Filmi Geek

Katha (1983)

कथा

With Sparsh and Chashme buddoor, director Sai Paranjpe had already proved to me her great skill at presenting down-to-earth, real, sweet stories about believable characters, so I came to Katha ("fable") with high expectations.  I was not disappointed.

Rajaram Purshottam Joshi (Naseeruddin Shah) lives in a chawl, a kind of boarding house common in Bombay.  A hardworking office clerk, Rajaram is pleased when he is promoted to permanent status at his company, and looks forward to celebrating with his neighbor Sandhya (Deepti Naval), a charming girl with whom he is quite obviously smitten.  Soon Rajaram's childhood friend Vashudev (Farooq Shaikh) - he prefers the hip nickname "Washu" - arrives, and casts a spell over all the residents of the chawl - including Sandhya.  He even cons Rajaram's boss, landing himself a job as Rajaram's superior.  Rajaram sees through his friend's slick-talking charm, but with his gentle demeanor he is powerless to stop the juggernaut that is Washu in pursuit of something - or someone - that amuses him. 

Just as in Sparsh and Chashme buddoor, Sai Paranjpe shows her gentle touch in Katha, offering characters who are real, relatable, and engaging.  In particular, just like Chashme buddoor, Katha offers adorable humor without outlandishness, real-life believable situations that make the audience laugh because it's not difficult to project them onto ourselves and our neighbors.  The portrayal of life in the chawl is particularly charming and satisfying, and is itself a reason to see the movie for anyone interested in workaday Indian life.  The chawl is a tight-knit community is like a small village or, as one character in the film analogizes, a great joint family, in which individuals and families live in small flats centered on a common courtyard and shared water and other utilities.  There is a bitter barren woman who yells at children playing in the courtyard; a newlywed couple who rarely emerge from their rooms but whose giggles can be heard through the closed shutters; a disabled man who asks incessant favors from every visitor; a grandma who cooks yummy snacks for every young visitor she receives; a couple, whose son is a doctor in Canada, who love nothing more than to show off their richly appointed flat and their refrigerator and television; and more.  Paranjpe paints the inhabitants of this microcosm with great vividness and affection, and their interactions are tremendous fun to watch. 

The enjoyable bustle of the chawl forms a delightful backdrop for the interactions of the main players (they even serve as a Greek chorus of sorts, especially in the film's wonderful songs).  The principals' performances are all executed without flaw, especially those of Naseeruddin Shah and Farooq Shaikh.  Naseeruddin Shah is at his droopy, sad-sacky best; Rajaram wears his frustration physically as Washu runs circles around him, projecting a confused and adorable mixture of disdain and admiration for his friend's antics.  And Farooq Shaikh nails Washu's puff-chested confidence to perfection.  In Chashme buddoor, Farooq's character was charming in part because despite being marginally smarter and more competent than his friends, he was still mostly a dork.   The same is true here, with a faintly sinister edge since Washu is, at base, a con-man.  But the joke which Paranjpe lets the audience in on - a joke that escapes Washu - is that Washu is nothing more than a small-time con, not half the player he thinks is.  For example, while Washu both cons and cuckolds Rajaram's boss, it's established early on that the boss is a weak target, not a very bright guy to begin with.  The result is a sense of desperation and cheapness about Washu, as if he's conned his own low-watt self right along with the easy marks he chooses.   

And so, as in the titular fable that provides the film's bookends - the story of the tortoise and the hare - Katha ends with the satisfying feeling that the wheel will turn and both Washu and Rajaram will get what they deserve from the universe.  And we, the audience, get a warm, delightful, and utterly charming film, another very, very fine feather in Sai Paranjpe's cap. 

Mandi (1983)

मंडी

Shyam Benegal films often explore broad social themes through a closely focused lens, in detailed studies of relationships among a handful of people.  Mandi ("market") is broader in scope, featuring a large number of characters whose relationships form an intricate web in which concepts like loyalty, morality, and duplicity are tangled.  A wry film with a healthy dose of black comedy, Mandi presents a sarcastic look at the tension between venerable but questionable traditions and modernity in its various forms. 

