Filmi Geek

Ishqiya (2010)

इश्क़िया

Any movie that opens with a languid, warmly-lit amble along the rolling curves of the supine body of Vidya Balan is a movie I am going to like.  A lot.  When I mentioned I was watching Ishqiya, several friends expressed surprise that I hadn't yet seen it.  ("That is basically inconceivable," said Beth.)  For what it's worth, I do have an excuse. I was a late boarder on the Vidya train; I did not realize that this mind-stompingly gorgeous woman was the love of my life until halfway through my first viewing of Kahaani just about a year ago.  I have been playing catch-up - but pacing myself - ever since. Having said that, in Ishqiya, Vidya is about as ohmigodHOT as a woman can be without violating several multilateral treaties.

Indeed, I don't know how to write about this movie without dissolving into a gelatinous heap of gush.  And not just for Vidya, either.  Ishqiya's director, Abhishek Chaubey, studied at the knee of Vishal Bhardwaj (who produced the film), and Bhardwaj's masterful influence is all over this striking, wry movie. Its tone is reminiscent of the most dry and funny vignettes of 7 Khoon Maaf.  Its narrative is less rangy than that of 7 Khoon Maaf, however, and therefore less lurchy.  Two of the dumbest criminals ever to cross a filmi screen, Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and his nephew Babban (Arshad Warsi), are in flight from their boss, Mushtaq (Salman Shahid), whom they have cheated out of some 25 lakhs.  The pair takes refuge in the home of Krishna (Vidya Balan), widow of their erstwhile business associate, the smuggler Vidyadhar Verma (Adil Hussain).  Both men fall for the quiet, intense Krishna, who hatches a plan to kidnap a local steel magnate KK Kakkad (Rajesh Sharma) for ransom.  But the kidnapping soon unravels and the men slowly realize that Krishna has manipulated all of them - Khalu, Babban, and even KK - for her own mysterious purposes. 

There is craft in every aspect of this Ishqiya. It is as beautifully shot as any Bhardwaj movie, and in the same warm, enveloping earth tones that can make a a movie as seductive for the eyes as lush caramel is on the tongue.  From the throaty reds of Krishna's sarees, to the damp brown clutter of the interior of her home, to the salted beige landscapes of the Uttar Pradesh countryside, every frame of this movie is almost tactile in its richness.  Bhardwaj's score, as his music usually does, adds texture and character, from the jaunty swagger of "Ibn-e-Batuta" to the sweet lilt of "Dil to bachha hai ji."

The characterizations are meticulously detailed  in both writing and performance. Khalujaan is philosophical and poetic, the brighter bulb of the two thieves, but not by a lot.  As he trims his beard, dyes his hair, dons handsome traditional clothes, and discusses the finer points of evergreen filmi songs with Krishna, Khalu projects the air of a man who does not necessarily want to shed the grit of his criminal life, but who wants to look as though he wants to shed it.  His love for Krishna is a touching mixture of passionate and avuncular; it's not clear exactly what relationship he wants to have with her, but it's clear that it's very loving.  Babban's style is more bombastic; his stupidity displays in rash, testosterone-driven bursts rather than Khalu's intellectual posing.  In one scene, Mushtaq and his men track down the pair when they run into Babban at a brothel in the town near Krishna's village; one has the impression that Mushtaq knows well that the most efficient way to find Babban in any city in the country is always to make a beeline for the nearest brothel. The performances of Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi as these not-so-clever medium-time crooks are pitch perfect, just the right mixture of grit and scene-chewing to be both endearing and eye-rolling.  It's hard not feel sorry for them when it becomes clear just how outclassed they are by Krishna, even when you facepalmed at their ill-considered antics just a few scenes before.

And then there is Vidya Balan, as smoldering, fierce, and sexy in this role as in any other.  (I considered doing this review in the style of my piece on The Dirty Picture - a debate between my analytic intellectual ego and my horny lesbian id - but my id did not have much to say beyond "Guh...."  A superbly executed sex scene had me wistfully craving an alternate universe in which I could be Arshad Warsi.)  But as gorgeous and fierce as Vidya is, there is a great deal of nuance to Krishna; the character is not merely a cartoon femme fatale with an eye for manipulable men.  Krishna begins the film as a loving wife, anxiously imploring Verma to give up the dangerous smuggler's life and turn himself in to the authorities.  Krishna's circumstances and what she has endured - not an inherent vicious streak or a flaw in  her nature - drive her to the bold and violent actions she takes as the film unfolds.  This is evident the first time she overtly betrays Khalu and Babban.  The men have gotten into a fight - mostly over her - while she waits in their getaway car with their kidnapping prey, the dazed and bound KK, lolling in the backseat.  Krishna hesitates nervously before taking the wheel and speeding away with their prize.  This is a woman with a plan, but not a woman so cold as to have no need to muster her courage before executing.  It is just one of a myriad finely wrought details that make Krishna - like everything else about Ishqiya - thoroughly compelling.

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. 

 

 

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola (2013)

मटरू की बिजली का मंडोला

If Vishal Bhardwaj's 7 khoon maaf is a creepy fun house at a sinister carnival, his Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a visit to a surrealist circus.  Trippy, touching, and uproariously funny, this movie sparkles and dances and enchants.  It is a sweet story of redemption, a biting political satire, and a magical romp all rolled into one crazy film.  It is wild, brilliant, and great fun.

