Filmi Geek

Himmatwala (1983)

हिम्मतवाला

Dir. K. Raghavendra Rao

I really want to love Sridevi.  I truly do.  Her talent bursts out of the screen when she smiles, when she dances, even when she pratfalls.  But, through no fault of her own, Sridevi's filmography makes appreciating her a tiresome slog.  For every great movie Sridevi is a part of (such as Mr India), there are numerous terrible movies in which she is the only watchable element (I'm looking at you, Chaalbaaz).  Worse still are movies so dire that even the magnificent presence of Sridevi cannot redeem them.  Himmatwala ("man of courage") is that dire. 

The titular Himmatwala is the upstanding goody-two-shoes Ravi (Jeetendra), the dreariest sort of film hero.  You know the guy - he is flawlessly devoted to his mother's honor, never tells a lie, delivers incessant lectures on morality to everyone around him, and can beat up four bad guys without breaking a sweat.  Yawn.  This kind of intolerably boring character can nevertheless be appealing if he's played with charm and cuteness (Shashi Kapoor made an art form out of this) but here, Jeetendra has none.  It's hard enough to swallow this sniveling, creepy old man as a freshly-graduated engineer and a romantic hero; I would say he was an obvious inspiration for the physical appearance of The Dirty Picture's Suryakant, but I don't know whether Ekta Kapoor could really have backed such explicitly unflattering reference to her own father. More than that, it's hard even to believe this is the same actor who made Caravan so delightful with his chubby-cheeked stupid cuteness.

Same guy?  Are you sure?

The villain of Himmatwala, Sher Singh Bandukwala, is played by Amjad Khan.  This, too, you might think would be a plus - how many awesome filmi villains has Amjad Khan delivered over the years?  Alas.  Here, he is doughy, bloated, mealy, and as far from menacing as an Amjad Khan villain could be.  There is some weak humor surrounding a running joke where he yells for his rifle-bearing sidekick - "Banduk!" - since his name is Bandukwala, you might think he'd have a rifle close at hand himself.  But a corny running joke hardly makes a villain, at least not in an apparently earnest morality tale like this one. Speaking of corny running jokes, dialogue-writer Kader Khan has a role in the movie as Bandukwala's spineless accountant (and father of Ravi's chief romantic rival, naturally played by Shakti Kapoor), whose every dialogue is peppered with arbitrary references to geographical locations.  Weird.   

Speaking of weird, guess who plays Ravi's mother.

 

What on earth is Waheeda Rehman doing in this God-awful movie? 

Himmatwala is not utterly without redeeming quality.  After all, it does have Sridevi.  When we first meet her, as Bandukwala's spoiled daughter Rekha, she is clad in a dreadful pleather outfit, leading a pack in cruelly taunting another girl.  This, I suppose, is Hindi film's first glimpse of its future rani. 

Instant stardom?

Once the petulant, brutish Rekha gets a taste of Ravi's morality lectures, though, she begins to soften, and sheds the skin-tight pleather in favor of classical dancing togs, as she dreams about her upstanding new love in the movie's best-remembered song, "Nainon mein sapna."

 

This is a really terrific song and is worth watching; no need to squirm through the rest of the movie to enjoy it, though.  Jeetendra comes closer to appealing here than at any other point in the movie.  His outfit is horrible and he looks as creepy and weird as ever, but at least he can dance.   He demonstrates this as well in another of the film's better songs, "Wah wah khel shuru ho gaya."  These songs seem to have pioneered the side-by-side dancing style that is so characteristic of the 80s and early 90s. 

But before you get too comfortable with the idea that Himmatwala's songs are safe and pleasant enough to watch even if the rest of the movie is cringe-inducing, be warned: "Imtehaan" blindsides you with grim stock footage of dead flood victims arrayed in a muddy plain.  That's right, corpses in a song:  WTF, Himmatwala?  This is just one of the gruesome lurches in tone taken by this barely coherent movie, which careens from goofy lowbrow comedy to high-falutin' moralizing and back again without warning, all in service of demonstrating the many skills and qualities of its infallible, justice-driven hero.  Feh. 