Rukmini bai (Shabana Azmi) is a madam who runs her brothel with a stern and demanding hand.  Aided by her melancholy houseboy Dhungrus (Naseeruddin Shah), Rukmini is protective of her girls, especially the brothel's virginal prize, Zeenat (Smita Patil), who is permitted to spend her days practicing her music and kathak instead of submitting to the kotha's more lascivious customers.  When a sanctimonious moralist, Shanti Devi (Gita Siddharth), flexes her political muscle in an attempt to drive the brothel out of town, Rukmini turns to her landlord Mr. Gupta (Kulbushan Kharbanda) for assistance, but finds in him only a conditional ally.  Caught in the crossfire is the town's mayor, Agrawal (Saeed Jaffrey), who is under the powerful Shanti Devi's thumb but also beholden to Rukmini, lest she air his own dirty laundry.  Rounding out the vast network of players is a terrified mute girl (Sreela Majumdar) married under pretext and sold by her new husband to Rukmini; a dirty-minded photographer (Om Puri) who prowls around trying to snap naked pictures of the tawaifs; a police-wala who does his "night duty" at the brothel; Agrawal's son, engaged to Gupta's daughter but madly in love with Zeenat; Shanti Devi's beleaguered assistant (Pankaj Kapur); a crazed and pious hermit (Amrish Puri) who shows Rukmini how to extract wishes from a variety of holy objects; and all the girls of the brothel (including Soni Razdan and Ila Arun), with their varying levels of satisfaction and loyalty to Rukmini.

That's an awful lot to squeeze into a film, and the squeezing does, to some degree, compress Benegal's characters into two dimensions.  The outstanding talent of the cast offers some compensation, though, allowing each character to be vividly rendered despite the tendency toward archetypy.  The darkly comic tone of the entire film enhances the vividness of the characterizations.  Without it, the film would collapse under the weight of its themes.  Delivering the tale with archness, teetering on the brink of tumbling over the top, allows the actors a breadth of expression that helps them pop out of the screen.  Amrish Puri's bug-eyed ascetic, Saeed Jaffrey's nervously buffoonish aristocrat, Naseeruddin Shah's droopy drunk - each plays to the back of the house in a departure from Benegal's usual hyper-realist style, yet the broad style is precisely what renders each of them memorable. 

Shabana Azmi's turn is the broadest of them all, and her performance is deliciously physical and yet still evoactively subtle.  Rukmini flits between angry snarls and obsequious smiles at a moment's notice, one minute dripping with maternal concern and the next barking orders like a foreman.  And she cannot resist a mirror, interrupting herself often, whether mid-tirade, mid-sob, or even mid-prayer, to smooth a stray strand of hair.  If there is an overarching mood to the changeable Rukmini, it's that she never for a moment displays an ounce of sincerity.  Indeed, most of the characters in Mandi are somehow scheming, double-crossing, or working both sides against the middle.  From the brothel girls whose loyalty to Rukmini is fragile and fleeting, to Zeenat who is not nearly as ingenuous as she seems, and even to the pompous Shanti Devi who (we learn from a throw-away line of Rukmini's) is having an affair with her own son-in-law, each of the characters is concealing a card or two.  And it is this ubiquitous duplicity that gives Mandi its entertaining edge -  it's hard not to laugh watching these colorful characters squirm, hedge, and lie through their teeth. 

Mandi's final scene is a little bit puzzling, but the ultimate message may be that degradation is in the eye of the beholder, and that perhaps the concealed hypocrisy of those who call themselves modern and upright is just as oppressive as the ancient traditions of the kotha.  Whatever the true moral of this amorality tale may be, though, it is a terrific film. 

Vanaja (2007)

Vanaja is a simple and sometimes lovely Telugu film, shot on a shoestring budget by a debutant director.  Though rough around the edges, it has a few moments of sparkle that make it well worth seeing. 