The narrative at the core of Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a potentially heavy one:  A crorepati industrialist, Mandola (Pankaj Kapur) schemes with the chief minister of Haryana (Shabana Azmi) to buy out, for a pittance, the farmers of the village that bears his name, so that he can develop a lucrative factory-mall complex on their land.  A mysterious figure calling himself after Mao Tse-Tung galvanizes and supports the villagers to fight back and preserve their livelihood.  Without the otherworldly, yet humanistic, levity that effervesces through Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola, this could be the stuff of a Prakash Jha film.  But Vishal Bhardwaj paints on a different kind of canvas here.

Mandola is a man divided against himself.  When sober, he is hard and calculating, willing even to use his own daughter, Bijlee (Anushka Sharma), as a pawn to advance  his schemes, including marrying her off to the chief minister's idiot of a son (Arya Babbar).  When Mandola is drunk, though - as he is much of the time - he sympathizes with the farmers and undermines is own business interestes.  He enlists an overqualified servant, Matru (Imran Khan) to watch over him.  But Matru's own motives are murky and his loyalties do not exactly lie where Mandola thinks.

This story is embedded in a matrix of the absurd that brings it to life with joyful giddiness.  The movie careens from pink buffaloes to dung-slinging trebuchets to swarming bees to a drunken midnight joyride in a flaming airplane.  A troupe of African dancers and an itinerant wedding band are among the disparate elements that shimmer in and out of Bhardwaj's magically unreal yet palpably dusty world.  Thrown into the mix is some very clever skewering of the press, the police, and the machinery of politics that is part Peepli Live, part Welcome to Sajjanpur, and all Vishal Bhardwaj. 

While invoking many established filmi conventions - such as a "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" type of climax - Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola turns others on their head.  In one sequence, the rains come to the agrarian village - but contrary to convention, the rain is not a cause for village-wide rejoicing.  It's after the harvest, and the deluge threatens to destroy the stored grain that the farmers need to sell to keep their land.  Mandola, the chief minister, and their cadre of corrupt officials dance in the downpour like film stars, while the villagers scramble to protect their livelihood.

For all its rich, rangy pleasures, Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is not without a few warts.  The characterizations are at times inconsistent, especially around Bijlee; her strengths are a bit unclear, and her relationship with Mandola a touch underdeveloped.  But these are minor quibbles in a movie that utterly enthralls and delights while it is happening.  (Other reviewers have complained that it sags in the middle; that could not have been further from this reviewer's experience.)  The relationship between Matru and Mandola is as touching as it is dysfunctional, and often hilarious and sweet as they drunkenly navigate the world together.  In one brilliant scene they crash into a well on a motorcycle and, deciding the well's location  is a dangerous, attempt to move it by dragging it by the rope that suspends its bucket.  United in this nonsensical and futile task, Matru and Mandola bond in the shared absurdity.

The movie is propelled through the madness by the performances of its actors.  Pankaj Kapur owns the film; Mandola is as loveably unloveable, as much the selfish softy, as his meanyhead in Bhardwaj's The Blue Umbrella.  Shabana Azmi delivers deliciously even as she chews the scenery with relish.  She has vastly too much fun as the long-suffering embodiment of manipulative evil, rolling her eyes as she strains to tolerate the buffoonery of her pawns, her son and Mandola.  I could watch Shabana Azmi all day long in roles like this one, a distillation and magnification of the character she developed for Loins of Punjab Presents.  Imran Khan does not emote much behind his fetching beard, but he is adequate to the demands that Matru's bizarre world places on him.  Even Anushka Sharma - who had better show some range soon if she is to live up to the promise of Band baaja baaraat - restrains the over-bubbliness here, and turns in a solid, reasonably grounded effort. 

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola has been receiving widely mixed reviews, and I went in with some trepidation, unsure what to expect.  But I came out grinning, utterly delighted with a film I can't wait to see again and confirmation of the storytelling genius of Vishal Bhardwaj.  The weaknesses will fade in memory, and all that will remain are the many pleasures, the reality of the ridiculous, the splendid satire, and the lingering laughs.  I'll stand by my gushing here because it is an honest response to a movie I enjoyed every moment of.  Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is simply a wonderful and unusual piece of cinematic art. 

Karz (1980)

क़र्ज़

An inspiration and source for Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, Subhash Ghai's Karz ("debt") is in virtually every respect a flawless masala entertainer. It has everything, and I mean everything.  As one of Hindi cinema's canonical peechle janam stories, it has a healthy dose of mysticism and larger-than-life themes like justice, karma, and familial bonds. It has a main character, Monty (Rishi Kapoor), who is a famous stage performer, for no reason other than to provide excuses for its fantastic, over-the-top songs - set pieces like song from which Om Shanti Om took its name, in which Rishi Kapoor dances awkwardly on a giant spinning record after riding in on the tone arm.  It has Pran, playing a good guy who speaks largely in couplets.  It has a brilliant Aruna Irani item number that also features Pran disguised as a fakir.  It has Simi Garewal, in a melodramatic yet wonderfully rangy performance - cold and creepy as a murderer, and increasingly disturbed and distressed as Monty gaslights her into explosive confession of her crimes.  It has Durga Khote, who recognizes Monty as the reincarnation of her murdered son without question.  It has strange, inappropriate nude photographs sprinkled throughout its sets, for the camera to focus on at symbolically charged moments.  It has a bizarre, greedy villain, Sir Juda (Premnath), who communicates by tapping out codes that only his henchman Mac Mohan can understand.  It has Iftekhar and Yusuf Khan in hilarious fake beards.  It even has Jalal Agha. In short, Karz has just about everything there is to love about Hindi movies in one fantastic package, with a quick pace and very little fat (allowing for a little pudge around Rishi Kapoor's rapidly spreading middle).

