Filmi Geek

Ankhon Dekhi (2013)

आँखों देखी

Dir. Rajat Kapoor

How do you decide what you believe? We live on a continuum that stretches from evidence to inference to faith. Most of us slide freely back and forth along it, never drifting too far toward one end or the other.  Some things we believe to be true because we have witnessed them ourselves.  Others, we take as established by the hard work and careful reasoning of experts we trust.  Still other things we believe as a matter of pure faith.

Stories have been told about individuals who take faith to extremes. Sometimes these are exalted as religious heroes, other times exposed as beknighted fools. Ankhon Dekhi, though, turns its lens toward the other end of the spectrum.

In this story, Bauji (Sanjay Mishra) decides that he will trust nothing except what he has seen with his own eyes.  Nothing short of first-hand experience will do. At first this seems a noble and even sensible way to avoid the pitfalls of untruth.  Bauji's inspiration is the injustice he perceives when people invest belief in unsubstantiated claims;  Bauji's family beats up Ajay (Namit Das, whose perpetually dazed expression is as perfect here as it was in Ghanchakkar), the boyfriend of his daughter Rita (Maya Sarao), based on neighbors' gossip about Ajay's womanizing. But when Bauji goes to meet Ajay himself, he finds a gentle, anxious, and responsible kid, not the slick operator he had been led to believe Ajay would be.

And so Bauji's plan to take nothing on faith or confidence is driven by a strong sense of justice.  But his recalcitrance, and his extreme application of the principle, soon applies a shearing strain to Bauji's family and his life. Bauji works in a travel agent's office; he loses his job after telling an inquiring client that he couldn't possibly know how good a particular resort was, since Bauji had never been there for himself.  Bauji's strange new ideas make him the laughing stock of Chandni Chowk, even while he begins to draw a following of local misfits who find him inspiring. The financial and social pressure is too much for Bauji's wife (Seema Pahwa), whose wails and laments escalate to deafening pitch and maddening constancy.  And it gets on the last nerve of Bauji's brother Rishi (Rajat Kapoor) too; he takes his wife and son and moves out of Bauji's home, breaking up the joint family.

The rift between the brothers is the real story in Ankhon Dekhi; one doesn't wonder so much whether Bauji will come to his senses and take a more balanced view of reason and trust, as whether Bauji and Rishi will start speaking to each other again in time for Rita's wedding.  And the tenderness of all the family relationships is where the beauty of Ankhon Dekhi lies.  There is a touchingly relatable ordinariness to these characters, and an inviting warmth to their Delhi-6 home. The film's opening shots are in warm evening colors, voyeuristically peering in through the open windows in the courtyard, and as the camera moves into the confines of the home, the viewer also joins the family.

Later, we are privy to other delicate interactions in the family orbit. Before Bauji has told his family that he's lost his job, he spends his days loitering about Chandni Chowk.  One day at a tea stall he runs into his nephew, who is bunking school. The two exchange an uncomfortable greeting, as each realizes the other's transgression. It is a sweet moment of familial bonding.

Ankhon Dekhi is not flawless.  Bauji's wife's screeching is unbearable; it should have been possible to convey the feedback loop between her suffering and the burden her suffering imposes on the rest of the family without making her painfully shrill and irritating to the audience too.  And there is a puzzling episode in which Bauji decides to stop speaking, on top of his commitment to believing nothing without witnessing it himself.  This willful dumbness is at best tangential to his quest for truth, at worst at odds with it; it does nothing but aggravate his family further, and he drops it with little explanation.  But Sanjay Mishra renders Bauji's stubborn adherence to his peculiar philosophy with such restrained guilelessness that the overall atmosphere of the movie is tender, even if a few of its threads are frayed.  And the movie's motion through the bustling but friendly streets and shops and homes of Chandni Chowk adds a layer of relatable ordinariness that grounds Bauji's extraordinary resolution. 