In a fishing village in Andhra Pradesh, fifteen-year-old Vanaja (Mamatha Bhukya) goes to school, giggles with her friends, and looks after her father.  After her father's  hard luck and drunkenness leaves him deeply in debt, Vanaja takes work in the household of the local landowner, Rama Devi (Urmila Dammannagari).  Rama Devi was, in her youth, the region's premier performer of traditional Kuchipudi dance, and Vanaja boldly and stubbornly prevails upon Rama Devi to teach her.  She proves reasonably talented, and she, Rama Devi, and Rama Devi's other servant, the elderly Radhamma (Krishnamma Gundimalla) fall into a happy routine for a while.  The balance is upset with the return from America of Rama Devi's strapping son Shekhar (Karan Singh), who, Rama Devi plans, will stand in a local election.   Shekhar is attracted to Vanaja, and Vanaja is fascinated by him.  But when a chain of events makes Shekhar resentful and suspicious of Vanaja, he takes decisive action that irreparably changes her life.   

Vanaja's director, Rajnesh Domalpalli, cast Andhra Pradesh villagers rather than professional actors in his film.  The effect is both the film's charm and its weakness.  The characters' raw authenticity and unpracticed emotions are engaging.  At the same time, though, the young Mamatha Bhukya is not quite up to the task of portraying Vanaja's shifting and confused motives, with the result that even her boldest actions sometimes feel detached or unmotivated.   Still, the film is often charming, and its best moments are driven by Urmila Dammannagari's performance as Rama Devi - she, though as amateur an actor as Mamatha Bhukya, is a mature woman, and seems able to draw on her lifetime of experience to make Rama Devi salty, sweet, stern, and soft, all in a delicate balance. 

Indeed, the relationship between Rama Devi and Vanaja is the most compelling facet of the film.  It operates on many levels:  master-servant, guru-pupil, and even mother-daughter - Vanaja's mother, we learn, died when she was very young, and Rama Devi appears to have no daughter of her own.  Sparks fly most when these disparate levels intersect, and Rama Devi is challenged by the clash of the proprieties of a high-caste landowner and the tenderness she feels for the girl.  The growth of the relationship between Vanaja and Radhamma, the elder servant in Rama Devi's household, also traverses a touching arc.  The result is that while Vanaja is in some ways a film about the gulf that separates high and low castes, it is even more than that a film about how the bonds between women, and the timeless universality of women's experiences, transcend those societal divides. 

The other delight of Vanaja is Vanaja's dancing.  As her lessons begin she is awkward and unsteady on her feet; she develops in grace and expressiveness as the film progresses, and her performances are a lovely counterpoint to the bleaker turns taken by the storyline.  Vanaja tries on many different roles as she feels her way through her traumatic adolescence - child, woman, seductress, mother - but the devotional roles she plays in traditional dance seem a respite for her from the painful complexity of her daily life. 

Ek doctor ki maut (1991)

एक डाक्टर की मौत

Some people dismiss Indian art films as ponderous and boring.  I'm usually an enthusiastic cheerleader for art cinema - the more variety of films available the better.  If I wanted to convince a mainstream film-lover that art films weren't ponderous, though, Ek doctor ki maut ("Death of a doctor") would not be the place to start.  This tale of a maverick scientist going up against the establishment just falls flat. 

Dipankar Roy (Pankaj Kapur) is a physician who practices in a government hospital.  He's not that interested in clinical medicine, though - his passion is his research on a vaccine for leprosy.  He works into the wee hours - to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Seema (Shabana Azmi) - in a tiny makeshift lab in his home.  Huddled amongst the caged lab animals, dusty reference volumes, and burbling beakers, Roy toils away night after night, his work punctuated by verbal sparring matches with Seema.  One day he has a breakthrough - he has discovered that females inoculated with his compound give birth to offspring immune to leprosy, and what's more, the compound has a secondary effect of reversing certain kinds of sterility in females.   His results are published by an eager science reporter (Irrfan Khan), but the reception in the scientific community is chillier than Roy anticipated.  Specialists in leprosy are skeptical of his findings, and gynecologists are incensed by his speculation that the compound may treat sterility.  Instead of getting a fair hearing for his work, Roy is shut down by his superiors in the health ministry, cut off from his work, forbidden to share it with the international medical community, and transferred to a remote village. 