And then there is Sridevi, the only reason I subjected myself to this drivel in the first place.  Sridevi is certainly cute here, if not yet quite fully-formed.   She does display marvelous presence in the movie's songs (see above).  Her comedic skill gets pressed into service too - one of the movie's better scenes comes where Ravi and Rekha scheme convince Sher Singh Bandukwala that Rekha is pregnant, and as Rekha hams for Bandukwala's benefit and feigns a green mango craving, we get a glimpse of the Sridevi that is to come.  But as in Chaalbaaz, she's just not enough to rescue an otherwise tiresome excuse for a movie. 

There is a remake of Himmatwala coming out later this year which, in the time-honored filmi tradition of ouroboros-like self reference, aims to introduce a Southern star to the Hindi-language audience.   As much as Tamannah is a guilty pleasure of mine (see Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam), the first trailer of this Sajid Khan indulgence looks every bit as dire as the original.  And the wizened, leathery Ajay Devgn (sic) opposite fresh-faced Tamannah appears  just as revolting as Jeetendra 2.0 was with Sridevi.  I can't wait. 

Charulata (1964)

চারুলতা

Dir. Satyajit Ray

Among the many trademark expressions of Satyajit Ray's artistic genius is the exploration of a singular imprisonment:  that which confines the minds of bright young women in the households of rich, intellectual, Victorian-era high society.  Ray's sumptuously-appointed Victorian interiors stifle sumptuously-dressed young Bengali women, and hint at a kind of oppression particular to the upper classes.

In both Ray's Ghare baire and Charulata, a man concerned about the loneliness and intellectual satisfaction of his young, intelligent wife attempts to broaden her sphere by introducing her to a vibrant outsider.  In both movies, the foundations of identity and home and marriage are shaken, with catastrophic results.  And in both movies, the counterpoint of relationships is a proxy for the the complex dance of East and West.  In Ghare baire, the tension is epitomized in the woman's English studies and repetition of an English song.  In Charulata, it is captured in (among other ways) a scene very early in the movie, in which the titular Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) peers through lorgnettes between the slats of the shuttered windows, watching a stereotypically ordinary Bengali man strolling by.  Something about him - his freedom, his ordinariness, his Bengaliness - captivates her attention, and she flits bird-like from window to window in her lushly filigreed European parlor to keep her gaze fixed upon him.  

Charu's husband Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), insted of inviting her to join his world of politics and newspaper editorials, indulges Charu's love for literature though he does not share it.  Curious to know whether she harbors real literary talent, Bhupati enlists his dreamy, indolent cousin Amol (Soumitra Chatterjee) to teach and encourage Charu to write.  The result of this experiment is both affirming for Charu, when her writing is successfully published, and devastating, when her growing love for Amol threatens her identity and her marriage.  The movie concludes on an ambiguous note, without resolution for Charu and Bhupati.  And Charu's literary and emotional awakening reminds me - as stories in this vein so often do - of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, whose protagonist has nowhere to go but into the sea once she has tasted freedom of spirit and body and mind.  Charu's ending is less tragic, but it carries just as strong a sense that there is no returning to her old life.  It takes only a tiny gesture to release a bird from its cage; coaxing her back in is another matter entirely.

As for the catalyst of Charulata's awakening, Amol himself is detached, sarcastic, even bratty.  Charulata's love for him reflects  her own immaturity more than a real emotional connection.  This is not a tragic love story of soulmates kept apart by the deep injustice of circumstances or society.  Rather, the story presents a talented but incompletely formed young woman with a sort of jealously competitive crush on a young man whose only advantage over her (and it is not an inconsequent advantage) is that he is male, and therefore more worldly and educated and confident than she.  Despite his own immaturity and indolence, however, Amol represents the hometown side in the East-West struggle that threads through the film. He wears Bengali clothes and writes in Bengali.  He sings Rabindrosangeet - even his "Ami chini go chini," nominally a love song to a foreign woman, is delivered with a sarcastic, mocking air.  He even refuses a generous opportunity to travel and study in Europe.  All of this is in stark contrast to Bhupati, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, penning English-language newspaper editorials about the English politics of the English rule over Bengal.  When Bhupati chides Amol for his literary passions, insiting that politics is far more important and real, Amol smirkingly plays "Good Save The Queen" on the piano.

