Filmi Geek

Manoranjan (1974)

मनोरंजन

Dir. Shammi Kapoor

I was just thinking that it had been a while since I watched an instant favorite - one of those movies that I know on first watch will be one I return to again and again, one that I gush about in a breathless review.  Manoranjan, it turns out, is one of those movies.  It is not original; it is a very closely wrought remake of Irma La Douce, that wonderful confection with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.  But it is nevertheless funny, charming, and sweet - not to mention bold and convention-smashing and maybe even a little subversive.  And it is made with a sophisticated and elevating attention to craft.  It is unfortunate that the studios of Bombay were for so long (and to a lesser extent, continue to be) in the habit of shamelessly copying the films of other nations without crediting them.  But taking that practice as a given, Manoranjan is in every way a worthy successor to Irma La Douce.  

One reason that Manoranjan is so delightful is that Sanjeev Kumar, with his goofy everyman appeal, fits right into the mold Jack Lemmon created for this character.  His performance is packed with physical comedy.  Like Jack Lemmon, he perfects a bug-eyed innocence, a manner both physically speedy and mentally a little slow on the uptake, displayed in cute double-takes and confused stammering.  If you already like Sanjeev Kumar - and I very much do - what he brings to Manoranjan is adorable enough to carry the movie all the way through.  

The character Kumar plays, Ratan, is hopelessly naive and splendidly good-hearted, a green-behind-the-ears police inspector utterly over his head in the world where he finds himself, which is a world of prostitutes and pimps, of shady dealings and matter-of-course bribes.  He quickly loses his bearings there, and his job.   But thus unmoored, he seems to have nowhere else to go, and so he stays.  He falls for Nisha (Zeenat Aman), one of the women who work the hustling beat between the cafe run by Dhoop Chhaon (Shammi Kapoor, chewing the scenery most delightfully) and the Hotel Mauj across the street.  He somewhat accidentally beats up Nisha's pimp Balram (Dev Kumar), and by the code of law that prevails over the civil law in such communities, becomes Nisha's pimp himself.  Ratan is horrified by this new role, though it is also seductive to his underdeveloped ego.  More, he is overcome by a clueless good-guy urge to save Nisha from her life of debauchery.  With some help from Dhoop Chhaon, Ratan adopts the persona of an elderly Nawab who has the means to pay Nisha for weekly visits, well enough that she no longer needs to provide her services to other men. 

Here is where a little mental compromise is required to enjoy Manoranjan; you do have to buy into its imaginary world of cheerful prostitutes and relatively gentle pimps who behave more like a group of harmless adolescent layabouts than an organized crime syndicate;  Balram is a brute but he also loves Nisha, and the other pimps, like the goofy Tingoo (Paintal), are chummy and comical.  The avuncular Dhoop Chhaon, serving up snacks and drinks at his bar, is the adult supervision that keeps the group's internecine conflicts under control, so that apart from the dark cloud of Balram's jealousy, there is nothing sinister in the operation at all, just laughs and fun and oh yeah, women selling their bodies and giving the proceeds to men to drink and gamble away.  It is a little uncomfortable for sure to accept this sanitized version of the sex trade and trot along as the story unfolds from the premise of it. 

 
Sheru gets tough; and, for a brief moment in a song, we get Zeenat and the other women in Nawab-drag.

And yet there is enough sophistication even in the Disneyfied atmosphere of Dhoop Chhaon's bar to hint at less sparkly truths that lie beneath the jaunty surface.  Irma La Douce had this too, and  Manoranjan preserves it faithfully, without losing the comedy's critical edge.  When "Sheru" (as Nisha incongruously nicknames Ratan) offers to marry Nisha, and support her so she no longer needs to have sex for money, Nisha retorts sharply that there is no honor in being supported by a man, that her pride requires that she work and give him a comfortable life.  What good is a woman who cannot provide for her man, she asks, in a funny and subversive twist on the societal norm that hangs masculine self-worth on the ability to financially support his wife.    In Nisha's world, gender norms are skewed, but perhaps the asburdity of Nisha's notion reflects absurdity of the corresponding notion in our world.  