That sounds like a pretty good story, and having summarized it just now I am struggling to understand why the film in execution is so gratingly dull.  Part of the problem lies in script and direction.  The film is shot in a hyper-realistic, hyper-literal style; there is no artistic camera work, no symbolism, nothing to layer the dialogue or add depth or allegory to the events unfolding on the screen.  It is more like reading a newspaper article than watching a piece of cinematic art.  And, like a newspaper article, Ek doctor ki maut presents its events in words - Roy explains his results to his friends; Seema orates her frustrations with her marriage, puts her threat to leave Roy in a letter, and then expounds, in words, on why she decides to stay.  All the verbiage smothers the lovely, subtle performances of both Pankaj Kapur and Shabana Azmi, the latter especially; she seems to want to show Seema's conflict in body language in the kind of performance that she can give better than anyone, but the script won't let her stop talking long enough to do it. 

Stylistic matters aside, as a former scientist, I was nonplussed by the film's treatment of the process of scientific discovery and review.  In the U.S., when scientists choose to present their work via the press rather than in a peer-reviewed publication,  they frequently meet with a skeptical response - not without reason, as illustrated by Fleischmann and Pons's now infamous announcement of cold fusion.  So I don't perceive any great injustice in the response in the medical community's circumspect reaction to Roy's self-published results.  This leaves me somewhat at a loss to interpret the message of Ek doctor ki maut.  Perhaps the practice of scientific research is different in India from my own experience, so that in the film's context it's clearer just what is being criticized.  To my eye, though, other researchers are justified in viewing Roy with some suspicion; he appears to be more eccentric than not, puttering in a makeshift homemade laboratory, forgoing  peer review, and lashing out in anger at any who dare challenge him. 

Ek doctor ki maut is not all bad; I've mentioned the delicacy of the actors' performances, and there were a few excellent moments shining in the film's bland substrate.  In one excellent sequence, Roy steals Seema's sterno cooker out from under her when he runs out of propane for his Bunsen burner; later, he predictably scolds her for failing to cook his dinner, and the skirmish is a poignant microcosm of their entire relationship.  And in the closest thing to a character arc there is in the film, Roy later demonstrates a growing awareness of his reliance on Seema and her need for some reciprocation.   This is best shown in several tender interactions between  them, one during her visit after his exile to village practice, and another in the film's final scene.  If the rest of the film had been handled as delicately, Ek doctor ki maut might have felt less like two hours of squandered potential. 

(Ek doctor ki maut is available for download at Jaman.  Also please see this post at Sounds Like Power for a more Shabana-centric look at the film.)

36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)

Taken at face value, this quiet film by Aparna Sen is a melancholy tale about a lonely woman facing her twilight years.  It has a clear allegorical reading, however, that is a forceful commentary on the role of the British in post-Independence India.

Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendal) is a mousy, quiet Anglo-Indian woman.  Living in 1970s Calcutta, she teaches Shakespeare to inattentive little girls, occasionally visits her senile brother (Geoffrey Kendal) in a nearby nursing home, and returns home to her tiny flat and the company of her cat, Sir Toby.  One day Violet encounters one of her former students, Nandita (Debashree Roy) and Nandita's boyfriend Samaresh (Dhritiman Chatterjee).  Eager to reminisce - and starved for companionship - Violet invites the young couple to her home for tea, and they politely, if reluctantly, agree.  In Violet's flat, Samaresh smells opportunity - the flat would offer a perfect, discreet hideaway for afternoon trysts with Nandita.  Nandita explains to Violet that while Samaresh is a writer, he finds it difficult to concentrate on poetry in his family's crowded home, and Violet is delighted to offer him the use of her flat.  Nandita and Samaresh frolic there every day, taking care to be dressed and presentable when Violet returns from school.  Often they serve Violet her tea or take her out for walks in the city, and their daily company cheers and energizes her.   It seems a very genuine and tender friendship, but Samaresh and Nandita see it quite differently from Violet.

