Filmi Geek

Vanaja (2007)

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

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

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

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

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

Bombay (1995)

बम्बई

There is something about sectarian violence that pushes all my buttons.  I am not Indian, and I am neither Hindu nor Muslim, but for some reason stories of communities torn apart along that particular axis simply breaks my heart.  By the end of Mani Ratnam's Bombay I was in tears - not merely weeping, but crying huge, hot, racking sobs.   I haven't bawled like that at the end of a film since 1947: Earth.  As I said, there's something about sectarian violence.  Bombay is very different from Earth in most ways - it's lot more hopeful, for one - but it's also less remote, covering events in recent memory.  And like Earth, its characters are so lovable that their anguish sears that much more. 

Shekhar (Arvind Swamy) has finished school and returns to his village to tell his family of his plans to take a job at a newspaper in Bombay and attend night classes in journalism.  Before he returns to the city, Shekhar catches a glimpse of a young burqa-clad Muslim woman, Shaila Banu (Manisha Koirala) when her veil flutters off her face in a seaside breeze.  Shekhar is instantly captivated; he sees her again at a village wedding and then contrives to meet her, learning that she returns his interest.  Rebuffed by their furious fathers - his a respected orthodox Hindu pandit, hers a devout Muslim brick-maker - the couple elope to Bombay and marry in a civil ceremony at a municipal office.  Disowned by their parents, they build life of modest contentment and are blessed with twin sons.  Then internecine tensions spark the Bombay riots of winter 1992-1993 - Hindus and Muslims tear after one another with Molotov cocktails and machetes, upending Shekhar and Shaila Banu's peaceful little world.

Bombay is more a series of beautiful moments than a story.  Some of these moments are warm and sweet, others harrowing, others unbearably sad.  But they encapsulate the full range of the human experience, from exuberant joy to unbridled anguish.  They also demonstrate the depth of tenderness that can exist within a family and that can develop even to bridge the widest gulf.  The film offers these elements in a measured and balanced mixture, gently retreating just when the pain seems too much to bear.  So, for example, as the sectarian hatred tears violently through the streets of the city, it is held in counterpoint by good-natured and humorous sparring between Shekhar's father and Shaila Banu's.  And when the destruction of the riots reaches its apex,  Shekhar's father risks his life to save the other man's Koran. 

The first time I watched Bombay I felt it was perfect, an engaging story told beautifully with a solid-to-outstanding soundtrack by A.R. Rahman and stunning performances by its principals.  Arvind Swamy brings an everyman sensibility to his role; pudgy and relatively ordinary-looking, he is nevertheless completely appealing, and his face registers every emotion perfectly.  And Manisha Koirala is not only gorgeous; she is one of the most skilled and expressive actors I've seen.  The film seemed utterly flawless.

On second viewing (the very next day) I had to acknowledge its imperfections.  Like many a filmi romance, Shekhar's and Shaila Banu's is based on little more than a glance and developed, in shorthand, in a song.  And the film offers their mixed-religion household as an idyllic haven, free from the tensions that plague the rest of the city - absent is any sign that compromise or adjustment is necessary to make a marriage work between two people raised so differently.  Shaila Banu declares dreamily that Allah gave her children "two gods," but in real life one would expect some conflict between the life cycle rites and customs of the two religions.  Bombay sweeps these details under the rug, establishing instead a simple dichotomy where home is pluralistic and safe while the outside world is full of hate and venom.

But on first viewing, critiques like these were beside the point; the movie just enthralled with its beautiful and symbolic moments, carefully crafted and perfectly rendered - like the moment in the gorgeous song "Tu hi re" where Shaila Banu's cloak, the last remnant of her burqa, catches on an anchor as she runs along the shore, and she must shed it to make her first secret meeting with Shekhar.  Or the heartbreaking and terrifying moment when one of Shekhar and Shaila Banu's twin boys, riding on the shoulders of his Hindu grandfather, furiously wipes the tilak from the old man's forehead when the pair are confronted by a group of Muslim rioters.  At its best, Bombay is a gripping succession of breath-stopping moments like these, and a simply unforgettable film. 

(A note on language:  Bombay was originally shot in Tamil and dubbed into Telugu and Hindi - the latter being the version that I saw - which is why I've included it in the "regional" category.  I suspect it would have been even better in Tamil.)

