Filmi Geek

Filling some gaps: Mini-reviews of Banaras, Slumdog Millionaire, Jaanwar aur insaan

With very few exceptions, this site contains a post about every Indian movie or India-related movie I have seen in the last eight years, even if just a paragraph or two.  Every once in a while, though, a movie slips through the cracks, and I neglect to write about it.  This offends my sense of order and completeness. 

And yet, for a variety of reasons, the chances are slim I will ever write a full review of some of these films.   So, here are brief notes that will fill in three gaps that have dogged me for months or years.

 

Banaras (2006)

Haay bhagwaan, this movie is awful.  It is the kind of awful I would have relished shredding in a full review, and I very much wish I had done so at the time I watched it.  But for whatever reason I did not get around to that, and I just can't bring myself to view it again as I would need to do to treat it properly.  Now, I remember little save the visceral shuddering sensation it induced, and the sense of embarrassment for the actors one feels when watching a truly horrendous work of cinema. 

Banaras, as I recall, is a dreadful, ham-fisted attempt to weave profound religious philosophy into the filmi archetypes of an inter-caste love story.  I can't say for sure that this idea is doomed from the outset; perhaps it has the potential to be a fine idea, and the film's near-unwatchability is due to irrecoverable flaws in execution.  Most of the film's cast is competent; Urmila Matondkar stars as a philosophical Brahmin woman, Raj Babbar and Dimple Kapadia play her parents, and Naseeruddin Shah makes an appearance as the enlightened mentor of the low-caste young man (Ashmit Patel) that Urmila's character falls in love with.  This Ashmit Patel is thoroughly outclassed in this company, and his stiff, breathy, awful performance contributes in no small measure to the cringeworthiness of this terrible movie. 

Having now been to the titular city in the years since I endured this film, I might at least enjoy its mystical setting.  There is something remarkable about being on the Ganga in Banaras; one can feel the holiness of the place in the collective sincerity of the pilgrims that flock there to worship.  But I would not risk desecrating those memories by superimposing this embarrassingly clumsy film on them.  It's just not worth it.

 

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

I saw this movie when it came out, but I didn't write about it right away, and after a week or two it seemed so much ink had been spilled about it that I had nothing to add to the greater discourse.  Now, more than four years later, I feel much the same.  It is a good film, tightly scripted, well-acted, manipulative in all the right ways, entertaining and moving (*).  But as a western movie by a western director, it raises issues that make me uncomfortable, issues I am not sure how to address. 

I don't think there is anything wrong, a priori, with people telling stories set inside cultures other than their own.  I do not think such stories are necessarily exploitative or colonial or presumptuous, although many are all of these things.  I do not even know whether Slumdog Millionaire errs in these respects, or whether its director Danny Boyle has treaded carefully enough to paint a legitimate picture.  But in a sense, it doesn't matter.  Western audiences with little knowledge of India will draw the conclusions they draw, regardless of how much care has gone into crafting the story. 

The portrayal of Bombay life  in Slumdog Millionaire may be faithful in some respects, but it is a faithful representation of only one of Bombay's multiplicity of truths, much less the truths of all of India.  Of course, no movie can explore all realities at once.  But there is an unfortunate tendency among western audiences without nuanced knowledge of India's many cultures to extrapolate from what they see in a movie like Slumdog Millionaire.  It is because of movies like Slumdog Millionaire that my mother accused me of neglecting the "real India" when I chose to take a walk on my own through Kala Ghoda and Fort rather than accompany her on a tour of Dharavi. 

After her visit to Dharavi, I showed my mother Dhobi Ghat (**), and I hope it helped her understand that the "real India" is in fact many real Indias, a layered and intertwined complex that cannot be experienced in an afternoon, whether one chooses to spend that afternoon in a poor or an affluent part of town.  But none of this means  categorically that movies about India shouldn't be made by western filmmakers and marketed widely in the west.  It has to be better for westerners to learn something about India, even if it is an oversimplified, undernuanced something, than to learn nothing at all.  Me, I would rather watch Indian movies made for Indians than western attempts at capturing Indian authenticities.  What I learn from, I suppose, is eavesdropping on the stories Indians tell each other.   But if even a small fraction of the westerners who filled theaters watching Slumdog Millionaire was inspired to go learn more, then the movie has already done more than a mainstream entertainer has any responsibility to do.

(*) I've been half-watching it while writing this, and I have to note that I am not finding it as well-acted or as moving the second time through.

(**) Once before our trip I had tried to show her Dharavi but she didn't get into it.