At its face, 36 Chowringhee Lane is a very sympathetic tale.  Violet Stoneham is a lovable character, and her loneliness will resonate with anyone who has ever thought about getting older and being alone.  Her increasing isolation and marginalization is poignant.  And the tenderness that Nandita and Samaresh show her - at least while it appears sincere - and the warmth and joy in her response to it is touching. 

But the film seethes with symbols suggesting that its real message is a strong critique of the Anglo presence in India:  You are dated, you have outlived your usefulness; you aren't wanted or needed, so get lost.  The young couple uses her while it's convenient, but as soon as they have the opportunity to take off on their own, they do so.  The new principal at Violet's school - the school's first Indian principal, we are told - cuts back on her course load, assigning her a dreary grammar class while a new young teacher takes over the Shakespeare; even teaching quintessentially English subjects, Violet's English perspective is no longer needed.  Violet's visits to her brother are particularly unsubtle; a relic of the colonial era, he is now weak, helpless and disoriented, and Violet must repeatedly explain to him that the Raj is over, that India is independent. 

These two levels of meaning make 36 Chowringhee Lane a full meal, engaging, poignant, and thought-provoking.  The performances are smooth and natural - unlike some of Aparna Sen's later films (such as 15 Park Avenue and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer), in which her actors sometimes fumble stiffly with English dialogue.   The result is a satisfying film, and if it is a little bit sad for the increasingly irrelevant Violet Stoneham, it also portrays a confidence in the rising of an independent India.

Dharavi (1992)

धारावी

This gritty film by Sudhir Mishra offers a window into life in the titular Bombay slum.  It's harrowing yet compelling, and though its focus is a depressing tale of defeat and loss, it somehow achieves a hopeful tone at its conclusion. 

Rajkaran (Om Puri) is a cab-driver living in a tidy, one-room Dharavi shack with his mother (Anjana), his wife Kumud (Shabana Azmi), and their son.  Rajkaran yearns for success in business and a better life; he is gathering funds to buy a small cloth-dying factory.  When one of his partners pulls out unexpectedly, Rajkaran reluctantly accepts a loan from the local underworld boss Tiravi, whose goons are suspected to be behind any number of neighborhood beatings and murders.  Now indebted to Tiravi, Rajkaran finds himself drawn into ever more shady dealings, to the despair of Kumud, whose brother dared to stand up to Tiravi's tyrrany and was murdered for it.   Kumud finds solace in the peaceful company of her first husband Shankar, with whom she had parted ways years before, and who has returned to Dharavi helpless and partially paralyzed after suffering a stroke.  On the verge of losing his livelihood and alienating his family, Rajkaran grows ever more desperate.

What is most fascinating about Dharavi is its slice-of-life look at Bombay's slums.  In small but vivid details as well as in big-picture themes the film illuminates this world that is so different from my own.  The slum neighborhood itself is like a village, where everyone is all up in everyone else's business - you cannot keep secrets, and you can't cross the thugs and heavies who rule over the place; there is violence almost daily.  Kumud engages in a daily struggle with the local corrupt water-mongers; they illegally tap the municipal water supply - there are no official municipal services in Dharavi - but they won't let Kumud take more than one bucketful without a fight.  But there's also a strong sense of community; women gather in the streets to make pappadums and gossip, and in the evenings, everyone gathers in a little alley movie theater to watch escapist movies starring the likes of Anil Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit.  Rajkaran has romantic dreams in which he and Madhuri (who plays herself) roll around in mustard fields, he confiding his troubles to her, she confessing her love for him. 