My utter delight as I soaked in every frame of this hilarious, satisfying movie came out in the tweets I made while I was watching it, many with screencaps to highlight the visual awesomeness.  Thanks to Storify, I have collected all those tweets here, and allow them to serve as my review of this fantastically entertaining movie. 

So without further ado, here is the joy and brilliance of Karz, summarized via live-tweets from a gobsmacked, delighted Carla.

 

 

Be sure to click the "Read More" link after Durga Khote - there are more tweets and I'd like you to see them all.

Namkeen (1982)

नमकीन

Sharmila Tagore made a career playing living embodiments of female sacrifice and suffering. In movies such as Amar prem and Aradhana, her characters endure a lifetime of loss and debasement, rewarded at the end with the exalted recognition of mother-worship. Gulzar's Namkeen ("salty") offers an alternative perspective on this theme. Delicate, quiet, and sad, Namkeen is a shifting blend of flavors to slowly savor - part salty, part sweet, and part tangy, like the three sisters of the family it portrays.

Nimki (Sharmila Tagore) is the mortar that holds her fragile family together. She looks after her younger sisters, the mute, sweet Meethu (Shabana Azmi) and spirited Chinki (Kiran Vairale). Together the three sisters care for their aging Amma (Waheeda Rehman), a troubled, frail woman bordering on senile dementia. Geru (Sanjeev Kumar), an itinerant construction hauler in the family's village for a brief contract, rents a room from the family, and before long bonds of friendship and even love develop between Geru and each of these women.

Namkeen unflinchingly delivers the raw hardship of village life for a family of women living without a man. The men of Namkeen are rootless wanderers; Geru's job takes him from town to town, and even the three women's father Kishenlal leads a traveling dance troupe that only rarely passes through the village. The women are rooted to the village but that rooting is their downfall. Amma scrapes and sells cow dung to get by, but fertilizes nothing within her own household; her daughters take on the rough physical labor of pounding spices, a quintissential domestic chore, but the spices are for other people to cook with. Geru's fellow construction workers, as they come and go, pause to harass and badmouth the women. Only Geru forms a connection, and even his is mercurial, expiring with his contract.

Each woman frames her own escape from these strangling roots. Meethu's youthful escape is into poetry, which gives her some joy, but her muteness renders this joy solitary. And it is inadequate as the outgrows the naïveté of youth; her ultimate escape is only through madness and death. Chinki's departure appears on the surface more voluntary - she flees to join her father's dance troupe - but there are hints of abuse and coercion in Amma's wild fear of him, which solidify with Chinki's transformation into hard bitterness after joining the troupe.

Nimki, though, finds no escape. She makes relentless sacrifices for the family. When Geru shows interest in marrying her, she first tries to deflect his interest to Meethu, willing to pass her own chance for escape on to her sister.  Then Nimki refuses Geru outright, insisting that she cannot leave her mother and sisters behind.  I read that Rekha was originally cast in the role of Nimki, replaced by Sharmila Tagore at some point in production.  I am very glad this change happened.  With any other actor, Namkeen would have been a straightforward, sad tale of the hardships of village life for women.  The casting of Sharmila elevates it into commentary on her canonical mother-goddess roles; it makes the reference, comparison, and contrast explicit.  Unlike Sharmila Tagore's other long-suffering goddesses, Nimki's self-conscious sacrifice does not bring apotheosis.  Nimki loses everything, and her endurance is rewarded with almost nothing.  Only a chance encounter that drives Geru back to the village rescues Nimki from utter loneliness and obscurity.  Although Geru saves Nimki from an utterly tragic ending, their salty-sweet reunion has the air of a narrow escape, not the inevitable due of a sanctified mother goddess.  Namkeen's is a more balanced look at life's suffering, more real and less allegorical, than the almost religious fables of movies like Amar prem and Aradhana.

The beauty of Namkeen as a film comes through in its quiet use of detail to convey relationships and themes with subtlety.  Amma's anxiety and confusion, Meethu and Chinki's sense of humor, Nimki's grounding competence are all illustrated by gentle domestic vignettes that are thoroughly engaging.  In early scenes, Geru struggles grumpily to adjust to the raw simplicity of life in Amma's home while the sisters look on in amusement, able to help but declining to offer.  At first Geru thinks basic hospitality and necessities are not forthcoming, until Nimki arrives and puts everything in order.  Geru's growing affection for the sisters, too, is gently portrayed, in an outstanding performance of Sanjeev Kumar, one with a low center of gravity that is nevertheless not overly heavy, and reminds me once again why he is my favorite male actor in Hindi movies. 

Indeed every note in Namkeen is perfectly struck, from Chinki's wry smiles to Amma's crooked spectacles to Nimki's resigned labor.  The dust of the village fills the camera but never obscures the colors of village life.  It is simply a beautiful movie, presenting the balanced flavors of life that blend and interact to build complexity from simplicity.  Part tangy, part salty, part sweet.  

7 khoon maaf (2011)

७ खून माफ़

I liked 7 khoon maaf ("7 murders forgiven") so much that I watched it twice in a week, and I am still not sure what to make of it.  Dark, weird, and bold, this strange Vishal Bhardwaj drama is part psychological study, part mystery, and part black comedy.  It is uneven in parts, lurching in tone from vignette to vignette.  These shifts can be confusing, leaving the viewer unsure which bits are earnest and which ironic.  But the weird, slightly disorienting effect is marvelously compelling.  Propelled by superb photography and a number of chillingly engaging performances, 7 khoon maaf is a visit to a sinister carnival's fun house.  It's discomfiting and even disturbing at times, and when it's over you can't wait to do it again, and bring your friends. 