 

Jaanwar aur insaan (1972)

Shashi Kapoor made a lot of movies.  His work ethic is legendary, but he could not have been terribly discriminating in his choice of scripts.  The truly worst movies he ever made are probably - blessedly - forgotten, tucked away in dusty cans in some moldy storage locker in Bombay, never to be transferred to digital medium.  But others of his clunkers do remain.  And some Shashi Kapoor fans are devoted enough to be as undiscriminating in our choice of films to watch as he was in his choice of films to act in. 

When I stumbled across Jaanwar aur insaan on YouTube, I knew I had to bring it to Beth's attention.  In addition to Shashi Kapoor, it offered Rakhee, another favorite of hers.  I briefly scanned the file for subtitles.  It didn't have them, but I could tell it wouldn't matter; the scenes I watched had little dialogue, just Shashi Kapoor beating up bad guys and Shashi Kapoor stalking a tiger. This was a movie we simply had to see.

When I watched the movie in the company of both Beth and Amrita, we were not fully prepared for how dreadful it would actually be.  It starts out promisingly, with terrific overture music over the opening credits and legitimately impressive wildlife photography.  It treats you to some of the more hilarious fight choreography that Hindi films offer so richly, and Meena (Rakhee) in a memorabe sun-yellow pantsuit.  Make no mistake - the movie is stupid.  The plot, such as it is, consists mostly of Shekhar (Shashi) stalking a tiger which he remains unable to catch for much of his adult life.  There is also the obligatory "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" sort of story element, whereby tension is caused by Meena's father having murdered Rakhee's father. But for a while the stupidness is fun, at least when enjoyed with a like-minded friend or two.

Jaanwar aur insaan takes a decided turn for the WTF when Shekhar and Meena's child enters the picture.  Shekhar contends for father of the year in his approach to teaching his spoiled, miscreant child a lesson:  He takes the boy to the wilderness, ties him to a tree, and leaves him there to be sniffed and nuzzled by wild animals.  This is how Shekhar finally defeats the tiger that has troubled him for years: using his own son as bait.  The loyal Shashi Kapoor fan who suffers through this movie may wish that it was she tied to that tree instead. 

Life of Pi (2012)

The long-standing convention in the movies is that the camera is a truthful, omniscient, unbiased observer. What we see on the screen is what really happens within the movie's canonical universe. Every once in a while, though, a movie challenges this idea, offering the audience the pleasaingly dissonant experience of realizing that the camera has been lying to us. 

This is a fascinating idea space for a movie to explore, the unreliability of subjective narrative.  The TV show The X-Files did this often, showing supernatural or alien phemonena which seem "real" to the camera's eye, until one notices that no character save Mulder is witness to them.   Mystery-thrillers like To Die For and The Usual Suspects allow the camera to illustrate deceptive stories fabricated by characters as if those stories really happened within the movie's reality.

Ang Lee's Life of Pi takes the unreliable narrator idea a step further.  Its unreliable narrative is not just a plot twist for thrilling, surprise-ending effect. Instead, the notion of unreliable narrative forms the central allegorical premise of the movie.  Its narrator, Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi (Irrfan Khan), tells two versions of his terrible experiences following a shipwreck.  When his listener (Rafe Spall) asks which story is true, Pi invites him to choose the truth that he finds more satisfying.  "And so it is with God," Pi concludes, underscoring the message that religious narratives, too, provide a multiplicity of tellings of the same underlying tale, none more inherently correct than any other, even if they are mutually inconsistent.  Life of Pi transforms unreliable narrative from a bug into a feature; it is not a reason to distrust conflicting worldviews, but rather a reason to embrace and even cherish them.

Pi himself, as a boy, was driven by the simultaneous experience of concurrent, conflicting narratives; he considered himself a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian all at once.  But the story that the adult Pi tells is not just an allegory for reconciling religious dogma.  It represents our experience of self, our power to choose our own interpretetations of the truths that swirl around us and within us.  In one version of his tale, Pi is stranded on a lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger.  Nature takes its course, and before long only Pi and the tiger remain, staking out their respective spaces for survival.  In the other, darker version of Pi's story, the zebra becomes a wounded Japanese sailor, the orangutan his mother, and the hyena a cruel, murderous ship's cook.  The tiger, of course, is Pi himself, a wild, raw facet of Pi that both threatens him and keeps him alive as he drifts over the ocean.  (It is perhaps the movie's only misstep that it makes this mapping between animals and humans explicit, and fails to give the audience the chance to draw our own allegorical conclusions.)

