Child in time: thoughts on Richard Linklater’s Boyhood

“I don’t want to live my life through a screen,” says 17-year-old Mason Jr in a late scene in Richard Linklater’s exquisite new film Boyhood. Within the narrative, Mason – a sensitive young man with an artistic temperament – is fretting about the pressures of staying visible on Facebook and other social media; that these things now seem to validate your existence, and he wants to switch off from them. But at an extra-narrative level too, the line is resonant – because young Ellar Coltrane, who plays the role, has lived so much of his life on the screen created by this remarkable project.*** Though a scripted fiction film, Boyhood was made in installments over 12 years, capturing Coltrane’s own growth from age seven to age 18. In the finished work, when Mason speaks about how futures can seem pre-ordained, how it can feel like the path ahead has been mapped out, one hears an echo of the actor who, as a child barely comprehending the scale of what he was getting into, became part of Linklater’s grand vision.

Time, and what it does to people and their relationships, is one of the big themes of Linklater’s cinema – most famously demonstrated in the three “Before” films made over 18 years with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – but even by his standards Boyhood was a risky experiment that could easily have crumbled in the execution, or worse, have come off as one giant gimmick. An important difference between watching Hawke and Delpy age over the course of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight and watching Coltrane grow up in Boyhood is that the latter was so young and vulnerable when this project began. In this interview he says he doesn’t even remember his first meeting with his director, and barely has any memory of the first 2-3 years of shooting. One might say that the concept of “performance” (which implies self-awareness to begin with) doesn’t apply in the normal sense to his early scenes.

To a degree, that is true for all child actors, and there is a danger of making the story of Boyhood’s filming sound more dramatic than it was. From what I know, though scenes were shot every year, each schedule took only a few days or weeks; Coltrane wasn’t like a willing version of Jim Carrey’s Truman in The Truman Show, under a camera’s scrutiny for every minute of his growing-up years. He continued to live his own life, as the other cast members did. Still, it couldn’t have been a quite normal childhood (whatever the ideal of “normal childhood” is). And though Boyhood is a lovely, absorbing film on its own terms, while watching it I kept thinking about the effect it must have had on the young actor.

What is it like to be the subject of such an experiment from an early age? How does your own (nascent) self get shaped by and subsumed in the character you are playing, and how does the role affect your own future real-life decisions? In his “young adult” scenes, Coltrane projects such a calm, mature personality it is hard to imagine that in real life he might be a different, more boisterous person. In his interviews too, he sounds like Mason, and some of his own interests – in photography, for instance – were absorbed into the film’s script. When Linklater picked the six-year-old all those years ago, he must have seen the seeds of the qualities he wanted for his protagonist. But could the very process of being filmed every year also have contributed to making Coltrane more inward-looking, more understanding of creative processes? And is it significant that though Coltrane cooperated with his director unfailingly, year after year, Linklater’s extroverted daughter Lorelei (who plays Mason’s sister Samantha) told her dad at some point that she didn’t want to participate anymore; couldn’t he kill her character off?

Watching the transitions in Mason’s (or Ellar’s) features over the film’s three hours – dreaminess and reticence shifting into something like confidence, a sense of a young person becoming comfortable in his skin (without losing his vulnerability) – I began free-associating, thinking of other films and books. The Antoine Doinel films made by Francois Truffaut, for example, in which Jean-Pierre Leaud played the central character from age 12 on, beginning with The 400 Blows and ending with Love on the Run 20 years later. Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table, in which a boy’s three-week ship journey between Sri Lanka and England becomes a symbol for “the floating dream of childhood”, the vast ocean unmarked by milestones. (In Boyhood, Mason Jr’s pre-teen life seems to go by like a dream, with people and houses flitting in and out of sight, and around half the film deals with his life between age 16 and 18.) Or even the strange career of child actors like Mayur, who played the young version of Amitabh Bachchan so often that by the time he did it in Laawaris – as a gangly 16-year-old – he had all the expressions and movements down pat, even in the little jig he does while listening to “Mere Angne Mein” on the radio; he was performing in a pre-constructed mould.