There is an undercurrent of sadness, too, in Zeenat's performance of Nisha, that also casts shadows on the shiny happy veneer of Manoranjan's jovial family of pimps and prostitutes.   This, too, is borrowed from the original, from the genius of Shirley MacLaine in keeping her eyes sad while her lips are smiling, keeping wryness in her voice even when her words are relentlessly cheerful.  I will not claim that Zeenat's work rises to quite that level, but it is credit to Shammi Kapoor's direction that this nuance is, to a certain degree, detectable in Manoranjan.  Nisha has never been treated truly generously by a man, and to her surprise, Ratan's tender deference to her reaches a part of her that had of necessity been closed off by the life she was born into and lived.  This is touchingly conveyed in one of the film's wonderful songs, later in the movie, "Chori chori solah singar karungi," where Nisha enjoys a midnight shower while singing of the first true happiness she has enjoyed in the entire movie, notwithstanding lots of smiles and laughter.  

 
Fan service!

The subversion continues as Manoranjan hews faithfully to Irma La Douce's story to the end.   Early on,  Manoranjan maintains plausible deniability about whether sex happens between Nisha and Ratan, and at first when Ratan comes to her as the Nawab, he is careful to keep their meetings chaste.  Eventually, though, it is irrefutably clear that Ratan (as Nawab) succumbs to Nisha's seduction.  It is noteworthy that Nisha is the sexual aggressor throughout her relationship with Ratan, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.  (Even when Ratan tries to take on the aggressor's role, in a moment of anger, he cannot bring himself to go through with it.)  True, Nisha is a prostitute; perhaps a Hindi film of the 70s could not have given a woman sexual autonomy without first relegating her to a demeaned, outsider category.  Still, while Nisha lives a life normally assigned to vamps played by Helen and Aruna Irani and Bindu, she remains the heroine, sympathetic, the one true love of the seedha-saadha bhola-bhala hero.   

There is so much more that I love about Manoranjan. It features a sparkling RD Burman soundtrack; the songs and their picturizations both are tons of fun.  From a jaunt early in the movie where Nisha's sorority of prostitutes bats poor Ratan around for sport, to the brilliantly conceived dream sequence of "Aaya hoon main tujhko le jaaunga," each song is fun and playful, and even enhances the story.  In "Aaya hoon main," Ratan dreams himself in competition with the Nawab, rendering in dazzling color and hilariously elaborate sets the conundrum he has created for himself with his ruse.  

 

An enormous bubble bath with a slide; a 50-foot guitar on which the couple dances flamenco.

There is quick verbal humor too, some borrowed from Irma La Douce, and some fresh and lending a more organic touch.  Like his original counterpart, Moustache, Dhoop Chhaon claims in a set of running jokes to have had a vast array of prior careers, from sitting on the Supreme Court in Lahore to being a union organizer to being a commodities trader, and every time he mentions one of these in conversation, he follows with "magar yeh kissa, phir kabhi (but that's a story for another time)." When Ratan adopts the disguise of the Nawab, Dhoop Chhaon cringes at his awful Urdu - an in-joke multiplied by the excellent, studied diction for which Sanjeev Kumar is famous.(*)  Ultimately, Manoranjan satisfies on every level - true to its title, it is charming, naughty, bold, a little bit thought-provoking, and a whole lot of fun. 

 

(*) There is another in-joke around this that I need some help with.  As the Nawab paces the street murmuring his practiced pronunciation of "shabba khair," the background music takes on the melody of the song of that name from Itihaas - still some 13 years in the future at the time of Manoranjan.  Any theories what's going on here?  RD Burman already had the melody in mind but hadn't had a chance to use it?  Could the song have been written for Manoranjan but cut? 

Abhimaan (1973)

अभिमान

Dir. Hrishikesh Mukherjee

As with Silsila, it's been said that Abhimaan hews uncomfortably close to real life for Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri.  That is likely an instance of the usual difficulties that the general movie-watching public has separating actors from the characters they play.  Either way, it is a credit to Abhimaan, and its actors, that it rings so real.  

The movie starts slowly, establishing the fame and position of the singer Subir Kumar (Bachchan) and his relationship with Chander (Asrani), who is part valet, part manager, part friend to Subir.  The film does not take off until Subir meets Uma (Bhaduri); when Jaya enters, the story begins.  Subir is taken with Uma and with her singing, which is strictly amateur; their romance proceeds apace, and after marriage Subir urges Uma to take her lovely voice to the public.  Before long, Uma's popularity outshines Subir, and the marriage falters.  

