around the point that the protagonist goes from being a wide-eyed outsider learning new things to being the smug know-it-all spreading the message of peace and oneness.

[Related posts: Sagan's inquisitive alien, new ways of looking at the world, a book about Aamir]

On Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly - power struggles, mindgames and innocence sidelined

One of my favourite Anurag Kashyap-directed scenes (and one that is a lot of fun to watch and discuss with students) is the chase through the slum in Black Friday. The scene begins in a purposeful, no-nonsense vein – Imtiaz Ghavate may have been involved in the Bombay blasts. He must be apprehended. Senior cops, shouting instructions, and their minions, who will do most of the running, gather to make enquiries. Everyone looks very determined – but then, as Imtiaz keeps eluding the police's welcoming arms and everyone starts tiring, the tone becomes almost comical. There are many stops and starts, the cops-and-robbers theme is deglamorised, we see how mundane and chancy such pursuits can be. A flabby policeman bleats “Imtiaz, ruk ja yaar” (and there is a contrast with Amitabh delivering fiery dialogues from a nearby TV). By the end of the scene, trapped as we are with the characters in Dharavi’s labyrinths, we have lost sight of the Big Picture, the fact that this is part of an investigation into a major terrorist attack. What matters are the little details: what we learn about Imtiaz and these cops and the world they are stumbling around in – a slum so congested that a large pipeline running through it performs the function of an arterial road.

And then he is finally caught, smacked hard by a senior officer – this is as much a bucket of cold water for the viewer, who has been enjoying the circus – and the next scene, an interrogation in a menacingly lit room, returns us to that larger picture and to the razor-sharp focus that is the need of the hour.

Something comparable happens over the course of Kashyap’s powerful new film Ugly. The serious situation that demands our attention is established early on – a little girl has vanished, probably been kidnapped – but then the narrative enters a warren of side-lanes to examine the shadowy back-stories and inner lives of the many people involved. And the thing that matters (or the thing that we thought mattered) is lost sight of and returned to, very unsettlingly, only in the film’s final moments.

When a struggling actor named Rahul (Rahul Bhat) and his small-time casting agent Chaitanya (the excellent Vineet Kumar Singh) realise that Rahul’s daughter Kali has disappeared from his car, they begin a frantic search. A suspicious man is encountered, a chase ends with a gruesome accident… but all this fast-paced action is immediately followed by a protracted scene in The Police Station Where Time Stood Still. Rahul and Chaitanya find themselves being interrogated by cops who are more interested in cracking gratuitous jokes than in recognising the urgency of the situation. They ask what “casting” means, discuss the real names of famous actors, make judgemental noises about talaaq causing problems by breaking up society’s moral fabric, and dwell on frivolities (how is it that Rahul’s daughter’s phone displays a photo of him when he calls her? How does that phone-camera work?).

At first this scene looks like one of those extended Kashyap setpieces that sometimes invite accusations of self-indulgence. After it had gone on for a bit, I thought “Okay, can we get on with the story now?” But later, after seeing the whole film, I felt that the scene’s meandering on was part of the point. We are aware that time could be running out for the little girl, and already the need to find her is being eclipsed by mind-games and irrelevancies. In this case, the game of one-upmanship involves policemen using their position to toy with people who are otherwise more privileged than them, people who can afford to buy shiny pink phones for their children, and who need to be pulled down a peg or two. (“Mere saab tum dono se bahut zyaada padhe likhe hain,” Inspector Jadhav tells Rahul and Chaitanya.) But this isn’t the only such game that will be played here. 

Much of Ugly is about a power struggle between two men who knew each other in college and whose lives have taken very different turns since then. One is Rahul, the other is police chief Shoumik (Ronit Roy), who is married to Rahul’s ex-wife Shalini (Tejaswini Kolhapure), and information about them comes to us in layers. When we first meet Shoumik, he is intoning that women must be kept in their place, and we see that he maintains an iron hand over his depressive wife, tapping her phone calls, even supervising how many litres of petrol she has in her car. His resentment about her falling for Rahul in their college days manifests itself in withering coldness. “Tera first choice bhaag gaya,” he tells Shalini when he hears of Rahul escaping custody, and he also implies that she came to him “second-hand”. (There is a close connection between this character and the part played by Roy in Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan – another hard-edged, controlling alpha-male who may once have had a sensitive side but has now settled into a regimented view of social norms and gender roles.) Rahul, on the other hand, comes across as a nicer guy at first, because we see him as a concerned father, the underdog, and a contrast to the autocratic Shoumik. But still waters run deep, it turns out that the man who is now a failed actor may have had the cards in his favour in the distant past, and that he may not have been a likable winner at the time. Our feelings about these people, and the others around them, keep shifting, which adds to the sense of paranoia, the suspense about who is conning or double-crossing whom.

Ugly is, on one level, a police procedural, a view of investigators trying to get their work done while also dealing with a perplexing new world of technology, and learning on the job. But it is more effective in its depiction of wasted lives, and the lengths people will go to so they can break out of their private traps. There are affecting touches, such as a scene where the dowdy Shalini mentions a glamorous red dress she had bought thinking she would wear it at one of Rahul’s premieres when he became a star, but there are also flashes of humour when you don’t expect them: a hood wearing a “Prem Rogue” T-shirt; the priceless expression on Shoumik’s face when he hears the lyrics of “Tu Mujhe Nichod De”, a song performed in a sleazy video by Rahul’s girlfriend.

One easy way of describing this film is to say that it is about innocence lost and forgotten in a world where being hardened and competitive is everything: fending for yourself, battling or nurturing your personal demons, looking for small and big ways of getting back at someone who has wounded you. It leads up to a last scene that is calculated for maximum visceral effect, confronting us with exactly what we don’t want to see (even if we know beforehand that this will be a dark film). Kashyap often deals in excesses, and often overreaches, but I thought that final unflinching scene was absolutely necessary. It is almost as if the viewer is being told, “Remember what all this was originally about? It didn’t really matter all that much to the characters in the story – they were too caught up in themselves and in their adult games. But does it matter to you?"

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P.S. The Inspector Jadhav character in this film (played by Girish Kulkarni) reminded me just a little of one of the most memorable characters in Indian English fiction of the past year, the fat, seething policeman Ram Manohar Pande in Shovon Chowdhury’s novel The Competent Authority, haunted by the thought that rich, English-speaking people are laughing at him behind his back, and determined that the laughter must stop. Consider this a plug for the book.