Adapted from Ruskin Bond's story Susanna's Seven Husbands, 7 khoon maaf tells the story of Susanna Anna-Maria Johannes (Priyanka Chopra), a wealthy Christian woman whose long procession of husbands each meets an untimely and often violent demise.  Like another Ruskin Bond story adapted into movie form, Junoon, the story explores a dark psychology, the dangerous corners of a passionate mind.  But where Junoon anchors its study in the larger historical context of the Sepoy Mutiny, lending it a broader allegorical reading, 7 khoon maaf keeps its focus inward, on the mind of Susanna herself and, to a lesser extent, the mind of the young man who narrates the tale.  That young man, Arun (Vivaan Shah), catches Susanna's attention as a boy servant in her household; she finances his schooling and eventually sends him to study medicine, and a bond of love develops between them that secures Arun's loyalty to her well into adulthood, even years after losing touch with her.  As Arun narrates Susanna's tale to his own wife (Konkona Sen Sharma, in a saucy and poignant cameo), Arun makes himself vulnerable by exposing the depth of his bond to Susanna and just how much he is willing to risk to protect her.  But the real story is what drives Susanna.

The story of each of Susanna's husbands - how they meet, their courtship, and ultimately how they die - creates a separate vignette or episode within the movie, and these range from sad, to disturbing, to disturbingly funny.  In each vignette, Susanna tries on a different persona - a new style of dress, a new religion, even a new name.  Arun provides a facile, oversimplified explanation for Susanna's many romances; he says that she "looks for her father in every man she meets."  But while her experimentations do have the air of a desperate search, it is as much a search for her own identity as a search for her father.  And over time the search leaves her weary - by the fifth husband, Inspector Keemat Lal (Annu Kapoor), she is bored and resigned to the ritual of courtship, marriage, and murder - and eventually insane.  It is only through obliteration of all identities - her own death and rebirth - that Susanna can find peace, and that is why her seventh and final marriage is with a partner who has himself died and been reborn. 

Each vignette, too, reveals a bit more about the forces the lead to the husbands' deaths.  Is Susanna herself killing them?  Is her small cadre of loyal misfit servants doing the dirty work for her?  If so, are they acting on their own to protect her, or with her knowledge and at her bidding?  These questions are unanswered at first, but the truths shimmer into focus with satisfying pace as the narrative unfolds.

Part of the movie's dark thrill lies in its moral ambiguity.  Some of Susanna's husbands are horrible, vicious men, for sure, but others are more sympathetic or even hapless victims.  And even in the case of the worst abuser, the third husband - a seductively dashing Kashmiri poet (Irrfan Khan) who gets sexual satisfaction from beating the snot out of Susanna - Arun asks why he had to die; could Susanna not just have left him?  It's a fair question; Susanna and her servants operate in a constantly shifting landscape of revenge, protection, defense, and ennui that combine with the movie's shifts in tone to produce an effect that is pleasingly unsettling.  The scenes with the poet are difficult to watch - Irrfan Khan is smolderingly sexy in this role, and his character recites the most beautiful and thoughtful lines, but there is no beauty in the bruises he leaves on Susanna's body and psyche, and despite Arun's question it's easy to get behind the sneering revenge in his fate.  Likewise the first husband, Major Edwin Rodrigues (Neil Nitin Mukesh),  a plainly vicious, insecure man.   Wounded in battle, he asserts his fragile manhood in violent outbursts and creepy, if not explicitly abusive, displays of sexual dominance over Susanna; when he leeringly caresses her face with the stump of his amputated leg, it is not hard to imagine still more vile treatment to come, and not hard to sigh with relief at his death - which, being the first in the film, is also the most plausibly dismissed as an accident. 

But this sense of justice served evaporates quickly.  And in a brilliant directorial maneuver by Bhardwaj, the most cold-blooded and least justifiable of the deaths come in the most comical of the vignettes.  The fourth husband, a Russian spy named Vronsky (Aleksandr Dyachenko) is batted around like a mouse in the paws of Susanna and her servants, as they have some sport with him before he is dispatched.  This scene is maniacally chilling and also very funny.   And the poor smitten Inspector Keemat Lal, whose courtship is suffered by a bored, eye-rollingly unimpressed Susanna, encounters death by punchline in a Viagra overdose.  In both cases the viewer  is left snickering at the joke, and at the very same time thinking that Susanna has perhaps gone more than a bridge too far. 

Finally, there is Priyanka Chopra, the heartbeat that drives every aspect of 7 khoon maaf.  I am fully sold on Priyanka Chopra as an actor - I was already most of the way there after seeing Barfi - and it is her empathy, her portrayal of Susanna's confusion and desperation and fear and her ultimate resignation that knits these almost disparate vignettes together into a compelling and cohesive story.   Most of the other performances are strong as well - several of the husbands I have mentioned, and the Susanna's sideshow freak gallery of loyal servants (Shashi Malviya, Harish Khanna, and Usha Uthup) are also magnificent.   But these performances would not be enough to carry the movie were Priyanka Chopra not up to the task of embodying the shape-shifting peregrinations of Susanna across the decades that the narrative spans.  It is a remarkable performance that makes for a remarkable, bizarre, and utterly compelling movie. 