Ankhon Dekhi's ending raises a related question for the viewer to the one that Bauji raised for himself: How much of what we see can we believe?  How much of this story is literal, and how much metaphor?  If we do as Bauji does, and believe exactly what we see, the interpretation is almost unbearably sad.  Ankhon Dekhi invites us to go beyond seeing is believing, to travel out of the literal world and into a space where seeing is only the beginning of a process of interpretation.

Gangvaa (1984)

गंगवा

Dir. Rajasekhar

For reasons that are mostly coincidence, I watched three 1980s masala flicks in the space of a little over a week.  All three had Kader Khan write them and act in them.  Two of the three had Rajnikanth in them; two had Amitabh; two had Amrish Puri; two had Shakti Kapoor; two had Bappi Lahiri scores.  And so I had to write them up quickly before the three films became blended into one giant protein-enriched masala smoothie in my brain.  

I've written about Naseeb and Geraftaar already, and now turn to the most unlikely of the three:  Gangvaa.  Here's how it happened.

Beth (on Twitter): One of the suggested videos after #TaxiChor was Gangvaa, starring Rajnikanth and...Shabana Azmi. O.o @carla_filmigeek

Me: @bethlovesbolly I am speechless. Did you watch?

Beth: @carla_filmigeek I did not - I thought I should watch it with YOU.

A true friend!  So Beth and I watched Gangvaa, starring Rajnikanth and Shabana Azmi.  Starring Rajnikanth and Shabana Azmi.  I want to repeat that and let it sink in, because despite nearly a decade of adoring Shabana Azmi and exploring the ins and outs of her career, I somehow had not really processed that such a thing existed.   I've seen a respectable amount of Shabana Azmi's mainstream work.  I've also seen a fair amount of her work in dire and terrible films.  I've even put myself through the agony of Son of Pink Panther out of pure love for her.  

But Shabana starring opposite Rajnikanth, that stylized superstar who is even larger than larger than life?  That is a whole new level of pleasing cognitive dissonance.  Gangvaa was a film I simply had to see, even without subtitles.  What we got was a film that was more enjoyable, and made with more attention to craft, than either one of us particularly expected.     

This really exists. 

The basic injustice at the core of Gangvaa is the way the landed classes take advantage of ordinary village folk.   Early on in the film, a work crew finds a pot full of gold coins (these are delightful yellow-painted circles of cardboard, near as I can tell), and a suitably mustache-twirling zamindar (Amrish Puri) confiscates them to add to his already massive wealth.  Enter Gangvaa (Rajnikanth) to save the day;  like a classical mythological warrior, he makes his first appearance in the film riding a chariot. 

 
I couldn't get a good screengrab of the chariot, but here's the man a couple moments later. 

Gangvaa punches and kicks his way through the zamindar's goons, and quickly dispatches the zamindar to an early exit (presumably freeing Amrish Puri to move on to the set next door where he can play the same villain in some other masala movie).    There is a satisfying, if gruesome, spatter of blood on the camera lens to mark the zamindar's final moment on earth.  And Rajnikanth's trademark fighting style is such an undeniable thrill to watch, even for someone like me who is not a big fan of dishoom-dishoom.  He delivers multiple punches of bone-crunching force without moving his arm - it really is all in the wrist, I guess.   

Gangvaa puts together a band of the men who had suffered under the zamindar's tyrrany. Together they hang out in the wilderness and perform Robin-Hood-esque raids for the sake of vigilante justice.  At some point Jamna (Shabana Azmi) encounters Gangvaa and is smitten.  Then a village girl accuses Gangvaa of rape, and Jamna is enraged - it is here that she gets the vigorously indignant speech that marks Shabana Azmi's movies of this time period, the kind of speech without which one presumes should would not have accepted the role.

But indignation looks so good on her. 

It turns out that the rape was actually done by a totally different guy named Gangvaa (Raza Murad), and righting this wrong wins Jamna back for our hero, but makes him a new set of enemies that he spends the rest of the film fleeing from.  Also on his tail is an upstanding police inspector in the handsome form of Suresh Oberoi, who cannot allow vigilante justice in his district, no matter how noble the intention.  Actually I am not sure that Oberoi's character is the archetypical blemishless uncorruptible officer - having watched Gangvaa without subtitles I am sure I missed some nuance.  It is possible that I am merely projecting Oberoi's character from Tezaab on this film.   But I'm pretty sure I have it right. 