Rajkaran and Kumud live in a tiny one-room corrugated shack, reminiscent of the shantytown dwellings I saw in the South African film Tsotsi.  But Kumud keeps it tidy and neat; there is a pretty little rug on the floor and potted plants on the sill, and other small comforts that can help preserve one's sanity and dignity when living in squalor.  Kumud works in a small oppressive tailor shop, like the old sweatshops of the lower east side tenements in New York, working a sewing machine while sweat beads on her forehead.  As hard as their life is, though, Kumud seems to manage it - early on, she questions why Rajkaran isn't satisfied, why he has to try to push for more - she doesn't seem, at least at this point in the movie, to share her husband's eagerness to get out of Dharavi.  But while his ambition might be inspiring, it enrages him when his industrial dreams begin to crumble, and his rage drives away everyone around him.  The message of the film is therefore a little ambiguous - should one just accept one's lot and leave well enough alone, or should one try to make something better for one's self and family?  The film resolves this ambiguity for the best by allowing Rajkaran to emerge from his trials bruised and set back, but not defeated.

Rajkaran dreaming of Madhuri:

And, a look at Shabana - I'll post a few more over at Sounds Like Power.

Dharavi is available for download from Jaman.com.

Antareen (1994)

Antareen ("confined"), a quiet and literary Bengali film by Mrinal Sen, examines a peculiar relationship that arises between two profoundly isolated individuals.  They connect and affect one another, in a demonstration that the effects of human contact can traverse both distance and anonymity.

A young writer (Anjan Dutt) arrives for an extended stay at the isolated, palatial home of a friend, who has given him the run of the house while he and his family are away.  Completely alone - save for the occasional company of a servant and the servant's grandson - the writer settles in for late-night, tea-fueled writing sessions.  One night the telephone rings, and though the other end is silent, the caller rings again the next day, and soon the young writer engages nightly in cryptic, languid conversations with the woman at the other end of the line.  She is a rich man's mistress (Dimple Kapadia) whose lover has apparently lost interest in her.  Still, he keeps her in a luxurious high-rise apartment, and also supports the rest of her family, from whom she is estranged.  The young woman is lonely and depressed; she never leaves the apartment, and reaches out only to random strangers on the telephone.  Their conversations, and the effect those conversations exert on each of them, is the focus of the film.

Though the film's pace is deliberate at best, it is intriguing enough as it unfolds, especially as the details of the woman's life come gradually into focus.  Through the woman's conversations with the writer, she slowly overcomes her inertia and begins to pull the pieces of her life together.  For the writer's part, in the beginning his interest in her appears somewhat mercenary, seeing her cynically, as grist for his writing.  But he comes to truly care for her, as we are shown, for example, by his distress when she fails to call for several days.  The dynamics of their relationship are constantly shifting.  He has the power to reach her emotionally, offering observations that strike close to home.  But for most of the film she holds the ultimate control over their interactions - she has his telephone number, while he does not have hers.  The moment when she relinquishes that control marks a clear turning point in their interaction, and by the end of the film both of them have been thoroughly transformed by the experience.

What is less clear is the statement that Mrinal Sen intends to make with the film.  It may be a statement about the randomness of human relationships, how we can be touched by input from completely unexpected and even virtually unknown sources.  I can't help but feel that if I were acquainted with Bengali literature I would have a better sense of the film's message, as it contains numerous explicit references - and probably even more implicit ones - to the short stories of Rabindranath Tagore, among others.  Without that background, Antareen is more of a mildly interesting curiosity than a truly compelling film. 

Antareen is available for download at Jaman.com.  The film is less than 90 minutes long; Dimple Kapadia is as pouty and lovely as ever in it; and the download is free - so if you are a fan of Dimple's it's definitely worth a look. 

Maya (2001)

Watching Maya made me think of spirited discussions I have had on the BollyWHAT? forums about the films of Deepa Mehta, like Fire and Water.  Some critics charge that Mehta's films are exploitative and manipulative - that they pander to a patronizing Western art-house audience by portraying India as a backward, unsophisticated, vicious and superstitious monolith.  I strongly disagree with this assessment of Deepa Mehta's films  - I find them nuanced, allegorical, and rich.  If I ever have seen a film that merited this criticism, though, it's Maya.