Naya daur (1957)

नया दौर

"Dead machinery must not be pitted against the millions of living machines represented by the villagers scattered in the seven hundred thousand villages of India." So wrote Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, as a title card at the opening of Naya daur ("new era") declares. And so begins a movie that indeed pits milling machine against woodworker, bus against tonga, unthinking mechanized progress for its own sake against the value of human teamwork. It is in no way a fair fight. In the real world, obsolescence of traditional ways of life may be an inexorable consequence of modernization. In the movies, though, the rugged salt of the earth always get their romantic, improbable victories over the sneering, cravat-wearing forces that would cast them aside in the name of greed. And such victories are always satisfying.

Shankar (Dilip Kumar) and Kisna (Ajit) are the best of friends, village boys who grew up together. Shankar makes his living as a tonga driver. Kisna chops lumber for the local mill owner (Nazir Hussain), who treats his workers with tremendous compassion, and reiterates his belief that his money and the workers' labor are in symbiosis, neither superior in value to the other. The mill owner leaves for a pilgrimage, though, and his son Kundan (Jeevan), who takes over operations, doesn't see things the same way - he brings in machines and fires all the woodworkers. Meanwhile, the bond of friendship between Shankar and Kisna is threatened when both fall in love with Rajni (Vijayantimala). Believing that Shankar has tricked him out of his chance with Rajni, Kisna allies with Kundan, who hires a bus to put the tongewale out of business. When the tongewale confont him, Kundan challenges them to a race. If your tonga can beat my bus to the temple, he says, I'll send the bus away and you can have your business back. Shankar accepts the challenge. But first he will have to get all the villagers working together to build a shortcut road for his tonga to outpace the bus. And the fire of Kisna's rage burns brightly enough to threaten not just this ambitious public works project, but Shankar's very life.

My friend @maxqnz described Naya daur as "the Lagaan of its time."  The comparison is not merely apt - Lagaan clearly owes a great debt to Naya daur, and even quotes from it.  For instance, in one scene, a boy asks Kisna to carve a stick and ball for him out of a hunk of lumber.  The scene in which Shankar accepts Kundan's challenge to the race - the incredulity of the other tongewale, and Shankar's speech about the value of taking some action over taking no action, however long the odds - also seems echoed in Lagaan.   Both movies feature the unlikely triumph of a ragtag bunch of villagers against sinister outside forces that senselessly oppress them.  In both movies, the livelihood of the village is at stake.  In both movies, a man is driven by unrequited love to betray the villagers and serve as a double-agent for the enemy, and is later moved to redemption by the magnanimity of the hero.  And in both movies, the heroine does little beyond smile and pout charmingly as the hero brings the villagers together for their victory against the odds. 

So the similarities between Lagaan and Naya daur are much more than superficial.  Lagaan is one of my all-time favorite movies, and as its antecedent, Naya daur matches up very well as an entertaining and inspiring fable about unity and courage.  I have never been a great Dilip Kumar fan - his acting style is often smug and mumbly, and he makes me think too much of Shah Rukh Khan to be of much appeal.  Here, though, he is relatively natural and charming enough.  Shankar's friendship with Kisna is delightfully portrayed, and one's heart breaks for Kisna when a misunderstanding drives them apart.  Indeed, Ajit as Kisna nearly steals the show from Dilip Kumar - he is startlingly handsome, and his expressive face shows tremedous emotional range, from innocent joy to malevolent, jealous rage.

There is some rich symbolism in Kisna's arc.  In his unholy alliance with Kundan, Kisna sabotages a bridge that the villagers have built at a key point along the road that Shankar's tonga will take in its race against Kundan's bus.  After Shankar's sister sets Kisna on his path to redemption, he works feverishly to repair the beams he has removed from the bridge, and ends up supporting the bridge with his own bodily strength as the tonga passes overhead during the race.   Thus the villager's ultimate success rests literally as well as figuratively on Kisna's redemption and the power of his friendship with Shankar.  Without that bond, there is no victory. 

Like Lagaan, Naya daur is punctuated by a number of excellent songs.  While through most of the movie Vijayantimala's charm is as wasted as Gracy Singh's, her magnificent dancing skills are well displayed.

 

The most inspiring sequence in the film comes in the superb song "Saathi haath badhana," in which the villagers - men and women alike - work together to build their literal road to victory.  This song has a terrific modern-sounding refrain combined with a classic midcentury filmi melody, along with lovely visuals.

 

There's lots of pure entertainment too, including a song tailor-made for me, "Reshmi salwaar kurta jaali ka," in which a cross-dressing girl romances another girl. 

 

I've been told that a colorized version of Naya daur was released fairly recently, and that's obviously the version the above clip comes from.  The black and white original of this song does not appear to be available on YouTube, and it's a pity, because the music track is better (it lacks the strange synthesized chords that fill out the sound but don't match the folks tonality of the tune at all), and it also has a couple of shots that are missing from the color version, such as the delighted head-bobbing of this enthusiastic fellow, which pretty well conveys how I felt while watching the song:

Jeevan cuts a fine villainous figure as always, with his outlandishly effete clothing (has anyone ever looked more ridiculous in a pair of Jodhpurs?) and his ever-present riding crop, with all of the attendant phallic symbolism.