Suresh Oberoi's resemblance to Vivek is stronger in Gangvaa than I've noticed before.  Suresh is much better-looking though. 

There is a certain grimness to 80s masala movies from which Gangvaa does not shy.  There are several distressing suicides.  One is quite unexpected; two are commited by characters who would evidently rather die than give up information about Gangvaa.  That's the kind of loyalty that only Rajnikanth can inspire.  

Gangvaa also features some very creative violence and action, like a scene where a disposable goonda is strapped to a rotating wagon wheel.   In one particularly well-crafted highlight, Gangvaa is strung up by his ankles; he frees himself by grabbing a burning candle in his mouth and contorting his limber body until the candle's flame contacts the rope he's suspended from. 

 

I'm glad I watched Gangvaa.  I really did need to have the experience of seeing Shabana Azmi paired with Rajnikanth.  This was in fact my first exposure to Rajnikanth - I watched it before Geraftaar - and as I noted in my review of that film, I get it.  His presence is enormous, and thrilling.

The movie packs a wollop of a surprise ending.  I won't spoil it here but it's not a happy one, even though it provides more opportunity for Shabana Azmi to get her sexy rage on.  Despite this, Gangvaa is  not a bad way to pass a rainy afternoon.  Good songs, good character actors, and Rajnikanth eating an apple off a knife blade.  Set expectations accordingly, and Gangvaa is pretty enjoyable.

Naseeb (1981)

नसीब

Dir. Manmohan Desai

Manmohan Desai's masala films are the richest, most symbolically laden, most delightfully creative of their time.  His stories are packed with archetypes for good and evil, god and godlessness, creation, nurture, and destruction.  They are masterful concoctions, with equal parts allegory and entertainment value bursting out of every frame.  Naseeb is no exception to this - indeed, it's a superb exemplar, offering big themes, fun songs, more henchmen than you can shake a stick at, and a top-notch climax. 

If you took Amar Akbar Anthony, pureed it in a blender, and passed it through a sieve into a parallel universe, you might end up with something like Naseeb.  The syncretic spirit of that older film, joining Hindu, Muslim, and Christian to muster the strength of the nation itself in triumph over evil, is captured here right from the very beginning in the three rings worn by Namdev (Pran) - a cross, an ॐ , and the name of Allah.  Namdev is the victim of a grave injustice; like Pran's character in Amar Akbar Anthony, he is framed for a crime, wins a fortune, and has it stolen from him all within the first 20 minutes of the film.  And like that character - like most anyone seeking justice in India - he must wait many years to see justice served.  

Where Amar Akbar Anthony distributed the three gods across three brothers, Naseeb jelly-rolls them into one John Jaani Janardhan (Amitabh Bachchan), who introduces himself to the world in song much the Anthony Gonsalves did.  

Speaking of Anthony Gonsalves, where he leapt out of an Easter egg, here Asha (Hema Malini), "India's most famous singer," steps out of an Easter basket to perform her signature song.  And just like Amar Akbar Anthony, Naseeb's climax begins with a fantastically-costumed number in which all three principals and their romantic partners distract the bad guys. 

   

But Naseeb ups the ante. This climax doesn't just offer silly costumes and acrobatic fistfights; it sets them in a revolving skyscraper-top restaurant which it then sets on fire. 

Bottom line, Naseeb is as good and rich and satisfying as any masala movie you'll ever see, including Desai's other bests, Amar Akbar Anthony and Parvarish.  Naseeb's cadre of villains includes Amjad Khan, Kader Khan, Shakti Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Yusuf Khan, and Amrish Puri – Pran, as noted above, is a good guy in this one, much as he is in Amar Akbar Anthony.  With that crew, plus Amitabh, Rishi Kapoor, and Shatrugan Sinha on the side of light, Desai does skimp a little on the heroines. Hema Malini brings first-class star power, her gorgeous smile, and not a small helping of guts and ass-kickery.