The pleasure of Charulata, and indeed the pleasure of any Ray film, lies in the density of content and meaning that is packed into a movie of relatively few words. An incredibly rich, layered assemblage of visual imagery, subtle cues, and symbolism paints a story that operates on multiple canvases at once.  Commentaries on the value of literature and the futility of politics, on the tension between Bengali and European modes of thought, on the nature of youthful infatuation and ambition, on the frustrations of the idle upper-class life especially for women, all these threads mingle and cross at many points of juxtaposition and harmony.  Recurring symbols like Charulata's birdcage, stormy weather, and the newspaper itself highlight the movie's important themes.  One of the most touching visual metaphors contrasts Amol's confident, fluent writing with Charu's initial halting effort; when he writes, the words flow out of the pen in an effortlessly beautiful script, while her words scratch and blot the page.

Unlike movies made by mere mortals, where emotions are too often spelled out in explicit, expository dialogues, Ray requires you to divine characters' internal states of mind from expressions and circumstances.  He demands of his audience a great deal of thought, empathy, and theorizing.  The result is a movie-watching experience more akin to voyeurism than to being told a story.  It is both unsettling and compelling, and it is what makes Ray's movies so deliciously rewarding of rewatching.  Ray's films are packed with overloaded symbols, subtle cues of meaning, visual metaphors, and allegories that operate on multiple levels.  Charulata, in this respect, is perfect vintage Ray - a beautiful and beautifully crafted movie that reveals more and more of its richness with every viewing.

Maqbool (2003)

मक़बूल

Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj

In recent weeks I have gushed beyond reason about Vishal Bhardwaj's recent movies Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola and 7 khoon maaf.  And in light of that gushing, I became more conscious that I hadn't yet seen his widely acclaimed Shakespeare adaptations, including Maqbool, based upon Macbeth.  So many people I respect hold this movie in very high regard, and I went in with high expectations.  That was not careful thinking on my part.  While I appreciate why the movie is effusively praised, it is just not a story I needed to hear told.  There is next to nothing I like about Maqbool.

I almost pulled the plug during Maqbool's unbearable first half hour, which is a scene after scene litany of anonymous angry men sneering and threatening and pointing guns at one another.  Eventually, their relationships begin to fall into place (though the swaggering and gun-pointing doesn't substantially abate).  Pandit and Purojit (Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah) are corrupt police inspectors. They moonlight as heavies in the employ of Jahangir Khan, also known as Abbaji (Pankaj Kapur), who is a widely respected - and feared - underworld boss.  Abbaji's right-hand man, Miyan Maqbool (Irrfan Khan), is a brooding and angry fellow.  He is nursing a secret relationship with Abbaji's mistress, Nimmi (Tabu), who goads him into betraying Abbaji and taking over the gang himself.  Both Abbaji and Nimmi are beset by fits of guilt as a result of this betrayal.

The trouble with this story, for me, begins with the underworld setting.  I just don't care about underworld stories.  Much of this movie is one dick-fight after another - Pandit and Purojit versus whatever rival they are sent to assassinate; Pandit and Purojit versus Maqbool; Abbaji versus corrupt politicians or other smugglers he does business with; Maqbool versus Abbaji's other deputy, Kaka (Piyush Mishra), or versus Kaka's son Guddu (Ajay Gehi), who is Maqbool's principal rival as heir to Abbaji's reign.  Many times through the film I just wished they could break out the rulers and be done with it.  The incessant chest-beating is not just tedious; it underscores how fundamentally uninteresting these characters are.  When relationships are determined by who displays the swaggiest machismo, I can muster little interest in the outcome.

Miyan Maqbool, who is of course the avatar of Macbeth himself, is supposed to be more nuanced.  Macbeth's internal conflict forms the meat of Shakespeare's play.  Likewise, Maqbool is meant to be an exploration of Miyan Maqbool's moral struggle, as his thirst for power outweighs his sense of filial loyalty to Abbaji.  The problem is that Maqbool is a reprehensible person.  He's senselessly rageful and cruel from the outset of the film.   He makes his living as a thug and an assassin for a gang of weapons smugglers that includes corrupt policemen and politicians.   And so if his reprehensible actions have consequences that pain him, so what?  I do not feel sorry for him and I do not find his angst or his suffering terribly compelling. 