These thoughts, though, were secondary to the experience to watching Boyhood unfold at its leisurely pace. Like much of Linklater’s other work, it is driven by naturalistic conversation and by a disavowal of clearly set-up dramatic situations for the characters to respond to in familiar ways. There are a few such situations here (which life doesn’t have them?) – a drunk stepfather terrifying his wife and kids at a dining table, a sweet old geezer from the Bible belt (Mason’s dad’s new father-in-law) gifting the boy a shotgun and assuming that everyone will be happy to go to Sunday church together – but they aren’t underlined. The obvious awkwardness felt by Mason, Samantha and their dad about the overt religiosity of the stepmother’s family doesn't lead to a “confrontation” or even a brief teenage outburst; instead the tension is diffused in a charming little moment when the siblings and their father whisper to each other about this “God thing” and the stepmom calls out jovially from a distance “I can hear you!”

Such is the “verite” nature of the film in any case that the dramatic moments aren’t presented in terms of a clear beginning, middle and end. Exhibit: a scene where Mason and Samantha and their step-siblings cycle up to their house and see Mason’s mother lying awkwardly on the ground while her husband yells at her. We don’t see the start of the fight or see him hitting her, we arrive right in the middle of a messy situation, disoriented, slowly piecing together what must have happened. This is slice-of-life storytelling at its sparest. And at the end here is Mason/Ellar, on the verge of being free from the screen at last, liberated and unsure in equal measure, looking ahead to a future that is no longer pre-ordained.

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*** As David Thomson noted in another context, here are two opposing – but also complementary – meanings of “screen”: one involves concealment, the other exhibition.

The boy who fixed Earth - on Tik-Tik, The Master of Time

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

The narrator-hero of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s new book for young readers is preoccupied with Time and wastes none of it in letting us know what the central peeve of his existence is. “There was one gigantic, colossal fault with our species which trumped all the advantages,” says Tik-Tik – a boy from the planet Nopter – on the opening page, “Our species was slow to grow up. Very slow.” In case you’re wondering, “growing up” isn’t code for a people collectively becoming wiser, or something else abstract or allegorical; it is literally about moving from childhood to adulthood. Hankering after the many freedoms available to adults, and impatient to become one of their rank, the single-minded Tik-Tik decides that “this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue unchallenged and uncured”.

In fact he continues to make such self-important proclamations throughout the book, for he is an endearingly deluded fellow. He gives himself heaps of credit along with many grand-sounding designations, but he constantly misreads situations and overestimates the worth of his own initiatives – which means much rescue work has to be done by other people, notably his unruffled friend Nib-Nib, with whom he shares a love-hate relationship (and whose cat Dum-Dum is a personal nemesis). This brings a bumbling charm to Tik-Tik’s narrative, which serves the book well, especially when he makes a proud announcement only to have the wind taken out of his sails a few sentences later. Or when he indulges in quasi-philosophical asides (“I realised that all planets have their Dum-Dums. One cannot escape them”) or over-dramatizes his problems: “With Dum-Dum prowling on the land mass, and the penguins underwater, this planet had now become for me the single most dangerous place in the whole cosmos [...] I hoped to find their military training camp, fitted out with rope ladders, horizontal beams and swings.” Even when he casts himself as an Evil Scientist driven to nefarious means for his survival, the effect is funny, not least because we know that little will come of his schemes.

This winsome book begins slowly, with a series of developments that culminate in Tik-Tik setting off on an inter-galactic journey in a space egg with his grandpa, but the pace lifts once they land on Earth and start figuring out “high science” methods to remedy the planet’s construction flaws. Hanging a giant comet from the “bottom” of Earth, for instance, would stabilise it and do away with the menace of changing seasons. A huge propeller fixed to the North Pole would be a nice way to speed up rotation and make time pass more quickly. And a polarity device is a neat method for keeping unwanted things and creatures as far away from you as possible (though this can, like anything else, backfire).

Sprinkled through the story are illustrations by Michelle Farooqi – the author’s wife – the best of which do a valuable job of enhancing the text and clarifying the things described. For example, it wasn’t until I saw the lovely drawing on page 61, a depiction of what Earth looks like after the propeller and the comet have been attached, that I felt I had a real sense of what Tik-Tik had been up to. The drawing is non-realist in that it shows Tik-Tik, his grandpa and five waddling penguins as abnormally large figures occupying a sizable part of the planet’s surface, both on the “top” and the “bottom” (the effect is similar to the famous images of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince on his tiny asteroid) but it is an instant mood-establisher, affectionate and quaint while also making the familiar seem unfamiliar.