Hindi cinema and the Anglophone viewer: MK Raghavendra on the new Bollywood

[Did this review for Biblio]

Conversations involving movie buffs who grew up in the 1980s often touch on the divergence between the mainstream Hindi films of then and the Bollywood of the past decade. This isn’t necessarily an exercise in rosy-eyed nostalgia, nothing as simple as “things were better in our time”, but it involves a recognition that even as our movies have become more sophisticated – more professionally made, with bound scripts, a variety of settings and subjects, and greater attention to detail – something important has been lost too. It is pointed out that even the tackier commercial films of the 1980s often had a raw honesty, a willingness to engage head-on with the non-English-speaking world, to create an immediate identification between the audience and the characters on the screen; the fourth wall had not been pulled down and replaced by a gossamer veil of irony. Indeed this quality is inseparable from the impression one gets, looking back, that the cinema of that time was clumsy, insular, not attempting a discourse with the cinemas of other countries.

In the last decade and a half, the pendulum, propelled by rapid globalisation and the “India Shining” narrative, has swung very far in the other direction. In a shrinking world (or in a world that upper-class Indians can convince themselves has shrunk), our films have elaborate premieres at international festivals; American stars like John Travolta and Kevin Spacey shake a leg to the “lungi dance” at our award shows; the multiplex culture has seen many seminal movies being targeted at an audience that travels widely and for whom English is a first language. MK Raghavendra’s new book The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium is about this shift in Hindi cinema’s idiom in the years following economic liberalisation. Its thesis is that during this period, films have increasingly been made for Anglophone viewers – so that the underprivileged have been marginalised or ceased to be subjects of the new cinema – and that the state’s withdrawal from the public sphere has had notable consequences for the filmic treatment of patriotism, community, aspiration and politics. Raghavendra proposes that even when the films themselves are celebratory, they carry bleak implications for the idea of an Indian “nation”.

Needless to say, this is a very big topic, and he tackles it by looking closely and in an organised manner at a number of key films released between 2001 (the year of Dil Chahta Hai, Lagaan and Gadar) and 2012 (Paan Singh Tomar) – what are their implications and undercurrents, what might they tell us about the post-liberalisation nation? Thus, for instance, the section on the feel-good Lage Raho Munnabhai notes the curious, cynical ways in which Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings have been transformed and re-applied to the imperatives of modern India, while films such as Bunty aur Babli are analysed in terms of how the go-getting entrepreneurial spirit is now celebrated without agonizing much about moral compromises. Overall, the accent is on films that have been successful – to some degree or other – across India, but the choice of movies is also a reminder that the line between the categories “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” is now less clear than it was in the “commercial film vs parallel film” (or Manmohan Desai vs Shyam Benegal) era. There are blockbusters by Karan Johar and Farah Khan (Kabhi Alvida na Kehna and Om Shanti Om respectively) and a stylish, glamorous thriller (Dhoom 2) but also lower-key movies such as Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal and Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live; there are relatively commercial works by respected auteurs (Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, Mani Ratnam’s Guru), alongside the oeuvre of that most self-consciously “socially conscious” director Madhur Bhandarkar.

Inevitably the results are uneven, with some essays being more stimulating and focused than others. Some conclusions are easily drawn: anyone can see that a film such as Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi na Milegi Dobara, populated by posh, cosmopolitan people (three friends on a road trip in Spain), is about and for Indians who are citizens of a global world; largely unconcerned with lives outside upper-class circles. But some of Raghavendra’s sharper observations concern films that, on the face of it, deal with poor people in lower-class milieus – he points out that these films, being made for multiplex audiences, often view the underprivileged with an anthropological (if sympathetic) detachment. Hence Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, though set in a crime underbelly, has the tenor of “a low-life fantasy lived out by the aspiring, upwardly mobile classes”. And though Taare Zameen Par is about an underdog – a boy whose classroom troubles stem from dyslexia – the visuals in an early scene, where little Ishaan imagines aquatic life reminiscent of that in the American animation hit Finding Nemo, are presented in terms that only a well-off, Anglophone viewer can relate to. “The child of a farmer in a hot dry district, for instance, is unlikely to imagine the Sun as a smiling yellow orb.”

Some of these analyses might make you reexamine your feelings about a film. Take Peepli Live, about a farmer in dire straits, who finds himself at the centre of a heartless media circus when he announces he will kill himself. Conventional wisdom has it that this film is empathetic towards the class that the protagonist Natha belongs to – certainly, there is little questioning the filmmakers’ good intentions. Yet, as Raghavendra points out, Peepli Live too belongs to a tradition of Anglophone cinema (the credit titles and the important closing legend are exclusively in English) where a viewer is not encouraged to directly identify with the poor in the way that viewers of an earlier time might have. And in this context he makes an interesting point about the use of movie stars in commercial cinema. “Film stars are naturally people in whom the public projects itself”, he notes – implying that when Nargis plays the destitute Radha in Mother India, or Dilip Kumar plays the villager driven to banditry in Gunga Jamna, or Amitabh Bachchan follows a similar arc in a more urban setting in Deewaar, there is a level of immersion that an audience might not achieve when watching the unknown Omkar Das Manikpuri playing Natha in Peepli Live (no matter how good his performance or how “authentic” the casting).

This is a thoughtful argument, one that extends beyond the scope of this book, in its regarding of stars with established personalities as “signifiers”. In fact, Raghavendra often draws attention to such signifiers – little filmmaking decisions that in some way or the other affect a viewer’s responses to a story and its characters. In writing about Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti, he notes that the central characters – the people whom the audience must, to some degree at least, root for – are played by urbane, westernized actors – Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Arjun Rampal – while the more rustic Manoj Bajpai (“who was born in a small village in Bihar”) plays their adversary. The film itself, being amoral, doesn’t give us any particular reason to think of the former set of characters as “good”, but the casting subtly affects our attitudes.

