Filmi Geek

Gaja Gamini (2000)

गज गामिनी

Gaja Gamini, M.F. Husain's first excursion into filmmaking, is absurd in almost every aspect, and not in the cool intellectual sense.  It is just ridiculous.  It's a series of laughably poor attempts at profundity, which are often embarrassing to watch.  It is safe to say that were it not for the reverence attached to Husain himself, the project would never have attracted either financial backing or the high-profile stars who dupe innocents like me into enduring it.   It is, as a Twitter acquaintance so concisely summarized it, senseless.

Gaja Gamini is widely described as Husain's tribute to his "muse," Madhuri Dixit.  If this description gives you pause - as it does me - it's with good reason.  Gaja Gamini is every bit as objectifying and regressive as it sounds when it comes to paying tribute to a woman, or to women, or to Women.  It is brimming over with revoltingly pompous references to the Ageless Mystery That Is Woman and Woman's Mystical Power and other such claptrap that one associates with the sort of self-congratulatory man who says things like "I'm not a misogynist; I love women." 

The titular Gaja Gamini (Madhuri Dixit), is a mysterious, flitting creature whom all men are in thrall of though none fully glimpses.  She incarnates through several ages as a series of women, most of whom have this in common:  Each waits alone on her conceptual pedestal for an arrant man to come to her and be inspired by her beauty to create their own masterworks.  One incarnation, Shakuntala, is the muse of the epic poet Kalidas (Mohan Agashe, a co-producer of the film credited here as Dr Mohan Agashe as if his academic credentials bolster the thin tissue of Husain's wanky fantasy).  Shakuntala's decidedly unworthy mate is a doltish, Jodhpur-wearing, banduk-toting rajkumar.   In another incarnation, Gaja Gamini is Mona Lisa, who is, of course, the inspiration of Leonardo Da Vinci, embodied here by Naseeruddin Shah - you read that right - in a stupid costume coughing up even stupider lines while waving his compensatory paintbrush in the air. 

What?

The supposedly modern incarnation of Gaja Gamini, Monica (note the western name), enjoys a light romantic dance with Shah Rukh Khan before the important manly work of covering a war (he is a photojournalist) wrenches him from her arms, leaving her teary and anxious.  This is M.F. Husain's great vision of the timeless power of woman - the endless ability to sit around on our asses crying while our men  create art, science, culture, and shape the world.

In some kind of token nod to feminist themes, one incarnation of Gaja Gamini, Sangeeta, inspires a group of village women including Shabana Azmi, Farida Jalal, and  Shilpa Shirodkar, to take up their lanterns and march against - well, against what it is not clear, but their march is stern and angry and they wield their lanterns fiercely.  But even this powerful Sangeeta is debilitated; she is sometimes blind, sometimes mute, and each of the other women transforms into her, ensuring that none of them is whole either.  And even Sangeeta waits for the rescuing hand of her ageless lover Jayant.  Feh.

Why, Shabana ji?

There is plenty more; the vapidity of Husain's vision is nearly boundless, and Gaja Gamini indulges it to the fullest in over two hours of excruciatingly scripted, stiffly acted nonsense. You might think that a movie conceived and executed by an artist of Husain's stature would at least have visual appeal, but not so Gaja Gamini.  The sets are, I suppose, meant to be theatrical, minimalist, and evocative, but for the most part they come across as amateurish and low budget.  The film's early sequences take place on an abstracted, primary yellow Banaras ghat that looks more like the hastily hammered and painted set of a high school play than that of a high-concept art film.   The Monica and Shah Rukh sequence occurs on a set bisected by a large brick wall (one side represents the past and tradition, the other the present and modernity, get it?) - and when Shah Rukh Khan's choregraphy requires him to lean against it, it shudders and sways, belying the papier-mâché beneath its brick facade.  Only the blue-and-white Dal Mandi set on which the women's march occurs is anything close to evocative.  One just expects more from such a revered visual artist as Husain.

I have been to Banaras, and you, sir, are no Banaras.