Tik-Tik, The Master of Time is a breezy, humorous adventure story – with some very rudimentary science for young readers – but it has a self-evidently serious side too. Tik-Tik’s impatience is a version of a paranoia many of us have experienced as children: suspecting that Adulthood is an exclusive, privileged club floating unreachably in the misty distance; wondering when (or if!) we will be admitted to this fellowship and what deep secrets we might learn when that happens. The irony is that for a grown-up reader, a book such as this one can both create and fulfil the opposite sort of yearning. And this may be why the climax, though a bit laboured in its spelling out of ideas, is so affecting – Tik-Tik’s sense of loss and disorientation when he finally gets his wish and then realises that there is no going back is easy to relate to. For those of us with limited access to space eggs and giant propellers, revisiting our favourite children’s books – and discovering new ones – is a good practical way of bridging time’s great divide.

(Some earlier posts on the work of the versatile Farooqi: on his excellent translation of the Hamzanama here and here; on another children’s book, The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man, here)

Tinkle tinkle little store

[A nostalgia piece I did for Kindle magazine's issue on book-stores and book spaces]

The first bookstore in my life – and the only one I can claim to feel really nostalgic about – had two wheels and a nasal voice that called out “Maga-zine! Maga-zine!” late in the evening. This was a thin man on a bicycle, bearing an improbably large selection of glossies tucked into a small space behind his seat. He would come to our house in south Delhi’s Panchshila Park each day – my mother being a compulsive renter of movie magazines – and it was through him that I discovered Amar Chitra Katha’s Tinkle comics. I was five years old; I know this because the oldest of the comics in my carefully maintained stack is dated July 1982.

Tinkle was a fortnightly then, and one could expect the latest issue to arrive anytime between 12 and 15 days after the previous one. I suspect my earliest understanding of the passage of time developed during those days. On most evenings I wasn’t too interested in the kitaab-wallah uncle’s comings and goings, but a little calendar in my head told me when nine or ten days had elapsed since the last Tinkle, and then the next few evenings were filled with anticipation. The sound of the bicycle bell, the dash to the door, the disappointment when I realised that today wasn’t the day, or the thrill when I saw the cover of a fresh issue for the first time (and quickly flipped through it to check if the final story was Kaalia the Crow, which I loved, or Shikari Shambhu, which I only mildly liked) – these things became a part of the daily routine. He sometimes played teasing games, claiming with a sad face that the latest issue was going to be delayed and then unveiling it just as I had turned away balefully.

It may seem like pushing things to designate this slender herald a “bookstore”, but I should stress that we bought every one of those Tinkles. I was just starting to learn that the books one found interesting were to be kept and hoarded and revisited and fussed over, not merely read once and returned (like the magazines that my mother exchanged every day). It’s a lesson I have never unlearnt; as I write this, a number of bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, tables, racks, bed-boxes and bed surfaces in my house are creaking in confirmation.

It didn’t take me long to learn that Bicycle Uncle was the mobile arm of a tiny shop – more like a stall – in the nearby Malviya Nagar market. Today this market occupies a low-rung position in a south Delhi filled with mall complexes, but even back then it was mainly a muddy, winding maze of vegetable stalls, shops selling groceries and trinkets, artificial jewellery and countless packets of bindis – most of this of very little interest to the child that I was. However, at some point during our walk through the back-lanes, we turned a corner and there the book stall was with its egalitarian display: Amar Chitra Kathas sharing space with Archie comics and digests, Jataka tales in one corner, Jughead Jones in the other. I have no idea now what the stall was called, if it was called anything (quite possibly it was only informally referred to by the owner’s name) or if it still exists. But I recall many happy times spent there on cold winter evenings and on rainy days when one had to wade through slush to reach it.

The Malviya Nagar byways wouldn’t have done for the “proper” books, though – the sophisticated publications by Enid Blyton and suchlike. For these, one had to travel what seemed to my child-self a very long distance – a 20-minute drive to South Extension, the home of Teksons.

It feels strange now to think of how central Teksons was to my early life: the shop is still around, in the same location, but I haven’t been to it in years, or felt the slightest desire to do so. In the same way that one doesn’t get to choose one’s relatives or one’s earliest nursery-level friends, it became the bookstore of my childhood by default, only because my family so often went to South Extension. As a young adult my preferred haunt would be the Midlands in Aurobindo Market, mainly for its round-the-year, unadvertised 20 percent discount on all IBH prices and its efficient display. And there would be many other fortuitous encounters: locating a much-sought-after graphic novel in London’s Foyles, for example, and picking it up despite its price and weight only because I knew there was no hope of getting it in India. Or a clearing-up sale in a shabby Connaught Place store, where I chanced upon a rare film book that is still one of my most prized possessions: Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, a collection of warm and informed essays that had a huge influence on me as a writer and movie-watcher (and which, incidentally, is not available anywhere today, even online).