But the other female leads are somewhat lesser lights – Rishi Kapoor and Shatrugan Sinha end up with Kim and Reena Roy, respectively.  These two are certainly up to the tasks they are given, even if they aren't in the same league as Parveen Babi, Shabana Azmi, or Neetu Singh. But each gets a song – Kim's is a terrific boys-against-girls kabbadi sequence with Rishi.   

The Farah Khan antecedents are as strong in Naseeb as her explicit quotations from Karz and Masoom. The college sequence in which Rishi Kapoor rabble-rouses from the roof and attempts to save Kim from a burning dormitory obviously provided a profound influence on Main hoon na.  And the parade of star cameos in the picturization of John Jaani Janardhan's self-laudatory song – which is set at the golden jubilee celebration of Dharam-Veer – anticipates Om shanti om's "Deewanagi deewanagi" by almost three decades, and maybe does an even better job at capturing the glitter and reverence of a Bollywood star-party.

And get a load of the adorable pixie on Sharmila Tagore. Yum!

But wait - there's more.  There is a delightful drunken buddy song between Rishi and Amitabh (Beth points out that there is something depressingly meta about Rishi Kapoor's character observing that since his family is full of alcoholics, he may as well drink too.) Shatrugan Sinha plays one of his trademark morally grey characters, like in Desai's Aa gale lag jaa, who seems like a creep but actually never does anything wrong and turns out to be a pretty good guy. If that's not all, there is sabre fencing – sabre fencing! - between Pran and a gloriously blond-wigged-and-bearded Amrish Puri. There is Lalita Pawar in perfect masala-maa form.  And to punctuate Desai's syncretic message, Pran's rings get distributed among the three principals, who each take a turn making an “impression” on Yusuf Khan …

 

… before using the rings to support their weight as they zipline to safety out the towering windows of the burning restaurant. Wah ji wah.

In short, if you like masala – and let me tell you, I like masala – there is really no reason not to watch this movie over and over again. I'll be right there with you.  Mere naseeb mein hai. 

Geraftaar (1985)

गिरफ़्तार

Dir. Prayag Raj

I have written before about how difficult it can be to overlook certain types of filmi misogyny, even when attempting to allow for the cultural milieu and era of the movie. It's one thing when a villain rapes or hits a woman; it is quite another when the hero engages in unconscionable conduct and yet remains unassailably heroic.  A rape threat and some violent manhandling of Mumtaz by Shashi Kapoor ruined the otherwise top-notch masala of Chor machaye shor for me; likewise Geraftaar, a delightfully satisfying masala meal turned rancid when the hero, this time cutey-patootie Kamal Haasan, throttles a woman until she falls in love with him. 

I want so much to love this movie. It has so much masala goodness going for it:  A Prayag Raj story, Kader Khan dialogues, a Bappi Lahiri score; a cast full of masala stalwarts like Nirupa Roy, Ranjit, Shakti Kapoor, Jeevan, and Kader Khan himself; a guest appearance by one of my favorite parallel-mainstream straddlers, Kulbhushan Kharbanda; a brief but utterly thrilling cameo by Rajnikanth, and "above all":

A very special role. 

Indeed, the first hour of this film just plain delivers. It begins with one of the more creative filmi murders you'll ever see, one involving large earth-moving machinery. A pair of young brothers are separated, setting the stage for masala goodness to come. One of these grows up to be Kamal Haasan, who has an absolutely wonderful cowboy-leatherman-spy disco medley and some beautifully choreographed and executed melees.  

 

The movie as a whole is available on YouTube (with subtitles!).  The song isn't. So here is the movie cued up to the beginning of the song.  

I am normally not that interested in dishoom-dishoom, except when it has comical elements, like the climax of Seeta aur Geeta or Ashanti.   But Kamal Haasan's fight scenes are special.   He brings an athleticism and even grace that is not common among Hindi film heroes.   There is a melee in which he uses a small wooden bench as a weapon and shield, and it is almost beautiful to watch.  (Skip to 31:17 in the above video to see it.)  There is some use of a double but for the most part Haasan does his own footwork, and the result is truly entertaining.  