Prancing about on these poor, pliant theatrical sets, the array of actors comport themselves woodenly and self-consciously; the experienced stars gracing this cast are as forced and ridiculous as Husain's unknowns.  There is nothing wrong with highly stylized direction when the style serves a purpose, but here it only lends pomposity, a sense that someone (well, Husain) believes these characters have such profound philosophical insights to deliver that they must speak them in the patronizing tones of a small child's religious teacher.  It compounds embarrassment upon painful embarrassment, in an utter disaster of a movie that is more pointless than profound.

Ooga booga!

If Gaja Gamini has a redeeming feature, it is Madhuri herself.  How many movies can one say this of?  If there is any actor who can make the unwatchable bearable for a moment with a dazzling smile or a crisply executed mudra, it is Madhuri Dixit.  Thankfully, here she is as radiant as ever.  M.F. Husain's tribute to her may be objectifying bakhwas with a camera that dwells embarrassingly languidly on the exaggerated sway of Gaja Gamini's ass, but you can't say Madhuri is not a worthy choice of muse.  She is at her best, of course, in the movie's songs, which are by far its highlights.  Bhupen Hazarika's music is quite lovely throughout, and the songs are smartly (if weirdly) choreographed. Indeed, I had seen two of the songs years ago, "Meri payal bole" and "Do sadiyan ke sangam," and rather wish I had left it at that.

 

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. 

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.  

Chor sipahee (1977)

चोर सिपाही

When I read about how Hindi movies were made in the 1970s, I can't help but be impressed by the alacrity with which the Bombay studios churned out product. Actors shuttling between three shootings a day and dubbing sessions in the evening; dialogue writers cranking out lines on set; stories resketched on the fly as actors' schedules conflicted or productions ran out of money - it's miraculous that movies of any quality were produced at all. Many a masala movie with an exciting cast and a promising first hour falls casualty to the risks of that kind of improvisational, shoestring filmmaking. The "curse of the second half" bumps more such movies than I can count right off the rails.

Chor sipahee ("thief and officer") is a textbook case of this, stylish fun masala with a lot going for it before it disintegrates into incoherence. You can feel the production becoming more rushed and careless as the film wears on. Twists in the story become more ad hoc and less clearly rendered; characters recede into the background or disappear altogether. And yet there is enough of both style and substance to redeem these sins of sloppy production, yielding sufficient reward for the masala connoisseur.

On the side of substance, Chor sipahee - like all the best masala films - hangs its wacky trappings on a profound social theme. In this case, the theme is the nature of criminality and redemption, and whether punishment or rehabilitation is the better philosophy for stopping and deterring criminal behavior. Shankar (Shashi Kapoor), a maverick but effective police inspector, believes so firmly in the principle of rehabilitation that he actually undermines attempts to punish criminals. When he encounters Raja (Vinod Khanna), an unrepentant gang leader, Shankar sees the ultimate opportunity to put his views into practice, and vows to reform Raja. Shankar is willing to go to great lengths to secure Raja's turnaround - he joins Raja's gang, renounces family ties, and apparently becomes a vicious evildoer himself. This is a subterfuge intended to show Raja the error of his ways.

Naturally, the plan is effective, and by out-badding the bad guys (including Ranjit as a gang leader who is either an Arab or peculiarly Arabophilic), Shankar convinces Raja that a life of crime is no life worth living. I would be lying if I said I understood the logic here, either of Shankar or of the script. For an alternate view, though, do see the excellent exegesis by Post-Punk Cinema Club, which finds remarkable depth and coherence in what seems to me slapdash filmmaking at its most joyously ad hoc.

On the side of style, Chor sipahee is 70s masala at its full-bore best.  From Vinod Khanna's superb high-heeled boots, to Shashi Kapoor's badass leather jacket (he is decked throughout in fantastic costumes designed by his wife, Jennifer Kendall), there's no shortage of awesome to feast your eyes on.  It's almost  a waste to write a review of a movie such as this when I don't have a DVD to take screencaptures from.  Fortunately Post-Punk and Memsaab are both on the case; see their posts for the full complement of visual goodness. 