In the fanciful, allegorical truth in which Pi shares his lifeboat with an untamed tiger, Pi faces and acknowledges his animal demons, understands them, and even though he neither befriends nor assimilates them, is able to let them go once his ordeal is over.  This is a very satisfying truth indeed, not just because the story is more fun and magical, but because of what it says about human strength, resilience, instict, and power.  And while Pi invites the listener to choose between the two stories, Ang Lee stacks the deck in favor of this version.  It is rendered in breathtaking and magical detail.  The visuals are not merely realistic; they are super-realistic, extra-realistic, beyond realistic.  The Pacific waters range from preternaturally glasslike calm to wild, towering, black waves. Luminscent sea creatures light Pi's lonely nights with wonder. Cheerful, chirping meerkats scoot and swarm across the brambles of a living island.  The gruesome tale of the cook and Pi's  mother, however, Lee does not illustrate at all.  Instead, the camera focuses close on the exhausted, weathered face of the young Pi (Suraj Sharma) as he recites this version of events without affect.  In the cold world of logic and reality, this version of the story is more plausible and more likely.  But in Lee's movie-world, the magical version is the one that occurs in the camera's view, the one which is granted that conventional imprimatur of truth.

Finally there is Irrfan Khan, the calm, steady heartbeat of the film even as the story and the viewer are tossed about on violent waves.  He is superb actor and delivers a worthy performance.  This is no mean feat given his character's extroardinary equanimity and the fact that most of his lines are delivered in voice over, so that Khan cannot even press his marvelous face into service of performance.  The adult Pi, narrating his tale, does not reveal a tremendous range of emotion.  And yet his presence is large; one has the sense of a man who has reached an enormous depth of insight and now takes genuine, warm pleasure in leading others to the same revelations.  He has the beatific air of one who has reconciled the infinite contradictions of this world and its many gods.  He, and Lee, invite us to join him in that peaceful place, as peaceful as Pi's boat floating in a silent sea of starlight.  It is an irresistible invitation. 

 

 

I Can't Think Straight (2008)

I have to admit up front that the desi content of this movie is so minimal that it doesn't strictly belong on Filmi Geek.  But what the heck, I'll write about it anyhow.  I crave stories about love between women, and I crave stories in which women in patriarchal cultures (including my own culture, I must point out) find the value of asserting autonomous control over their own sexuality.  Shamim Sarif's I Can't Think Straight at least attempts to offer both.  And with my interest in the rich, diverse cultures of both the Middle East and India, this romance between a Jordanian aristocrat (Lisa Ray) and a London daughter of middle-class Indian immigrants (Sheetal Sheth) should have hit all my sweet spots.  Instead, it's a warty, often cringe-worthy production.  But I can't bring myself to shred it mercilessly.  I Can't Think Straight is a movie whose ham-fisted unsubtlety is punctuated by occasional moments of smart and sexy.  It's a movie, in short, that is a lot like me. 

To its credit, I Can't Think Straight has some sweetness to it and strikes a few good targets.   The relationship between Tala (Ray) and Leyla (Sheth) starts off contrived but becomes more believable as the film progresses.  Early on Tala's brash confidence overwhelms the tentative Leyla.  But it becomes clear that Tala's numerous broken engagements are not the result of strong-headed wilfulness - to the contrary, they are the detritus of her confusion, uncertain attempts to be what her overbearing mother wants her to be.  In the meantime, Leyla's arc takes the opposite trajectory - as she comes into her own as a writer and as a lesbian, her uncertainty transforms into absolute strength and confidence.  "You have to admire her guts," says a mutual friend of the two women (Rez Kempton), and he's quite right.

And so the two women don't just feel attraction to one another, but they do deeply change one other.  Tala challenges Leyla's  already shaky adherence to her Muslim faith.  In return, Leyla inspires Tala to stand up to the culture that Tala feels limits her choices so severely.  When Tala insists that she cannot pursue her love for Leyla because Jordanian high society is closed-minded and conservative, Leyla points out that "it will stay that way, as long as no one is willing to challenge it." 

These are the movie's strengths.  Unfortunately this simply moving story is embedded in a distracting matrix of cliché, stereotype, caricature, and unsubtlely that requires an entire tray of freshly-baked eyerolls to get through.  Tala's mother Reema (Antonia Frering) is a cartoon witch of a Middle-Eastern socialite, making her daughters miserable with constant harping on their weight and fashion choices, and barking orders at staff who despise her.  ("Where is my husband?  And where is my coffee?")  Leyla's mother (Siddiqua Akhtar) is even worse, hitting every stereotype of the provincial, fresh-off-the-boat NRI housewife.  Her performance is dreadful, full of mealy smiles and nahin-faces that would be better suited to a saas-bahu serial than to a movie that appears to want to be understated.  This is the only remotely desi content in the film, and it's just cringe-inducing.

