Filmi Geek

Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015)

दम लगाके हईशा

Dir. Sharat Katariya

Let me start with what I do like about Dum Laga Ke Haisha: its lead woman, Sandhya (Bhumi Pednekar). I can think of vanishingly few characters like this one, not just in Hindi films but in western popular narratives as well. Sandhya is a smart, with a modest but sincere ambition to be a schoolteacher.  She is confident, giving as good she gets when her family or her in-laws give her a hard time.  (One friend on Twitter taught me the expression "muh-tod type" to describe her.) And she is kind and patient, doing all she can to give her marriage to Prem (Ayushmann Khurana) a fair chance to succeed.

She is also overweight. And the way Dum Laga Ke Haisha handles Sandhya's weight is exceptional.  It doesn't pretend she's not overweight - it doesn't pretend that Sandhya's lived experience as a woman in a chubby body is the same as any typical slim heroine's.  But the film doesn't judge her for it, either.  When characters comment about her weight, the comments serve to show the smallness of the character, not to get the audience laughing at the fat girl.  Jokes about her body are offered as mean, not as funny. And, in a very true-to-life that many overweight women can identify with, Sandhya both steels herself against them and is wounded by them.  

Physical type aside, Sandhya shows an impressive maturity and commitment in her approach to life, while never forgetting that she is entitled to get something out of the bargain.  Dum Laga Ke Haisha is set in the mid-90s, a time when Hindi films were often still peppered with dialogue about how suffering and sacrifice is a woman's lot (this came up in 1994's Anjaam, for example).  But Sandhya isn't having any of that.  She wants to do what is right, which in her world is to be a good wife, supporting her husband and keeping him happy.  But she refuses to subsume her entire self, to subjugate any desires and needs of her own, for the sake of the bharatiya-nari ideal.  She is committed to making a serious effort at this.  She tries more than one tack to make her marriage work, but she's only willing to beat her head against a wall for so long.  When her efforts go unrewarded - and worse, when Prem outright insults her for them - Sandhya shifts her focus to taking care of herself, to finding a new life path without Prem.  She even initiates divorce proceedings, an astonishingly bold move in a conservative community.  The result is of all of this is that Sandhya is a terrific character, remarkably portrayed.  She is real, likable, and flawed (that tongue can be a bit sharper than is called for).  It is so easy to get behind Sandhya, to be invested in her and to care what happens to her.

And because I care what happens to Sandhya, Dum Laga Ke Haisha fails for me as a romance. I just can't stand to see her saddled with Prem, as dour, unappreciative a jerk as ever was the hero of a movie.* Crumpling spinelessly under pressure from his parents, Prem marries Sandhya early in the film, and then sulks like an angry five-year-old through all her game efforts to connect with him. In the first two thirds of the movie, Prem insults Sandhya, and alienates his family, his friends, and even his mentor.  All of them offer him advice in the direction of pulling up his big-boy chaddees and acting like a decent adult.  But Prem is too self-absorbed to do that kind of work, and too shallow; his main objection to Sandhya (whom he did consent to marry, after all) is that she's fat.  He is an all-around odious and unpleasant person. 

When I complained of this on Twitter, someone asked, is it necessary to like the main characters to like a movie? The answer depends strongly upon the movie. Satirical comedies are often populated by awful people, and many a gangster movie centers on an anti-hero.  But for a romance, likable principals are an absolute necessity.  In a romance, the conclusion is foregone: one way or the other, the couple will end up together.  The pleasure of a romance lies not in the whether but in the how; the journey is everything.  So that journey had better be in the company of people you enjoy spending time with. And, of course, you have to want the couple to get together.  If you can't root for the success of the pairing, watching a romance is an irritation, not a diversion.