No masala movie worth its salt is complete without an outlandishly-costumed qawwali, and Chor sipahee delivers with "Duniya hai aati jaati," in which Shashi Kapoor and Vinod Khanna, in identical qawwal outfits, repeatedly exchange places via cleverly executed backflips. This song, only about 45 minutes into the movie, also marks the last interesting thing my beloved Shabana Azmi gets to do in it. 

 

As often happens in her masala turns, Shabana Azmi is woefully underused in Chor sipahee.  She has a terrific scene very early in the movie, in which she outwits Raja while he tries to rob her father's safe.  (At this point in the film it must be admitted that Raja doesn't seem terribly smart for a successful recidivist crook.)  Parveen Babi gets a bit more substance to her role, as Raja's righteous sister Bharti.  In a delightful bit of masala melodrama, Bharti, disgusted by Raja's criminal pursuits, refuses his angry demand that she demonstrate her love by tying a rakhi on his wrist.  Durga Khote gets a marvelously filmi turn as well,as Raja and Bharti's mother.  In one terrific scene, she demonstrates her loving forgiveness for Raja by fixing him a bowl of kheer, and he demonstrates his unrepentant viciousness by refusing to eat it.  Fortunately for everyone, Shankar turns up and eats the sweet with relish, to mother's wide-eyed delight.

On reflection, especially after reading the other reviews I've mentioned, I feel I should have found Chor sipahee more satisfying than I did.   As Memsaab enumerates, it hits all the required masala elements and then some.  70s masala is a little bit like pizza - even when it's mediocre, it's still pretty good while it's happening.  Chor sipahee is a good time, even if there's not much to remember the next day.  And Shashi Kapoor does look mighty groovy when he dons appropriate threads for joining a smuggling ring:

(Thanks to Memsaab for the shamelessly purloined screencaptures.)

Hira aur patthar (1977)

हीरा और पत्थर

When I visited Beth, we watched a whole mess of movies.  "Mess," it turns out, is an apt description of Hira aur patthar ("diamond and stone"), about as disappointing an attempt at masala as I've ever seen.  Beth and I figured we could not go wrong with a movie that featured each of our respective fake-pretend movie significant others, Shashi Kapoor and Shabana Azmi.  As an added bonus for me, there is also Ashok Kumar, my recent fascination.  When "with Asrani and Bindu" came up in the credits, Beth and I actually high-fived each other.  A short time into the movie we caught a glimpse of Manorama as well.  "This is going to be great," we thought.  What better way to spend our visit together than with this cast?  Alas.

As a young boy, Shankar loses his faith in God - particularly Jagdishwar, worshiped in the temple high on a clifftop overlooking his village - when his mother is fatally wounded in a fire and the boy's prayers fail to revive her.  The fire was set by a cruel zamindar, Vikram Singh (Raj Mehra), bent on extracting as much money as possible from the farmers who work his land.  Shankar's father and uncle (Bharat Bhushan and Chandrashekhar), now without their farm, take up the work of carrying pilgrims up to the temple on a doli.  Even when he grows to adulthood, though, Shankar (Shashi Kapoor) still refuses to visit the temple, and won't even mount the steps - despite the entreaties of his cousin Tota (Asrani), Shankar refuses to carry a doli of his own.  To shoulder his share of the family's debts to Vikram Singh, Shankar plans to make his fortune in the city.  On the eve of his departure, though, he meets Gauri (Shabana Azmi), the daughter of the security officer who guards the temple.  Smitten, Shankar relents - he stays in the village, agrees to carry the doli, and gladly climbs the steps each day to visit Gauri.  But he still refuses to enter the temple, enraging Gauri's father.  And when Shankar and his friend Dr Anand (Ashok Kumar) learn of Vikram Singh's thievery against the village and the temple, Singh's son Pratap (Narendranath) plots to put Shankar's life and liberty in peril.  Pratap has another reason to want Shankar out of the way - the girl he loves, the vampish Rupa (Bindu), favors Shankar over him.

Hira aur patthar starts off with so much promise.  The seeds of masala goodness are sown early and one expects them to sprout richly.  There is terrific trauma-drama-o-rama as young Shekhar bounds up and down the temple steps screaming pleadingly for Jagdishwar to save his mother's life.  There is a marvelously filmi passage-of-time sequence, in which the frustrated boy shows his anger with God by casting stones at his reflection.  Ripples spread, the credits roll, and soon we see the grown Shankar sitting on the very same riverbank, still casting angry stones. 

