A small, unseen film

In all the online discourse I’ve seen around Ra.One, what makes me want to tear my hair out is when its apologists say things like “Okay, it isn’t a great film – but you have to respect all the hard work that Shah Rukh and his team have put into it.”

In other words: so what if this is a cringe-inducingly uneven, appallingly written and imagined movie that offends the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about good science-fiction/fantasy or video games – we are STILL dutybound to scrape at the altars of the obscenely rich Bollywood deities who condescended to bring it to us.

To clarify, I have no real problem with anyone honestly thinking Ra.One was a good film (though I wouldn’t want to spend much time talking about movies with them). But whenever I hear the “respect the money and effort” plea, I think about the many people I know who have been struggling just as hard to realise their cinematic visions – and to bring them to an audience a tiny fraction of Ra.One’s – in more difficult circumstances.

I think, for example, about Shekhar Hattangadi, the associate director of a little film called Teen Behenein, which was directed by Kundan Shah for Zee Telefilms six years ago, and which you won't even find listed on IMDB. For the past few weeks, Hattangadi – who is in his mid-50s – has been in Delhi on his own initiative with a single DVD of the movie, screening it at colleges, trying to spread word about it through his contacts. For reasons that are unclear to me, there is no expectation that this film will get a commercial release or a DVD release anytime soon. This is a pity.

Teen Behenein, inspired by countless tragic stories from across India, is about three young sisters from a lower-middle class family who decide to commit suicide to relieve their parents from the burden of dowry demands (and the social derision when they are unable to meet them). It isn’t a great film – it occasionally struggles to balance the requirements of gritty, issue-oriented cinema with the need to simplify an issue for a general audience. It’s also a little tacky in places: a key fantasy scene near the end involves a particularly unfortunate costuming decision (Death in a crotch-less tin suit?) that might throw off even the most sensitive, invested viewer. But it works well when it focuses – as it usually does – on the interactions between the three girls on the last day of their lives: their personal equations, their responses to the little interruptions that keep delaying their plan, the slivers of hope and optimism filtering in through their despair.

At a screening I attended, the audience didn’t seem to care for the inclusion of songs in what they probably expected to be a strictly “realist” film. But I liked the way the musical interludes (mostly gentle, tuneful and convincingly acted) punctuated the narrative and caught the girls’ vacillating moods. One of the songs even facilitates Shah’s famous knack for injecting morbid humour into a seemingly cheerful situation: there’s a shot where the sisters – singing, skipping about, feeling temporarily sanguine about things – playfully don black veils, hang their heads and swing their arms limply to mimic a post-hanging posture. In hindsight it’s one of the film’s most vivid images, a representation of three spirited young people suddenly turned into corpses. Time and again, we see that these girls have potentially bright and meaningful lives ahead of them, but that they have been conditioned to believe there is no future, no way out. (At the beginning of the film, the feisty youngest sister insists on writing her own - presumably sharply worded - suicide note for their parents. Near the end, we see her tearing this note up – it’s a distressing but inevitable moment in a story about the crushing of individuality.)

The three central performances (by Amrita Subhash, Shiju Kataria and especially Kadambari Kadam as the youngest sister) are very strong, which brings me to something worth mentioning about the making of this film. If you see the discipline of good theatre acting here, that’s because Shah and his team extensively rehearsed every sequence in long takes – choreographing the characters’ movements and conversations within the small space that the story is set in – before they ever switched on the cameras. The result was that very little film stock was wasted on multiple takes and the shooting ratio was very low – which is important for a low-budget production. Given some of the crud that not only makes it to multiplexes these days but also gets ridiculous amounts of media coverage, I think it's a pity that films like Teen Behenein – low-key, well-intentioned, flawed in some ways but with strong points too – aren’t assured even a TV screening.

[Also see: this post by someone who attended a JNU screening and was disturbed by how disconnected some other viewers were from the types of lives depicted in the film. Tehelka has this interview with Shekhar Hattangadi. And Trisha Gupta’s Sunday Guardian review is here]

Glimpses from a cultural and literary Quest

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

One of the pleasures of reading The Best of Quest – a collection of essays, fiction and poetry from the pages of the now-defunct quarterly magazine that was dedicated to “inquiry, criticism and ideas” – is discovering the many voices of the late Dilip Chitre. I had a passing acquaintance with Chitre’s poetry, and a memory of the film Godaam which he wrote and directed, but I hadn’t encountered his essay writing before this.