Elsewhere, he observes that even though Bhandarkar’s Page 3 is “less bleak in tone” than Govind Nihalani’s 1980 film Aakrosh (the former is a stylishly told, mass-audience-friendly narrative; the latter is sombre and hard-hitting in a manner characteristic of the “parallel” movement of the early 1980s), it is Page 3 that is essentially more pessimistic. And this difference has to do with the changed situation, Bhandarkar’s film having been made in a climate where capitalism runs rampant and true justice for the poor – in this case, sexually exploited lower-class children – is a fading dream. (“The characters are implicated in a situation which is irremediable, that is, increasing dominance of the market over the state […] there is no authority to which one might appeal.”) Similarly, 3 Idiots, which presents itself as a “triumph of the underdog” tale, doesn’t attempt to explain how the Aamir Khan character Phunsukh Wangdu has risen from the servant ranks to become an internationally respected scientist; the film simply tells us this has happened and allows us to leave on a feel-good note. “In this inability to imagine Wangdu lies an uncomfortable truth: that such a person is unimaginable. It is unimaginable that a servant’s child in India will become a celebrated inventor. Elite educational institutions are not for his kind even when the institutions have been established by the state.”

These propositions are open to debate, of course. One might paraphrase a famous truism about India: “For every observation you make about Hindi cinema, the opposite can also be shown to be true.” It can also be pointed out that many of the conscientious “art-film” directors of the 80s lived cushy, cosmopolitan lives at a remove from their downtrodden subjects. (Nihalani’s excellent 1984 Party, about a group of bleeding-heart artists and armchair activists at a house party, can be viewed as a caustic self-interrogation.) And if Peepli Live is classified as a mainstream film for the purposes of this study, would this also be true for, say, Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday or Rajkumar Gupta’s Aamir, which do offer a chance to directly relate – in the case of the former, almost to a dangerous extent – with the frustrations of the helpless “common man”?

The fact that each essay must ultimately veer round to the big thesis about the Anglophone audience makes this book heavy-handed and forced at times, and the dry, mostly impersonal writing it represents is not for all tastes. But it is possible to quibble with Raghavendra’s broader conclusions while appreciating the quality of his engagement. Within the broad church of academic work on film, he is one of the better writers and thinkers around, worth taking seriously for the quality of his insights, and his analyses of individual films are always worth reading. Whether making an intriguing connection between two different sorts of movies (the fictionalised Dhirubhai Ambani biopic Guru and the caper film Bunty aur Babli) or pointing out how locales in Gadar are subtly placed at the service of patriotism (“India is always assisted by the film’s cinematography – with views of the countryside in which wheat fields are conspicuous – while Pakistan is portrayed through the city […] India is evidently the more fertile and democratic space”), he is consistently perceptive about the underpinnings of popular cinema. Even if you don't agree with everything he says about the state of the nation, you’ll probably find yourself looking at some of these films through a new prism – and that is one of the most valuable things a critic can do.

Notes on Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider (and a brief chat with Basharat Peer)

To begin by stating the obvious – Hamlet isn’t a great, enduring play because of what it tells us about the politics of 16th century Denmark or Europe. The reasons for its appeal are more universal: the quality of the poetry and how it fuels the narrative, creating a weave of human emotions, relationships and duplicities; the portrait of the sensitive young prince at the centre of it all, wise and callow by turn, child and man at once, never quite sure of what he must do; and the many ways in which the particular sheds light on the general. (I have always been puzzled by Charles Chaplin’s remark that he wasn’t too interested in Shakespeare because the plays were mostly about privileged royals whom he couldn’t identify with.)

But Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider isn’t “just” an adaptation of one of the most celebrated English plays ever (which would have been a big enough challenge) – it is also concerned with the recent history of Kashmir, which is an immediate, politically charged subject (so charged that the film has already run into trouble for its refusal to treat the Indian Army as unblemished angels of mercy and righteousness). And what made Haider compelling for me was the friction I sensed within the film: a conflict between the need to do well by Shakespeare – to do new things with a major literary text that has universal appeal – and the need to address Kashmir’s complexities. This tightrope act gives a pleasingly schizophrenic quality to a movie that is, after all, about a young man on the cusp of madness.

Some thoughts (mainly for those who have seen the film):

– Can a script that carries the load of Kashmir PLUS Hamlet avoid patches of heavy-handedness? Probably not, but Haider acquits itself well in the circumstances. I liked the non-underlined way in which this story's Gertrude – Haider’s mother Ghazala, wonderfully played by Tabu – becomes a sort of symbol for Kashmir herself: the object of desire or (blood)lust, the thing that needs to be possessed (the film isn’t coy about Haider’s own ambiguous relationship with her), the woman – “our sometime sister, now our queen” – whose very body is a battleground (an idea literalised in an explosive climax where Ghazala is given more agency than Gertrude has in the closing moments of the play).

– Other noteworthy things are done with the original text, such as the use of the character Roohdaar, who presents himself as the “rooh” (soul) of Haider’s father, a mouthpiece for a dead man. It’s a good way of sidestepping the supernatural aspects of the play, but it also ties in with a basic ambiguity in Hamlet itself: until the moment of Claudius’s confession, we can’t be completely sure if Hamlet’s father really was betrayed and murdered; the prince might be hallucinating, or the ghost might be a malevolent spirit leading him astray. In Haider, the very nature of the setting – the moral murkiness, the deceptions and counter-deceptions – is such that there exists at least a small possibility that young Haider is being set up. This adds a layer to his madness, uncertainty and his rambling, Toba Tek Singh-like soliloquy, which touches on how the people of Kashmir are caught in events they can’t fully understand. Which side, which border to trust?

– Scenes such as the gravediggers’ goofy song “So Jao” are reminders of how similar Shakespeare’s work is to a certain type of Hindi film: the episodic structures with constant shifting of moods and tones, the melodrama and the cheerful bawdiness, the use of clowns as sutradhaars who get to say unexpectedly profound things. Watching the “Ek aur Bismil” sequence where Haider confronts his uncle during the course of a celebratory song, even someone who knows his Hamlet might forget the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king and instead recall “Ek Haseena Thi” in Karz – but of course Shakeapeare’s “lowbrow” dramatic flair has influenced popular Hindi cinema for decades, and that Karz song is part of the tradition.

This is also one reason why Haider’s wildly over-the-top Rosencrantz and Guildenstern worked for me. Turning these two spy-buffoons into Salman Khan-obsessives in a video parlour (complete with the playing of “Tumse jo Dekhte Hi Pyaar Hua” on the car stereo in a grim late scene) was an inspired touch. It’s loud, cutesy, front-bencher stuff…and I think Shakespeare would have heartily approved of it.