This is the kind of foundation that great masala films are laid upon.  There is a charming meet-cute sequence between Gauri and Shankar at a vegetable stand, in which she accidentally squirts him with tomato seeds, and smiles that bashful, tooth-covering smile characteristic of Shabana Azmi when she was this young and self-conscious.

There is even a pretty decent first action sequence - Shankar takes on Pratap Singh in the open market, knocking over vegetable stands and snack carts to rescue Gauri from Pratap's harrassment.  (This is after Pratap manhandles Gauri in the street and a bunch of men stand around just watching.  Just like real life!)

Reminiscing about these early scenes with Beth, I described them as "back when we still thought this was going to be a good movie." 

"We were so young and naïve," Beth replied.

So where does it all go wrong?  It's hard to say exactly where Hira aur Patthar bumps off the rails.  It just loses steam and takes a turn for the boring about halfway through.  Bindu lacks her full glory as a vamp, and Pratap is about as mealy and unsatisfying a villain as I've ever seen. The movie lacks any kind of connective tissue, any grand masala theme to tie all the elements together.  It flirts with a couple ideas - Shankar's steadfast denial of religious faith is one, and a false start in which it appears Shankar will organize the doliwale into some kind labor force is another - but nothing crystallizes.  There are no great songs, no boisterous qawwali, no costume-donning antics, no climactic set-up to chase the villain down in his lair.  In short, Hira aur patthar is not grounded enough to be a passable serious movie, and not silly enough to be a passable masala movie.  To misapply Gertrude Stein, "There is no there there."

There are just a couple of moments worth their masala salt that lift Hira aur patthar out of Filmi Geek's new "Execrable" category and into "Timepass".  One comes in service of Tota's quest to marry a village girl named Chanda (Jayshree).  This hilarious scene features wedding rites performed in the back of a speeding truck driven by the stereotyped friendly Punjabi truck driver, while the bride's father and his choice of groom follow in a car that falls apart piece by piece.  There is also some elegant suspense in a fight scene between Pratap and an unruly customer who tries to rape Rupa - a stabbing occurs behind an upturned couch, and for quite a long effective moment it is not at all clear who died.

But that's about it, and it's just not enough to sustain.  It's telling that this far into the review I haven't had much to say about either of the principals, for whom Beth and I ostensibly chose this movie.  That is because even they don't have a lot to offer.  Shashi Kapoor comes as close to phoning it in as I've ever seen him do, and Shabana Azmi - my dear, beloved Shabana Azmi - just doesn't have a whole lot to do save some flitting (and as much as I adore her, she's not really much of a flitter) and some fretting. They look pretty, though, and Shabana always gives good sari.

And if nothing else, the Hira aur patthar offers a generous helping of the marvelous Manorama and the faces she pulls like no other.  So I leave you with a sampling of that - a Manorama panorama, if you will. 

Apne paraye (1980)

अपने पराये

Recently, thanks to a couple of thoughtful visitors, discussion has revived on my review of Swami.  By coincidence, the next movie I had in my queue to watch and review was, just like Swami, a Basu Chatterjee film based upon a novel by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Apne paraye ("our own and others"). 

Chander (Amol Palekar) is a bit of a layabout, a good-hearted man with a poor head for business and no taste for hard work.  He lives, on suffrance, in the household of his absent-minded elder cousin (Utpal Dutt), a wealthy and successful Calcutta lawyer.  Chander's wife Sheela (Shabana Azmi) runs the household with a stern hand, to the consternation of the laywer's weak-minded and sickly wife, Sideshwari (Ashalata).  Sideshwari can't deny Sheela's domestic competence, though, and she dotes on Sheela's children as enthusiastically as her own.  This fragile domestic peace is shattered when the lawyer's younger brother Harish (Girish Karnad), also a lawyer, arrives with his family and moves into the Calcutta haveli.  His wife Naintara (Bharati Achrekar) is jealous of Sheela, and angry that Sheela doesn't coddle Naintara's spoiled eldest child.  Naintara schemes to drive a wedge between Sheela and the impressionable Sideshwari.  This tension comes to a head when Naintara manipulates Sideshwari into having Chander and Sheela and their family thrown out of the house, and exiled to the family's farmland, where matters only get worse for them. 