Sanjay (Nikhil Yadav) and his cousin Maya (Nitya Shetty) are carefree village kids.  They spend their days creating trouble, as kids will, throwing rocks and stealing sweets.  They are gently scolded, but clearly loved, by Sanjay's mother (Mita Vasisht) and father (Anant Nag).  Their life is idyllic and warm.  But when Maya reaches puberty, everything changes in the space of just a few days.  The family heads to the neighboring village of Maya's parents to prepare for a mysterious ceremony marking Maya's transition to womanhood.  Maya, who only dimly understands what happening to her, is told that she is no longer a child, and discouraged from her familiar play with Sanjay.  Sanjay, with even less understanding, chafes against the separation from his playmate and acts out, angering his father.  Then, when the day of the ritual arrives, over the terrified protests of Sanjay, Maya is subjected to a trauma that is truly shocking and horrible.    

It is shocking and horrible - but perhaps only tenuously related to any real practice.   We are told by a title card at the very end of the film that no particular practice has been portrayed; instead, the film is loosely inspired by a variety of religious practices that may or may not still be in currency.  Indeed, the film is vague about both time and place, leaving me wondering what its point was supposed to be.  All we are shown is an exaggeratedly horrific abuse of an innocent child taking place somewhere in India, amongst a village full of adults complicit in the horror.  No one, not even a token character - except a powerless small child who doesn't even understand what is going on - stands up and speaks against the horrors that are presented as accepted and commonplace religious ritual, or even questions them in the slightest. 

The result is a film without depth, without allegory, without a message; a film that serves only to shock and disturb its audience with some vaguely presented notion of Indian village life and unspecified, mysterious rituals performed in the name of Hindu gods.  The nature of the ritual is kept mysterious until the film's climax, and no explanation or justification is offered - what is the rationale behind the practice?  Are all girls subjected to it?  If so, why?  If not, how are girls selected - why is Maya selected?  The complete absence of information or context reinforces the impression that the film's principal goal is to shock rather than to enlighten.  Maya could have had depth; it could have made a compelling point about the status of women in rural India, about progress that has been made and steps that still need to be taken.  Instead, it's just nasty and shocking and not a whole lot else.  It's a terrible waste of so much potential - a waste a talented cast, especially the child actors; a waste of a realistic (up to a point) glimpse of village life; a waste of some very lovely cinematography.  Maya is a truly disappointing film.

Maya is available for download at Jaman.com, but I can't say I'd recommend it. 
 

Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959)

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy films are considered by many to be the crowning achievement not just of Satyajit Ray himself, but of all of Indian film.  Apur Sansar (The world of Apu) is the final installment of the story, and I saw it without having seen the first two chapters, which recount events in Apu's childhood and adolescence.   

Apur Sansar picks up at Apu's graduation from school.  Living in a grungy Calcutta tenement beside the railroad tracks and barely scraping his rent together, Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) aspires to be a great novelist, and we learn early on that he has had some success at it, selling a short story to a local periodical.  On a vacation with his practical and grounded friend Kulu - ostensibly for Kulu's cousin's wedding - Apu makes a rash and heroic decision that changes his life forever.  The bridegroom succumbs to mental illness, and Kulu prevails on Apu to take his place and marry Kulu's cousin Aparna (Sharmila Tagore, here only about fourteen years old).  Apu and Aparna settle into a spare life in Apu's dingy flat, and for a while they enjoy a delicious period of newlywed bliss.  Then tragedy strikes, though, and Apu, unmoored and confused, struggles to recover his bearings. 

Apur Sansar's story covers a period of six or seven years in Apu's life, and is therefore necessarily episodic in nature.  Indeed, the film may fairly be characterized as a series of beautifully shot, poignant moments.  The dialogue is sparse and one is left to fill in the blanks, to guess at what the characters are thinking and feeling.  But the direction and performances are both subtle and expressive, so the emotional content is very real, even if the viewer must supply it.   In one early scene, Apu visits a pharmaceutical factory looking for work.  His face droops in self-doubt as he realizes that he lacks the constitution for monotonous physical labor.  Later, a series of warm, tender scenes conveys the quiet happiness of Apu and Aparna's married life.  In every scene, emotions play subtly across the actors' faces and evocative symbols - a wounded animal, a torn curtain, an inkblot - do much of the film's heavy lifting. 