– In Hamlet, because the focus is on individuals and their conflicts, revenge is a relatively straightforward thing: there is a sense of loss, of course, and a sense that innocents like Ophelia have been swept away in other people’s battles, but the canvas is small and self-contained. In Haider, despite the emphases on relationships (Haider and his mother, Haider and Arshia, Arshia and her father), the big picture is always in view. And the thought that inteqaam followed by more inteqaam can only lead to wholesale destruction is a philosophical statement that keeps in mind the generations of self-perpetuating distrust and antagonism in Kashmir.  (It is also an apt thought for a film released on Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary.)

I liked the way the film ended, but I felt it might have been even better if the last shot had been the one of Haider indecisively holding the gun over his uncle’s head, and a simple fadeout on that image, along with the dual voiceover, one voice urging revenge, the other urging restraint: that would have been a fine encapsulation of the “to be or not to be” (or “to do or not to do”) theme, and an image of Kashmiri lives in a state of suspension.

P.S. Shortly after writing the above, I spoke with Basharat Peer who, in preparing the Haider screenplay, revisited Hamlet and simultaneously drew on his own wide-ranging experiences of Kashmir (including some that have been chronicled in his excellent Curfewed Night). Basharat said he wasn’t consciously thinking of Ghazala as a symbol for the “motherland”, but in writing the character – and in trying to make this Gertrude a more active participant – he had in mind the many stories involving unsung heroines from the Kashmir struggle: women who are often forgotten in official and unofficial records, and who defy the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman who stays at home with eyes lowered.

The gravediggers too were inspired by some of the old men Basharat knew who were running around trying to save – or avenge – their children. “When we talk of the violence, we usually think of young, able-bodied men," he said, "but there are so many older people too who picked up guns after losing everything. And people like that don’t do this for big ideological reasons, it is purely personal: you lose your child, and all you want to do is destroy the world. It’s all part of the overwhelming complexity of what has happened in Kashmir, where the personal is always mixed up with the political.” I thought it notable how this view of embittered old people, dealing with grief, knowledge of mortality and the possible meaninglessness of it all, fits so well with the absurdist-nihilistic graveyard scene in Hamlet, and with Vishal Bhardwaj’s own dark sense of humour (also mentioned here and here, in the context of his collaborations with Ruskin Bond).

Basharat also mentioned that the “roohdaar” – Haider's father's twin soul, so to speak – was drawn from a real-life incident where a man, fired upon and dumped into the river (with a sack containing the chopped-up limbs of his friends tied to his back), survived to tell the tale. Another case of fiction huffing and puffing to keep pace with the implausibilities of real life. No wonder great Elsinore to high Srinagar can come.

Mardaani - stray thoughts

I liked Pradeep Sarkar’s new film very much – thought it was tightly constructed for the most part, with a fine script by Gopi Puthran and very good performances by Rani Mukherji as a Crime Branch cop battling the sex-trafficking mafia and Tahir Bhasin as her young adversary Karan, who calls himself Walt in tribute to the protagonist of Breaking Bad. Some scattered observations (if you haven't seen the film and plan to, you might want to avoid the last 4-5 paras):
 
– Any Hindi film on this subject, with a resourceful woman cop as protagonist (and a title that has Jhansi ki Rani associations), automatically invites discourse on hot-button topics such as women’s empowerment, the glass ceiling and sexual violence – more so in the post-Nirbhaya India of the past two years. Those issues are addressed here to some degree or the other, but I didn’t find myself thinking too much about Shivani’s femaleness while watching this film. It isn't overemphasised or constantly drawn attention to; at the same time it isn’t self-consciously downplayed to the extent that the film drowns itself in political correctness pretending it’s a routine thing for a woman in India to be a senior inspector in the Crime Branch. The focus is on making her credible as an individual and on matter-of-factly observing other people’s responses to her in specific situations – from the male colleagues who have probably developed respect for her over time, to an antagonist who sneeringly tells her that women take everything too personally.

– This inspector is neither a female Chulbul Pandey (notwithstanding a couple of seeti-bajaao moments and a possibly overlong one-to-one fight scene at the end) nor the stereotype of the sensitive, well-behaved lady cop bringing refinement into a rough-hewn profession. She doesn’t refrain from using salty language or making the sort of gendered remark that would usually be seen as a male preserve – using words like “item” to refer to a criminal’s squeeze (or even random women on the street), or wisecracking “Sir ke biwi ko koi shopping karvao” after she gets a minor dressing down from her boss on the phone. This again is the sort of thing that could have been done in a forced, overblown way, so that one felt the film was trying too hard to present Shivani as “one of the boys”. But the writing and Mukherji’s performance make it work. Shivani may be putting on a macho act at times – as a woman in this job might occasionally feel the need to – but mostly you believe that this is the way she really is, that it comes naturally to her.

She has achieved success in the big city, has earned the right to be called “Ma’am” and speaks good English. But midway through the film we gather that she grew up in a village, presumably learnt to fend for herself at an early age, and that she occupies a hazy space between two Indias and two states of mind. There was a forest nearby, she says, and she has brought her knowledge of wild animals to the urban jungle she now works in: you need to be a rat to ferret out a rat, a tiger to stalk a tiger…and a snake to catch a snake. These are useful things to know, for the bad things happening in this story are not localised in the “other” India, the place of backwardness, illiteracy and poverty. Here, the snake in the water may be a Hindu College dropout emerging from the depths of a swimming pool during a glamorous party where rich white men are being serviced by scared girls who have been dressed up in slutty outfits and given names like Angelina. The sinister Karan switches casually between Hindi and English. Many of the girls who are sold into sex slavery are from English-medium schools, and an elderly woman involved in the trade appears to be a high-society type. There are no comforting illusions for the urban, cosmopolitan viewer that the criminals here are the mythical “them”, the rustic beasts in the backwaters, well out of sight.

– You’d think moral haziness would have little place in a story that is about a clear-cut, easily condemnable crime – the kidnapping and sexual exploitation of young girls. But the film’s very first scene – a prelude of the sort that one often sees in thrillers – sets up the tangled relationship between cops and small-time criminals, a relationship that involves give and take and often attains unexpected levels of camaraderie. Their banter can sound almost affectionate. “Nahin aaya tere encounter ka order,” Shivani sweetly tells a scared goon named Rahman before arresting him. There are some pithy one-liners – “Aajkal instant ka zamaana hai,” she tells a potential informer, indicating that he might as well come clean quickly so they can get on with their work. In recent Hindi cinema there have been other such depictions of cops and criminals who understand each other well, being from similar lower-class backgrounds, their lives having diverged at some unknowable point: recall the great chase scene in Black Friday, which ends with an unfit cop huffing and puffing after his quarry, calling out “Imtiaz, ruk jaa yaar.”

