Filmi Geek

Filmi Geek metapost

Namaste sab ko!

It has been a fun and busy couple of months since my last metapost.  I've reviewed 16 more movies since then (wow!) which means that review #100 is just around the corner.  In my last metapost I thanked you for 10,000 page views - I will reach a total of 20,000 today or tomorrow.  I was delighted to see yesterday that one of my reviews was linked on a Wikipedia page - my thanks to the reader who did that.  But mostly I thank all of you for reading and offering your comments and perspectives.

I would also like to make a small plug for a website I've gotten involved with.  Jaman is a place to download, watch, and discuss movies from all over the world.  I hope you will consider checking out Jaman's offerings and fledgling communities.  You can find me starting discussions in Jaman's South Asia section.  There is also a lot of interesting work by independent filmmakers from other parts of Asia, Latin America, and more.

I can't make any predictions about what will pop up here on Filmi Geek in the next couple of months - I have tons of films waiting to be watched and I'm sure more will insert themselves into the queue.  In the near future I expect to watch some more Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor classics, some more of the fun 60s and 70s fare I enjoy so much, mix in a few modern films, and of course you can count on more of the magnificent Shabana Azmi turning up sooner or later.  There are some things in life that are simply immutable!

Chokher bali (2003)

Dir. Rituparno Ghosh

In my adventure romp through the rich fields of Indian cinema, I have been very fortunate.  Thanks to the guidance of thoughtful friends in communities like the BollyWHAT? forums to shape my selections, I have seen very, very few Indian movies that I found truly awful, without any redeeming feature.  There are only about two Indian movies that I pulled the plug on partway through,  and only about two more, out of the ninety or so reviewed on this site to date, that I wished I hadn't stuck out until the end.  I regret to say that Chokher bali ("A grain of sand") is a third.

In Raj-ruled Calcutta, Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) has had a hard year.  Her family's marriage proposal was rejected by Mahendra (Prasenjit Chatterjee), so she was married to another man, who survived less than a year.  Binodini enters the ascetic world of the 19th-century Hindu widow - she dons plain, unadorned sarees, forgoes all makeup and ornamentation, commits to strict dietary restrictions, and ceases her English education.  When Binodini arrives for an extended stay at Mahendra's home, she insinuates herself into the quotidian routines of every member of the household.  She develops a fast friendship with Mahendra's vapid and privileged wife, Ashalata (Raima Sen), and encourages the other widows in the household - Mahendra's mother and aunt - in the mild transgression of drinking tea, a habit that is both forbidden to widows and also excessively English.  She also entertains a light, intellectual flirtation with Mahendra's friend Behari (Tota Roy Chakraborty), a bookish agitator for independence.  Most explosively, she cultivates a passionate sexual affair with Mahendra himself.  From there, the tightly-wound threads of human relationships in the household snap and unravel.

At least I think that's the story.  The film opens with an impenetrable twenty minutes of exposition, in which the backstory leading to Binodini's stay in Mahendra's household is told in a confusing series of voice-overs.  It is equally unclear at all moments who is speaking and whose drama is being told - names of characters swirl by with little solid connection to images on the screen.  I watched the opening segment several times before I felt confident that I knew who was who; my viewing companion paused the film and referred to a plot synopsis on-line to settle her own confusion.   These are not markers of competent filmmaking.

And matters don't improve from there.  While the beginning of the film is dense with this exposition - telling the viewer what happened instead of showing it as a film can and should - in the middle of the film, when we finally do get to see the characters interact, there are excruciating segments in which very little happens.  The characters' most intense and personal feelings are revealed in letters written to one another and read in voice-over.  This device may have worked beautifully in Rabindranath Tagore's famous novel from which Chokher bali is adapted; in the film, however, it only spares the actors the challenge of conveying their emotions on screen, and robs the viewer of the experience of perceiving them.

Whatever message Chokher bali might wish to send - whether regarding the plight of widows, male-female inequality, sexuality, or any other theme - is lost among the endless narrations and the lurching pace of the story.  Even the film's ostensible focus, Binodini, is a mess of inconsistent characterization; she wheels from conniving manipulation to false contrition to real contrition and back again so many times that by the end her motivations are completely opaque.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that the film, originally shot in Bengali, is dubbed into Hindi, severing the connection between the actors' movements and their words and evoking Sunday-afternoon Japanese monster movies from my childhood.  In a better film this would have been forgivable and perhaps not even noticed; here, though, it only exacerbates a simply dreadful cinematic experience.

(Chokher Bali is available for download from Jaman.)

