Filmi Geek

Outlook Roundup

In case you missed them, here are my last few columns at Outlook.

• Quirky Parsis and Drunk Christians - despite the title that my editor gave this piece, it is actually about movies that go beyond these stereotypes when depicting minority communities.

• Enviably Evil - on the luscious and devilish roles of Nadira.

• From Aurat to Mother India - how Mehboob Khan remade his own 1940 movie from a simple agrarian tale into an allegorical epic

• Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered - remembering Meena Kumari on her death anniversary

 

 

Two more columns

My two most recent columns in Outlook India cover some of my favorite movies.

• Two Films, One Maker pays tribute to Vijay Anand and revisits the timeless question:  Teesri Manzil or Jewel Thief?

• For the Love of a Feckless Goofball takes a look at the smart, self-actuated women who fall in love with Kishore Kumar's wackiest characters.

Please read and share them. 

In the meantime, I've been watching movies faster than I can write about them, which is more fun for me than for you.  Some movies I've watched recently that you might (or, might not) see reviews of here on Filmi Geek include:  Dil apna aur preet parai, Roop ki rani choron ka raja, and the truly awful yet delightfully watchable Nagin. 

Aan (1952)

आन

Dir. Mehboob Khan

Aan may be the most awful movie I ever loved watching.   Its story is full of regressive and revolting portrayals of love and feminine agency.  Its hero is Dilip Kumar at his smarmiest, all smirk and swagger and absolutely no humility or charm.  And once again, in that venerable tradition that never ceases to grate on me, this arrogant piece of work is loved by two different women.

Among the many despicable achievements of Kumar's character Jai Tilak is the repeated belittling, throttling, and even threatening to drown Mangala (Nimmi), his childhood friend who, despite the constancy of this treatment, is in love with him.    If that's not bad enough, Jai himself loves his locality's haughty, Jodhpur-wearing rajkumari, Rajshree (Nadira), and gives her the old "your lips tell me no but your eyes say yes" routine, insisting that she loves him - or will come to love him, anyhow, which is all the same to him.   He shows that he is willing to bank on her future love, by physically (and arguably sexually) assaulting her throughout the movie, as if all will be forgiven when she realizes his truth.  It's a funny thing about Jai, that he treats the woman he loves and the woman he's indifferent to just about the same. Both are subject to beatings if they don't do just what he happens to want in the moment.

There are a few more threads in the story of Aan.  Rajshree is the younger sister of a kind-hearted maharaja (Murad) who enjoys staging cheerful public games and giving gifts to his subjects.  The maharaja perceives the dawn of a new era; he announces a plan to cede royal power entirely, naming the people themselves as his heir.  This is too much for Rajshree and the maharaja's ambitious brother Shamsher (Premnath); he arranges to have the maharaja killed so that he can sieze power for himself.  (Shamsher also kidnaps Mangala and treats her not significantly worse than Jai ever did.  But you see, Jai is the hero, while Shamsher is the villain.  So when Shamsher manhandles Mangala, it's bad.)   

Thus Aan is in part framed as a kind of allegorical triumph of populism over monarchy; Jai's triumph over Shamsher is the triumph of the regular guy over the most entitled, abusive, and self-serving aspects of aristocracy and anti-democracy.  But that is not Jai's only victory (see what I did there?).  Much more central to Aan, and highlighted by its title, is Jai's taming of Rajshree's pride.  Jai is supposed to have won her over with his boldness but also to have taught her a lesson in humility. In the second half of the film, after the villagers flee an an attack from Rajshree and Shamsher's army, Jai kidnaps Rajshree and forces her to live among the rabble in the villagers' refugee camp.  Rajshree is quickly brought to earth by her inability to perform tasks that the village women do day in and day out, such as grinding flour, carrying water, and mending clothes.  Her pride eventually gives way under this populist onslaught, and Aan's glorification of the everyman is underscored.    Mehboob Khan seems to have missed the irony of lessons in humility coming from smug, arrogant Jai, who hasn't had a humble moment in his life.  But just like the physical abuse of Mangala, arrogance and superciliousness are only evil when perpetrated by the nominal villains, not by the anointed hero Jai.  And perhaps they are even worse when committed by a woman; Rajshree is not so much a lover to be wooed as a filly to be broken, like the mare Jai wins from Rajshree at the maharaja's games.

And yet I thoroughly enjoyed this film even with its hot mess of a story.  For one, it is absolutely glorious visual gluttony.   The sets are marvelous, even fantastical.  The interiors of the maharaja's palace are a ceaseless parade of delights, festooned with animal sculptures, baroque pillars, elaborate fountains. 

On the left, wall sculpture of tiger attacking elephant. On the right, Rajshree's bathroom. Rajshree's bathroom.

Rajshree's dungeon is accessed through a door made of an enormous pair of crocodile jaws that swing open onto the imposing stone staircase.  Shamsher's dungeon (yes, each has his or her own. The modern rajkumar and rajkumari need personalized spaces in which to toss those who displease them) features huge spiked pillars, sliding wall panels, and a cage in the shape of a tiger's jaws, which opens to release an actual lion when Shamsher flips an outsized, gothic-style electrical breaker. 