I feel somewhat out of my league reviewing Apur Sansar, which, despite the many ways in which it is fundamentally an Indian story, reads more like a European art film than an Indian film.  I don't know a thing about European art films, and while I enjoyed Apur Sansar and was moved by it, I don't know that I fully understood or appreciated it.  Each shot is loaded with complex symbolism that is rich and even apparently contradictory at times.  At the movie's conclusion I immediately wished I could watch it again to give more thought to those symbols.  Instead, here I am with my rather impressionistic and incoherent commentary.  For something more, please visit my friend Amit and read his thoughts.

Khamosh (1985)

ख़ामोश

Khamosh ("silent"), a 1985 mystery thriller by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, is clever, self-referential, satirical, and thoroughly entertaining. 

Shabana Azmi and Amol Palekar - playing themselves - are at an idyllic mountain resort with a film crew, shooting a thriller.  When their co-star Soni Razdan (also playing herself) turns up dead, the crew and the local police assume it is a suicide.  Then a taciturn CID inspector (Naseeruddin Shah) turns up and begins his own investigation.  He is convinced that Soni's death was no suicide, and as he learns of the secrets and feuds that seethe among the cast and crew, his eye shifts from suspect to suspect - the producer Dayal (Ajit Vachhani), publicly humiliated by Soni; the mother of a young starlet competing with Soni for a part in Dayal's next film; Dayal's drug-addled brother Kuku (Pankaj Kapur), desperately in love with Soni, and others.  As the body count grows and the red herrings proliferate, it quickly becomes apparent that few of this rag-tag bunch are who they appear to be.

The plot is a straight-up murder mystery, quite Agatha Christie in feel, since it features a tense group, confined to close quarters, criss-crossed by passions and rivalries.  What makes Khamosh different from other exemplars of the whodunit genre is that it is stuffed with in-jokes, references, and homages.  It pokes fun at slapdashery in Bollywood filmmaking, when the director spontaneously decides to rewrite the script and orders the dialogue-writer to produce new scenes for the actors to shoot the next day.  Vidhu Vinod Chopra pokes fun at himself with a running joke of the director repeatedly saying, "This is just a thriller!  Wait until my next film!"  And the actors poke fun at themselves as well - the Shabana Azmi of Khamosh, for example, sleepwalks, reads stories about herself in the gossip rags, and declares that she "can't understand politics."  Khamosh also acknowledges its debt to the films that went before it; one standout scene pays explicit homage to the shower scene in Psycho with a reference to The Godfather for good measure.

Having the actors Shabana, Amol Palekar, and Soni Razdan play themselves - rather than playing fictitious movie stars with made-up names - was a stroke of absolute genius that added a self-referential layer to the film, lifting beyond the realm of cute, entertaining murder mystery.  The film operates on several layers at once, playing with the viewer's sense of movie-reality and suspension of disbelief.  I am accustomed to seeing Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi together on screen, but here there is a strange and pleasant disconnect; he is in character, and addresses her as "Shabana ji."  The loopiness also alters the viewer's expectations about what can happen to the characters and what they can do.  It's difficult to explain the full scope of this effect on my experience of the film without giving away too many of the plot details!  But it was very enjoyable.

The sleuth at the center of the story, Naseeruddin Shah's Bakhshi, was entertainingly fallible - far from the flawless master of deduction, he jumped to conclusions and acted rashly as frequently as he showed investigative insight.  And the story itself was sufficiently twisty and surprising to sustain the suspense.  My friend Amit points out that Khamosh suffers from a few plot holes.  To a certain extent, I think he's right - it rare that a script with complex twists can stand up to detailed scrutiny.  But I barely noticed these small weaknesses on first viewing, because I  was just having too much fun enjoying the ride.  It may be "just a thriller," but it's a solid, suspenseful, and thoroughly entertaining film.