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

 

 

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969)

গুপী গাইন বাঘা বাইন

Dir. Satyajit Ray

I don't so much want to analyze this amazing film as revel in the sense of wonder it creates.  It is pure fantasy, what with its dancing ghosts, sinister magicians, an entire kingdom under enchantment that renders it subjects mute, and long-lost brother kings.  It is visually thrilling, imaginative, trippy, and delightful. All in support of a simple fable that transports you into a magical, musical world.

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne's two main characters, Goopy (Tapen Chatterjee) and Bagha (Rabi Ghosh), start the movie hapless and a little stupid, or at least cripplingly naive. Goopy, longing to move the hearts of others with his singing, and Bagha, with dreams of rousing people with his drumming, have each been run out of their respective villages for being absolutely awful musicians, and they seem a quintessential pair of slightly dim, easily duped folks, archetypal fools.  But by the end of the film they prove themselves strong-hearted and resourceful heroes.  They get some help, for sure, in the form of three wishes granted them by a ghost king.  But what they do with the power they are given is all them.  Their efforts win them the admiration of a king (Santosh Dutta), outsmart a villainous usurper (Jahor Roy), reunite long lost brothers, and avert a war, and through all this they never lose their sweet smiling innocence.  It's hard not to love them.

 
Goopy and Bagha in their default state: "Uh....";  the ghost king who takes pity on them. 

As charming as Goopy and Bagha are, though, I have to wonder how Ray, who can be so extraordinarily sensitive to the way women are bound and restricted in his society, could tell a story in which there are no women whatsoever, except until the final scene in which the kings' daughters are gifted to our young heroes as prizes for their noble efforts.  The omission is notable, and discomfiting.  It's just one film, just one story, but it is also a beloved film aimed in the direction of children, with its uncomplicated fable of a story and playfully silly visual design.  And the message little girls get with the pervasiveness and repetition of stories like these is that there is no place for them in the world at large, no need for them to travel to distant lands, no opportunity to influence world affairs, no role to play except to stand silent and bashful as their fathers hand them off to suitably big-hearted young men.  Stories like these reinforce and perpetuate the very cultures that create the caged and dissatisfied Charulatas, the othered and dehumanized Devis that Ray exposes with such a deft hand in many of his other works.   

 
The brother kings reunited; the usurper and his mischievous magician (with deely bobbers!).

But if I set that wart aside (how many films must one say this about, Indian or otherwise!) what a splendidly bubbling fountain of delights is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.  There have been times when I have fallen prey to the cliché of describing a sweet gentle film as a confection. But Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is not so much a confection as it is the copious rain of mithai that Goopy cleverly conjures to distract the enemy soldiers while he spirits away their good but enchanted king.  As the men stuff their faces with these sweets from the sky, we too can stuff our eyeballs with the wonder that Ray conjures.  

The film's first twenty minutes look like any other Ray village tale - a young man in a dhoti-kurta ambles about a dusty, sun-baked countryside, a group of grizzled old fellows huddle in the shade of a pipal tree.  And then the ghost dance happens, imaginative and trippy with its thrumming drumbeat and its use of black art, masking, and negatives.  Graceful dancers slither across the screen, white figures whirling, only to be replaced by the toddling shadows of chubby panjandrums. By the time the ghost king himself appears, all fangs and fluorescent spots, we know we're not in Kansas any more.

 
More scenes from the ghosts' dance.

That is only the beginning of the magnificent visuals.  What is to follow is downright Seussian - curly slippers with grinning faces that are somehow both sinister and friendly; a king sporting a giant turban topped by a sort of chimney; a wizard (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) with mirrored sunglasses and deely-bobber antennae two feet long.  It is a most colorful display of visual magic, despite being rendered in black-and-white.  And speaking of not being in Kansas, like The Wizard of Oz, Goopy toggles from black-and-white to color at a key point in the story. But while the switch in that 1939 film signals the passage from reality into a magical hyper-reality, here it does something a little different, marking a new stage of life for Bagha and Goopy, an entirely new status.  And Bagha appears completely startled by it.    

 
Shoes given by the ghost king are not only enchanted but stylish; Goopy cleverly conjures a rain of pots of mithai to distract the enemy soldiers. 

When the ghost king grants Goopy and Bagha the power to mesmerize people with their music, the songs they sing are fun little narrative embellishments, describing the scene or the action.  The songs are as impish as the visuals. Indeed, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne exposes a playful side of Ray that doesn't surface in most of his socially significant dramas.  There are hints of it in the humor of Shatranj ke Khiladi, but that film was anchored in history and a sharp sociopolitical message. Goopy takes the realistic Awadhi court of Shatranj ke Khiladi through the looking glass, emerging in a dreamworld where dopes can become princes by clicking their heels and wishing for buckets full of mithai.  And its world is an utterly delightful place to visit. 