With its petulant, obnoxious hero and a heroine who deserves far, far better, Dum Laga Ke Haisha becomes a frustrating ride. And even if Prem does undergo some character development - which he arguably does, though I'll have more to say below about the facile device that demonstrates this - it weights the dynamic part of the story toward Prem, when Sandhya is the better and more interesting character to watch.  An annoying brat realizes he's been an idiot, and a gutsy, interesting woman who was all ready to strike out on her own decides instead to forgive him for having been an annoying brat.  That's just not an enormously satisfying story arc. 

As for that device by which Prem finally proves his readiness to contribute some effort to his marriage:  It's not so much that after avoiding cheap fat jokes, the film culminates in a contest in which Prem must literally hoist Sandhya's extra weight on his back.  The movie handles that with some dignity and steers clear of body-shaming Sandhya right until the end.  It's more that the symbolism of the wife-carrying contest itself gives me  indigestion.  I can't get behind the metaphoric notion that a woman is a dead-weight burden that her husband must bear.  For Dum Laga Ke Haisha to use this, of all metaphors, to represent what Prem must do to shoulder the burdens of adulthood and contribute to his own marriage is discomfiting, not cute as the movie was going for. And it short-changes one of the most interesting and deserving heroines I have ever seen.

* Ayushmann Khurana might be making a career out of such characters; I had similar problems with Vicky Donor.

Anjaam (1994)

अंजाम

Dir. Rahul Ram

When I sat down to write a post about the most thematically interesting part of this movie - Madhuri Dixit's character's transformation into an avatar of both mother goddess and death goddess - it turned into a broader rumination on the changing portrayals of revenge in Hindi films, and became my latest column in Outlook.  Please do go and read it.    

There's still lots to talk about, though. Anjaam has surprised me a little by sticking with me.  While I was watching, I didn't think it would. The first half of the movie is rather stupid; Shah Rukh Khan hams it up more than a pig roast, and it's pretty painful to watch.  Madhuri, as was so common in those years, is far better than the material and actors she's given to work with - the mulleted flaccid noodle who plays her husband (Deepak Tijori) is especially beneath her.   And as if all that isn't bad enough, Johnny Lever drives the comic side plot as a hijra.  I'm one of the few people on earth who actually believes Johnny Lever has talent (not that's it's usually well deployed or anything), but really - Johnny Lever as a hijra?

What the phrase "oh HELLS no" was created for; Shah Rukh Khan in a relatively tolerable state.

But there's some very interesting stuff in there all the same, and the movie's surprisingly satisfying second-half rewards the wait.  Here's some of what I said about Anjaam in that Outlook column:

Back in the 1990s, when revenge films were the order of the day, Anjaam showed another character turning to revenge when the criminal justice system failed her. Shivani (Madhuri Dixit) is convicted and imprisoned for the murder of her husband on the strength of perjured testimony of the real murderer, Vijay Agnihotri (Shah Rukh Khan). Agnihotri, credible as both a wealthy industrialist and a man, paints Shivani as an hysterical and wanton woman, a misogynist theory of the crime that the court is all too ready to accept. After a few brutal years in prison and plenty of grating talk about how enduring injustice and degradation is the lot of all women, Shivani snaps, propelled by the religious chants of her blockmates into a spree of cold-hearted revenge against everyone who has wronged her during her ordeal. When she finally catches up with Agnihotri, he is hospitalised and catatonic. Not satisfied with this karmic justice doled out by the universe, Shivani takes the time to nurse Agnihotri out of his catatonia and convince him she's fallen in love with him, just for the satisfaction of his full awareness when she kills him. 

Shivani's crusade against Anjaam's lineup of vile and awful men (plus one complicit female prison guard) is echoed by later Madhuri Dixit performances in Mrityudand — another film in which nearly all the men are horrible, awful people — and even Gulaab Gang. In those films, Madhuri’s characters face down the institutionalised oppressors of women in terms they can understand, with rifles or machetes. Anjaam goes a step further, placing Shivani in an archetypal space in which she wields the feminine ideal as advanced by patriarchy as a weapon against it. Shivani lulls Agnihotri by playing into his misogynist fantasy of how women, especially this particular woman, should serve him, and then turns on him with another misogynist stereotype, that of woman as seductress, betrayer, and destroyer of men. Anjaam stirs an interesting religious flavor into the rib-sticking broth of revenge, dovetailing as it does the nurturer-goddess and death-goddess aspects of archetypal womanhood.