Apne paraye has the potential to be the kind of movie I love - a taut, compelling exploration of the social problems of the joint family system through an intimate study of the lives of its characters.  This is the kind of movie that Shyam Benegal does so well, and I had high hopes that between Chatterjee's delicate touch and Chattopadhyay's story, Apne paraye would shine.  Unfortunately, the movie does not quite measure up.  The first half, which focuses on the relationships among the women, is unsatisfyingly superficial.  Zooming reaction shots and a booming soundtrack lends something like the feel of a saas-bahu serial to this otherwise delicately directed piece, and trivializes the tensions among the women by reducing them to catty jealousies over who is boss of the kitchen and who dotes on whose precious little offspring.  

The movie's second half fares better, as the story moves beyond the tight confines of the crowded Calcutta homestead and begins to develop some symbolism that adds richness.  Chander and Sheela are forced to face the harsh realities of the outside world, while for those who remain at home, the world almost seems to fold in on itself like a domestic ourobouros.  Naintara's bitchy manipulations escalate to fever pitch, while Sideshwari implodes in weepy dithering.  The men, especially Harish, overreact to the complaints of their wives, quite literally making a federal case out of a very ordinary domestic squabble.  The members of the household who remain in Calcutta seem to utterly lose perspective, while Chander and Sheela face the daily cold-water splash of trying to make ends meet in the real world.  Despite this potentially interesting contrast, though, the movie suffers from a facile ending, a giant "reset" in which the conflict is resolved without any sign of lasting consequences or transformation. 

The best moments of the movie are those that simply reflect domestic life without trying to wring drama from them - such as the family's meals, obviously a focus of the daily rhythm of life.  At mealtimes family business is transacted, grievances are aired, power is exerted and conceded, sacrifies are made, burdens are shared.  In the movie's only real hint of character development, early in the film Sheela manipulates her husband and sister-in-law by refusing to eat; later, she declines to eat out of sacrifice, when there is no longer enough food to go around, and Chander shows his maturation by offering to make the sacrifice along with her.

Making six adult characters all distinguishable and human is not a trivial task for a movie, and Apne paraye does a reasonably good job of it.  Naintara and Harish are a little one-dimensional in their self-absorption. Sideshwari's defining characteristic is her weakness and impressionability, but in moments when the movie is steering clear of melodrama, there is some interesting tension in her perpetually shifting loyalties.  Chander's shiftlessness is balanced by his evident good intentions and affection for his family.  Sheela is the most complex of all, and most of that complexity is thanks to Shabana Azmi's performance (and Basu Chatterjee's direction), as it is conveyed in subtleties of expression and body language.  While she is stern and dour in her direction of the household and discpline of her children (including the adult-child, her husband Chander), Sheela often betrays her tender side with a small indulgent smile. 

For every Chattopadhyay adaptation I have seen and been to some degree disappointed by - from Swami to Devdas to Parineeta - my lukewarm reviews have been met with staunch defenses based on the novel's texts.  I have no doubt that Chattopadhyay's novel (entitled Nishkriti) is better than Apne paraye, and presents the characters and their relationships with more depth and subtlety.  But I write about movies, not the books they are based upon, and I do believe that a movie - even an adaptation - has to stand on its own strengths and answer for its own weaknesses.  In its best moments, Apne paraye perhaps offers glimpses of the social insights for which Chattopadhyay is renowned.  On balance, though, it misses the mark - not by much, but by just enough to be frustrating.

 

Ashanti (1982)

अशांति

Not all masala is created equal.  There is masala with a message - Amar Akbar Anthony comes to mind - where there is a bit of social commentary baked into the fluffy cake of  wild stunts, dashes of romance, comedic disguises, and over-the-top misanthropic villains.  And then there is masala that invites you to check your brain at the door and just come along for a wackadoodle ride.  Ashanti ("unrest") is that kind of masala.