Chitre’s long association with Quest began in the 1960s and continued till the magazine's dying days during the Emergency years; he later served as an editor for its second incarnation New Quest. Consequently his writings – reviews, opinion pieces and a translation of Hamid Dalwai’s incisive piece “Mohammed Ali Jinnah: A Study in Hatred” – are well-represented in the lengthy “Essay” section of this book. But in addition to the pieces that appeared under his own name, Chitre also wrote a regular column using the pseudonym “D”.

“There is a comedian inside me who is restless to burst into the open,” he explains in “I was D”, the last piece included in this book (and written not long before his death), “I love to mark the absurdity underlying most seriously regarded things. I also love to take the comic as seriously as it deserves to be taken.”
 
Both "D" and "Dilip" consistently display wit, acumen and the ability to engage with a variety of topics. Even when one disagrees with some of Chitre’s views (among other things, he calls R K Narayan a “second-rate” Indo-Anglian writer), it’s hard not to respect the honesty and intelligence behind them. At other times, you might instinctively blench at something he says – or wonder if he’s being facetious – only to realise upon reflection that it contains a kernel of truth. In a possibly part-satirical piece titled “What has Dimple Got that Satyajit Hasn’t?” Chitre compares Raj Kapoor’s very mainstream film Bobby with Satyajit Ray’s artistically high-minded Ashani Sanket and suggests that “their moral and aesthetic import is on the same level of mediocrity... Except that Ray fails to entertain the masses, which Kapoor does”.

Raj Kapoor produces opiates for the masses, including the educated uncultured, while giving them traces of cinematic value; Ray gives the middle class its own kind of highbrow drugs, heaps of crude cinematic values coated with the sugar of a static pre-modern imagination.

Other highlights from the pen of D/Dilip include “Aspects of Pornophobia”, in which he lampoons undiscerning censorship and the general incompetence of those saddled with “preserving culture” (there's a great anecdote here involving the actress Snehaprabha Pradhan and a "seductive female dog"), and the long essay-cum-review “Nirad’s Nightmare”. The latter is an analysis of Nirad C Chaudhuri’s book The Continent of Circe as well as a psychological profile of its author “who began as an unknown Indian and, after years of striving, has virtually become perhaps one of the most authentic Englishmen of all time”.

When he is worked up to a climactic frenzy in expressing his love for England and things English, Mr Chaudhuri gives one a sense of parody by extreme perfection – a comic ability to run rapidly and unhindered on a track strewn with banana peels. Even an Englishman would find the strain of being so precisely and religiously English all the time quite unbearable.

Again, some of the views expressed here can be debated – Chaudhuri was a complex figure and the product of colliding cultural influences – but there’s little faulting the intellectual rigour of Chitre’s arguments.

****

Apart from Chitre’s work, there is much of interest in The Best of Quest, including a thoughtful interview (by Adrian Rowe-Evans) of V S Naipaul. Anyone who has had trouble reconciling Naipaul’s frequently splenetic or obnoxious behaviour with the empathy in the best of his work might be intrigued by this bit:

I may sit down in enormous rage to write something; I might even begin in terms of caricature and animosity; but in the course of the writing, something will happen. That side of me, that comes out in the writing, is the better side, and better not because it’s nicer but because it’s truer; it’s the side that in one’s rage one might wish to forget. I began my recent book about Africa with a great hatred of everyone, of the entire continent; and that had to be refined away, giving place to comprehension.

Having working on the literary beat for only the last few years, I also found it illuminating to read Jyotirmoy Datta’s 1966 essay “On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots” – a sardonic, often whimsical critique of Indian writers who worked in English – followed by P Lal’s measured response. (“We do not write in English because it is a pan-Indian language of the educated; we write because we cannot write as well in any other language...There are many plots to till; English is one.”) The discussion is a reminder that the many fierce debates around Indian Writing in English did not begin in the post-Midnight’s Children world. I’m not done with The Best of Quest yet – there’s plenty to read in the Fiction section, including short stories by Kiran Nagarkar and Kamleshwar – but what I’ve read so far has offered a very agreeable glimpse of the cultural and ideological discourse of another time, much of which is still relevant today.