In the world shown here, everyone is constantly connected. Personal and private lives are bound up with each other, so that Shivani might have a conversation with her nemesis on the phone even as her niece and husband call out to her because dinner is getting cold. Some of the smart-alecky chatter between Shivani and "Walt" (“Kya adaa kya jalwe tere paaro,” she says wryly) belies the seriousness of what is going on. But the bigger, darker picture is always in sight. We can smile at those early scenes between cops and crooks, but this chumminess, this connectedness, is a minor-scale manifestation of something much bigger and more unsettling, something all of us are familiar with – something that Karan/Walt smiles and spells out even as he is being beaten up by Shivani in the climax: that in this country, if you have connections at the right level and in the right places, you can get away no matter what you did and no matter who knows you did it.

That imprudent remark of his leads directly to his violent end, in a scene that might make some viewers uneasy – with Shivani’s sanction, he is beaten and stomped on by a group of the girls he victimized. I haven’t read any other reviews or pieces about Mardaani (and don’t intend to, for a while anyway), but I wouldn’t be surprised if there have been accusations that the film is glorifying vigilante justice. These things certainly are worth talking or arguing about, but personally I find it a bit problematic when a scene in a film – involving well-realised characters in specific circumstances, reacting to those circumstances – is interpreted as being prescriptive in a large-canvas sense. If Karan is kicked to death by the girls he tortured and exploited, it doesn’t have to mean that the film is summarily recommending this as a means of dealing with criminals. It can be a natural, plausible response, within this particular narrative, by a group of long-suffering people who realise their tormentor is likely to get away if handed over to the law. Or it can be wish-fulfillment, the film’s way of spitting in the eye of the inadequacies and flaws of the world we live in.

– There were a couple of gaps in the screenplay that left me dissatisfied, such as the exact nature of Shivani’s relationship with the little girl Pyaari, whom she repeatedly refers to as “meri beti jaisi” (though she doesn’t seem too affected at first when she doesn’t hear from her for three days) and why this girl, though she lives in a shelter for poor children, is selling flowers at a traffic light when we first see her. This didn’t affect my overall view of the film, but I sometimes get the feeling that our current generation of writers and directors is so conscious of the “show, don’t tell” principle – and so keen to break away from the overstatement one often saw in the Hindi cinema of decades past – that they sometimes tread too far in the other direction. It happens routinely with me these days, even when watching films I mostly liked, that I get the impression a small but key scene had been left on the editing table; that it would have been nice to know just a little more about this character or that relationship.

– The scenes where the young girls are stripped, assessed, packed together and auctioned are intense and hold little back. But hope exists too: there is no idealised narrative about having to save a kidnapped girl before she has been raped (a fate that is so often shorthand, in both our society and in our cinema, for being made an “un-person”, someone who has no future). Everything here doesn’t hinge on the preservation of “honour”. The girl whom Shivani is trying to trace is brutalized, but that doesn’t mean her life is over – being rescued for a life of freedom is a huge deal, and in the end she will walk out happily with the other victims.

– It is refreshing that Shivani’s husband, even though he is very much around and she goes home to him every day, has such a small role in this narrative that the actor who plays him (Jisshu Sengupta) had to be given a “guest appearance” credit. We don’t get many details about their relationship, or learn how they met, but we see each of them emotionally vulnerable in the other’s presence and sense that there is real closeness between them. Which, for the purposes of this story, is enough. And of course, her name is first on the nameplate outside the door.

P.S. there's a good scene, just before the intermission, where a single teardrop glides down Shivani's cheek. Vastly different in effect from a similar Rani Mukherji moment (mentioned here) in Kabhi Alvida na Kehna, but between the two scenes, and others like them, there is probably enough to make auteur-theorists sit up. ("The key to the Mukherji star persona, the 'Rosebud' that explains her Kane - whether used in a family melodrama or a gritty police procedural - is the motif of the Lone Teardrop," begins the entry in the 2050 edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Hindi Cinema.)

How I was phooled by Dev Anand’s Censor

Dev Anand’s 2001 film Censor – about a movie director’s skirmishes with a censor board made up of hypocrites – has too many wondrous things in it to discuss (or even recall) here: among them, a Kamasutra ad within a film within a film, Jackie Shroff reciting Urdu shayari, and an admirably inert scene where a policeman’s son and an underworld don’s son murder each other clumsily and then die in each other’s arms like lovers. But forget all that. Take the scene in which we first see the legendary Dev-saab. He is standing on a stage contemplating a large, motley audience of gawkers as they contemplate him. (Which is – SUBTEXTUAL ANALYSIS ALERT! – a fitting image when you consider this film’s “Who watches the watchmen?” theme.) The gawkers whisper to each other and we catch stray sentences, from the confused “Inhein kahin dekha hai” to the flickering-lightbulb “Shaayad innki tasveer akhbaar mein aayi thi” and finally the epiphanic “Arre, yeh voh film director Vikramjeet toh nahin, jo Vicky ke naam se mashhoor hain?”

Vikramjeet, of course, can hear every word, so he smiles and nods (and nods, and nods) at the last remark and announces “Jee haan, aapne theek guess kiya!” So far, so good. But then we learn that all these people were invited by him to this auditorium specifically for a preview screening of his new film “Aane Waala Kal”. Which begs the question: why did they have to “guess” his identity? Why are they so clueless about their own purpose for being here, all dressed up? Why do they behave like the doomed guests on the mysterious island at the beginning of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (or like the hundreds of attendees at cocktail-party book launches back in the good old days before publishers began tightening purse-strings and making authors pay for their own little chai-and-pakora shindigs)? Through the length of this film, the engaged viewer will find himself muttering these and other sentences that begin with “Why” and “How”.