The early stages of Tala and Leyla's relationship are particularly fraught with facepalm moments of dreadful writing.  Leyla seems perpetually to attract bits of lint that Tala is compelled to pluck off of her, leading one to wonder why Sarif could not come up with other excuses for the two women to touch.  A tennis match provides an especially corny and heavy-handed metaphor for their growing attraction, complete with a breathlessly panted "That was amazing!" at its conclusion.  Tennis is not effete enough to convey Tala's aristocratic milieu, so she also plays a polo match, leading to one of the film's most nauseating exchanges:

Leyla (practically batting her eyelashes): I was worried you were going to fall, leaning across the horse like that!

Tala (with forced nonchalance): I like to take chances.

Filmi Geek:  Puke.  

Moments like this are bad enough, and the unsubtlety just gets thicker and thicker.  At its nadir, Leyla's sympathetic and proactive sister Yasmin (Amber Rose Revah) tries to figure out what's troubling Leyla, before the latter has come out even to herself.  The astute Yasmin notices a stack of books on Leyla's dresser - Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, even Martina Navratilova's autobiography - and a k.d. lang CD nearby.  Really, Sarif?  Really?   And finally, the entire movie may be one extended setup for this chestnut of a punchline uttered by a gossipy Middle Eastern lady in its denouement:  "She's what? But some of my best friends are Lebanese!" 

The weak writing - both for the caricatured parents and the lovers themselves - hog-ties all the actors into stiff, formulaic performances. In contrast to all this woodenness, the movie's sex scenes are outstanding - fluid, passionate, and downright hot.  It seems that when Sarif cuts her actors loose and lets them just be and feel, they can do a lot more than when constrained by the fetters of Sarif's unnatural scripting.

The movie's 80-minute running time, while merciful, also forces it to short-change anything more than superficial examination of how either woman's cultural and religious heritage affects their prospect for life together.  Tala asserts that her reluctance to lead the "difficult" life in a lesbian relationship is due to the strictures of Jordanian society, but her family is so outrageously wealthy and her life so apparently divorced from Jordanian society that her reasoning is suspect.  Even a white American child of such a socially prominent and controlling mother would have a hard time rebelling against parental expectations; there is nothing especially Middle Eastern about this.  Meanwhile, Leyla's struggle against her culture is painted in the color of stereotype and seems to resolve itself the moment she comes out to herself and her family.  If the dialogue weren't so painful, it would be nice to have 40 minutes more of it, to give some more depth to aspects of these characters' lives that could have been more particularly Arabic and desi.      

Still, I wouldn't devote so many words to complaining about the weaknesses of a movie that doesn't also show a lot of potential to be better.  For all those stiffly executed, lazily written scenes, I Can't Think Straight offers moments of delicate thoughtfulness and sympathy for its characters.  These (plus the terrific sex scenes, which are worth watching again, for research purposes of course) make it worth cringing through the worst parts, if stories about love between women are as close to your heart as they are to mine.   

Delhi Belly (2011)

I recentlty read Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde, which is about (among other things) regular people who get swept into the circles of very dangerous criminals, and find themselves in desperate situations doing very desperate deeds.  Watching the recent dark comedy Delhi Belly, I was struck by the similarities of its basic outline to that summary of the novel. Most of us will never find ourselves face-to-face with the likes of the movie's diamond smugglers or Reamde's panoply of international gangsters, terrorists, and spies.  But there is something nevertheless compelling about such stories; even with its veneer of silliness, it's hard to watch Delhi Belly without thinking, what would I do if that happened to me?  

Tashi (Imran Khan) is a young, unambitious Delhi reporter who lives in squalor - borne more of laziness than necessity - with his two roommates, the lecherous photographer Nitin (Kunal Roy Kapoor), and a depressed commercial artist named Arup (Vir Das).  Tashi's breezy fiancee Sonia (Shenaz Treasury) has cluelessly agreed, as a favor to friend, to deliver a package that is quite obviously (to the audience, at least) contraband.  Sonia asks Tashi to complete the delivery, but thanks to a series of mishaps the package is confused with a stool sample of Nitin, who is afflicted with the filmi's titular ailment.  Needless to say, the intended recipient, a diamond smuggler (Vijay Raaz) isn't too pleased with the delivery.  And when the young men discover that they have a cache of stolen diamonds, they make a series of spectacularly bad decisions that lead to them chasing all over the city trying to sell the diamonds and, later, recover them.  Tossed in the mix is a colleague of Tashi's, the worldly Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan), whose homicidal ex-husband Rajiv (Rahul Singh) is violently jealous of Tashi - as if Tashi's life isn't complicated enough, an attraction is developing between him and Menaka.