Ra.One mini-review

At last, a film that manages to be insulting to Chinese people, South Indians AND videogame characters. I've waited for this all my moviegoing life.

(For something much more elaborate and profound, read this great post by Samit)

On Supremo, Ajooba and other pre-Ra.One superheroes

[Did a version of this for First Post]

Watching the Ra.One trailers – so evocative of Hollywood superhero and fantasy films – and reading about the huge budget and the cutting-edge effects, I remembered a time when “Bollywood Superhero Movie” was a tautology. If a leading man already has powers well beyond mortal imagination, how does it add value to dress him in tights or a metallic suit and to have death rays or spider webs flowing from his fingers?

But as my just-excavated “Adventures of Amitabh Bachchan” comics show, movie heroes were occasionally dolled up in the distant past too. Published in the early 1980s, this series cast the superstar as “himself” and as his crime-fighting alter-ego Supremo. Supremo had no superpowers, but that didn’t stop him from wearing a tight pink suit with a purple sarong tied around his waist (wisely, the people who thought up the series decided against Superman-style outer-innerwear) and the obligatory aviator goggles to protect his identity. He travelled by helicopter, solved mysteries with his young assistants Vijay and Anthony (obvious references to two of Amitabh’s best-known screen aliases) and hung out on an island populated by wild animals. To eight-year-old eyes, all this was supremo-cool.

Hindi cinema itself made few excursions into sci-fi/fantasy at the time, notwithstanding magnificent dream sequences like the one with Govinda and Kimi Katkar as Superman and Spiderwoman (or was it the other way around?). The best of those movies was the hugely popular Mr India, with its invisible hero (Anil Kapoor never looked better!), a pink acid pool in the villain's den and a variant on the Superman-Lois Lane story (a chirpy reporter falls in love with Mr India without realising who he really is). But apart from a couple of neatly staged scenes like the one where the bad guys are seemingly knocked out by a Hanuman statue, there was nothing especially high-tech about that film.

That promise briefly came with the other signpost superhero movie of my youth – the Arabian Nights fantasy Ajooba, with Bachchan as a regular guy named Ali who doubled up as the dashing eponymous masked hero. Two years earlier, in a film set in the "real" world – Shahenshah – Amitabh had also played a bumpkin with a secret vigilante identity, but Ajooba was meant to be much more. Scanning Bollywood-related blogs today, I find that it’s now viewed as a film that was always meant to be high camp (and which therefore met its own ambitions perfectly) – its cult following rests on scenes like the one where Amitabh interrupts a conversation with a dolphin to tell an old woman “yeh machli meri ma hai”. (Somewhere Nirupa Roy was weeping tears of maternal betrayal.) But I remember the long build-up and the pre-release claims made for it in magazines; back then, everyone thought it would bring new standards of technical excellence to Hindi cinema.

The Friday afternoon when we finally saw it was a disappointment. Even to an impressionable 13-year-old, the metallic monster that showed up in the climax was a walking scrap heap with an endearingly doleful expression, the back-projection for the flying carpets was amateurish, and the sight of a miniaturised Rishi Kapoor gyrating inside Sonam’s blouse was small compensation. None of it could compare with the seamless, almost poetic special effects in the most high-profile Hollywood movies of the time, like Terminator 2.

Twenty years on, it’s safe to say that the paisa-vasool scenes in Ra.One will look like they could have dropped out of any contemporary Hollywood film. This is part of a new generation of big-budget movies that are competing with an ever more sophisticated gaming universe – one that today’s kids are so familiar with that most regular action films look unimpressive to them.

The Ra.One look – or what little has been revealed of it so far – reminds me of a much-repeated Shekhar Kapur quote from a few years ago. A time will come, Kapur said, when Spider Man takes off his mask and the face underneath will be that of an Indian or a Chinese actor. The point was to extol the increasingly global appeal of Asian cinema (and its access to the best technology), but a counter-question might be asked: actors apart, will there be anything identifiably Indian about this film? One shot in the trailer has Arjun Rampal (playing the titular villain) emerging from a fiery background that takes the shape of the ten-headed Ravana. But apart from this token reference to Indian mythology, the bad guy’s look seems to derive from films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (and, doubtless, video-game villains of whom I know nothing).