 

 

 
The real reason to watch Anjaam. Do not mess with this woman.

Here are a few additional observations.

• Every last man in Anjaam is horrible.  Even Shivani's husband, who could have been a nice guy in his mulleted, baggy-jeaned, 90s kind of way, lets his own greed blind him to the obvious fact that his wife is being stalked by a maniac.  He dismisses her very real concerns and instead follows the ₹ signs right into the trap that Vijay Agnihotri lays for him. 

• On the flip side, each and every horrible man in the movie gets punished by death at Shivani's hands (except her husband, though she is convicted of his murder).  The death of Shivani's awful brother-in-law (Tinnu Anand) is especially creative; he too has been a greedy bastard from the film's first scene, exploiting both his own wife and Shivani for every rupee he can squeeze out of them and drink or gamble away.  Shivani kills him by stuffing his mouth with rupee notes until he suffocates.

•  To achieve her final revenge against Agnihotri, Shivani also sacrifices herself - first symbolically, by devoting months to his care and rehabilitation in the hospital and subjecting herself to the indignity of pretend-loving him, and then physically, so that they die together. This has both narrative expedience (death goddess or no, you can't really let a character get away unpunished with the number of brutal killings Shivani pulls off, no matter how just they seem within the fantasy world of the movie) and cathartic value for Shivani.  She has transcended life on earth at this point; one can't simply return to life as a flight attendant after marauding around as an incarnation of Kali.

• I love the way Anjaam acknowledges that women, too, can be agents of oppression when they buy into the unjust power structures of patriarchy; this comes in the form of Kalpana Iyer, delightfully chewing up a bunch of scenery in a brief role as a smokin', swaggerin' prison warden who gets off on pimping out her charges to local bureaucrats and beating the stuffing out of them when they object.  Don't worry; Shivani gets her, too. 

• Anjaam has a couple of really fantastic Madhuri numbers - including a great 90s-style folk wedding song and another folk-style song, in which she serves as Agnihotri's imagined substitute for some other stage performer he happens to be watching.  (I love songs about how mirchi-hot Kolhapuri girls are; see also Ashanti.)

 

 

I like it when I'm surprised by a movie.  Here was a movie with two strikes against it - 90s rapey-revengey-women-suffery stuff, and the dreaded smugness of Shah Rukh Khan.  And yet it was pretty enjoyable while it was happening - the songs got me through the first half and the second half really took off - and gave me all these ideas to think and write about.  Actually I just placed a big fat DVD order as I do a few times a year and I am kicking myself that I didn't take the opportunity to add it to my collection.  But for now I can watch it over again on YouTube.

 

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969)

গুপী গাইন বাঘা বাইন

Dir. Satyajit Ray

I don't so much want to analyze this amazing film as revel in the sense of wonder it creates.  It is pure fantasy, what with its dancing ghosts, sinister magicians, an entire kingdom under enchantment that renders it subjects mute, and long-lost brother kings.  It is visually thrilling, imaginative, trippy, and delightful. All in support of a simple fable that transports you into a magical, musical world.

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne's two main characters, Goopy (Tapen Chatterjee) and Bagha (Rabi Ghosh), start the movie hapless and a little stupid, or at least cripplingly naive. Goopy, longing to move the hearts of others with his singing, and Bagha, with dreams of rousing people with his drumming, have each been run out of their respective villages for being absolutely awful musicians, and they seem a quintessential pair of slightly dim, easily duped folks, archetypal fools.  But by the end of the film they prove themselves strong-hearted and resourceful heroes.  They get some help, for sure, in the form of three wishes granted them by a ghost king.  But what they do with the power they are given is all them.  Their efforts win them the admiration of a king (Santosh Dutta), outsmart a villainous usurper (Jahor Roy), reunite long lost brothers, and avert a war, and through all this they never lose their sweet smiling innocence.  It's hard not to love them.

