Filmi Geek

Mandi (1983)

मंडी

Shyam Benegal films often explore broad social themes through a closely focused lens, in detailed studies of relationships among a handful of people.  Mandi ("market") is broader in scope, featuring a large number of characters whose relationships form an intricate web in which concepts like loyalty, morality, and duplicity are tangled.  A wry film with a healthy dose of black comedy, Mandi presents a sarcastic look at the tension between venerable but questionable traditions and modernity in its various forms. 

Rukmini bai (Shabana Azmi) is a madam who runs her brothel with a stern and demanding hand.  Aided by her melancholy houseboy Dhungrus (Naseeruddin Shah), Rukmini is protective of her girls, especially the brothel's virginal prize, Zeenat (Smita Patil), who is permitted to spend her days practicing her music and kathak instead of submitting to the kotha's more lascivious customers.  When a sanctimonious moralist, Shanti Devi (Gita Siddharth), flexes her political muscle in an attempt to drive the brothel out of town, Rukmini turns to her landlord Mr. Gupta (Kulbushan Kharbanda) for assistance, but finds in him only a conditional ally.  Caught in the crossfire is the town's mayor, Agrawal (Saeed Jaffrey), who is under the powerful Shanti Devi's thumb but also beholden to Rukmini, lest she air his own dirty laundry.  Rounding out the vast network of players is a terrified mute girl (Sreela Majumdar) married under pretext and sold by her new husband to Rukmini; a dirty-minded photographer (Om Puri) who prowls around trying to snap naked pictures of the tawaifs; a police-wala who does his "night duty" at the brothel; Agrawal's son, engaged to Gupta's daughter but madly in love with Zeenat; Shanti Devi's beleaguered assistant (Pankaj Kapur); a crazed and pious hermit (Amrish Puri) who shows Rukmini how to extract wishes from a variety of holy objects; and all the girls of the brothel (including Soni Razdan and Ila Arun), with their varying levels of satisfaction and loyalty to Rukmini.

That's an awful lot to squeeze into a film, and the squeezing does, to some degree, compress Benegal's characters into two dimensions.  The outstanding talent of the cast offers some compensation, though, allowing each character to be vividly rendered despite the tendency toward archetypy.  The darkly comic tone of the entire film enhances the vividness of the characterizations.  Without it, the film would collapse under the weight of its themes.  Delivering the tale with archness, teetering on the brink of tumbling over the top, allows the actors a breadth of expression that helps them pop out of the screen.  Amrish Puri's bug-eyed ascetic, Saeed Jaffrey's nervously buffoonish aristocrat, Naseeruddin Shah's droopy drunk - each plays to the back of the house in a departure from Benegal's usual hyper-realist style, yet the broad style is precisely what renders each of them memorable. 

Shabana Azmi's turn is the broadest of them all, and her performance is deliciously physical and yet still evoactively subtle.  Rukmini flits between angry snarls and obsequious smiles at a moment's notice, one minute dripping with maternal concern and the next barking orders like a foreman.  And she cannot resist a mirror, interrupting herself often, whether mid-tirade, mid-sob, or even mid-prayer, to smooth a stray strand of hair.  If there is an overarching mood to the changeable Rukmini, it's that she never for a moment displays an ounce of sincerity.  Indeed, most of the characters in Mandi are somehow scheming, double-crossing, or working both sides against the middle.  From the brothel girls whose loyalty to Rukmini is fragile and fleeting, to Zeenat who is not nearly as ingenuous as she seems, and even to the pompous Shanti Devi who (we learn from a throw-away line of Rukmini's) is having an affair with her own son-in-law, each of the characters is concealing a card or two.  And it is this ubiquitous duplicity that gives Mandi its entertaining edge -  it's hard not to laugh watching these colorful characters squirm, hedge, and lie through their teeth. 

Mandi's final scene is a little bit puzzling, but the ultimate message may be that degradation is in the eye of the beholder, and that perhaps the concealed hypocrisy of those who call themselves modern and upright is just as oppressive as the ancient traditions of the kotha.  Whatever the true moral of this amorality tale may be, though, it is a terrific film. 