An Evening in Paris (1967)

Dir. Shakti Samanta

Like the contemporaneous Jewel Thief, An Evening in Paris taps into a certain "occidentalism," an Indian fetishization of the west that is the mirror reflection of the west's orientalist exoticization and fetishization of the east.  It is a whirlwind tour of romantic locales - strolling along the Seine, skiing on the Jungfrau, water-skiing at a posh resort in Beirut, and spinning to a dramatic climax in the swirling rush of Niagara Falls. 

Deepa (Sharmila Tagore) is a wealthy Indian debutante out for a sojourn in Paris.  Tired of the endless gold-digging suitors who pursue her only for her wealth, Deepa longs for true romance, for a man who will love her for who she is and not what she has.  Enter Sam (Shammi Kapoor), a bold and manic Indo-Parisian who aggressively courts the recalcitrant Deepa; following her around Paris and ultimately to the rest of the film's locales, donning disguises and pulling off elaborate schemes in his efforts to woo her.  Meanwhile Shekhar (Pran), the son of Deepa's family servant, is down on his luck and in debt to some very dangerous gangsters.  To pay them back, he determines to woo Deepa and her riches for himself.  The gangsters, though, have other plans - they are looking to kidnap Deepa and sell her back for ransom.  Thrown into the mix is Deepa's twin sister Rupa, kidnapped years before when the sisters were tiny children, and now a hard-boiled nightclub dancer and gangster's moll known as Suzy.  From there, romance, adventure, mistaken identity, and other familiar masala elements take the action around the globe. 

Like Sharmilee a few years later, An Evening in Paris packs a social message into its disposition of the twin sisters - Deepa, despite her jet-setting independence, is always an upstanding Indian girl at heart, while Suzy's skimpy clothes and sharp, westernized edge are paid for with an ambiguous fate.  Indeed, in a sequence in which Suzy impersonates Deepa, it is her cigarette - a evocative symbol of the errant bad girl - that gives her away to the amorous Sam.  (The same device reveals the evil twin's deception in Sharmilee as well.)  And yet this moralizing is set against the backdrop of the lush western romanticism of Paris and the film's other exotic locations.  Deepa enjoys her exotic jaunt to the fullest, but even when she falls in love her good-girl instincts never falter; she is scandalized by the sight of Parisians kissing in public, and despite Sam's gentle encouragement insists that such enjoyments wait until after marriage.

Aside from this social message - which really accounts for only a fraction of the movie - An Evening in Paris is a solid, entertaining masala meal, particularly in its first half, which is driven by Sam's relentless pursuit of Deepa.  While I can see, with his wild gyrations and floppy hair, why Shammi Kapoor is sometimes compared to Elvis, he is a notch too tubby for my taste.  Still, his antics in this film are charming enough, and the song density is unparalleled - the rocking tunes, like this one, come every fifteen or twenty minutes through the film's first half.  Adding to the fun are crowds of perplexed Europeans in the background during the songs that were actually shot in broad daylight the streets of Paris, watching the dances.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with masala thrillers, the film gets bumpier when the plot, such as it is, gets going in the second half - but the dramatic climax at Niagara Falls is worth hanging on for. 

Sharmilee (1971)

शर्मीली

Dir. Samir Ganguly

Sharmilee ("Shy")  appears on the surface to be a jaunty masala film with many of the usual elements: a soft-focus heroine (here in a dual role), a handsome, upstanding soldier (who also happens to be an orphan raised by a priest), a passel of shady hipster bad guys, wistful romance, mistaken identity, and a generous helping of dishoom-dishoom.  As is often the case in films of its era, though, Sharmilee is is something of a morality play, an allegory projected through a masala lens. 

Captain Ajit (Shashi Kapoor), stationed in Kashmir, is instantly smitten when he meets the spunky, aggressive Kamini (Rakhee).  Kamini disappears after one dazzling evening of poetry, though, and Ajit despairs of ever seeing her again.  Then Ajit's adoptive father, the kind-hearted Father Joseph (Nazir Hussein), unaware that Ajit has fallen for Kamini, seeks to arrange Ajit's marriage to Kamini's excruciatingly bashful twin sister, Kanchan (Rakhee, the other half of her dual role).  Ajit is briefly confused, but all seems set straight soon enough, and Ajit is set to marry his sprightly Kamini; Kanchan is depressed but resigned to her wallflower status.   When a shady gunda from Kamini's past surfaces, however, things take a turn for the weird, and a whirlwind of mistake, confusion, and deception follows, with an aerial climax worthy of the most over-the-top masala imaginable.