 
Goopy and Bagha in their default state: "Uh....";  the ghost king who takes pity on them. 

As charming as Goopy and Bagha are, though, I have to wonder how Ray, who can be so extraordinarily sensitive to the way women are bound and restricted in his society, could tell a story in which there are no women whatsoever, except until the final scene in which the kings' daughters are gifted to our young heroes as prizes for their noble efforts.  The omission is notable, and discomfiting.  It's just one film, just one story, but it is also a beloved film aimed in the direction of children, with its uncomplicated fable of a story and playfully silly visual design.  And the message little girls get with the pervasiveness and repetition of stories like these is that there is no place for them in the world at large, no need for them to travel to distant lands, no opportunity to influence world affairs, no role to play except to stand silent and bashful as their fathers hand them off to suitably big-hearted young men.  Stories like these reinforce and perpetuate the very cultures that create the caged and dissatisfied Charulatas, the othered and dehumanized Devis that Ray exposes with such a deft hand in many of his other works.   

 
The brother kings reunited; the usurper and his mischievous magician (with deely bobbers!).

But if I set that wart aside (how many films must one say this about, Indian or otherwise!) what a splendidly bubbling fountain of delights is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.  There have been times when I have fallen prey to the cliché of describing a sweet gentle film as a confection. But Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is not so much a confection as it is the copious rain of mithai that Goopy cleverly conjures to distract the enemy soldiers while he spirits away their good but enchanted king.  As the men stuff their faces with these sweets from the sky, we too can stuff our eyeballs with the wonder that Ray conjures.  

The film's first twenty minutes look like any other Ray village tale - a young man in a dhoti-kurta ambles about a dusty, sun-baked countryside, a group of grizzled old fellows huddle in the shade of a pipal tree.  And then the ghost dance happens, imaginative and trippy with its thrumming drumbeat and its use of black art, masking, and negatives.  Graceful dancers slither across the screen, white figures whirling, only to be replaced by the toddling shadows of chubby panjandrums. By the time the ghost king himself appears, all fangs and fluorescent spots, we know we're not in Kansas any more.

 
More scenes from the ghosts' dance.

That is only the beginning of the magnificent visuals.  What is to follow is downright Seussian - curly slippers with grinning faces that are somehow both sinister and friendly; a king sporting a giant turban topped by a sort of chimney; a wizard (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) with mirrored sunglasses and deely-bobber antennae two feet long.  It is a most colorful display of visual magic, despite being rendered in black-and-white.  And speaking of not being in Kansas, like The Wizard of Oz, Goopy toggles from black-and-white to color at a key point in the story. But while the switch in that 1939 film signals the passage from reality into a magical hyper-reality, here it does something a little different, marking a new stage of life for Bagha and Goopy, an entirely new status.  And Bagha appears completely startled by it.    

 
Shoes given by the ghost king are not only enchanted but stylish; Goopy cleverly conjures a rain of pots of mithai to distract the enemy soldiers. 

When the ghost king grants Goopy and Bagha the power to mesmerize people with their music, the songs they sing are fun little narrative embellishments, describing the scene or the action.  The songs are as impish as the visuals. Indeed, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne exposes a playful side of Ray that doesn't surface in most of his socially significant dramas.  There are hints of it in the humor of Shatranj ke Khiladi, but that film was anchored in history and a sharp sociopolitical message. Goopy takes the realistic Awadhi court of Shatranj ke Khiladi through the looking glass, emerging in a dreamworld where dopes can become princes by clicking their heels and wishing for buckets full of mithai.  And its world is an utterly delightful place to visit.