What more can you ask of a Hindi movie than charismatic stars, excellent songs, and a rich, unsubtle populist message of unity and the importance of preserving traditional village values in the face of modernization and westernization?  Naya daur begins with the words of Gandhi and ends in Gandhian triumph, offering a full complement of romance, buddy-pyaar, villainy, betrayal, naach-gaana, and a even few Johnny Walker pratfalls in between.  It's about as perfect a midcentury filmi experience as there is. 

English Vinglish (2012)

As the opening date of Sridevi's first movie in 15 years approached, I began to notice a rising pitch of excitement and anticipation among desi women of a certain age. So many of my friends and acquaintances in their 30s and 40s were beside themselves, unable to contain their delight at the prospect of their childhood favorite returning to the big screen.  An outstanding article by Supriya Nair captures what Sridevi means to that generation. (It also includes a fascinating discussion of Sri's masterful song from Mr. India, "Hawa hawai.")  

As an outsider, I  have no childhood memories of Sridevi to draw on to fuel my anticipation - only an admiration for Sridevi's obvious gifts, which to my eye are so often far out of proportion to the horrible movies she graced with them.  Nair's nostalgic exploration traverses the many faces of Sridevi - her comedic radiance, her raw ingenuous vulnerability - that captivated and confused a generation trying to find its voice in a nation transitioning to modernity.  Reading this piece helps me understand why the women I know awaited the new movie, Gauri Shinde's English Vinglish, with such thrill and expectation.  Seeing the movie made real for me all the praise I'd ever heard for Sridevi.  She is a gifted, empathetic, and thoroughly charming performer. And English Vinglish is a beautiful, lovable movie, fully worthy of her gifts.

Sridevi's Shashi Godbole is an overworked, underappreciated Pune housewife who, like the classmates Supriya Nair remembers from her school days, also finds her voice in a confusing world.  Shashi's family unthinkingly undermines everything she does from which she might derive a sense of pride or accomplishment.  Shashi's husband, Satish (Adil Hussain), has no problem with modern women in his working life, but it's clear that he prefers a submissive galley slave at home.  He tells her in so many words that he only bothers coming home from work because of her cooking.  More than that, he belittles and discourages her from pursuing her independent business, hand-crafting and delivering laddoos.   Shashi's preteen daughter sasses her, as young girls will do to their mothers - but the girl's embarrassment has an edge that gets under Shashi's skin.  She is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother's backwardness - especially her inability to speak English.  When a business meeting keeps Satish from a parent-teacher conference, Shashi attends in his place, to the girl's utter mortification.  Shashi is elated after a charmingly successful discussion with one of the teachers, but her daughter destroys that elation in a single verbal stroke, leaving Shashi bruised and uncertain.

One has the sense - thanks both to taut scripting and Sridevi's masterful performance - of a woman bursting with intelligence and creativity, a woman who harbors a flickering sense of her own power, as yet unable to find a suitable outlet for it.  When preparations for a family wedding land her in New York with a month to herself, Shashi sees an opportunity and leaps at it, signing up for an intensive English course.  What follows is a delightful and touching adventure, as Shashi discovers the capacious strength and courage that has been in her all along, and presses these into service of her pursuit of respect for everything she is and can do. 

I crave stories like this, stories about mature women finding ways to express themselves independently, tapping into strengths they may not even have been aware they had.  And in this, English Vinglish delivers beautifully.  This is Sridevi's movie from beginning to end, and she is simply outstanding.  She is in every scene, and her famously huge eyes fill the screen with emotion and sensitivity.  The physicality of Sridevi's performances is legendary, but her work in English Vinglish is entirely different in character from her comedic physicality, on display in iconic pieces like "Hawa hawai," with their nods to the tradition of Lucille Ball.  Here, rather than comedy, Sridevi's body language conveys broadly ranging emotion.  Beaming with delight after her conference with her daughter's teacher, Shashi visibly deflates under the girl's mocking words.  In a later scene, Shashi talks with her sister about the latter's great success  as a businesswoman in New York.  While her sister sits straight-backed and confident, Shashi slumps in her chair.  Later, though, Shashi's posture and stride grow more sure as she navigates the subways and streets of the city daily on her way to class.  How satisfying to see her strut down a crowded avenue wearing a trenchcoat over her gorgeous Sabyaschi sari, clutching a cup of coffee.

Another delight of English Vinglish is that it doesn't take a romance for Shashi to find her confidence. There is a romantic element - one of Shashi's classmates, the dashing Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou), falls for her quite hard - but there is little sign that Shashi returns his feelings beyond friendship.  Indeed, Shashi seems to find Laurent's romantic interest somewhat frustrating and beside the point.  Instead of being inspired by male attention, Shashi is inspired by recognition and respect.  When her English teacher (Cory Hibbs) tells her that her laddoo business qualifies her as an "entrepreneur," Shashi glows with wonder as she tries the word on for size - and walks unnoticingly right past the smitten Laurent.

Recognition and respect is exactly what Shashi does not get from her husband Satish, who is a first-class jackass.  Even when attempting to pay her a compliment, he belittles her - as when he exclaims "My wife was born to make laddoos!" after dismissing the business earlier in the film as a frivolous waste of time.  But here the script and Shinde's direction again achieve flawless balance - Satish remains just this side of mustache-twirling cartoonishness, even as his maddeningly demeaning comments make one want to punch him in the head.  The disrespect from her family makes Shashi's climactic speech about the vitality of support for one's family - delivered, of course, in slow but increasingly confident English - all the more satisfying.