Anyway, as if all of that Kamal Haasan goodness isn't already fantastic, when Kader Khan turns up, he is sporting a positively epic wig-and-moustache combo. Also he consults a glowing-eyed plastic skull for advice, something like a magic 8-ball, except it opens up and dispenses fortunes on folded-up pieces of paper. It seems like it can't get any better, and Rajnikanth hasn't even turned up yet.

I really want one.  The skull, not the moustache.

Then something absolutely dreadful happens.

I should have been prepared for it. I'm watching a 1980s masala film, after all; there is a reason I've seen relatively few of those. I should have known to expect the film to go all rapey and misogynistic on me. And yet, I feel bitten by Geraftaar and its utter betrayal of first-hour awesomeness.

What happens is Kishen (Kamal Haasan) pushes Anuradha (Poonam Dhillon) around; forces her into marriage, holding her by a twisted clump of hair while smearing blood in the place of sindoor; smacks her and throttles her for trifling with his affections.  These actions are presented with no moral complexity at all; Kishen is the hero, and the forced marriage and physical abuse are justified and upstanding because Anuradha is a spoiled rich girl who was mean to him.  After Geraftaar's glorious first hour I was stunned by this turn, and my stomach sank as I anticipated the inevitable consequence:  Anuradha is moved, whether by the beating or by Kishen's accompanying chastisement, to love him, to accept him as her husband, to shun her miniskirts, calf boots, and sports cars in favor of sarees and domesticity.

“Feh” doesn't even begin to cover it.

Once this atrocity has passed, astonishingly, Geraftaar picks up again.  There are more excellent songs, including a terrific disco buddy song between Rajnikanth and Amitabh. There is the female police inspector (Madhavi) who kicks serious ass in her own right – such a treat. The climax brings back the earth-moving machinery of the early scenes, nicely bookending the story. Kamal Haasan, when he isn't busy biffing on Poonam Dhillon, is adorable. There's really everything one could want in a masala film.

And there is Rajnikanth, who deserves a paragraph of his own.  When Rajnikanth makes his appearance, famously lighting his cigarette with a mid-air pistol shot, something transformative happens. He is an incredible star, a massive personality, and riveting to watch.  He's not an especially good-looking guy, but his charisma is powerful.  The stylized staccato of his melee moves is thrilling.  

But the decidedly unheroic actions of this film's hero are too much even for Rajnikanth to redeem, and sour the delights of what could have been a surprise instant favorite. When I tweeted my reactions to Kamal Haasan's physical abuse of his heroine, a few folks reacted with what were essentially verbal shrugs:  What do you expect from 80s entertainers?  Some had forgotten this aspect of the movie altogether; it was so much a part of the landscape of Hindi films at that time that it wasn't even noteworthy to them. But others did remember it. “Geraftaar is one abusive relationship after another,” one tweeter commented.

And I really can't look past it either. I'm not an Indian kid in the 1980s seeing Rajnikanth for the first time, blown away by his manifest coolness, or inspired by Madhavi's fierce ass-kicking to practice my own spin-kicks. I am 2014 Carla, and for better or worse there's a limit to how much of my sensibilities I can check at the door. I'd like to watch Geraftaar again sometime, for everything that is terrific about it: for Kamal Haasan, for the thrill of Rajnikanth, for the fantastic songs, for the pure fun of the villainous scheming combo of Kader Khan, Ranjit, Shakti Kapoor, and Kulbhushan Kharbanda. But if I do, I'll have to skip the middle third. I just don't want this movie ruined for me a second time.  