But it was in Teksons that I formed most of my early reading habits, moving over the years from Blytons to Agatha Christies, and thence to Maughams, Wodehouses and Hemingways. Each visit was an encounter with new possibilities and changing tastes: becoming aware of a world outside that of the Famous Five’s macaroon-and-scone picnics; working out what type of book to turn to next; reading descriptions on back jackets, flipping pages to see if a stray passage of text struck a chord or revealed an interesting conversation or idea. It was here that I bought my first Christie, Murder in Retrospect, which would chill the summer afternoons I spent in Ludhiana during a family trip. Here it was that I felt indescribably proud lugging a copy of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage to the cashier’s counter: it was such a bulky book with such a grown-up title, it was so much more respectable to be seen buying something like this rather than another in the Hardy Boys Case Files series (which I may also have smuggled across to the counter). It was at Teksons too that I bought my first proper dictionary, a pleasingly heavy Oxford publication that made me feel much empowered as a reader. (Today, in the Internet age, physical dictionaries seem laughably unnecessary – but that only makes the memory even more precious.)

All this said, I am not sentimental about book-stores as physical spaces. Certainly, I don’t fetishize them like some of my friends do. This might seem odd coming from someone who has been an eager reader since a young age, worked professionally on the literary beat for years, never used an electronic-reader to date, and been a late convert to online buying (my first Flipkart purchase was as recently as early 2011). But perhaps it has to do with the fact that for much of the past decade my job has entailed receiving unmanageable quantities of books, more than 90 percent of which I will never read. I can understand the attraction a good bookstore holds for a keen reader who doesn’t work professionally with books – and who perhaps only gets to indulge the reading habit for 20 minutes at the end of a tiring day – but take it from me: when one’s own room starts looking like a particularly messy publisher’s warehouse, some of the romanticism associated with entering a store and smelling thousands of new books (or thousands of old books in a second-hand store) wears away.

What doesn’t wear away is the memory of early discovery – of the browsing rituals that become a gateway to new knowledge about the world and about oneself. Or simply hearing the sound of a bicycle bell tinkling and knowing that 30 pages of fresh stories await a reader's immersion.

A boy and a ship: unstructured thoughts on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

[Notes for a review I may or may not finish writing - as you can probably tell, I have conflicted feelings about the book]

– On a large ship travelling from Sri Lanka to England in 1954, an 11-year-old boy makes the first significant journey of his life; it will be a rite of passage too. Three weeks are to be spent at sea and he is for all practical purposes travelling alone: a distant acquaintance who happens to be on board keeps an eye on him, but she is a First Class passenger while Michael – along with two boys his age and a few scattered adults – has his meals in the least privileged section of the ship’s huge dining room.

The good thing about being placed at the “cat’s table” is the sense of independence and vague disreputability it creates in one so young. Michael spends his days mostly in the company of his two new friends, the self-assured Cassius and the introverted Ramadhin, and their paths intersect with those of the adults around them: a botanist who is transporting a whole shimmering garden in the ship’s hold; a half-Sicilian pianist named Max Mazappa; an acrobat with the stage name The Hyderabad Mind; a quiet teacher going to England for the first time; the enigmatically spinsterish Miss Perinetta Lasqueti; and most thrillingly, a shackled convict who is believed to have killed a judge.

– “Once we climbed the gangplank onto the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults,” says the grown-up Michael, narrating the story decades after the journey. Over the course of this novel (written by another Michael – Ondaatje – who also happened to be on an ocean liner from Ceylon to England in 1954), we are left in little doubt that his shipboard experiences have resonated throughout his life and become reference points for him. (As a married man, when Michael sees his wife dancing with someone else and making a casual gesture that implies intimacy, he is reminded of seeing a similar gesture made on the ship’s deck years earlier. There are many other echoes of this sort.)