Arguably the first time we saw effects of this quality in an Indian movie was last year, in the Rajinikanth-starrer Robot/Enthiran, with its spectacular (and spectacularly overlong) climactic sequence where hundreds of evil robots arrange themselves into serpentine shapes, swallowing cars and helicopters whole. But even this CGI-fest never lost sight of Rajinikanth’s chief fan base – the ones who knew he was a superhero even when he was playing a taxi-driver. And so, Enthiran had its cheesy mass-audience moments too, its nods to the tradition of a dainty heroine having to be rescued from leering, moustached goons, and even a tacky little animated-mosquito interlude that played like a Kachua-Chaap ad. In any case the film’s eventual hero was not the high-tech robot but the nerdish professor with no superpowers (except for the important detail that he was played by you-know-who).

Back in Mumbai, as we keep hearing these days, “retro” is the rage. Salman Khan – Shah Rukh’s major rival within Bollywood – has had a line of box-office successes with Wanted, Dabangg and Bodyguard, movies that have been celebrated for their harking back to the dhishum dhishum cinema of the 1980s (and an older definition of “superhero”). Compared to the cheerful mass appeal of these films, it’s likely that Ra.One’s audience will be more niche: mainly the urban, multiplex-going youngsters. It will no doubt have a global market - which is just as well, given the costs it needs to recur - but will it be a pan-Indian success? (Remember, in the pre-multiplex age, the divide between metropolitan and small-town audiences was less pronounced than it is today. Those Amitabh comics were published in various Indian languages, and one could imagine literate children anywhere in the country reading and relating to them.)
 
Shah Rukh and his financiers have probably spent more time thinking about these things than I have, and since they are smart businessmen they will have taken whatever steps are necessary to broaden their film’s appeal. Though I haven’t followed Ra.One-related gossip too closely, one of the last things I heard was that Rajinikanth had been brought in for a cameo as well as for “blessings”. This sounds as good a move as any. If only they could have thrown in a brief animated sequence with Supremo on his island and Ajooba’s dolphin ma(one) whistling in the distance, we would have that rare thing: an ultra-slick gaming blockbuster that a nostalgic 80s child like yours truly could relate to.

[Dolphin pic courtesy Beth Loves Bollywood, whose Ajooba post you must read]

Just linking...

...to the Saffron Tree blog, which is a nice resource for children's literature. A few days ago they did this interview with my friend Radhika Chadha, the author of many fine picture books published by Tulika. And in the archives there is also this interview with another friend Anu Kumar, who has written the Myth Quest series and In the Country of Gold-Digging Ants, apart from books for older readers. All worth checking out if you want to get your child into the reading habit. 

(And why wouldn't you? It helps keep them out of trouble. That is, until they grow up, become writers and start expressing views that other people don't like.)

Propaganda with a touch of art: 49th Parallel

There is often a natural conflict of interest between explicitly message-based “propaganda” films and dynamic, imaginative cinema. Movies made with the chief aim of educating or rousing an audience will understandably emphasise content at the expense of form. When the priority is to feed ideas to viewers (rather than create a nuanced work that is open to interpretation), a script can easily become clunky and over-expository, and the camerawork might be no more than functional – there isn’t much sense using techniques that might distract or be lost on viewers.

Working on such films can be drudgery for those with creative aspirations. Writer-director Kundan Shah once told me about being commissioned by the Films Division to make a documentary titled Visions of the Blind, meant to show what blind people could achieve if given the opportunities. Noble though the cause was, there were many constraints and it wasn’t an artistically exciting assignment for someone who had studied at the FTII and dreamt of following in the footsteps of leadingavant-garde moviemakers. “It was a staid film,” Shah said, his eyes glazing over, “but I needed the work.”

This is not to say that good cinema and propaganda have to be mutually exclusive – film history has many examples to the contrary. Consider Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will (about which I wrote here), which used powerful and distinctive visual grammar to portray Hitler as a nation-rescuing deity.