If Vishal Bhardwaj had chosen to map the grand conflict of Macbeth onto more accessible, everyman characters - instead of a bunch of unredeemable underworld criminals - that could have been an utterly brilliant movie.  After all, even ordinarily good people do make colossally bad choices from time to time.  The fallout of an awful, evil action committed by a regular, relatable person could have been intensely compelling cinema.  Instead, Maqbool offers yet another dreary story about angry men who don't know any way to respond to strong emotions except by pointing guns at people's heads.  I am aware that such men exist in the world, but I am utterly uninterested in seeing their stories told again and again and again in the movies.  I just don't care. 

The only redeeming feature of Maqbool is Nimmi, and Tabu's smoldering, sinuous performance of her.  Nimmi's story has more nuance than that of the men.  She must achieve her manipulation and intimidation without the benefit of machismo, thugs, and weaponry; subtler methods are required.   Nimmi is aware that her days with Abbaji are numbered after a young starlet catches Abbaji's eye; Nimmi points out that she'll have nowhere to go if Abbaji throws her out.  Thus, she manipulates Maqbool - not because she truly loves him or thinks he deserves to inherit the mantle of the gang, but because it's the only way she can protect her comfortable position in the gang's luxurious haveli. 

But while Nimmi's arc makes the middle of the movie more tolerable than its execrable first half hour, she is not enough to overcome my fundamental frustration with the premise.  Underworld gangsters can go ahead and kill each other and betray each other and feel guilty about it or not, as much as they like.  But I don't want to hear about it, and I don't watch to watch movies that glorify it.  There are just so many other stories I would rather be told.

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola (2013)

मटरू की बिजली का मंडोला

Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj

If Vishal Bhardwaj's 7 khoon maaf is a creepy fun house at a sinister carnival, his Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a visit to a surrealist circus.  Trippy, touching, and uproariously funny, this movie sparkles and dances and enchants.  It is a sweet story of redemption, a biting political satire, and a magical romp all rolled into one crazy film.  It is wild, brilliant, and great fun.

The narrative at the core of Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is a potentially heavy one:  A crorepati industrialist, Mandola (Pankaj Kapur) schemes with the chief minister of Haryana (Shabana Azmi) to buy out, for a pittance, the farmers of the village that bears his name, so that he can develop a lucrative factory-mall complex on their land.  A mysterious figure calling himself after Mao Tse-Tung galvanizes and supports the villagers to fight back and preserve their livelihood.  Without the otherworldly, yet humanistic, levity that effervesces through Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola, this could be the stuff of a Prakash Jha film.  But Vishal Bhardwaj paints on a different kind of canvas here.

Mandola is a man divided against himself.  When sober, he is hard and calculating, willing even to use his own daughter, Bijlee (Anushka Sharma), as a pawn to advance  his schemes, including marrying her off to the chief minister's idiot of a son (Arya Babbar).  When Mandola is drunk, though - as he is much of the time - he sympathizes with the farmers and undermines is own business interestes.  He enlists an overqualified servant, Matru (Imran Khan) to watch over him.  But Matru's own motives are murky and his loyalties do not exactly lie where Mandola thinks.

This story is embedded in a matrix of the absurd that brings it to life with joyful giddiness.  The movie careens from pink buffaloes to dung-slinging trebuchets to swarming bees to a drunken midnight joyride in a flaming airplane.  A troupe of African dancers and an itinerant wedding band are among the disparate elements that shimmer in and out of Bhardwaj's magically unreal yet palpably dusty world.  Thrown into the mix is some very clever skewering of the press, the police, and the machinery of politics that is part Peepli Live, part Welcome to Sajjanpur, and all Vishal Bhardwaj. 

While invoking many established filmi conventions - such as a "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" type of climax - Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola turns others on their head.  In one sequence, the rains come to the agrarian village - but contrary to convention, the rain is not a cause for village-wide rejoicing.  It's after the harvest, and the deluge threatens to destroy the stored grain that the farmers need to sell to keep their land.  Mandola, the chief minister, and their cadre of corrupt officials dance in the downpour like film stars, while the villagers scramble to protect their livelihood.