Delhi Belly is, in an objective sense, a very good movie.  It's well crafted, nicely paced, and genuinely funny at times (despite a generous helping of toilet humor).  The three young men in their filthy apartment evoke a sort of parallel-universe version of Chashme buddoor, where post-modern ennui and bitterness replace the dreamy innocence of the trio in Sai Paranjpe's charming movie.  The characterizations are mostly lively, even if the characters are not always likeable.  The acerbic Menaka is especially appealing, though (partly because she is an older actor) she seems at times to belong to a different movie with more mature characters.  Tashi is the least lively; he moves through the film in a nearly emotionless haze.  This is probably intentional, as he seems rather buffeted and passive in his life, bullied into marriage by Sonia's family and shoved into a violent underworld he isn't at all prepared to handle.  And so even his dazed performance is engaging in its own way. 

And yet, despite Delhi Belly's strengths, I can't exactly say I enjoyed it.  Usually I relish high-fidelity renderings of Indian life, and this movie offers a very unusual serving of that, with its young urban atmosphere, its salty language, and its open, realistic, and often funny sexuality.  But perhaps I am simply too old for a movie like this one.  There are for sure some Hindi movies I like more than I would like their Hollywood counterparts, simply because they are Hindi movies.  Delhi Belly, though, is mostly in English, and while I can take some interest in it as an Indian movie, perhaps the overwhelming ways in which it is a youth movie leave me, teetering on the brink of middle age as I am, somewhat cold. 

Then there is the question I raised in the opening paragraph - what would I do in Tashi's situation?  The characters in Reamde do violence I could never imagine myself doing, but in the simple morality of that story the correctness of their actions is never really in question.  In Delhi Belly, by contrast, Tashi and his friends, motivated entirely by selfishness, take steps that ensure their bad situation gets worse and worse.  While that could arguably add an interesting shade to what is essentially an absurd sort of comedy, it does make it harder for me to root for them unconditionally.  And that leaves me feeling that I missed the point - that if I were younger, with nothing to lose, I would sympathize with them and be more willing to get into the spirit of the movie. 

 

Loins of Punjab Presents (2007)

I waited almost a year for my chance to see this film, and the charming comedy was worth every minute of the wait.  11 months after its successful festival opening and notable 7-week run in Indian theaters, Manish Acharya's adorable and fun debut film, Loins of Punjab Presents, has finally begun a limited theatrical run in the United States.

Loins of Punjab, the largest distributor of pork loins on the east coast, is sponsoring a weekend-long talent contest called Desi Idol, and desi dreamers from all over New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have descended on a humble New Jersey conference hotel to work their talents for a chance at the $25,000 prize.  The contestants include Sania Rehman (Seema Rahmani), a mediocre New York actress with Bollywood aspirations; Vikram Tejwani (Manish Acharya), a laid-off financial analyst who breaks down everything - including romance - into probabilities and statistics; Preeti Patel (Ishitta Sharma), a high school student suffocating under the thumb of her rigid, but loving, immigrant family; A gay hip-hop Bhangra dancer calling himself the Turbanotorious B.D.G. (Ajay Naidu); and Joshua Cohen (Michael Raimondi), an American admirer of Indian culture.  Joshua enters the contest at the urging of his girlfriend Opama Menon (Ayesha Dharker), who soon grows less supportive when she realizes he is the ridicule of the Indian contestants. 

The film's delight is in the detail with which each of these characters, and even the many others who come and go throughout the film, are painted.  Although Acharya draws on stereotypes, he does so with deep affection for the many-faceted NRI culture from which the stereotypes arise.  And more importantly, he does so with great original humor; the jokes are not merely based upon the stereotypes, but are built upon them in satisfying layers.  So while there are broad laughs to be had from such moments as a Gujarati uncle asking for "wedge snakes" (his mispronounced version of "vege snacks") or Sania's inability to string together a sentence in Hindi despite her Bollywood dreams, there is subtler humor as well - like a running joke of desi characters taking Joshua for a waiter, or the poignant jokes about the contestant called Saddam Hussein, a security specialist who can't get work because of his unfortunate name.  This sort of joke adds a slight tinge of edginess to the humor, hinting at the darker aspects of life as a desi in America, without burdening the film with too much preachy politics. 