However, I find it particularly interesting when directors with a real sense of cinematic style are reined in by the need to be solemn and didactic, and you can sense that tension in the work itself. One example is the British duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (jointly known as the Archers), who made a series of magnificent films in the 1940s. Their best work was assured and daring, often segueing effortlessly from the real world to a fantasy landscape: take A Matter of Life and Death (about an airman who stands trial in Heaven) or the ballet film The Red Shoes (with a stunning, highly stylised 15-minute dance performance at its centre) or Black Narcissus (about a group of nuns becoming increasingly paranoid in a beautifully recreated Himalayan setting).

During World War II, Powell also worked on more straightforward, morale-boosting films, including a poignant five-minute short titled An Airman’s Letter to His Mother. Among the best of his full-length features in this category is 49th Parallel, about a small band of Nazis coming ashore in Canada and being confronted with more courage than they had expected to find. It’s an honourable, solidly crafted movie with big-name actors such as Laurence Olivier (fresh from his first Hollywood successes in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, and cast here in one of his most atypical movie roles as a garrulous French-Canadian trapper) and Leslie Howard (who himself directed a couple of WWII propaganda films such as The Gentle Sex), working at half-salary for the wartime cause. But as a contemporary viewer, distanced from the urgency of those dark days and the realness of the German threat, one is aware of how it tries to hammer home its points. In one extended scene, where the Nazi leader makes a speech extolling his ideology and is then answered by a speech by an anti-fascist, the film becomes deferentially inert, the camera staying trained on the faces of the two men as if they were talking directly to us.

And yet, this movie, which could have been an assembly-line production in other hands, has verve and moments of subtle beauty; it takes an episodic narrative structure (the dwindling group of Nazis travel across the country, encountering different sets of individuals) and forges from it an adventure tale and a travelogue while also sharply observing the many different responses to wartime; and it has a feel for characterisation, giving us a conscientious German (remember, this was 1941!) and portraying even the bad Nazis as resourceful and dedicated to their cause. It represents one of those happy moments where a top creative talent, working within limitations and on a commissioned project, managed not to completely lose his own identity. The Archers would certainly make better films in the next few years (included subtler message-oriented works), but no one can accuse 49th Parallel of being “just” a dry piece of propaganda.

[From my Business Standard film column]

Divine savages and “real” truth

[Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian books column]

There is no such thing as an “objective” reader or reviewer – our feelings about a book are shaped by many things working in conjunction: personal experiences, biases, genetic makeup, level of engagement with a subject, and so on. The best a reviewer can do is to admit the necessary subjectivity of his perspective and then tackle a book as honestly as possible. But even so, I had misgivings about writing on Georges Van Vrekhem’s Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God. Apart from being an atheist, I fall in that small minority of homosapiens who think Richard Dawkins’s and Christopher Hitchens’s critiques of religion are perfectly reasonable (and in Dawkins’s case at least, expressed with greater civility than I could have mustered if I had been a public figure contending daily with Young Earth Creationists and other unevolved simians). A quick look at the jacket text of Vrekhem's book told me that he feels very differently about the whole religion-vs-science shebang.

In the long tradition of attacks on Darwinism (or on evolutionary theory at a broader level), there has been a tendency to misrepresent arguments, make straw-man attacks and display ignorance about the workings of the scientific procedure. Which is why I was initially relieved to find that Vrekhem is an intelligent and well-read man, and that his book (whatever my overall reservations about it) is a probing, serious-minded work – something that can’t be said about the majority of the literature that tries to bolster religious faith by undermining science. But this also makes it harder to process some of his more whimsical ideas and his many literary detours.
 

Revisiting the complex history of evolutionary theory in his first few chapters, Vrekhem quotes liberally from other writers – so much so that the parade of inverted commas gets distracting and it isn’t always easy to separate his views from the ones he cites. One of the first times he uses strong and judgemental language of his own is when he says that “materialistic biologists” display “a kind of sick pleasure to demonstrate how much their science abases the human being”. Later, he employs words like “denigrating” for the idea that humans are “just animals among animals”, or “accidental and incidental products of the material development of the universe”.