For all its rich, rangy pleasures, Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is not without a few warts.  The characterizations are at times inconsistent, especially around Bijlee; her strengths are a bit unclear, and her relationship with Mandola a touch underdeveloped.  But these are minor quibbles in a movie that utterly enthralls and delights while it is happening.  (Other reviewers have complained that it sags in the middle; that could not have been further from this reviewer's experience.)  The relationship between Matru and Mandola is as touching as it is dysfunctional, and often hilarious and sweet as they drunkenly navigate the world together.  In one brilliant scene they crash into a well on a motorcycle and, deciding the well's location  is a dangerous, attempt to move it by dragging it by the rope that suspends its bucket.  United in this nonsensical and futile task, Matru and Mandola bond in the shared absurdity.

The movie is propelled through the madness by the performances of its actors.  Pankaj Kapur owns the film; Mandola is as loveably unloveable, as much the selfish softy, as his meanyhead in Bhardwaj's The Blue Umbrella.  Shabana Azmi delivers deliciously even as she chews the scenery with relish.  She has vastly too much fun as the long-suffering embodiment of manipulative evil, rolling her eyes as she strains to tolerate the buffoonery of her pawns, her son and Mandola.  I could watch Shabana Azmi all day long in roles like this one, a distillation and magnification of the character she developed for Loins of Punjab Presents.  Imran Khan does not emote much behind his fetching beard, but he is adequate to the demands that Matru's bizarre world places on him.  Even Anushka Sharma - who had better show some range soon if she is to live up to the promise of Band baaja baaraat - restrains the over-bubbliness here, and turns in a solid, reasonably grounded effort. 

Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola has been receiving widely mixed reviews, and I went in with some trepidation, unsure what to expect.  But I came out grinning, utterly delighted with a film I can't wait to see again and confirmation of the storytelling genius of Vishal Bhardwaj.  The weaknesses will fade in memory, and all that will remain are the many pleasures, the reality of the ridiculous, the splendid satire, and the lingering laughs.  I'll stand by my gushing here because it is an honest response to a movie I enjoyed every moment of.  Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola is simply a wonderful and unusual piece of cinematic art. 

Karz (1980)

क़र्ज़

Dir. Subhash Ghai

An inspiration and source for Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, Subhash Ghai's Karz ("debt") is in virtually every respect a flawless masala entertainer. It has everything, and I mean everything.  As one of Hindi cinema's canonical peechle janam stories, it has a healthy dose of mysticism and larger-than-life themes like justice, karma, and familial bonds. It has a main character, Monty (Rishi Kapoor), who is a famous stage performer, for no reason other than to provide excuses for its fantastic, over-the-top songs - set pieces like song from which Om Shanti Om took its name, in which Rishi Kapoor dances awkwardly on a giant spinning record after riding in on the tone arm.  It has Pran, playing a good guy who speaks largely in couplets.  It has a brilliant Aruna Irani item number that also features Pran disguised as a fakir.  It has Simi Garewal, in a melodramatic yet wonderfully rangy performance - cold and creepy as a murderer, and increasingly disturbed and distressed as Monty gaslights her into explosive confession of her crimes.  It has Durga Khote, who recognizes Monty as the reincarnation of her murdered son without question.  It has strange, inappropriate nude photographs sprinkled throughout its sets, for the camera to focus on at symbolically charged moments.  It has a bizarre, greedy villain, Sir Juda (Premnath), who communicates by tapping out codes that only his henchman Mac Mohan can understand.  It has Iftekhar and Yusuf Khan in hilarious fake beards.  It even has Jalal Agha. In short, Karz has just about everything there is to love about Hindi movies in one fantastic package, with a quick pace and very little fat (allowing for a little pudge around Rishi Kapoor's rapidly spreading middle).

My utter delight as I soaked in every frame of this hilarious, satisfying movie came out in the tweets I made while I was watching it, many with screencaps to highlight the visual awesomeness.  Thanks to Storify, I have collected all those tweets here, and allow them to serve as my review of this fantastically entertaining movie. 

So without further ado, here is the joy and brilliance of Karz, summarized via live-tweets from a gobsmacked, delighted Carla.

 

 

Be sure to click the "Read More" link after Durga Khote - there are more tweets and I'd like you to see them all.