Abhimaan is remarkable for its wonderful nonverbal expression, the details that convey the passion between Subir and Uma.  The newlyweds lounge in bed, Uma's bindi smeared, smudges of her makeup staining Subir's kurta.  Later, when Uma rouses Subir from sleep, his hair is suggestively mussed; Uma's is damp and freshly combed, irresistible to Subir's hands.  These scenes are creative and just plain sexy vignettes that impart the tenderness of their desire. 

 

Is it hot in here or is it just me?

As Uma's star rises and Subir's jealousy grows, he does some reprehensible things.  This is compelling in the same way that Amitabh's character in Saudagar is compelling; it is a treat to see pre-stardom Amitabh, before he became the people's greatest hero, comporting himself in a decidedly unheroic manner.   Unlike Saudagar, though, Subir is sympathetic and afflicted, not calculating and predatory.  The overall impression is of a good man, confused and undone by his envy.  Subir is like a little boy; he has never been challenged.  He is profoundly out of touch with his feelings, denying his envy when Uma confronts him but offering no alternative explanation for his rage.  He jacks his booking price up to Rs.6000  as soon as Uma gets Rs.5000 for her performance, even though this costs him work - yet even as he does this he seems not to understand why.  Amitabh's character in Saudagar is Machiavellian; his cruel decisions are taken deliberately.  Subir is much more sympathetic, and therefore redeemable. 

There is certainly an implicit element of sexism in Subir's discomfort.  But it is not the jealousy of possession that Shashi Kapoor's character feels over Hema Malini's in Abhinetri.  There, Shashi can't bear the gaze of other men upon his wife, can't bear her being on public display.  Subir's anguish is envy of success, a different animal from personal, possessive, sexual jealousy.  Subir perhaps wants to be the top breadwinner in the family for reasons of manly pride, but far more dominant is his need to be the top singer in the country, the best and most in demand over all.  It seems likely that Subir would suffer exactly the same sort of envy if Uma were his little brother rather than his wife.  The issue in Abhimaan is, as that very title suggests, one of pride, rather than regressive values about what is and isn't proper for a woman to do.  After all, Subir pushes Uma into a performing career after marriage, rather than forbidding one that she had enjoyed before marriage.  

The result, of course, is similar to that in Abhinetri - Subir makes the marriage unbearable, and Uma leaves.  But this film is far more satisfying, and its resolution feels more like a caesura for the characters after genuine growth and change, rather than the reset-button copout of Abhinetri's finish.   Abhimaan does get a bit bumpy approaching its conclusion, sagging under the weight of psychobabble around Uma's post-miscarriage depression and the rather filmi prescription by a rather filmi psychiatrist that Uma can be cured of this if she can just be made either to laugh or to cry.  But the film also provides an opportunity for Subir to pull up his big-kid chaddies, to take some responsibility for Uma's suffering, and display his tenderness in his efforts to break through her melancholy.  

And it also provides a showcase for Jaya's superb range as an actor - if Abhimaan was imitating life in portraying Jaya's character as a greater talent and bigger star than Amitabh's, it's not without merit, because Jaya is a tremendous actor.   Hrishikesh Mukherjee lets her look awful when she should look awful, and Jaya is unafraid of being unglamorous.  Her sobs are real sobs, not overwrought filmi sobs.  I love Jaya's gravitas in these early movies.  She is an anchor that fixes films in the real;  stories seem to condense around her.  Few young actors have that kind of presence.

 

Hrishikesh Mukherjee's movies are always delightful for the way they balance their deft and delicate narrative style with generous applications of filmi entertainment.  Abhimaan is no exception.  It is seasoned with some beautiful and memorable S.D. Burman songs - when I tweeted that I was watching it, many a nostalgic response praised these.  Its supporting cast includes a basketful of favorites: Durga Khote, A.K. Hangal, David Abraham.  Also remarkable is a rare non-vamp and even very touching appearance by Bindu, as Chitra, a would-be lover of Subir who graciously steps aside when he falls for Uma, and returns to offer sincere friendship when Subir's troubles overtake him.  Chitra is a kind of Chandramukhi to Uma's Paro; the film makes this comparison explicit.  Package all of this up with the intensity of Jaya and the long, tall handsomeness of youthful Amitabh, and the result is a film that, in its quiet way, is pretty much terrific. 