Sharmilee's allegory reflects an ambivalence in Indian culture toward modernization and westernization.  The duality - traditional versus modern, east against west - is embodied in the twin sisters.  Kamini, brash and modern, attracts all the attention; suitors come to the family to consider marriage to the modest, retiring Kanchan and end up enchanted with the flashy, outspoken Kamini.  She even wins the heart of Ajit, the ideal Indian man, a loyal and heroic soldier, obedient and deferential to his elders.  But the film punishes Kamini, and in the end it is the traditional Kanchan who is exalted and glorified.  Though she puts on a modern persona to please Ajit, Kanchan's heart is always demure.  Bollywood501 offers the excellent observation that unlike Kamini, Kanchan can successfully adopt western trappings only because she remains at the core a traditional Indian girl.  Thus, Sharmilee's ultimate moral is that without a traditional grounding, westernization is shallow, unmoored, and even dangerous. 

As a film, Sharmilee is reasonably entertaining, though some of its twists are whiplash-inducing.  Its driving force is the passion of the beautiful Shashi Kapoor; he radiates masala charm and charisma, but as Ajit  wheels from tenderness to anger to despair, Shashi's pure, abundant acting talent is also quite evident.  Ajit is an Indian renaissance man - a brave soldier, a good son, a passionate lover, a sensitive poet, and the interplay of these shades is the most compelling aspect of the film.  Rakhee is passable in her double role; she shows much more life and spark as the brassy Kamini, though, leaving the film's real heroine, the sad, innocent Kanchan, dull and flat in comparison.  The film falters where the masala-action elements take over; these are contrived, and undermine the film's strengths, which lie in the close interactions between Shashi and Rakhee's two avatars. 

Finally, Sharmilee's soundtrack is a gem by SD Burman; its standout song is the lyrical "Khilte hain gul yahaan," wistfully sung by Kishore Kumar and picturized on Shashi, who is as pretty as the song; Kanchan's domestic fantasy "Aaj madhosh huaa" is sweet; and the rest of the soundtrack is lovely as well.

(Sharmilee is available for download from Jaman.)

The Namesake (2007)

Dir. Mira Nair

Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's bestselling novel The Namesake is fairly true to the book; Nair's eye brings vividly to life the flavors and colors splashed through Lahiri's pages.  The result a lovely film with all the same strengths - and all the same weaknesses - as the novel it adapts. 

Ashima's (Tabu) marriage to Ashok Ganguli (Irfan Khan) is arranged by her parents in her home city of Calcutta; immediately after the marriage she is whisked to New York, where her new husband is a graduate student, and begins to adjust to the new and different life she will lead in America.  Their first child is a son, and they name him Gogol, after the Russian author, who (for a variety of reasons) is very close to Ashok's heart.  Gogol (Kal Penn) grows into a sullen teenager and eventually a discontented young man, disconnected from his Indian roots but also unmoored in the urban and urbane company he keeps.  As he moves through a series of romantic relationships and weathers some family tragedy, Gogol's identity shifts and reforms, and in time he reaches an understanding of the gifts his parents have given him in his Bengali heritage, his name, and his autonomy.

The Namesake's greatest strength is that it is a real, uncaricatured story; it avoids the trap of lapsing into cliche, of recycling the tired themes of the strained arranged marriage, the overbearing immigrant parents, the second generation's rebellion.  Instead,  Ashima and Ashok's marriage grows from its formal beginning into genuine, moving tenderness; while Ashima laments the brash, American mannerisms of her children she and Ashok are committed to letting them have their own choices and freedoms; and Gogol's distance from his parents is not so much a reaction against being Indian as it is a general malaise.  His identity crisis is focused through his particular cultural lens, but his drifting of purpose perhaps resonates universally.

Because The Namesake is so much about what goes on inside its character's heads - Ashima's and Gogol's in particular - it would fail without excellent performances from its actors, and Mira Nair gets what she needs from her talented cast.  Tabu and Irfan Khan are particularly outstanding, communicating volumes even with very little dialogue; young Kal Penn stands up well also, with a handful of superb scenes that outweigh his few sullen teenager moments.  Indeed, Gogol's occasional shallowness is not really Kal Penn's fault.  One irritating aspect I recall from the novel is that Gogol is not always an interesting enough character to have a whole book about him; this weakness is not corrected in the film.  As with the novel, I am left wishing for more about Ashima and less about Gogol.  Still, there is enough substance in Gogol's arc to maintain the focus, even if the women in his life are thinly-drawn tokens.  And the film's eye never drifts too far from Ashima, navigating the vast confusion of American suburbia. 

Like the novel, The Namesake is episodic, sometimes disorientingly so, as the viewer is jerked through the passage of time, often with no hint of what transpired in the interstitial years; one moment Gogol is a high-school graduate headed to Yale; the next, he is a young architect living in a swanky apartment in New York with a rich, white girlfriend.  In fact the film omits some episodes in which the novel touched down, leaving the film to feel even more compressed and speedy at times.  But these are minor complaints, small flaws in a film that was on the whole lovely, sweet, and fairly satisfying.