If I have to lodge even one complaint about English Vinglish, it's that the movie shortchanges Sridevi's wonderful dancing.  She does dance a little in the film's final song, and while her bashfulness at doing so is entirely consistent with Shashi's character, it would have been nice if she cut loose for more than a few seconds once that tentativeness is established and overcome.  But this is such a small nit to pick about a movie that is a true delight.  The journey that Sridevi takes us on with Shashi, learning to flex her strength and her voice, is beautiful.  It's one that I am sure I will revisit again and again - an instant favorite. 

Delhi-6 (2009)

दिल्ली-६

A recent Outlook India piece by Sunil Menon (one that also happened to mention this blog, I'm delighted to say) lamented the absence of a sense of place in many Hindi films.  Traditionally, Menon argues, geographical realism yields to movie magic, be it in masala films that are "officially headquartered in cloud-cuckoo-land (with branches in Switzerland)," or even in more serious films that make only passing invocation of locale through picture-postcard shots of landmarks. 

But my own experience of Hindi movies of late has been quite different from this.   From Kahaani's vibrant Calcutta, to Chhoti si baat's bustling Bombay, and even Tere ghar ke samne's romantic traipse up and down the spire of Qutub Minar, I have felt exquisitely connected to locale in many movies I have watched in recent months.  Almost certainly this is a lingering effect of my first trip to India, taken earlier this year, which converted many of the colors and locales of the movies from flat scenery to real, swirling, sensual associations in my mind.  One of the most potent experiences I had - one that made India pop off the movie screen and into the rest of my senses - was a bicycle-rickshaw ride and walk through Chandni Chowk on just the second full day of my trip.  Rakeysh Omprasad Mehra's Delhi-6 whirls through those very same churning streets, and watching this excellent movie closes the feedback loop of my experience - watching Hindi movies has made India a fascination for me of limitless depth and life, and seeing India inperson has made Hindi movies breathe with a new vivacity.

Annapurna (Waheeda Rehman) has been living with her son and his family in New York for many years, but her only wish is to return to her home in Delhi and spend the end of her life there.  Her grandson Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) takes her there, and meets the extended family of relatives and neighbors who welcome Annapurna back into their crowded Chandni Chowk lives.   Roshan is thrilled by the sensory overload of the neighborhood, the brilliant pageantry of the Ram Leela plays, the broad spectrum of people he meets there.  He makes a bumpy adjustment to the realities of life in old Delhi - city streets choked by the holy spectacle of a cow giving birth, the arbitrary exercise of power (and reaping of baksheesh) by the police.  He is caught up, too, in the fear and excitement that grips the city because of seemingly random capers of an enigmatic assailant, Kala Bandar (the black monkey).  As Roshan gets pulled deeper into the mystery of Kala Bandar, he becomes a part of Delhi 6, and Delhi 6 becomes a part of him.

Among the many pleasures of Delhi-6 is Roshan's broad sense of wonder as he greets the tumult of Chandni Chowk for the first time.  As Roshan gazes across the crowd and exclaims "Awesome!", I can't help but share in that wonder and relive it with him.  Roshan is a foreigner, despite his family roots in the community - he grew up in America, speaks Hindi only as well as is expedient for the story, and greets the city and its inhabitants with wide-eyed fascination (and occasional indignation) that is palpably identifiable to a firang like myself. 

The people Roshan meets there provide the texture that brings the location to life.  Central among these is a close family friend, the avuncular Ali Baig (Rishi Kapoor), one of the wealthier inhabitants of the neighborhood, who becomes a father figure and confidant to Roshan.  Rishi Kapoor is delightful in this role, a more natural performance than his scene-chewing in Luck by Chance.  Less loveable but just as compelling is the cranky Madangopal (Om Puri), father of Bittu (Sonam Kapoor), who hides her makeup and navel-piercing from her family and dreams of Bombay and stardom.  Madangopal's ambitious but somewhat stupid brother Jaigopal (Pavan Malhotra) teases the apparent simpleton Gobar (Atul Kulkarni), who of course turns out to be smarter and wiser than anyone gives him credit for.  A sinister money-lender (Prem Chopra) wields his power and influence like the jeweled walking-stick he carries.  The sweet-shop owner Mamdu (Deepak Dobriyal) greets Roshan with overflowing warmth and offers of sweets; he declares, "Bhookh mitane ke liye kutte khate hain - insaan khaate hain jodne ke liye." (Dogs eat to sate hunger - people eat to bond with each other.)

I adore this sort of neighborhood ensemble cast that brings to a movie a vibrancy, an essence, a palpable sense of life in a particular place.  This was something I loved, too, about Shyam Benegal's Welcome to Sajjanpur - and here, as in that movie, Divya Dutta once again utterly fascinates in a very brief but completely riveting role.  She plays Jalebi, a low-caste woman who collects trash and, with a compelling mixture of viciousness and sadness, harrasses neighborhood boys who cringe superstitiously away from her.  And she is a harbinger of the divisive mentality that lurks below Chandni Chowk's affable surface.

The people generate the pulse of Chandni Chowk, all these religiously, ethnically, economically diverse souls cramped together in the narrow galis of the old city.  And they live together in relative harmony, until the tension of Kala Bandar drives wedges between them, splintering the neighborhood.  Roshan, of course, ultimately helps to repair the shattered community.  But he is not so much the prodigal savior, as is Shah Rukh Khan's character in Swades.  Roshan is not a smarmy hero, swooping in with great knowledge from the West to rescue the backward locals.  Instead, he is something of an accidental savior.   After his initial tourist reaction to Delhi 6 subsides - and when internecine tension threatens to set the neighborhood ablaze - his first instinct is to flee back to the comfort of the US.  But finally, moved by love (both for Annapurna and for Bittu), Roshan sees, and takes, an opportunity for self-sacrifice. 