Of course the main attraction for me is the vicious socialite, Mrs. Rrita Kapoor (Shabana Azmi), for whom no tactic is too low if it will help her win the contest.  She intends to donate the prize money to her pet charity - if only to upstage a generous donation by her chief rival in her high-tone social scene - but her noble intentions can't compensate for the dirty pool she plays.  Her performance is as broad and scene-chewing as any in her career, and watching it almost is almost as much fun for us as giving it seems to have been for her.  But notwithstanding my own Shabana-centric reasons for awaiting this film so eagerly, no one character stole the show.  They are all likeable (well, except Mrs. Kapoor), sweet, and very, very funny. 

The resolution of Loins of Punjab Presents carries a warm-hearted message which, in one of the film's many clever and funny twists, is incoherently verbalized by its dumbest character.  If you have the opportunity to see it, you should.  It is an outstanding debut film, full of smiles and "awwww"s, and deserves to be picked up for broader distribution. 

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.

The Namesake (2007)

Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's bestselling novel The Namesake is fairly true to the book; Nair's eye brings vividly to life the flavors and colors splashed through Lahiri's pages.  The result a lovely film with all the same strengths - and all the same weaknesses - as the novel it adapts. 

Ashima's (Tabu) marriage to Ashok Ganguli (Irfan Khan) is arranged by her parents in her home city of Calcutta; immediately after the marriage she is whisked to New York, where her new husband is a graduate student, and begins to adjust to the new and different life she will lead in America.  Their first child is a son, and they name him Gogol, after the Russian author, who (for a variety of reasons) is very close to Ashok's heart.  Gogol (Kal Penn) grows into a sullen teenager and eventually a discontented young man, disconnected from his Indian roots but also unmoored in the urban and urbane company he keeps.  As he moves through a series of romantic relationships and weathers some family tragedy, Gogol's identity shifts and reforms, and in time he reaches an understanding of the gifts his parents have given him in his Bengali heritage, his name, and his autonomy.

The Namesake's greatest strength is that it is a real, uncaricatured story; it avoids the trap of lapsing into cliche, of recycling the tired themes of the strained arranged marriage, the overbearing immigrant parents, the second generation's rebellion.  Instead,  Ashima and Irfan's marriage grows from its formal beginning into genuine, moving tenderness; while Ashima laments the brash, American mannerisms of her children she and Irfan are committed to letting them have their own choices and freedoms; and Gogol's distance from his parents is not so much a reaction against being Indian as it is a general malaise.  His identity crisis is focused through his particular cultural lens, but his drifting of purpose perhaps resonates universally.

Because The Namesake is so much about what goes on inside its character's heads - Ashima's and Gogol's in particular - it would fail without excellent performances from its actors, and Mira Nair gets what she needs from her talented cast.  Tabu and Irfan Khan are particularly outstanding, communicating volumes even with very little dialogue; young Kal Penn stands up well also, with a handful of superb scenes that outweigh his few sullen teenager moments.  Indeed, Gogol's occasional shallowness is not really Kal Penn's fault.  One irritating aspect I recall from the novel is that Gogol is not always an interesting enough character to have a whole book about him; this weakness is not corrected in the film.  As with the novel, I am left wishing for more about Ashima and less about Gogol.  Still, there is enough substance in Gogol's arc to maintain the focus, even if the women in his life are thinly-drawn tokens.  And the film's eye never drifts too far from Ashima, navigating the vast confusion of American suburbia. 

Like the novel, The Namesake is episodic, sometimes disorientingly so, as the viewer is jerked through the passage of time, often with no hint of what transpired in the interstitial years; one moment Gogol is a high-school graduate headed to Yale; the next, he is a young architect living in a swanky apartment in New York with a rich, white girlfriend.  In fact the film omits some episodes in which the novel touched down, leaving the film to feel even more compressed and speedy at times.  But these are minor complaints, small flaws in a film that was on the whole lovely, sweet, and fairly satisfying.   