Bhishm Bahadur Singh (Amrish Puri), scion of maharajas, is bitter that he is merely rich, and no longer royalty.  He vows to undermine law and order, sowing chaos and unrest to take his revenge against the democratic society that dethroned him.  To carry out this plan he engineers a counterfeiting operation and a string of bank robberies executed by his son Ramesh.  Police inspector Kumar (Rajesh Khanna) is framed and sent to prison by Ramesh.  Released from prison some years later, Kumar hunts Ramesh down, only to lose his leg in their violent confrontation.  Plotting his revenge, he collects three young women - Kamini (Shabana Azmi), Sunita (Parveen Babi), and Sonia (Zeenat Aman) - all of whom have been terribly and violently wronged by Bhishm Bahadur Singh and Ramesh's gang.  He trains them in combat and surveillance, and with the help of the spirited bootlegger Shankar (Mithun Chakraborty), they set to work tracking down the villains and seeing that justice is done.

As with many light-on-substance films, though, the pleasure of Ashanti is not in the intricacies of the plot - it's in the grab-bag of masala elements and over-the-top moments.  Ashanti puts its filmi touch on its Charlie's Angels-inspired setup.  Kumar and his three angels solemnize their vow of revenge in a temple in a kind of 4-way wedding.  The angels get up to wild disguised comedy antics as they carry out their plan.  And in the scenes leading up to the climax, they naturally perform a jaunty song to con their way into Bahadur Singh's palace.  To Ashanti's great credit, as well, it's very satisfying that the girls get to kick some serious ass in the movie's wacky fight scenes.

The angels aren't the only ones who contribute to the parade of memorable masala moments that make Ashanti thoroughly paisa vasool.  Shankar has a big gay shirtless fight with Bob Christo, and a truly terrific drunk song with Sunita.  A sweaty Bahadur Singh proves how badass he is by deliberately goading a venomous snake to bite him.  There's even a role for the wonderful Nadira, who in a kitchen fight scene, gets a brinjal in the mouth from Sonia:

That fight scene also bears mention as another of Ashanti's tempting, if trippy, set pieces - the girls take on the hijra kitchen staff with ridiculously comic violence, as when Sonia slaps dough on top of a hijra's head and stuffs the head, and the dough, into a tandoor - pulling out a perfectly cooked naan. 

Kumar, for his part, makes the most of his maiming - he gets a gun installed in one of his crutches and fires it with wild abandon, and in the film's climax he pulls off his prosthetic leg and beats Ramesh with it (never mind how he stays standing while he does so).

In short, if you are a fan of nutso masala, then run - or at least hobble on your bullet-loaded crutches - to the nearest DVD player and watch Ashanti.

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. 

Main Azaad hoon (1989)

मैं आज़ाद हँ

Main Azaad hoon ("I am Azaad"), one of a very few Javed Akhtar films that Shabana Azmi appeared in, is an interesting rumination on how an ordinary - and anonymous - man can be moved to tremendous sacrifice by the plight of his fellow human beings.   

Publisher Gokulchand's (Manohar Singh) newspaper is not selling, and his columnist Subhashni (Shabana Azmi) is facing the ax.  To boost the paper's sales - and to save her job - quick-thinking Subhashni concocts and publishes a letter from a fictional man named Azaad - the name means "independent" - who threatens to kill himself in protest against social injustice throughout the state.  Azaad is an immediate sensation throughout the city, and Subhashni pens more letters, creating an entire backstory for the fictional man.  Gokulchand is delighted with the result in the paper's bottom line, and to keep the charade going he authorizes Subhashni to find a suitable man they can pay to play the role of Azaad.  Subhashni discovers a charismatic vagabond (Amitabh Bachchan) who is willing to take on the role in exchange for a few good meals and a generous handful of rupees.  Azaad's mystique grows, and everyone with a grievance seeks his aid, from slumdwellers in search of clean water to striking factory workers clamoring for a living wage.  Azaad is moved by these causes, and soon he is acting from his heart instead of merely acting the part that Gokulchand and Subhashni have paid him to play.  And his heart is tested when the power players who created him try to use him as a pawn for their own advantage.