     

Bobby Jasoos (2014)

Dir. Samar Shaikh

Bobby Jasoos is an adorable movie.  It is not flawless; there is a measure of lazy scripting and plot elements that don't stand up to rigorous thought.  But I do not feel inclined to be especially critical of it. 

Movies like this are still fairly rare, though thankfully they are no longer unheard of.  By "movies like this" I mean a movie about the self-actualization of a woman, a movie in which a woman has agency and makes decisions based upon her own ambitions and desires.  I was very critical of Aiyyaa, which some people thought was a stellar example of such a movie; it missed the mark for me in a few crucial ways.  In contrast I reacted to English Vinglish and Queen with as much emotion as analysis, and was very happy to overlook their flaws and just revel in the warmth and satisfaction of them.  Bobby Jasoos is not as substantial as any of these - it is perhaps less ambitious.  But it is a delight.  It may not do everything right, but it makes no grave mistakes from a feminist perspective - there is no cringe-worthy, film-ruining misstep that undermines what is enjoyable and refreshing about it.  That sounds like a low bar, but I don't mean it to be.  I kept expecting an error analogous to the movie-killing ending of Ghanchakkar, except in the form of a spasm of an anti-feminism rather than a spasm of violence.  It's all too easy for mainstream stories to be tone-deaf when it comes to women's agency, and Bobby Jasoos avoids a lot of potential pitfalls.   (Remember Lajja, where three hours of stories of fierce, fiery women are capped by a big, strong, deus ex machina of a man who steps in with a machete to save the day for them?)

Among the most remarkable features of Bobby Jasoos is that its titular character Bilqis, known as Bobby (Vidya Balan), is thirty years old.  This fact is not trumpeted loudly across the film nor held up as a self-conscious, self-congratulatory banner.  It just is.  Bobby is not especially concerned with the social demands ordinarily placed on one of her age and sex, and her Hyderabadi Muslim family bears her varying levels of hostility about this.  Her mother (Supriya Pathak) has all but given up on getting her married, which is fine with Bobby, who would rather pursue her dream of becoming a big-shot private detective than worry about homemaking.   And so Bobby's matchmaker aunt (Tanvi Azmi) focuses her efforts on Bobby's younger sister Noor (Benaf Dadachandji).  But Bobby's father (Rajendra Gupta) sees her ambitions as gallivanting, shameful romping that brings a bad name to the family and interferes with finding a suitable match for Noor.  Bobby's father is on the ragged edge of disowning her entirely; he refuses to speak with her, and snubs her various peace offerings.

At its best, Bobby Jasoos is about this relationship between Bobby and her father, and also about a very deftly handled romance between Bobby and Tasavur Shaikh (Ali Fazal),  a local TV celebrity who is also a client of Bobby's detective gig.  Tasavur has hired Bobby to  track down dirt on a lengthy series of women with whom Tasavur's family has hoped to arrange his marriage.  The scene when Tasavur makes his first appearance is one of the film's best.  He makes his way single-mindedly across an outdoor market, distractedly fielding requests for autographs, with a nervous energy fixed on Bobby.  Bobby, meanwhile, sees him coming and waits for him with a slumped, exasperated, "oh this guy again" affect.  My immediate thought is that Tasavur hires Bobby to break up proposal after proposal because he wants to marry her; that is not quite the direction in which the romance grows but it says something about the chemistry that Ali Fazal is able to project in the direction of Vidya Balan.   

I am surprised at this point by this fact:  as much as I adore Vidya Balan, I am here talking about Ali Fazal first, before singing Vidya's praises.  Ali Fazal is an absolute revelation in this role, the most adorable, appealing male lead I have seen in, well, as long as I can think of.  There is not an atom of arrogance in his bearing or in the arc of the romance.  The audience understands that he is in love with Bobby several scenes before he does.  And from the moment that awareness dawns, he is all vulnerability and sincerity, none of the bravado or entitlement that so often characterizes filmi heroes in love.  He is just a pleasure to watch.  It's hard to believe that a guy could upstage Vidya Balan - Vidya Balan! - in my reflections on a movie but Ali Fazal as Tasavur comes as close as anyone could.  Watch Bobby Jasoos if just for this guy. 