The Guru (2002)

As a white American with an obvious interest in Indian culture, I am sensitive to the stereotypes of white Americans interested in Indian culture, and I try very hard not to reinforce them.  Even so, I sometimes squirm a little uncomfortably when these stereotypes pop up in the movies.  I can't help but wonder: is that what I look like?  Fortunately, the version of the stereotype that is sent up in The Guru is so over-the-top that I didn't really have to worry.  And the film, a comical diaspora story about exploitation and love that draws on a number of Bollywood-ish elements, is a light, cute, and entertaining story.

Ramu (Jimi Mistry) is a dance instructor in Bombay who longs to be a star.  At the urging of his NRI friend Vijay (Emil Marwa), Ramu follows his dreams to New York, but arrives to discover that Vijay's tales of penthouse living and fancy cars were exaggerated just a smidge.  When a swami-for-hire passes out drunk before an appearance at a high-society party at which Vijay is working as a waiter, Ramu steps in and fakes his way through an impromptu discourse on sex and spirituality.  The ditzy, spiritually-searching socialite Lexi (Marisa Tomei) is taken with Ramu, and declares him her guru, the "Guru of Sex."  Suddenly Ramu finds he can make a ton of money by churning out pseudo-exotic sexual philosophy that rich, bored ladies who lunch will pay generously for.  But Ramu needs material, so he enlists the help of a porn star, Sharonna (Heather Graham).  Believing that Jimi is trying to break into the porn business - and knowing nothing of his spiritual sideline - Sharonna reveals her most personal thoughts and philosophies about sex and sexuality, and Jimi repackages these for his new disciples.  Sooner or later, Sharonna will find out that Jimi is using her - but not before he falls in love with her. 

The story is sort of dumb and some of the humor is a little crude, but on balance, The Guru is warm and funny, offering an unlikely love story amongst a fun and diverse collection of characters.  While there are some gems in the casting, the characterizations and performances are a little spotty.  Ramu's childlike dreamy innocence is somewhat at odds with his willingness to carry on a sexual relationship with Lexi, whom he does not seem to care for very much.  But Jimi Mistry is sufficiently cute and appealing that the inconsistencies in his character are not a serious distraction.  Lexi herself is spot-on; Marisa Tomei offers a perfect comic presentation of the spoiled rich kid who is hungering for something deeper than BMWs and penthouses, but who is too clueless and sheltered to recognize the difference between real spiritual depth and flaky trendism.  She is both a caricature and fully human.  Heather Graham's philosophical porn-star is neither here nor there, serviceable but not memorable.  There is one real treat in the cast, though - Christine Baranski, sharp-clawed as Lexi's sneering yet indulgent mother, is as delicious as she always is.

The Guru features a few musical numbers, mostly in Hindi; these are meant as tributes to the Bollywood form, I guess, and while some of them were quite good - Heather Graham was more alive in her song than she  was in the rest of the movie - others left me feeling that I'd rather watch the real thing.  The film's ending was delightful, drawing on one of Bollywood's favorite tropes - the interrupted wedding, with a couple of light-hearted surprises.

I would generally rather watch a Hindi movie than a western film inspired by Hindi movies.  Still, The Guru is a charming enough timepass, worth a watch if you happen to stumble across it. 

Being Cyrus (2005)

Damaged people make for really good stories.  Being Cyrus is a dark, raw story about a dysfunctional family full of broken people, shattered by the intrusion of a man who is not what he appears to be. 

Dinshaw Sethna (Naseeruddin Shah) is an aging, reclusive, pot-addled artist who lives in a dingy, cluttered rural bungalow with his restless wife Katy (Dimple Kapadia). One day Cyrus Mistry (Saif Ali Khan) shows up at their doorstep.  Cyrus, who narrates the story, offers his services to Dinshaw, and ends up taking on a wide variety of household jobs and errands for the family, especially Katy.  Cyrus introduces the Bombay branch of the family - Dinshaw's frail, elderly father Fardoonjee (Honey Chhaya), Dinshaw's brother Farokh Sethna (Boman Irani), and Farokh's demure bride Tina (Simone Singh).  As Cyrus's narration grows increasingly dark and cryptic, he airs the Sethna family's dirty laundry.  Fardoonjee lives in squalor and dementia in a back room of Farokh and Tina's apartment, starved and neglected.   Katy, flirtatious and frustrated, is having a clandestine affair with her brother-in-law Farokh.  And Cyrus, as his narration announces, is "playing them like a violin."

As the film spins and twists toward its grim climax, the wrinkles in Cyrus's psyche unfurl in a series of complex metaphors - chess games, scrambled eggs, torn dolls - suggesting the film's themes of manipulation, of irreparable, catastrophic change, and of the lasting effects of familial contempt and dysfunction.  The symbolism is at times a little too thick, too self-consciously arty, but on the whole Being Cyrus is suspenseful, engrossing, and satisfying.   