Main Azaad hoon's script is little too wordy; there were places where the story dragged.  But Javed sahib's award-winning dialogues deliver with the expected style the film's statements against manipulation of the common man by those in power  - like when one character, an elected official, says that the key to politics is to "make promises to the poor, and make deals with the rich."   Subhasnhi's character arc in particular is compelling.  She starts out just as manipulative as the power players - she is very shrewd in fact, acting in calculation of her own interests only, and is not moved until she sees Azaad willing to commit himself to the fullest for the rights of others.

Indeed, there are parallels to Shabana Azmi's own experience built into Subhashni's story that are so striking I had to wonder if Javed sahib didn't write the script with his wife in mind.  Subhashni begins with the view that her newspaper column is strictly entertainment for the masses.  As the film wears on, she struggles to keep entertainment separate from social responsibility, just as Shabana Azmi herself did, and, again like Shabana, ultimately follows her heart in the direction of activism.  The film contains parallels between Azaad and Amitabh Bachchan too - in one scene, Azaad emerges from his rooms to find an overwhelming crowd of supplicants awaiting darshan; I have read about such crowds at Amitabh's own home, especially in the early 1980s.

Javed Akhtar once said that Hollywood films are short stories while Hindi films are novels. But the characterizations and scope of Main Azaad hoon are, in some ways, more like the former.  Rather than offering reels of epic backstory, Azaad's true origin and life story remain a complete mystery.  We learn a little about Subhashni's father - he was a hero, a freedom fighter on the eve of independence - but no friends or relatives of hers are present in the film.  By filmi standards, the two principals are unanchored and lonesome (though Azaad has a sidekick who makes a few appearances) - these loners are given their sense of purpose by devoting themselves to a wider community to which neither fully belongs. 

Shaque (1976)

शक़

A story of a marriage worn down by fear and suspicion, Shaque ("doubt") has a very strong start but takes a few unfortunate turns that leave the film overall with a very unsatisfying heft. 

Vinod Joshi (Vinod Khanna) is a witness to a murder in his workplace.  He cooperates with the police investigation; there is an arrest and a trial at which Vinod testifies; and Vinod's colleague Subramaniam is convicted of the crime.   Vinod  and his wife Meena (Shabana Azmi) do their best to forget the harrowing incident, thinking it is behind them.  Ten years later, Meena receives an ominous letter from a man called Maan Singh (Utpal Dutt), who claims that Vinod was more involved than he let on and allowed an innocent man to be convicted in order to cover his own crimes of embezzlement from the company.  Meena is troubled by the letter, but while Vinod assures that it's nothing but the baseless ravings of disturbed old man, Meena can't shake the dreadful feeling that Vinod hasn't told her the whole truth.  She launches an investigation of her own, behind Vinod's back - but their marriage bends under the strain of her suspicions.

Shaque is at its best when its focus sticks to the relationship between Vinod and Meena and the strains placed upon it by Meena's suspicions.  Vinod Khanna and Shabana Azmi are understated and sweet in the scenes establishing their relationship early in the film, and the realist style of their performance lets tensions grow between them without too much overwrought dramatizing.  The tension is delicately enhanced by some very nice camera work, framing shots like the one pictured above.  Their tenderness and passion is apparent too, illustrated in a handful of touching, intimate scenes.

Unfortunately, the film's masala elements - especially the supposedly suspenseful confrontations towards the film's end - contrast with the delicacy of its study of the marriage, in a distracting rather than an effective way.  And Meena makes some very questionable judgments that make it hard to identify with her.  Her poor judgment about Maan Singh when it's painfully obvious that he's blackmailing betrays her as naive, and her incomprehensible suicide attempt seems like drama-mongering.   Neither paints a sympathetic heroine.  The film would have done better to give us a sensible woman caving to the temptation of doubt, rather than Meena almost wrecking her own marriage through stupidity.   In the end, the weaknesses outweigh the strengths, and even though Shabana and Vinod give the best performances they can under the circumstances, Shaque isn't much more than a forgettable timepass, despite its well-crafted moments.