Filmi Geek metapost

I have had to close the comments on the review of Fire.

The person who drove the flame war may not believe me, but my problem with his/her posts is not the underlying substance of the views they express; rather it's how s/he chose to express them, with name-calling, vitriol, and disrespect. That person fancies India to be a largely monolithic country where the vast, vast majority not only agrees with him/her, but would support forcibly expelling everyone who doesn't - starting with Shabana Azmi.

I know I am an outsider and that it's presumptuous of me to take up the banner of someone who takes controversial positions that I only begin to understand. I am not prepared to provide a forum for political debate with any of my blogs, but I have to recognize that Shabana Azmi is a political person and one cannot talk about her without talking about politics. That is why I do not censor political discussions, why I don't delete comments and why I allowed the debate on the Fire post to go on as long as it did.

Having said that, I have to demand a certain level of civility and respect for differing viewpoints. The person who ignited the comment war did not evince that (though the regular commenter who engaged him/her largely did, and for that I am thankful), and so I had to shut the discussion down.

The point of this post is not so much to call attention to that debate (though it will certainly have that effect), but to urge all of you to feel free to express whatever opinions you have, as long as you do so in a way that is respectful of everyone involved. I don't want either Filmi Geek or SLP to be a wasteland of vapid praise or boring sycophantism - I encourage substantive disagreement - but I can't let them be breeding grounds for angry invective.

Can we get back to talking about movies now?

There are reviews of two great movies coming soon - I am working on review of Shyam Benegal's Mandi and Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor will follow not far behind.  In the meantime please have a look at some wonderful new(-ish) blogs that I'll be adding to my blogroll at the right:  So they dance! by my friend Sanni, who loves old films as well as new and has a wonderful style;  Picturesque, featuring Sunny's detailed and thoughtful reviews; and Bitten by Bollywood, by Nida, who is new to Hindi films and offers the fresh perspective of the thinking neophyte. 

Anand (1971)

आनंद

This is one of the most difficult reviews to write of any since I started this blog.  I usually get a perverse kind of pleasure from writing about films I didn't enjoy, but this has not been the case with Anand ("joy," as well as the lead character's name), which I watched months ago and haven't brought myself to review until now. 

Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan) is a young physician with a gloomy outlook.  A workaholic, he takes his work to heart and doesn't see much to enjoy in life.  Then his mentor introduces him to Anand (Rajesh Khanna), a cheerful soul who brightens the spirits of everyone he meets, including the dour doctor.  But Dr. Banerjee is dismayed to learn that Anand has an inoperable, terminal cancer, and a prognosis of only a few months to live.  Anand is determined to spread as much joy as he can in the short time he has left, and from him Dr. Banerjee learns to appreciate all aspects of life. 

I wanted to like Anand; I love so many of the films of its director, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and I adore the performances of young, pre-stardom Ambitabh Bachchan.   And The film is so widely loved, and had been recommended to me by so many different people, that I feel like an insensitive philistine for failing to appreciate it.

Yet just about everything about it grated, starting with the hyperactive cheerfulness of Anand himself.  I've not found a single appealing quality to Rajesh Khanna, between his froggy smile and his mumbly, droopy-eyed diction; here, he combines these traits with a ferret-like energy that is by multiples more annoying than charming.  But it's not merely that Anand's idea of cheerfulness is too shouty and bouncy to appeal to me; it's that everyone in the film is as delighted by it as I am irritated.  Even the somber doctor, a man who looks like he should be getting migraines from Anand's very presence, is instead moved to the depths of his soul.  I understand how I am supposed to feel, but I can't get on the train; instead of being charmed by Anand's joy, I just want him to shut the hell up.  Anand is not merely terminally ill; he's terminally annoying. 

Beneath the surface - of course - Anand harbors some melancholy, which shows itself only in quiet moments when he thinks he's not being watched.  This feature of Anand's character is such an obvious cliche that it adds no depth to him at all, and I found myself only rolling my eyes when it was revealed.  It's just one more predictable step in the very predictable arc of this entirely by-the-book story.  Anand's inevitable end - the conclusion is painfully apparent from the moment Anand is introduced - brought me no tears, just relief that it was finally over. 