But why is this denigrating? No Darwinist (least of all Dawkins or the other villains of this book) has denied the massive potential that humans have for the nobler emotions. If man has evolved from an animal state to a creature with a complex brain, capable of (among other things) creating and appreciating great art, reflecting on his own place in the universe, making efforts to expand his knowledge and capabilities – and yes, even mulling on the possible existence of Something higher than himself – aren’t these things to be proud of? Wouldn’t we as a species have more reason to be proud of ourselves if this were the case, rather than if we were pre-manufactured to be something special, made in the image of God and held to the highest possible standards from the outset (in which case, the continuing existence of humans of the order of Sarah Palin, for example, would cast serious aspersions on our Creator’s designing skills)?


****

Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God is filled with criticisms of both Darwin the man (who, Vrekhem feels, is unduly deified today) and the nebulous building blocks of “what is nowadays labelled as Darwinism”. Vrekhem takes pains to point out that the exalting of Darwin has been at the cost of at least two other men who deserved to be similarly reputed: the French evolutionary theorist Lamarck, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of natural selection around the same time as Darwin did (and received co-credit for it) and who, more importantly in Vrekhem’s view of things, developed a belief in “spiritism”, or the validity of things that lay beyond the bounds of “scientific materialism”.

He also repeatedly accuses Darwin of guesswork without clarifying that never once did Darwin try to pass off guesswork as immutable fact (something that religious authorities, incidentally, have been doing for millennia). Living at a time when genes were still unknown, Darwin could naturally not have understood the precise workings of his own theory in the way that we understand it today. But like any scrupulous scientist, he expressed hope that future generations would debate over, expand on and modify his propositions in light of new discoveries (something that is in fact still happening).

As I read these meandering early chapters, I found myself wondering what Vrekhem was building up to. The answer is more complicated and fuzzy than can be dealt with in this space, but it involves the idea that man is a step along a chain of evolution from ape to superman and that he carries within himself the capacity to become a godlike being in his own right - presumably getting closer to God in the process. Anyone familiar with the writings of Sri Aurobindo (of whom Vrekhem has been a follower for decades) will recognise the influence of Aurobindo's "supramind" concept in these passages.

This leads Vrekhem to formulate vague-sounding sentences like “As long as what is real can only be approached from the outside, the reality cannot be known” and “Truth, to be known, has to be realised, lived, and as such is always an approach, conditioned by the earthly circumstances of the beings who dedicate their life to this kind of realisation.” And perhaps most tellingly: “If God is omniscient and omnipotent, the Divine Mind must be of a different order, it must be a supermind, which is a word, a label covering by definition something of which we can have no idea.”

Aha! Here at last we have that old sophism: God belongs to a different order of things, hence science cannot touch or understand him. “Real truth” can only be ascertained by “direct personal experience”. But what does this random prescription amount to exactly, and where might unquestioning faith in personal experience (as a foolproof universal formula for enlightenment) lead us? What if Sri Jabberwockee Singh were to sit in solitude for a period with his eyes closed, and by this process acquire the mystical realisation that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the root of all things and that the only way to gratify Him is to consume endless quantities of chilled beer until Oneness is attained? Will Vrekhem respect the veracity of my “direct personal experience”, and will he join me for that eternal drink?

I don’t mean to sound flippant – there is food for thought in Vrekhem’s book, for those who have the patience to sift it out. As he says:

If science is materialistic, it is because to us, beings incarnated in matter, only matter is directly perceptible to our senses, and only experiments with material objects are communicable and repeatable… [But] at fault is the fact that this materialism has been declared the exclusive metaphysical basis of the understanding of anything whatsoever … Our knowledge is incomplete. The knowledge of our world and ourselves is incomplete.

There is little in the above passage that any thinking person would wish to argue with. But at risk of exposing myself as a “shallow materialist”, I think good science must shoulder most of the burden of revealing further, demonstrable truths about our existence. If God does after all exist, He (or She, or It, or whatever floats your ark) can be held responsible for the fact that “only matter is directly perceptible to our senses”. Being a darned good scientist Himself, I think He would approve of His biggest-brained creations using rigorous, testable methods (while of course simultaneously trying to lead an altruistic and productive life) rather than following an approach that can be used to believe in anything they want to believe.

[Some posts on related subjects: Creationism, quotation marks and moose stew; Darwin the good novelist; Does He Know a Mother's Heart?; Down with atheist values; The God Delusion; Tales from the crematorium]