Being Cyrus offers fresh cinematography and evocative visuals.  Everything in Dinshaw's rustic home is gray with pottery dust, and the garden is a verdant tangle of overgown brambles; Fardoonjee's one-room Bombay prison seems caked in a layer of grime.  The film also sports spooky background music that sets a sinister tone long before the narrative has begun to uncover the Sethna family's lurking demons.  But what really drives the film is the astonishingly good performances from all of its principals.  Saif Ali Khan presents Cyrus as shielded, methodical; wearing the numb, languid expression of a man who is truly broken, he is both chilling and sympathetic.  Naseeruddin Shah, though underused, is perfect as the tripping, philosophical potter. 

Dimple Kapadia, though, thoroughly steals the show.  Her Katy vibrates like a fly trapped under a glass, straining and agitated, driven to distraction by the failure of her life and marriage to live up to her romantic, cosmopolitan expectations.  It is a tremendous credit to Dimple's talent that she is vastly charismatic and appealing, even when playing a singularly unappealing, trashy, and narcissistic character.  Being Cyrus is a compelling illustration of the range and potential of this fascinating actress. 

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002)

Aparna Sen, the filmmaker who wrote and directed Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, never seems to garner criticism for casting her own daughter in her films.  Perhaps that is because her daughter is the best young actress in India.  Konkona Sen Sharma was the shining star of her mother's 2005 film 15 Park Avenue.  Before that, she earned a National Film Award for her charged and real performance as the skittish Meenaxi Iyer in Mrs. and Mrs. Iyer.

The film opens on a bus traveling through an unspecified rural province, carrying a varied assortment of passengers who are a distillation of the diversity of India.  The chatter on the bus is a Babel of the nation's languages - Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and Tamil are represented, as well as English, the lingua franca of the entire subcontinent.  Many of India's religions are represented as well - there are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and even one of India's rare Jews.  Meenaxi Iyer (Konkona) is a sheltered, traditionally Hindu, Tamil Brahmin wife, en route with her infant son to Calcutta to meet her husband.  Raja (Rahul Bose) is a Bengali wildlife photographer also traveling to Calcutta.  When the bus is waylaid by a curfew imposed as a result of some local sectarian violence, the journey turns dark and treacherous, as riots and killings spring up all around.  Circumstances throw Raja and Meenaxi together - soon they are traveling as the titular Mr. and Mrs. Iyer - and what follows is a tense exploration of Hindu-Muslim relations, the interplay of traditionalist prejudices and modern biases, and the strange way that intimacy sometimes finds people even when they are not seeking it. 

During their ordeal, Meenaxi and Raja do not talk much about their real lives.  This lends a sense of unreality to the journey, as if it is bracketed and separated from real life.  There is an echo in that unreality of the characters' own mixed perception of their adventure.  By shutting out their reality they can take comfort in the shared illusion of being Mr. and Mrs. Iyer and in the closeness that develops between them within that illusion.  But it serves another purpose as well; if they think too much about reality, they will have to acknowledge that the journey and the violence and the danger is real as well.  In one of the film's most breathlessly chilling scenes, Meenaxi is jarred fitfully into that acknowledgment when she witnesses a sectarian killing.  Thanks to Konkona's brilliant work, Meenaxi's anguish leaps out of the screen.

I am coming to suspect, based in particular upon Mr. and Mrs. Iyer and 15 Park Avenue, that Aparna Sen is at her best with high drama and powerful emotion.  In her films, mundane, quotidian dialogue sometimes comes across as forced or stilted.  But when she lets her characters go, prepare to be shaken to the core.  The most charged scenes in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer left me breathless and stunned. 

Finally, in the allegorical language of Indian film, the interaction between Meenaxi and Raja may be mapped to the intersection of traditional and modern India, respectively.  Raja challenges Meenaxi to leave off the caste and religious prejudices with which she was raised; Meenaxi demands Raja's respect.  That they ultimately manage both to compromise and to bond with one another suggests that the film's message is not merely that the disparate elements of Indian culture learn to get along, but  that if they are willing, they can each be enriched in the process. 

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer is mostly in English; as Raja speaks no Tamil and Meenaxi no Hindi, the two must communicate in India's lingua franca.  (Indeed, any awkwardness in Aparna Sen's dialogue, both here and in 15 Park Avenue, may be attributable to a less-than-deft handling of English.)