It says something about my unfamiliarity with the logical arcs of Dev-saab’s last few films that I not only asked these questions honestly but was also completely misled by scenes involving the actress Archana Puran Singh. Ms Singh, who is in the audience in that preview scene (with what one can later surmise was a sceptical “show me what you’ve got, cowboy” expression on her face), arrives a few minutes later to meet Vicky. Grabbing his hands, extolling the brilliance of his film, she introduces herself as an American named Margaret Trueman, a member of the Motion Picture Academy. (“Vaise Haalivood se hoon, ek time pe actress thi vahaan par!”) She strongly recommends that Vicky nominate his movie for the foreign-language film Oscar.

And I, of course, took none of this at face value. Ms Singh’s accent here is so similar to the ludicrous voices used by Naseeruddin Shah and Bhakti Barve in Jaane bhi do Yaaro when they pretend to be “Time and Newsweek magazine ke reporter”, I simply assumed that here was a desi naari masquerading as an American and taking the piss out of this poor gullible old man for nefarious, yet-to-be-revealed reasons. (Besides, her very name points to subterfuge. True. Man. Get it?)

A further important point: there is a gargantuan, menacing, unexplained sunflower in this scene. It is at least two feet in diameter and sits on the table near where Vicky and Maggie talk. Having watched Censor twice by now, the flower remains a mystery to me, one I expect never to resolve. But during that first virginal viewing I spent most of the scene looking at it, wondering why and how it came to be there and what it would do next: would it leap out of its vase and swallow the waiter whole, or at least sing a few lines from “Build me up Buttercup”? Thinking harder and more seriously about it with my Critic’s hat on (and convinced by now that Margaret "Trueman" - huh! - was an imposter), it struck me that flowers have reproductive functions and perhaps this one was a clever visual code, telling us that “Maggie” was an illegitimate, unacknowledged daughter of Vikram, back for revenge. In such a reading, the sunflower could be a symbol: people have babies, and then those babies grow up and become monstrous, uncontrollable things and devour their parents.

Anyway, for this reason and others, I continued to be misled about Maggie. Later in the film, she is supposedly back in Los Angeles and speaks with Vikram on the phone (still gushing about how he absolutely must go to the Oscars), and we see her sitting alone in a generic room with a large wall-hanger: a huge photo - a little faded, with visible creases - of a nighttime American skyline. That clinches it, I said to myself. This woman is not just a fake but a loon who is obsessed with America. Who else would cover almost their entire wall with an ugly blown-up photograph of featureless skyscrapers when so many far more aesthetically pleasing US-themed options are available, such as this poster of Love at Times Square?

And so it went, with me second-guessing everything Maggie said, and wondering when the big twist would come. More than three-fourths of Censor had passed when I realised with a shock that Margaret Trueman really was a full-blooded American and a member of the Motion Picture Academy who really had seen Oscar-worthiness in Vikram’s film. And that the wall-hanger was intended to be a real, honest-to-goodness depiction of the very American view outside her very American room. And the sunflower was probably just a flower.

Once this penny dropped, all my assumptions and expectations had to be reshuffled. I had been watching this film as a suspense thriller, but now I saw with blinding clarity that it was a profound meditation on the relationship between an artist who is ahead of his times and the uncomprehending world that seeks to keep him in chains. As Maggie puts it in her first scene, “So inspiring, awwwsome, so great!”

P.S. In the hope of conveying how much hard work and artistic vigour can go into the creation of something like Censor, here is a relevant extract from Dev-saab’s magnificent autobiography Romancing with Life (a book I also wrote about here and here):

Another film was in the making in my mind; I would call it Censor. The rough storyline and a hazy sketch of the characters started being drawn on the canvas of my mind. I needed absolute isolation to help my thinking process. I drove to Mahabaleshwar, which I always do when I want to be completely by myself […] I started writing furiously. Ideas flow as my pen feels the touch of paper on its tip. When I’m writing, time ceases to be. I forget all about thirst or hunger. My excitement is what sustains me.

Watch Censor. You will never be thirsty or hungry again.

Saved by the screen - thoughts on Filmistaan

Nitin Kakkar's Filmistaan has many platitudes about Indians and Pakistanis being essentially one people with a shared culture, a shared passion for cricket – and for Hindi cinema, which ordinary people in Pakistan watch with enthusiasm even as religious leaders and militants warn them against its corrupting effects. When Sunny (Sharib Hashmi), an aspiring actor, assistant director and incorrigible movie buff, is kidnapped by terrorists near the border (they were after the American members of his film crew) and awakens to learn he is now in the Pakistani wilderness, he can’t tell the difference – everything looks the same, people have similar faces, speak the same language. In a moving scene that follows shortly after, he hears a folk song sung to the tune of “Yaara Seeli Seeli” and joins in by warbling the lyrics as he knows them – it brings him comfort, as do the nighttime DVD screenings of films such as Maine Pyaar Kiya. Like a benshi providing vocal accompaniment to a silent film (or a “chalta-phirta Bombay Talkie”), Sunny gets to speak Salman Khan’s lines for the wide-eyed audience when the soundtrack on the pirated DVD goes dead.

Even if you can relate to Sunny’s obsession, you might feel ambivalent about him: as film dialogues trip off his tongue in almost any given situation, he can go from being likably funny to exasperating in the space of a few seconds. But by the time he has made friends with a young Pakistani named Aftab – a fellow film buff who wears colourful, flowery scarves, illegally peddles “seedi-yan” and decides to help Sunny escape his captors – the viewer’s sympathies are fixed.

And how can they not be? After all, we are in a hall ourselves, watching a film. And set against these two kindred spirits are the terrorists, who are suspicious – or outright contemptuous – of movies. “Kanjar!” they mutter at the wannabe actor (much like Prithviraj Kapoor’s disapproving father did nearly a hundred years ago, and look how that turned out). Using guns to terrify people and threaten their children is part of their way of life, but the other kind of shooting is an idea only the devil could have thought up, and the camera is a “manhoos cheez” for them. Though they are briefly seduced by it when Sunny goofily offers to help them make the film they want to send the Indian government, listing their demands.