And what about Vidya Balan?  Well she does a delectable job, of course, in a role that is not all that easy to play.  Her main handicap is that Bobby is not an especially nice person throughout much of the film.  Her chafing against her family is sympathetic, but her selfishness is grating.  When a big case lands in her lap - a mysterious rich man (Kiran Kumar) throws gobs of money at her to track someone down, no questions asked - Bobby is embarrassingly uncritical.  Whether this is a character flaw by design or a bit of lazy scripting is unclear, but either way, as clever and resourceful and spirited and bold as she is, Bobby is more than a little frustrating in the film's first half, and Vidya has a challenge to make her likable nevertheless.  Whether she suceeds is, perhaps, a matter of personal preference; I like her enough to think she did, but rational Carla can see some room for just finding her annoying.    

You'd like to think a movie about a detective would have at its heart a satisfying mystery, but here Bobby Jasoos falls especially short; this part of the story doesn't quite hang together.  The script reaches an apogee of laziness in the final third, where Bobby picks up clues out of earshot from the audience.  But the weakness of the mystery doesn't torpedo the film, which as I noted is more about Bobby's relationships than the details of her sleuthing.  And the big win of Bobby Jasoos is that neither of these relationships requires a compromise of Bobby's autonomy to find its resolution.  In a key scene in which Tasavur finds himself defending Bobby to his own father, Tasavur says that her drive and career-mindedness are what makes her special.  Nor does rapprochement between Bobby and her father come with any promise, explicit or implicit, that Bobby will mutate into a different kind of person.   That is the sense in which Bobby Jasoos most succeeds:  Bobby gets to be Bobby, and remain Bobby - 30 years old, driven, part stupid, part smart, good-hearted, a fully actualized human being. 

Bombay Talkies (2013)

Dir. Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap

I would like to write a review of Bombay Talkies that is more than a concatenation of four mini-reviews. But that presumes that Bombay Talkies is more than a concatenation of four mini-movies. The minds behind this cluster of stories surely intended it to be more than the sum of its parts, to be a synergistic assemblage that would resonate across a century of Indian cinema. But it is not. The stories are loosely basted together by a very broad theme – the ways in which cinema touches lives. But this connection is too facile and self-indulgent to add anything beyond what the stories themselves offer. There is no substrate, no connective tissue of any substance.

Contrast another recent multi-story film, Love, Sex aur Dhoka, by Dibakar Banerjee – auteur of the strongest segment of Bombay Talkies. That film examines a narrower theme, cinematic voyeurism, and its three stories are far more tightly bound thematically. They are also stitched together by intersections in narrative space; events in each of the three vignettes touch events in the others. The result is a taut, compelling unity. In Bombay Talkies, though, each story sits in a hermetically sealed silo, narratively and thematically disjoint from the others. It's a shame, because linking them by more than their broad and, to be truthful, fairly limp theme would have elevated Bombay Talkies into something truly memorable.

Read across the four shorts, Bombay Talkies takes an encouragingly broad view of who the movies touch, and how. The dour, closeted, and self-loathing Dev (Randeep Hooda) of Karan Johar's segment doesn't seem to care much for modern cinema at all – he openly disparages his wife Gayatri's (Rani Mukherjee) work at a popular film magazine – but evergreen movie songs from cinema's golden age are his escape, his transport out of the stultifying misery of the life he's boxed himself into. For a young beggar girl whom Dev encounters at a railway station, the same classic songs are a livelihood.

That alone spans a wide space – movies as solace for a wealthy, privileged man, and subsistence for a poor little girl. Other shorts examine other branches in cinema's reach – middle-class children inspired by its sparkle and chime, working poor moved by its stories and worshipful of its stars, dreamers, people nursing hopes and anxieties, relationships across generations.