It is a very satisfying character arc, in a very satisfying movie.  Roshan's growth, the superb cast of richly diverse and colorfully sketched characters, the swirling sense of Chandni Chowk, the beautiful array of A.R. Rahman's songs, all combine and resonate with my own memories of Delhi, for a movie I am sure I will return to whenever I want to relive my thrilling afternoon in Delhi 6.

Chhoti si baat (1975)

छोटी सी बात

Don't ever let anyone tell you, as one of my guides in India claimed, that all Hindi movies are the same.  We know better.  They are not all bombast and melodrama, improbable dance numbers and dishum-dishum.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  But there has long been a place in Hindi cinema for sweet stories adorably and delicately told.  Taking pride of place alongside charming gems like Chashme buddoor and Katha is Basu Chatterjee's lovable, scrumptious, and hilarious Chhoti si baat ("a little thing"), truly one of the cutest, most delightful Hindi movies I have ever had the pleasure to see.

Arun (Amol Palekar) is a mild, bashful accountant with an all-consuming crush on Prabha (Vidya Sinha), a woman who works in a nearby office building and takes the same bus as Arun to work.   Arun can't bring himself to speak to Prabha, but his adoring gaze on the bus - and his habit of following her all the way home - tips his feelings to Prabha.  She indulges him, and even seems rather to like him - but she can't resist teasing him a little, too.  Soon, though, a rival arrives on a shiny yellow scooter and forces Arun's  hand - the breezy, confident Nagesh (Asrani), a lawyer in Prabha's office who takes an obvious shine to her and leaves Arun in the dust.  Desperate, Arun turns to a famous fixer, retired Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (Ashok Kumar), who dishes out advice to everyone from lovelorn office workers to superstars like Amitabh Bachchan.  The Colonel takes a fatherly interest in Arun's case, and gives him a month-long crash course in suavity and confidence.  But it remains to be seen whether following the Colonel's sometimes questionable guidance will do the job to help Arun turn the tables on Nagesh, and win him Prabha.

If I weren't already firmly on the Amol Palekar train after Golmaal, Chhoti si baat would certainly have done the trick.   The guy is flat adorable.  From his first appearance minutes into the movie, with his sweet anxious demeanor and nervous smile, I was grinning like a dope and didn't stop until long after it was over.  He renders Arun's docile sweetness just perfectly, and is a complete delight to watch - and to root for - as he stumbles through his courtship of Prabha.  Palekar brings a charming physicality to this role, adjusting his posture and mannerisms almost continuously as his confidence grows and wanes and grows again.  And Arun's Walter-Mittyish fantasies add to his charm and make him thoroughly relatable to a daydreamer like me.  In one fantastic sequence Arun, in a cinema hall, watches a song featuring Dharmendra and Hema Malini.  He squirms jealously in his seat as Hema morphs into Prabha in Dharmendra's arms - and then relaxes into a contented smile as the image of Arun takes Dharmendra's place.

 

Vidya Sinha brings her share of adorable to the show, too - Prabha sports a magnificent smile (not to mention a vast collection of fabulous sarees), and it's not difficult to see how Arun could be utterly besotted by her.  Especially charming are the scenes where she recounts Arun's fumbling attempts at stalking and courtship to her coworker (Nandita Thakur), who cracks slightly racy jokes as the clearly smitten Prabha blushes.  Indeed, most wonderfully portrayed is that Prabha actually likes Arun, right from the very beginning, and is fairly unwavering in that - Nagesh's smooth talk and slick scooter may seem a threat to Arun, but the audience is in on the secret that as far as Prabha is concerned, it's Arun all the way.

The best treat of all, though, is Ashok Kumar, who is simply hilarious as the avuncular Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (I never tire of that name, and neither does the movie).  I chronicled my ever-growing appreciation for Ashok Kumar when I recently wrote about Ek saal - it's hard to imagine a more different role from that of the Colonel, but here he is just a riot.  He spews an endless stream of advice that is somewhere between platitudes and complete nonsense, and then chides Arun for answering "yes" when the Colonel asks "samjhe?"  "Khak samjhe!" the Colonel spits, "main khud nahin samjha maine kya kaha!" ("Like hell you understand! I myself don't even understand what I said.")  And as humorously and broadly-drawn as he is, the tenderness with which the Colonel realizes, toward the end of the film, that he might have steered Arun wrong is genuinely touching.

Chhoti si baat offers some visual treats too, including a fun hillside trek through Khandala.  And, of course,  there are marvelous street scenes of Bombay that made me long for more time there, after my very abbreviated visit a few months ago.  These are crowned by this wonderful sparkly poster for an Amitabh and Saira Banu film that adorns the bus stop where Arun and Prabha meet:

Among Chhoti si baat's pleasures are a number of cameos, including a hilarious appearance by Rajendranath as a fake sadhu who pulls out a lemon out of his rear with a ridiculous "look what I did!" grin, bilks Arun out of a tidy sum, and steals his pen to boot.  I first saw Rajendranath in his riotously cute role in Tere ghar ke samne, and I laughed like a loon through his entire scene here.

What can I do besides gush?  Chhoti si baat is a thoroughly delightful film, one I'll watch over and over again, and one that is available in reasonable quality with subtitles on YouTube.  What are you waiting for?