 
"That is serious lair flair," said Beth.

 

Mehboob Khan with technicolor is both a kid in a candy shop and a bull in a china shop.  Each scene seems calculated to outdo what came before, delivering spectactle in every sense - especially the interiors, though there are some gorgeous exterior shots as well, such as the palace gaming arena, a terrific holi song, and a stampeding camel herd.   A dream sequence late in the film marries large scale and dizzying color with marvelously inventive design; the result is literally fantastic. 

 

That last must surely have inspired some of Rekha's looks down the years.

And apart from the sumptuous visuals, Aan has Nadira.   Oh, Nadira.  I have observed before that she melts my shorts.  Here, she delivers Bette Davis cheekbones and Joan Crawford intensity, in a performance that is hugely theatrical.  It is a wildly melodramatic delivery that amplifies each emotion with eyes, brows, nostrils, lips that never stop working.  Every muscle in her face is pressed into service with focus and intent, for a performance that is simply over the top in all the best ways. 

     
  

Also, perhaps because she is an outsider, a Jewish actor appearing in her first film, Nadira gets to do stuff in Aan that you don't often see Hindi film heroines doing - riding horseback, wielding pistols and rifles (and firing them),  and just generally being fierce.  As Rajshree, vibrating with pent-up rage and passion, viciously proud and paralyzingly haughty, she seems as likely to go off as the loaded pistol she tucks in her pocket when she finds Jai swashbuckling his way into her private chambers.  

   
As with all screenshots on Filmi Geek, click to embiggen. Trust me, it's worth it.

There is nothing restrained about this performance - indeed, it is the opposite of restrained - but Rajshree is constrained, and Nadira's presence and ferocity convey those emotional fetters with absolute clarity.  It's a shame that Aan sees Rajshree as a shrew to be tamed.  Imagine what this character could do with some agency, some ability to free all that intensity and channel it toward something other than loving a domineering, arrogant man.  That would be a hell of a movie. 

Madhumati (1958)

मधुमती

Dir. Bimal Roy

I have a theory that as Bimal Roy sat in the editing room working on Kamal Amrohi's Mahal, watching that movie's bizarre story take shape, he was thinking to himself, "If I were telling this story, this movie would actually make some sense."  A little less than a decade later, the result of that thought is Madhumati, a film that has nearly as much spiritual handwaving as its predecessor without any of the mental illness or wackadoodle plot detours.  It is a much simpler tale, less weighed down by excess of embellishment, and as a consequence it is a much more entertaining movie.

Madhumati is not a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but it is a ghost story wrapped in a reincarnation tale.  This packaging is a stroke of genius on Bimal Roy's part.  It turns a melancholy, tragic love story capped by murder and suicide into a parable of hope, a paean to the concept of souls eternally connected by bonds strong enough to transcend death.  It allows you to leave the movie feeling content, even though the characters you spent more than two hours getting to know wind up senselessly dead; their spirits, and their love, live on in a new pair of characters played by the same actors.  Madhumati opens, like a Bulwer-Lytton novel, on a dark and stormy night, with rain falling in torrents.  Devendra (Dilip Kumar), on his way to meet his wife and new baby, is waylaid by a washed-out road.  He seeks shelter in a gloomy, looming mansion of the gothic variety, where Devendra is beset by waves of déjà vu so powerful that they flood his mind in narrative form, and in flashback we receive the story of Devendra's pichle janam. 

Some decades before, Anand (also Dilip Kumar) comes to the mansion as manager to its owner, Ugra Narayan (Pran).  Once there he courts a girl from the nearby village, the titular Madhumati (Vyjayantimala).  Anand overcomes some resistance from Madhumati's father, but his insubordination to Ugra Narayan incites that jealous, megalomaniacal zamindar to kidnap and eventually murder Madhumati.  Anand is haunted by the ghost of his love; the lilting phrases of her  melody "Aaja re pardesi" lure him to distraction much as Madhubala's "Aayega, aayega" drove Ashok Kumar's midnight meanderings in Mahal.  Soon Anand encounters a real live girl, Madhavi (also Vyjayantimala), who happens to look exactly like Madhumati, and for a time it seems the apparitions are explained.  Anand hatches a plan to use Madhavi, dressed as Madhumati, to put the fear of God into Ugra Narayan and extract a confession from the evil man.  Even if you have not seen Madhumati, anyone who watched Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om knows how that's going to turn out.

Did you catch that?  Madhumati not only has ghosts and reincarnation going for it, but also the classic filmi device of the purely coincidental doppelganger, a character who just happens to be an indistinguishable double of an unrelated character.  It almost starts to sound like a masala movie.  It's not, of course; Madhumati is too noir and dramatic in tone (despite Johnny Walker's best efforts at levity) to be a masala film.  But these masala elements are part of what makes Madhumati so satisfyingly entertaining, despite the fact that I'm no kind of Dilip Kumar fan, and I really have no patience for ghost stories.  It's no matter here, though, because Madhumati has a lot to redeem all of that.  For instance, there is Pran, is as gloriously, sneeringly horrible as ever.

