Filmi Geek

Antareen (1994)

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

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

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

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

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

Maya (2001)

Watching Maya made me think of spirited discussions I have had on the BollyWHAT? forums about the films of Deepa Mehta, like Fire and Water.  Some critics charge that Mehta's films are exploitative and manipulative - that they pander to a patronizing Western art-house audience by portraying India as a backward, unsophisticated, vicious and superstitious monolith.  I strongly disagree with this assessment of Deepa Mehta's films  - I find them nuanced, allegorical, and rich.  If I ever have seen a film that merited this criticism, though, it's Maya.

Sanjay (Nikhil Yadav) and his cousin Maya (Nitya Shetty) are carefree village kids.  They spend their days creating trouble, as kids will, throwing rocks and stealing sweets.  They are gently scolded, but clearly loved, by Sanjay's mother (Mita Vasisht) and father (Anant Nag).  Their life is idyllic and warm.  But when Maya reaches puberty, everything changes in the space of just a few days.  The family heads to the neighboring village of Maya's parents to prepare for a mysterious ceremony marking Maya's transition to womanhood.  Maya, who only dimly understands what happening to her, is told that she is no longer a child, and discouraged from her familiar play with Sanjay.  Sanjay, with even less understanding, chafes against the separation from his playmate and acts out, angering his father.  Then, when the day of the ritual arrives, over the terrified protests of Sanjay, Maya is subjected to a trauma that is truly shocking and horrible.    

It is shocking and horrible - but perhaps only tenuously related to any real practice.   We are told by a title card at the very end of the film that no particular practice has been portrayed; instead, the film is loosely inspired by a variety of religious practices that may or may not still be in currency.  Indeed, the film is vague about both time and place, leaving me wondering what its point was supposed to be.  All we are shown is an exaggeratedly horrific abuse of an innocent child taking place somewhere in India, amongst a village full of adults complicit in the horror.  No one, not even a token character - except a powerless small child who doesn't even understand what is going on - stands up and speaks against the horrors that are presented as accepted and commonplace religious ritual, or even questions them in the slightest. 

The result is a film without depth, without allegory, without a message; a film that serves only to shock and disturb its audience with some vaguely presented notion of Indian village life and unspecified, mysterious rituals performed in the name of Hindu gods.  The nature of the ritual is kept mysterious until the film's climax, and no explanation or justification is offered - what is the rationale behind the practice?  Are all girls subjected to it?  If so, why?  If not, how are girls selected - why is Maya selected?  The complete absence of information or context reinforces the impression that the film's principal goal is to shock rather than to enlighten.  Maya could have had depth; it could have made a compelling point about the status of women in rural India, about progress that has been made and steps that still need to be taken.  Instead, it's just nasty and shocking and not a whole lot else.  It's a terrible waste of so much potential - a waste a talented cast, especially the child actors; a waste of a realistic (up to a point) glimpse of village life; a waste of some very lovely cinematography.  Maya is a truly disappointing film.

Maya is available for download at Jaman.com, but I can't say I'd recommend it. 
 

Kaagaz ke phool (1959)

काग़ज़ के फूल

This bleak but often lovely film is the gloomy story of a depressed filmmaker who spends his life lonely, unappreciated, and plagued by demons - not unlike the tragic biography of its  tortured auteur, Guru Dutt. 

Director Suresh Sinha (Guru Dutt) is making an adaptation of the classic Indian tragedy Devdas. His heroine doesn't share his artistic vision - she wants her character glammed up, with luscious sarees and a sophisticated hairdo.  After she walks off the set, Suresh stumbles across the heroine he has been looking for in Shanti (Waheeda Rehman), a young working woman without a family.  Suresh becomes Shanti's mentor and father figure, and a tenderness grows between them as well.  Just when that tenderness appears poised to blossom into real love, though, Suresh's young daughter Pammi (Kumari Naaz), who is kept from Suresh by his estranged wife (Veena) and who harbors a fantasy that her parents will reconcile and reunite, prevails on Shanti to leave Suresh.  The film covers a span of years as Shanti and Suresh, who seem destined for one another, nevertheless attempt to navigate their lives apart.    

Kaagaz ke phool ("Paper flowers") is in many ways an exceedingly beautiful film.  It is poetically written, touchingly acted, and shot with gorgeous and evocative black and white cinematography that I do not even feel qualified to describe.  Its tortured artist theme, however, is somewhat grating - films about how hard it is to be a filmmaker always tend toward the self-indulgent, and even an excellently-crafted film like Kaagaz ke phool cannot entirely escape the gravity of that sort of navel-gazing.  It is frustrating to watch the tragic evolution of people who are done in by their own stubbornness; Suresh in particular, but Shanti too, have plenty of opportunities to improve the course of their lives, and their persistent refusal to take advantage of them shifts the mood away from the tragic and toward the pathetic.  At one point, after Suresh - without Shanti as his muse - makes a bad film and loses his job, there is some musing about how unforgiving the film industry is, how once one has begun to fall there is no regaining one's footing.  But this is not shown to be an inevitability  for Suresh - rather, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in both the professional and personal domains of his life.  It is not for nothing that the film opens with Suresh molding Devdas to his vision; that story chronicles an even more annoyingly self-indulgent character who refuses to take responsibility for his own happiness.

None of this is to say that I did not like Kaagaz ke phool or that I think it is a bad film - it is, for the most part, engaging and compelling, save for a few draggy portions in the second half when we are shown Suresh's descent and degradation from a few too many different angles.    But Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman are beautiful and charismatic, and even though the actions of their characters frustrated me, I genuinely cared about them and wanted better for them.  (In this aspect the film stands in stark contrast to the only adaptation of Devdas that I have seen, in which the miserable protagonist's death could not come quickly enough to satisfy me.)  And there were moments at which my breath caught at the sheer beauty, like the picturization of the majestic and unutterably lovely "Waqt ne kiya", the film's iconic song, which I am sad to report cannot be seen on YouTube.  I feel I need to see the film again, perhaps on a day when I am better prepared to be battered by a story that starts out bleak and gets bleaker, in order to fully appreciate its art.