“Film chaahe chhoti ho, par dil se banaana chaahiye,” Sunny says as he prepares to shoot this video. Real life meets melodrama in these scenes, which are a little too cute (what with the refrain of “Roll. Rolling. Acting” spoken by the militants) – but perhaps this is part of the point. The divide between fantasy and hard reality is stressed in another scene at the film’s halfway mark: Sunny, fooling around with a rifle – putting on a show for the village kids by mimicking how Mithun Chakraborty and Ashok Kumar might fire a gun – doesn’t realise that his own life is in very real danger. But even this tense scene is followed by a shot of a hakim speaking what we might think of as filmi lines: you are lucky the bullet only grazed your shoulder, he tells Sunny, and then they bond over the hakim’s memories of Amritsar’s kulchas and Sunny’s memories of his dadaji’s love for pre-Partition Lahore and its kebabs.

In some ways then, Filmistaan is a trite film. Like another film about a man caught on the wrong side of the border, Ramchand Pakistani, it is a little too pat and feel-good in places. Characters show unexpected self-awareness in spelling out their own predicaments (as in a dialogue involving a man who grew up in a madrassa under a strict father's supervision and was made to do azaan five times a day without fail but wasn’t assured of two meals); there are stereotypes such as the grinning do-gooder, the hardened older militant and the more introspective younger one. But perhaps the way to look at this film is to see it in terms of wish-fulfilment rather than as a hard-edged depiction of the realities of the India-Pakistan situation. And in this view of things, it may be lack of imagination that handicaps the terrorists, and the power of imagination that allows Sunny and Aftab to get away.

Imprisoned in a room, like a movie star in a screen, Sunny acts out scenes for the children outside – he is upbeat despite knowing he may only have a few days left to live. But perhaps this is because he knows he is in a film himself and that he will be rescued by the magic of cinema; perhaps the universe will conspire to help him. And indeed something amusingly ironic happens in the climax: a character who is not at all interested in cinema – the older terrorist Mahmood (Kumud Mishra) – does something filmi, in the style of the James Bond villain stopping to talk instead of quickly eliminating his quarries, and this buys some time for the good guys. The filmi duniya does have a way of bringing unlikely people into its fold.

  Soon after, it seems like Sunny and Aftab will be separated through the Sholay Trope: one friend will send the other off to safety and sacrifice his own life. But that doesn’t happen, and no matter, for there are other cinematic possibilities available. (Mild spoiler alert) The actual ending of Filmistaan reminded me of the freeze-frame that closed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a scene that suggested cinema’s ability to keep hope alive – or, even if there is no hope, to spare us from seeing bad things happen to the characters we like. Whether Sunny and Aftab get away in the end is a much too literal question, almost beside the point. What matters is that this Indian and this Pakistani have made it together, hand in hand, to some mythical place where barbed wire doesn’t exist, where they can watch seedi-yan of the movies they love and perhaps even make a few themselves. Meanwhile, in the “real world” beyond their ken, life continues in a more complicated, less hopeful way.

Lord of the rink: on Hawaa Hawaai

Amole Gupte’s new film Hawaa Hawaai begins with a lush, elegantly shot scene where a poor man sings a devotional hymn in the presence of his family, including his little son Arjun: learn to embrace a hard life (“angaaray pe chal”) if that is what fate has in store, go the words of the song. This poetic sequence can be viewed as a prelude that exists independently of the film’s main narrative. The light is warm and soothing, the music builds in intensity… and then there’s a segue to the first scene of the story proper: a harsher, more prosaic outdoor scene in which Arjun’s mother reluctantly sets him to work at a Bandra tea-stall. He is called “Raju” here, the generic name allotted by the shop-keeper to his employees, and he leads the sort of life where dreaming is forbidden. But then, working at the stall late at night, he sees rich kids being coached for a skating competition and is smitten by the shiny wheels.

One of the things I liked about Gupte’s first film as director, Stanley ka Dabba, was that it refrained from over-explaining things: the engaged viewer was allowed to connect dots, fill in the gaps, or to speculate about a character’s back-story. Hawaa Hawaai has the same quality. The transition from that opening sequence to the next one in Bandra doesn’t immediately tell us that Arjun’s father is no longer alive – this is something we only gather a little later. Nor do we know yet that the boy had started going to school and was apparently a good student before circumstances led him into this new life. The show-don’t-tell principle is very much in place, with snatches of information accumulating over the course of the story, so that we gradually learn more about the characters and understand their personal arcs. This applies not just to Arjun, but also to his friends from the slum, who help him construct a makeshift pair of skates. It also applies to the skating coach and to his elder brother who works as an investment banker in the US. (We see the closeness as well as the tension between the brothers, but some things about their past – including their parents, who were killed in a road accident – are not elaborated on.)

I enjoyed this film hugely and thought it was tighter and better paced than Stanley ka Dabba, which had a few slack moments. In fact, Hawaa Hawaai often transcends its own genre. “Inspirational” films about underdogs triumphing against the odds can so easily become trite, wringing gallons of fake emotion from the premise alone. The familiar template for such stories includes stock scenes such as a climactic competition where flesh-and-blood opponents as well as private demons must be conquered at the same time. Those clichés aren’t avoided here, but the key lies in the handling. There is restraint and interiority, and the film in general is less sentimental than it might have been – not least thanks to the excellent performances of the child actors, led by Gupte’s son Partho in the lead role (at 13, Partho, who was also so good in Gupte’s earlier film, may already be one of the finest actors we have), and a likable adult cast including Saqib Saleem as the young coach, “Lucky sir”, who (cliché alert) wants to "give these kids wings".

The understatement is also admirable given that this is a tale of contrasts between the lives of the privileged and the unprivileged. Images of pampered kids being chauffeured around in big cars are juxtaposed with shots of Arjun and his friends scavenging in garbage dumps. The line “Lakh ki cheez hai” (a reference to the cost of an impossibly sleek pair of skates that Arjun has been admiring from a distance) is followed just a few seconds later by a shot of the boy getting his day’s salary – a worn 20-rupee note, a couple of tens. And inevitably, there are a few facile shots like the one of a kid clambering down a mountain of garbage while an airplane flies past in the background. But again, the film mostly manages to negotiate this subject matter without getting didactic about it.