How frustrating then to have all of this glorious expansive scope forgotten in the film's dreadful closing song sequence. There, the wide lens of Bombay Talkies tightens its focus, reducing the entire magic of the movies to a singular pleasure for the solitary young male. Gone are the poor fathers and professional women, the dreaming boys and the neglected girls whose existence was acknowledged, to varying degrees, in the previous segments. In this song, all the stars of Bombay cinema line up to serenade a well-fed, backpack-clutching educated urban young man, occupying an entire cinema hall all by himself. The world is his, and this world is too, the magical world of cinema. (See Beth's analysis of the same song – she said it all very well.)

Perhaps this would all be less frustrating if Bombay Talkies were not marketed as a tribute to a century of Indian cinema. That set-up burdens the film with a big responsibility, and it falls a little short. Bombay Talkies is just four short films that happen to be packaged together. They are pretty good short films, and deserve credit for being that, but they don't make each other more than that.

The strongest of them is Dibakar Bannerjee's piece, which looks at cinema as storytelling and at storytelling as a driver for life itself, with a lovely touch of magical realism. Its hero Purandar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a working class everyman, has a close encounter with the moviemaking process, as an extra on a set, that both inspires his own life choices and allows him to connect with his sick daughter. After the shoot, Purandar flees the set without even waiting for his pay, and as he hurries home you understand that acquiring a way to make his little girl smile is worth more to him than wages for a day's work. The last few minutes of this story, in which Purandar spins the story of his extraordinary day into a fable for the girl, are transcendent; rendered silently, the narration is a special moment for the two of them, not for us. But we are treated to his animation, his expression, which are pure joy.

Karan Johar's contribution is a hard look at relationships and concealment; it is also the only tale of the four that has a female human being among its main characters or even an adult woman of any significance to the story. (Again we see who the history of cinema has been about and for.) In this story, a manic and aggressive young gay man, Avinash (Saqib Saleem), lobs a bomb into the gangrenous marriage of the closeted Dev and the magazine-editor Gayatri I mentioned above. Of the four segments of Bombay Talkies this is the one that could have been twice as long. Much of it is rushed, shorthanded, backstory blanks left for us to fill in by assumption.  In particular, I wanted more of the broken Gayatri-Dev relationship, to know whether it is truly as affectionless as it is sexless, to know whether Dev's outrageous surliness when Avinash is at the dinner table is typical of his discourse with Gayatri, or peculiar to the discomfort his attraction to Avinash engenders. But that fact that I care about these questions at all is evidence that Johar has in his hands the skeleton of a good story, well-told. It continues to be a pleasure to see Rani Mukherjee in grown-up roles; she is that good.

Anurag Kashyap's piece explores the tendency of movie fans to grant apotheosis to their stars. Its tale of a family's exaltation of Amitabh Bachchan – to the point where his bite on a piece of murabba is invested with life-saving potency – resonates with my recent viewing of Coolie, and that film's unique breaking of the fourth wall to acknowledge Bachchan's God-like status. The story ends with a nice grounding, a reminder that it is possible to worship the brilliance of the movies and simultaneously keep one's feet on the ground, rooted in rational reality.

Zoya Akhtar investigates the power of cinema to embolden dreams and self-expression, in a touching story about a young boy (Naman Jain) who longs to cut loose and dance like Katrina Kaif. Much more telling in Akhtar's piece is the boy's older sister, whose interests and desires are as irrelevant to their father (Ranveer Shorey) as his son's comformance to strongly gendered ideals are paramount. This father is a dreadful man. Having dropped a couple thousand bucks on football practice which his son doesn't want, he refuses a much smaller amount for a history-class trip that would make his daughter's year. The critique of this father is perhaps the stealth message of this film, which is superficially masked by the sparkle of the little boy's costume and the chime of “Sheila ki Jawaani” when he dances his heart out to it. There is nothing particularly exicting about a boy performing an oversexualized caricature of femininity. The father's obsession with acceptable gender performance, which he places above any expression of personality by his daughter (he only pays attention to her interests when he thinks she likes Katrina Kaif), speaks to a vast overvaluing of sons relative to daughters. This is the key point of Akhtar's piece, and it highlights the absence of this theme in the rest of Bombay Talkies. If not for the boy's spirited defiance, the sister would be all but forgotten, like most of the women in Bombay Talkies's supposed tribute to a century of Indian cinema.