I suppose the saccharine sentiments would have been forgivable if the characters had worked, but between Anand's hysterical babble and the doctor's sour-lemon demeanor there wasn't much to sink my teeth into.  The entire experience was like biting into a puff of cotton candy and finding it artificially sweetened, bitter with aspartame aftertaste.  Though one of the best-loved emotional tear-jerkers of Hindi cinema, Anand's delicacy was completely lost on me.   

ETA:  I feel somewhat less self-conscious and thick about disliking this film after reading Philip Lutgendorf's astute (as always) comments on it.  He notes, as I did, that whether one is moved by the film depends upon whether one is charmed or irritated by the character of Anand; he also observes that Anand is an archetype of the manic, self-centered embodiments of romance heroes all over Hindi cinema. 

Awara (1951)

आवारा

When I saw Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Shree 420 I was astonished in equal parts by the magnetism of the stars and by Raj Kapoor's mastery of the art of entertainment.  So I had high expectations for Awara ("vagabond") - perhaps too high, because while Awara was certainly an excellent film, it left me somewhat unengaged and disappointed.

Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor) considers himself a forward-thinking man, and bucks tradition and his family by marrying a widow.  When his wife Leela (Leela Chitnis) is kidnapped and then mysteriously returned, though, Raghunath is overwhelmed by the wagging tongues of his community.  He concludes, in shades of the Ramayana, that her honor is sullied, and casts her out of his household; she bears his son in squalor. 

Raghunath continues to rise in esteem and eventually becomes a judge who deals harshly with criminals, believing them born of bad blood and incapable of rehabilitation.  His son Raj (Raj Kapoor), meanwhile, under the influence of the same thug Jagga (K.N. Singh) who kidnapped his mother, grows up to be a crook and a bank robber.  When he is reunited with his childhood friend Rita (Nargis) - who happens to be Judge Raghunath's ward - sparks fly, and Raj is torn between his desire to be good enough for her and his belief, fostered by Jagga, that he is no good for anything other than crime.

Like Shree 420, Awara explores a wide range of social themes.  Dominated by ruminations on the question of nature versus nurture, it also addresses classism, injustice toward women, and other weighty issues.  But where Shree 420 clothes its missive to post-partition India in a truly entertaining package, watching Awara it is difficult to shake the feeling of being educated.  Everything, and everyone, is deadly serious.  The tone is set by Prithviraj's clenched jaw and furrowed brow and carried through Raj's dour sarcasm, a bitterness that sours even the film's tender moments.  The result is a movie that, despite the excellence of its craft, feels like work to watch. 

There are unquestionable strengths to Awara.  Raj Kapoor and Nargis turn in subtle and emotional performances.  And Nargis's character Rita is a rare treat - a young woman who also happens to be a lawyer.  She is cautioned against allowing her emotions (presumably a feminine weakness) to interfere with her rationality, but her introduction of compassion into the cold calculus of criminal justice is presented by the film as an unambiguous asset and the key to both Raj's and Raghunath's redemption.  This is possibly Awara's most radical idea, the notion that criminals should be treated as redeemable individuals with the potential to rehabilitate, rather than as the mechanical sum of their breeding and past bad actions. 

Awara also features a beautiful evergreen soundtrack, whose highlights include the title song, a creepy and gorgeous dream sequence in "Tere bina aag yeh chandni," and - especially - the cheeky "Dum bhar jo udhar munh phere,"in which Rita implores the bright full moon to give her and Raj some privacy for an amorous moment.  But the film's sweet, engaging, or moving moments just aren't enough to overcome the general tone of gloom and preachiness.  I realize that Shree 420 is an impossible standard to hold any film against (and that it was made after Awara), but Awara just misses striking that balance of offering its substantial message in a package that would make me want to watch the film again.  It's a great film in many ways, but just a little ponderous, a little off.