 

Vyjayantimala is put to good use; the film has a number of delightful folk-style songs that take charming advantage of her dancing abilities.  My favorite of these is "Chadh gayo paapi bichua," with its lovely visual arrangements, making rotating peaks and stars out of the girls' chunaris.

 

In general, Madhumati's visuals are among its strengths.  It has its gothic, noirish moods, without being oppressive or self-indulgent; there is plenty of frolicking in the forest to balance out the dark and creepy stuff.  There are some wonderful shots of the countryside as well; village women lining up to collect water, picturesque terrace farms, or lush hillsides with cheerful wildlife, somewhat like  the Disney-song sort of stuff that comes later in Bees saal baad but not trying quite as hard. 

Madhumati does hint at some allegorical substance.  There is tension between the zamindar and Madhumati's father relating to some prior dispute about land rights.  The result are well-defined territories that the villagers tend to respect; people from this side of the river don't visit that side of the river, and vice versa.  Anand, a classic filmi interloper - and not incidentally the only character in the film who wears Western clothes - represents a modernized, egalitarian ideal; he arrives on the scene and shows immediate contempt and disregard for this traditionally-defined knowing of one's place.  Anand goes wherever he wants in this land, shocking his servant and annoying both Narayan and Madhumati's father.

Ultimately, though, not much comes of these quasi-political themes (although Madhumati's father's distrust of Anand does set up a nice twist whereby Madhumati gets to propose marriage to Anand rather than the other way around).  Madhumati is mostly just what it appears to be, a straightfoward tale of romance, haunting, reincarnation, and love that endures across the veil of death.

Parash pathar (1958)

পরশ পাথর

Dir. Satyajit Ray

Though perhaps lacking in the depth and multi-layered richness of his later films or his Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray's Parash pathar ("Philosopher's stone") is a simple, familiar story, delicately and charmingly told. Its everyman protagonist, Pareshchandra Dutta (Tulsi Chakravarty), is middling in every way - middle class, middle aged, spreading around the middle, a middling bureaucrat with a better than middling chance of losing his job in the near future.

When Pareshchandra finds a stone that can transform ordinary objects into gold, he begins to fantasize about how the windfall can change his life, and even his daydreams are modest. He imagines himself saluting an honor guard of Indian soldiers; he dreams of a garlanded statue in his memory standing humbly in a city park. Even when he leverages his easy wealth to a place of recognition and adulation in high society, he does so with positive, not negative, influence:  He supports cultural programs that celebrate Bengali heritage, and makes generous charitable donations even to the most humble of causes.  While he moves himself and his wife into a gracious bungalow, he maintains the same solitary servant (Jahar Roy) who had worked for him in his cramped, crumbling flat. This servant - hilariously - hurries to change clothes as he rushes from one role to the next, driver to butler to chai-server. Even as a grand man, Pareshchandra remains simply hewn and relatable.

How far out of his element Pareshchandra has ventured becomes clear when his young assistant Priyotosh (Kali Banerjee) tells him he has been invited to a cocktail party.  Pareshchandra beams like a child; he seems never to have experienced anything as thrilling as a cocktail party in his life, and he skips from the office exclaiming "Cocktail! Cocktail!", trying on the unfamiliar idea with delight. At the party, though, he is awkward and unsuited.  He fails to make conversation with any of the other guests. He becomes desperately drunk (in a drunk scene too vividly real and viscerally stomach-churning to be especially funny), and in a frantic bid to remain interesting to the high-society crowd, reveals the supernatural source of his wealth.  Pareshchandra's downfall from here is unsurprising to anyone familiar with this kind of story, from any culture.

In the greater society's response to this revelation of instant gold for the taking, Parash pathar finally begins to take on some of the broader allegorical significance that one expects of Ray films. The rich react with greed (which the modest Pareshchandra had himself mostly avoided), and society at large reacts with hysteria, throwing the gold market into chaos.  It is easy to read this as a thin allegory for the function of world economies, especially for a film made at a time when many nations were debating the abandonment of the gold standard (though India itself was on a different precious-metal standard, silver).

For the most part, though, Parash pathar is a straightforward, unnuanced, and very funny fable about the dangers of greed and the non-negotiable truth that there is no such thing as a free lunch. What makes it most enjoyable are the touches of Ray's nascent craft - his use of surprising camera angles, a restrained and unusually light and evocative soundtrack, and his willingness to let Tulsi Chakravarty play to the cheap seats. Chakravarty is by no means a pretty man, but he is a master of broad, expressive physical comedic acting. His bulging eyes, fishy, fleshy lips, and enormous pot belly are almost characters in their own right. The way Charkavarty controls them, delivering their lines in perfect complement, elevates this simple fable into memorable cinematic and comedic art.