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.

Antareen (1994)

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

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

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

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

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

Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959)

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

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

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

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

Shatranj ke khilari (1977)

शतरंज के खिलाड़ी

International relations, domestic relations, and the game of chess.  There are elements shared by all three - strategy, tactics, sacrifice, give-and-take, the necessity of patience.  Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke khilari ("The Chess Players") is an excellent little film that spins layered metaphors from these commonalities. 

It is the late 1850s, in Lucknow, capital of Awadh, the seat of elite Muslim culture in northern India, and two elite Muslim gentlemen - Mirza (Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir (Saeed Jaffrey) - have discovered the brilliant game of chess.  They play all day and deep into the night, with little awareness of the toll their obsession is taking on their marriages, and only slightly more awareness of what is happening on the larger political scene.  The latter is that the British East India Company has decided that it is time for King Wajid (Amjad Khan), the last semi-autonomous ruler in Hindustan, to step down.  Wajid, who now regrets having devoted less of his attention to affairs of state than to the music, dance, and poetry for which Awadh culture is famous, must decide whether his next move shall be to accede to the Company's proposal - he is offered a handsome pension - or pull together an army and go to war. 

And so there are chess matches at at least three different levels.  There are the literal chess games between Mirza and Mir, and there is the metaphorical chess match on the international scale between King Wajid and the British. Mirza and Mir's domestic situations map to chess games as well.  Mirza's wife Khurshid (Shabana Azmi) engages in a variety of tactical maneuvers to recapture her husband's attention; she feigns illness, attempts seduction, and even hides his chess pieces.  Mir's wife Nafisa (Farida Jalal), meanwhile, plans a more proactive attack: she takes a lover, and Mir makes the strategic blunder of misinterpreting her enthusiasm for his long nights out playing chess, mistaking it for wifely support of his intellectual pursuits.   

Mirza and Mir's clueless indifference to domestic matters is set forth in a strong parallel to King Wajid's neglect of his realm as the Company takes over.  The message seems to be a gentle criticism of India for its complacency in allowing the British to gain so much power, underscored by Mir and Mirza's casual decision to abandon the Hindustani rules of chess in favor of the speedier and more aggressive English rules with which we in the West are familiar today.  I say "gentle criticism" because Mirza and Mir are hapless and sympathetic characters, akin to Shakespearean buffoons in presentation, and their interactions - especially the desperate lengths to which they will go to put together a game - are airy and genuinely comical (thanks in no small part to the brilliant work of Saeed Jaffrey and especially Sanjeev Kumar, who was one of the finest actors ever in Hindi film).  As a result the film never feels heavy-handed, despite the fact that it swirls with metaphor; there is a always lightness and a balance tempering the many variations on the theme. 

Shatranj ke khilari is a delight to watch, for many reasons.  It is, I have been told, Satyajit Ray's most Bollywood-ish offering, and the cast is packed with faces familiar from Bollywood and beyond - in addition to Sanjeev, Shabana, Saeed Jaffrey, Amjad Khan, and Farida Jalal, there are also turns by Victor Banerjee, Farouq Sheikh, and even Richard Attenborough; as if that weren't enough, Amitabh Bachchan lends his distinctive voice to the film's narration.  The film is also visually appealing, shot for the most part with generous lighting and a clean style.  It is a terrific film that I expect to watch again and again.

Finally, regular Filmi Geek readers know by now to expect the following indulgence:

Ghare baire (1984)

In the Bengali film Ghare baire ("The home and the world"), Satyajit Ray - a giant figure in Indian art cinema - explores the political situation in Victorian Bengal, at the time when Lord Curzon divided the province into predominantly Hindu and predominantly Muslim regions, presaging the ultimate partition of the subcontinent. A forward-thinking Maharajah (Victor Banerjee, best known to Western audiences from A Passage to India), encourages his wife to come out of purdah to meet his school friend, who has become a militant leader of the Swadeshi nationalist movement. All of the relationships are strained when she falls for his message – and for him – only to learn too late that he is little more than an egotistical hypocrite. This interesting film is perhaps best understood as allegory - the sheltered wife is Mother India, tumbling headlong into the modern era.