But even while The Cat’s Table recognises the ways in which people are shaped by – and return to – their early experiences, it is perceptive about the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood. At one point, Cassius suggests that the boys keep their backgrounds to themselves. “He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship.” It’s a reminder that this is how so many of our earliest friendships play out, with the participants being unaware of, or uninterested in, family and background details that will later come to mean a great deal.

– This book is also about the impossibility of knowing exactly how and when you pass from one life-stage to the next. (When sailing through one vast body of water after another, the boundaries are necessarily imprecise. There are no signposts to tell you exactly where this sea ends and that ocean begins.) Even as Michael spends his time blithely adventuring with his friends – “being a child”, in other words – there are passages where he shows the self-awareness one associates with growing up. A significant moment between him and his older cousin Emily, who is also on the ship, carries a hint of sexual awakening before resolving itself into a more conventional scene of a distraught child being consoled by a relative. On another occasion, briefly coerced into assisting a thieving Baron - his body covered in the oil that allows him to slither through a narrow cabin window - Michael sees himself in a mirror. “This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself,” the adult Michael tells us, “It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years – someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet."

(This reminded me of Pip in the graveyard in the superb opening pages of Great Expectations: “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening...”. Incidentally The Cat’s Table contains a brief but important reference to Dickens’s convict Magwitch.)

– What slightly muddied my appreciation of The Cat’s Table is that this is two different novels in one, and they cut into each other’s space. The first is a pure adventure tale, a boy’s voyage of discovery on board an unimaginably big ship where many exciting things happen and many intriguing people are met. The second is a more reflective attempt to link these events with Michael’s future, and while this is done with care and insight, the two modes don’t always come together seamlessly.

Initially it seems the story will be set exclusively in the distant past (and aboard the ship), but then the first of many “flash-forwards” occurs – a bracket-enclosed, page-length paragraph in which Michael mentions a further acquaintance with Ramadhin in London. Later, midway through the book, we are taken off the ship for 30 pages and given extended information about Michael’s subsequent life, including a relationship with Ramadhin’s sister Massi; and there is another long detour towards the end. I found my attention drifting during these sections. The Cat’s Table has many lovely passages and a real feel for how people and their relationships change over time, but the minor disconnect between its two halves make it as choppy in places as the ocean Michael crosses on his way to a new life.

– Some of the flash-forwards do work well on their own terms, adding new layers to our perspective on the ship days. For instance, though Michael appears to be closer to Cassius than to Ramadhin while they are together on the Oronsay, we learn that he will lose all contact with the former after they disembark. This is believable at a strictly realist level: we all know about intense childhood friendships which, when freed from the contexts in which they were formed, were quickly forgotten. But since The Cat’s Table constantly invites us to read it at a metaphorical level (with the three-week journey representing the wonders and uncertainties of childhood), I think it’s worth considering that Cassius stands for something latent in Michael – a feral side, perhaps, that he brushes against on the voyage and then turns away from once he reaches cold England. (At one point, recalling a subsequent adult visit to Cassius’s art exhibition – where they don’t meet – Michael uses this intriguing sentence: “Some grains of Cassius had after all remained in my system.”)

Echoes from a floating dream

– I don’t usually pay much attention to book-jacket texts – they can become traps for a reviewer – but there’s a striking phrase in this one: the Oronsay is likened to “the floating dream of childhood”. Ondaatje isn’t subtle about the symbolism of a large ship moving through the great unknown, but he very skilfully evokes the amorphous quality of our childhood recollections. The 21 days at sea don’t come to us in chronological order – the fragmented memory of the book’s narrator does not permit this. Two events – or encounters with different people – that might have occurred on the same day are narrated several chapters apart as Michael gives them a context. The three weeks become a cornucopia of colourful incidents, so that it’s difficult to pin down the order in which they occurred.

And of course, this is how most of our childhood memories work. Those of us who have held on to diaries we kept at a young age, or who have an unusually acute memory for dates, might theoretically know that two significant but unconnected incidents took place in (say) the same week 22 years ago; but when we actually try to recall them, our minds might find it impossible to fill in the other details of the time-span in which they occurred – or to even believe that they happened so near each other.

Towards the end of The Cat’s Table, the adult Michael muses: “Looking back, I am no longer certain who gave me what pieces of advice, or befriended us, or deceived us.” Throughout the book there is a sense of barely remembered conversations, or events that echo one another, so that the possibility arises that Michael’s memory is conflating one experience with another (which, again, is something we all do when attempting to recapture the past).