 

Baton baton mein (1979)

बातों बातों में

Dir. Basu Chatterjee

There is something quietly appealing about movies that portray the ordinary lives of minority communities in middle-class India.  Pestonjee, a movie I recently revisited, provides a somewhat dismal window into a Parsi community.  Bombay's Christians, like its Parsis, are not without representation in the movies, but, like Parsis, the representations are often stereotypes or tokens - the drunken middle-aged man, the dutiful nurse, the kindly priest.  Baton baton mein does something a little different, turning its lens on a community of Christians to show concerns of theirs that are nearly universally relatable. 

The worries of the families of Baton baton mein are not that different from the worries of other filmi families.   The Pereiras want to get their daughter Nancy (Tina Munim) married to a financially stable young man.  The Braganzas want their son Tony (Amol Palekar) married to a respectable girl from a decent family.  These characters have names like Nancy and Tony and Rosie and Tom; they go to church and marry in white lacy wedding dresses; and there isn't a sari or a murti to be seen throughout the film.  But there is nothing about their concerns that is particular to the Christian community, and more importanlty nothing that hangs on tired Christian stereotypes.

Despite its filmi subject, Baton baton mein does not have a very filmi tone.  There is no love at first sight, no "yeh shaadi nahin hogi!" (Although, when the characters go to the cinema to watch Ginny aur Johnny, this film-within-a-film features a hilarious dialogue, "main chapati pakne nahin dungi!")  The romance between Nancy and Tony begins on the Bombay 9:10 local, where Nancy is ruffled by Tony admiring and sketching her pretty face.  So desperate is Nancy's Uncle Tom (David Abraham) to find her a husband that he responds to Tony's ogling by inviting him to join them for a cup of tea; no leering creepster is too good for his beloved Nancy.  Fortunately for all of them, Tony turns out to be a pretty nice guy, and a romance develops between him and Nancy organically and sweetly.  They go on dates; they take walks along the Bandstand waterfront; they actually talk to each other.  

The development of this romance, though partially shorthanded in song sequences, is satisfying and believable.  Nancy, wounded from a previous attachment, is depressed and needs time to ready herself to give her heart again.  Her reticence is played somewhat woodenly by Tina Munim; it is sometimes difficult to tell if her flat affect is a deliberate rendering of a melancholy young woman's detachment, or just not a terribly nuanced performace.  If the latter, it is forgivable, because Nancy's frustration is sympathetic and she shows occasional sparks of agency that are truly refreshing.  After all, this young woman is pretty sure she can get by without a man at all, and earns a very respectable Rs.700 per month, compared to Tony's provisional Rs.300, which Nancy's mother Rosie (Pearl Padamsee) finds quite disappointing.  For his part, Tony is simply not sure he's ready to commit to something as life-changing as a marriage.  And so their courtship proceeds at a pace that is measured at best; when they are still dating with no talk of shaadi after a perfectly plausible four months, Rosie begins to lose patience.

The film's title suggests conversation, things spoken, and indeed much of Baton baton mein's conflict comes from things people say, especially the garrulous Rosie, who cannot keep herself from blurting out personal questions and aggressive verbal shoves in the direction of marriage, to Nancy's repeated mortification. Despite the title, though, any tension between the principals themselves arises because of the things they do not say, but rather assume. After an embarrassing clash between Nancy's mother and Tony's at the cinema, the two young people avoid eye contact on the 9:10, each one believing him or herself the aggrieved party and yet presuming the other is taking offense. Resolution is only possible when the two finally stop listening to the constant prattle of well-meaning but irritating interlopers, and start listening to each other.  Yet, ironically, this only happens because of the intervention of Tony's father (Arvind Deshpande), suggesting that a subtle balance is needed between exercising youthful independence and heeding the wisdom of family elders. 

Weaving in and out of this light drama are some delightfully funny side characters, like an elderly aunt (Leela Mishra) who repeatedly drops by claiming she can't stay and then stays for days.  Best of all is Nancy's violin-playing brother Saby (Ranjit Choudhury, as always seeming put-upon far beyond his young years), who serves as a sort of Greek chorus on the proceedings, both with his commentary and with his music.  The latter provides better punctuation for the dialog than any comical scoring ever could.  It's one of many charming touches that make Baton baton mein delicately sweet and a lot of gentle fun.