Dil apna aur preet parai (1960)

दिल अपना और प्रीत पराई 

Dir. Kishore Sahu

Mopey movies about mopey lovers separated by circumstances can be so dreary.  Somehow, though, Dil apna aur preet parai doesn't bog down in its own pathos. Given the subject matter, it easily could.  Even its obligatory comic side plot carries a dark tone; it is set in a hospital ward and revolves around the jovialities of a patient's terminal cancer (the patient is Om Prakash).  Yet while there is plenty of angst to go around, the movie manages to remain lively.

No small part of this is due to the pure radiance of Meena Kumari, the life she brings to her role of Karuna, a nurse who falls in love with a doctor just in time to see him married to another woman.  But the script gets some credit as well; it allows Karuna to live, not just to fold in on herself, even in the ache of unrequited love.  Karuna socializes with her fellow nurses, even when her heart is ailing; she does not isolate herself in a lonely tower of suffering.  Even when she is at her most anguished, Karuna remains connected to the world; in a charmingly real moment, she spills her teary secrets to her roommate like any young woman in love might do.  

This sensibility of the real, even in what is a pretty basic filmi melodrama, buoys the movie and helps it stand out in its genre.  In one scene, Karuna spies her love, Dr Verma (Raaj Kumar) bringing back his new bride Kusum (Nadira) after a trip to his native Kashmir.   As she understands what she is seeing, Karuna bobbles the tray she is holding - but it's just a bobble, not a melodramatic crash and clatter, no dropped tray accompanied by a thunderclap or a loud, tense note from the strings.  The restraint renders the scene all the more effective. Later, Dr Verma tells Karuna that his mother has brought her a gift from Kashmir, and asks if she wants to know what it is.  She replies, archly, "Dulhan?" and leaves Verma gaping.  Karuna suffers, but she retains a sharp self-awareness, and punctuates her grief with wry smiles and snarky comments.  There's even a wryness to the delivery of Karuna's famous song, "Ajeeb dastan hai yeh." (Contrast the inward-focused, ascetic heroine of Bandini, who almost revels in her own suffering.) 

There are other delightfully real touches that keep the story alive.  Karuna realizes her love for Dr Verma is returned when she sees her name written in all kinds of decorative ways on his desk blotter. Who among us hasn't doodled an infatuation's name this way and that on our notebook and papers? It's a detail that is both relatable and sweet, and it's charming to see it attached to a man, rather than to a starry-eyed girl.  Indeed, throughout the arc of their romance, Karuna seems more grounded in reality than Dr Verma; his love is characterized by a rather funny daydreamy song sequence, the end of which finds Verma making out with the door of a truck before jolting awkwardly back to reality.

  
I have so totally done this name-doodling thing, in Devanagari and English too.  But my daydreams are not as elaborately staged as Verma's.

I have an inexplicable fascination with Raaj Kumar, and he doesn't disappoint in this movie, young and fairly boyish as a character, if not physically so.  And of course I have an even more unholy thing for Nadira.  But she draws the short stick in this movie; Kusum is horrible.  And not sexy-horrible as in Aan, or sexy-shrewd-horrible as in Shree 420, but just horrible horrible.  Kusum has one sympathetic moment in her unhappy marriage, when Verma unreasonably objects to Kusum using money given by her father to decorate their home to her taste.  Dil apna aur preet parai could have made Kusum human, and been a poignant story about how this marriage of obligation damages all three of the principals, not just the two lovers.  Instead, despite that one moment, the movie presents Kusum as a deranged harpy; she blows whatever sympathetic capital she has when she interferes with Verma's work and hastens a patient's death.  It's hard to root for a character who says in nearly so many words:  To hell with your patient's critical surgery, you need to take me to the movies.  

 

And then take me to dinner, where we shall eat soup in unison.

And Kusum's dive off the deep end leads straight to Dil apna aur preet parai's completely ridiculous, deus ex machina ending.  I will spoil it here:  Kusum, having come thoroughly unhinged, drives her flashy left-side-drive convertible off the edge of a cliff with Karuna in the passenger seat.  A few moments after the car splashes into water, Karuna surfaces, sputtering, and a heroic Verma dives in to drag her back to dry land.   Disturbingly, Verma and Karuna never look back to see whether Kusum might have survived; so desperate are they for the universe to unite them that they seem silently to conspire to let Kusum sink out of the picture.  When I began this movie, someone on Twitter had warned me that it is a very good movie, except for the ending.   I can't disagree; it's the only blemish on an otherwise lovely piece.