For example, at one point the adult Michael reads a letter written by Perinetta Lasqueti, where she mentions dressing up as Marcel Proust – complete with a slim moustache – at a fancy-dress party in her youth. This feels like an echo of an incident earlier in the book, when the child Michael describes Perinetta similarly disguised as a man during a port of call at Aden. It leads one to wonder: did the Aden episode really happen as he remembered it? (And could the Proust reference be a sly nod – by Michael Ondaatje the author – to the whimsies of memory?) There are other little recurrences in the writing (such as two references, a few pages apart but in completely different contexts, to the application of unguent on a skin wound) and they probably aren’t accidental, coming as they do from the pen of such a careful and organised writer.

Boy and wolf: thoughts on Stanley ka Dabba

The figure of the Big Bad Wolf is central to fairy tales about the fears and trials of childhood, and there are many variations on the character. The Wolf doesn’t have to be the villain-in-chief: he can be watching from the shadows, a potential rather than explicit threat. Or he might be revealed to be something very different from the bogeyman of the child’s nightmares (see Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example). But that doesn’t necessarily make the nightmares any less vivid.

In the Red Riding Hood story the Wolf has big, sharp teeth and reckons that the little heroine might make a tasty dinner. The villain of the new film Stanley ka Dabba isn’t that fearsome, but he’s a nuisance at the very least – a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, who bullies children into sharing their tiffin lunches with him. The role is played by the film’s writer-director Amole Gupte, who also wrote the very popular Taare Zameen Par (and was originally going to direct that film, before Aamir Khan took over the production). In the Acknowledgements, Gupte mentions director Vishal Bhardwaj, with whom he has worked in the past – and indeed his own shifty-eyed portrayal in this film reminded me of the avaricious shopkeeper in Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella, a man who thinks nothing of taking a little girl’s precious umbrella away from her.

Gupte plays a “khadoos” in Stanley ka Dabba, but his own empathy for the interior world of children is visible throughout this well-written and acted – if somewhat unevenly paced – film. It’s about a boy named Stanley (wonderfully played by Gupte’s own son Partho), popular among his classmates for his storytelling skills – though none of them realise just how good he is at making up fictions about himself. We sense early on that something is wrong when he tells a colourful but unconvincing tale about fighting with a bigger boy, and when he makes a hurried phone call to an unseen mother to tell her he’ll be late coming home from school. But things come to a head when Verma, the Hindi teacher, insists that he bring his own lunchbox to school (mainly so he put his own grubby hands in it). In the face of adult hegemony of this sort, the happy-go-lucky boy starts to wilt.

(Minor spoiler alert) As it turns out, this story is building up to the revelation that Stanley is an orphan who spends his non-school hours performing menial tasks at an uncle’s rundown little dhaba. The closing credits turn this into a commentary on child labour in India, complete with relevant statistics, and I was ambivalent about this ending – I thought it was a little too hurried, with too much centred on the revelation. But there’s no doubt that the film’s structure as a whole is a clever and effective exercise in viewer manipulation – it pulls the carpet out from under the feet of the urban, English-speaking viewer, by giving us a seemingly middle-class, Convent-educated boy to identify with and then presenting him in an unsettlingly different avatar at the end **.

But what I personally found more interesting than the ending was something the film chooses to be nebulous about: the way it hints lightly at Verma’s human side. This isn’t done in an obvious or sentimental way, and there is no real attempt at redeeming the character – certainly, his back-story is never revealed to us in the way that Aamir Khan’s teacher in TZP was revealed to have been dyslexic himself. But many of the scenes involving this gruff, hairy man make it possible for us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It’s possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise. In any case, he is by no means the only – or the most dangerous – wolf in the little boy’s life.

** Note: there is of course a distinction to be made between 1) “viewer manipulation” as done in an artistically satisfying way, without upsetting a film’s internal equilibrium, and 2) yanking indiscriminately at the heartstrings of the most easily manipulated viewer. But there are times when the line can be a surprisingly thin one, and I thought this was one of those times. (While on that, do read this excellent piece by Trisha Gupta.) Stanley ka Dabba has greater integrity in some ways than Taare Zameen Par, but it does make its own small compromises; there's no losing sight of the fact that it was made specifically for a complacent multiplex audience.

P.S. Gupte's performance as Verma can be included in a (very lengthy) hypothetical postscript to my Yahoo! column about directors in acting roles.