Importantly, it has a sense of humour, which both offsets and heightens the effect of the serious scenes. Raju/Arjun’s first appearance on the “skating rink” is a scene that could easily have been played only for laughs – he is wearing a ludicrous robot outfit with blinking lights, his skates are covered with a carefully woven zari cloth in the fashion of a new bride, and the other kids understandably yelp and scatter as if an extraterrestrial has appeared in their midst – but surface comedy aside, this is a very important scene, where a modern-day Ekalavya will transform into an Arjuna. (Literally, as it happens: the coach learns “Raju’s” real name, confers him the dignity of calling him by it, and legitimizes his dreams in a way that was denied to the unfortunate tribal boy of the Mahabharata.) Without the lightness of touch, this scene would probably not have worked so well. Gupte’s script also allows the poor children to be irreverent, even crude, without letting us lose sight of their hardships. When the well-mannered Arjun asks his friends to refer to their fathers as “pitaji” instead of “baap”, they retort, “Pitaji bolenge toh baap badal jaayega kya?” - a smart-aleck line, sure, but also a reminder that these children, who constantly see other children leading much cushier lives, might yearn to have been born into a different family.

Perhaps it is also notable that the plot MacGuffin – the thing that sets Arjun dreaming – is something as low-key as skating, as opposed to a mainstream sport such as cricket or even hockey. Even though the film does enter high-drama mode in the climax (complete with suspenseful stops and starts and a droning commentator who seems concerned only with Arjun’s progress in the race), there is no pretence that Arjun’s whole life can be magically transformed by his becoming a district champion – or that he will spend the next few years gliding from one international championship to another, earning lakhs along the way – and that isn’t the point anyway. The point is that he has got the chance to do something on his own terms and to find a measure of success in it – which can perhaps be a stepping stone to self-sufficiency in other fields, and realising other sorts of dreams. No wonder the roller-skate scenes have the feel of rebirth about them. When Arjun puts them on and tries gingerly to move about on them, he is like a fawn taking its first baby steps.

P.S. What I thought was a cute little snide reference: at one point in the race, Arjun is trying to overtake another boy who doesn’t let him pass, and the commentator goes “Aamir is blocking his progress.” Anyone who knows about Amole Gupte’s troubles during the making of Taare Zameen Par, a film that was his baby and that he was originally supposed to direct, will probably get the import of that line.

Quick notes on Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi

“Haan, main mendak hoon,” says Bauji (Sanjay Mishra), the aging protagonist of Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi, “apne kuay ko samajhne ki koshish kar raha hoon.” (“Yes, I’m a frog in the well, but at least I’m trying to understand my well.”) Bauji’s “kuaan” is a marvelously realised Old Delhi setting with crumbling houses in which joint-family members squabble and talk past each other for much of the day, but have relaxed rooftop soirees once in a while. Young people try to find a measure of independence, middle-aged men take out their frustrations on their families and feel bad about it soon afterwards, hospitality and goodwill are measured in glasses of “rooh-abja”. Working in a small travel agency, Bauji is surrounded by clocks that tell the time in far-off countries, but he appears to have rarely ever left this neighborhood.

Though his world is a small one, there is a lot he still has to comprehend about it, even at his age. His daughter Rita has grown up and is in a romance with a boy who may or may not be a rogue. His younger brother Rishi (played by Rajat Kapoor himself) is becoming distant and wants to move out with his family after decades of living together. The basic affection between Bauji and his wife (Seema Pahwa, brilliantly channeling the many facets of a loud-mouthed but soft-hearted woman harried by events) is usually overridden by the little trials of everyday life, and casual chat is rare. “Kya hua?” she demands when he asks her to come and sit with him. “Jab kuch hoga, tab hee aaogi?” he replies.

Something does happen though: Bauji has a personal epiphany when his relatives turn out to be wrong about his daughter’s boyfriend. This gets him thinking about the need to look closely at the world and make up one’s own mind about what is real – it is as if he has been reborn, or at least grown a new pair of eyes. Soon he is sharing his insight with other people, trying to convince them that they too must rely on their own observations and discover their personal sach. But what might the cost of such a project be? Could it mean letting go of unquantifiable things, such as one’s complicated relationships with family and friends? As he will learn, being untethered could mean soaring above the world like a bird (or like a frog that has escaped its well), but it could just as easily mean crashing down to earth.

Or perhaps he will find that everything is an illusion anyway. The studio behind Ankhon Dekhi is Mithya Talkies, and Kapoor’s Mithya, one of the best Hindi films of the last decade, was about an actor who is hired to masquerade as someone else and ends up fitting all too well into his new role; in the tradition of other fine films about stolen or borrowed identity – The Passenger, Plein Soleil and Kagemusha among them – notions of selfhood become confused and perhaps even irrelevant. Bauji’s story isn’t as dramatic, but he is often in danger of losing touch with reality in the very process of defining it. Trust only what you can see, he tells a group of apostles, even as one is constantly reminded of the impracticality of such advice. (Some of the followers react by blindly accepting what he is saying, which may be a wry comment on how organised religions come into existence.) He speaks about the importance of truth – going to the extent of leaving his job because how can he sell the virtues of cities he has never been to himself? – but ends up concealing things from his family and gets involved with an underhanded gambling operation.

There have been a few films with Old Delhi settings in recent years, and like most of them Ankhon Dekhi emphasises authenticity in character, dialogue and production design. It has many nice touches, from Bauji’s wife’s weary exclamations of “Arre bhaiya!” (even when she is addressing a prospective son-in-law who has shown up unannounced) to the improvised wedding vows that a bride and groom are made to recite, to the pleasing but unexpected candour of a scene where Rita shows up at her boyfriend’s house and makes herself comfortable. There is overlapping dialogue and a ear for conversation, and it is all wonderfully performed by Mishra, Pahwa and a cast of fine supporting actors including Brijendra Kala and Manu Rishi.

But plot-oriented though this film appears to be, it is - again like Mithya - formally deceptive, with a few detours into strangeness (a young boy suddenly turns into an idiot savant, spouting high-sounding gibberish for hours on end, and is then “miraculously” cured) that may reflect the main character's state of mind and his inability to pin down what is real or verifiable. Kapoor dedicates Ankhon Dekhi to his “masters” Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, and that should tell you something about his often-abstract filmmaking sensibility. It is a sensibility with traces of nihilism - a cold, detached view of the absurdities of our condition - but it also gently observes and acknowledges the little things that can make life bearable. Watching this film made me want to return to his earlier work, and in particular roused my curiosity about his unreleased 1990s film Private Detective, which Naseeruddin Shah half-seriously described as “a very bad combination of James Hadley Chase and Mani Kaul, who go together like rum and whiskey”.

In any case, the point of this rambling post is to say: do try to see Ankhon Dekhi. You could do a lot worse with your time this week.