 

Kusum about to go over the edge; plus, Helen in a delightful rip-- er, adaptation of Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song. 

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. 

Bandini (1963)

बन्दिनी

Dir. Bimal Roy

There is something peculiar about the orientation of the moral compass of Bandini, something in its message that I cannot quite work out.

The self-sacrificing, self-effacing heroine, Kalyani (Nutan), is in prison as the film opens, serving time for a murder.  Eventually, we learn Kalyani's story in flashback.  She had fallin in love with a freedom fighter, Bikaash (Ashok Kumar), who promised to marry her but then disappeared.  Later, Kalyani learns that Bikaash is alive and married, to a vicious harridan whom Kalyani, as a caregiver in the nursing home where the woman resides, must serve despite her abuses.  In a moment of blinding rage - whether pure jealousy or a mad desire to rescue her beloved Bikaash from the prison of this horrible wife - Kalyani kills the woman with poison.

In that flashback, when Bikaash apparently abandons Kalyani, we see her suffer the harsh opprobrium meted out by villagers on a woman who is in any way disgraced. Kalyani is blameless, but the shame of being jilted makes her a laughing stock among the village women, who mock her openly. Her disgrace is borne by her father as well, of course – the men of the village harass and even physically threaten him. And he turns on her, blaming her as viciously as the villagers. For the crime of being mistreated by a man, Kalyani is scorned by one and all, and run out of the village on a rail.  Shamed, abused, and ridiculed, she flees to the city where her path eventually crosses that of Bikaash and his wife.

Bikaash's betrayal of Kalyani turns out to have been morally justified – he did it to advance the cause of independence for which his life is dedicated. The murder that Kalyani commits, in contrast, has little justification; yet nearly everyone in the film who learns of it is willing to overlook and forgive it, out of some belief that Kalyani is a decent person at heart. The prison doctor, Devendra (Dharmendra, extremely young and fresh-faced, yet already squarely masculine), loves Kalyani and wants to marry her, almost without regard to her past; he shows little interest in even hearing her story. The prison warden (Tarun Bose), Devendra's friend, is so moved by Kalyani's story that he petitions for her early release even though Kalyani, in full remorse over the crime she has committed, does not want any such leniency. And the warden pleads Kalyani's case to Devendra's mother, who is initially (and quite understandably) reluctant to see her son married to a convicted murderer.

The result here is that to Kalyani's village compatriots, being abandoned by a lover is a dreadful crime for a woman to commit, worthy of shaming and expulsion from the community. But to the educated city folk who observe Kalyani in prison, even an impassioned, vicious act of murder is forgivable. I do not know what to make of this. Is the film pitting the small-minded judgment of conservative village folks against modern, cosmopolitan mercy? If the film is commenting on the leniency afforded to a pretty young woman of poise and breeding, it is not a cynical commentary; Kalyani is presented in complete sympathy, and we are clearly supposed to agree with the assessment of those who believe her self-effacing years in prison are ample punishment for her crime. Not much of a thought is spared for the victim, Bikaash's horrid, shrewish wife. If anything, the murder is expedient for the ending; it disposes of Bikaash's wife so that Kalyani's true and noble love for her true and noble freedom fighter can prevail.  

Notwithstanding the puzzling message of the narrative, Bandini is visually mesmerizing, a magically beautiful movie to watch. Every shot is artfully constructed, lit as dramatically as a painting. In my favorite sequence, Devendra leaves the prison after one of his tender encounters with Kalyani.  She drifts toward the high prison wall as his tonga starts away on the other side, and for a moment the two of them are there, under the same sky but separated by this wall, a palpable symbol of what connects them and the great distance between them.

 

The songs of Bandini are pensive and lovely.  Strikingly, Kalyani is not given a song in the first half of the film – her misery and remorse are too great to permit even a mournful musical lament, I suppose.  The result is some very interesting songs picturized on other prisoners, who do sing, hopeful tunes of the expectation of better times to come, or laments of family members lost to time and distance.  These songs show (with some romanticizing) the sadness and drudgery of life in a prison. In “O panchhi pyare”, women do their chores, pounding spices and grinding grain in a rhythm that makes the work and the time go a little more smoothly, until a guard comes and chastises them for showing signs of good cheer.

 

Another of the film's superb songs is the gorgeous "Mat ro maata lal tere", a stirring patriotic martyr's song, proudly sung by a freedom fighter on his slow final procession toward the gallows. These songs add a richer and more expansive texture to the movie than one sometimes sees in movies of the era.  There is more going on here than an ingenue frolicking in a meadow or a pair of lovers running around trees.  Bandini is a story of one woman's downfall, bondage, and redemption, but it acknowledges a broader world in which that story is embedded.