Filmi Geek

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. 

Ardh satya (1983)

अर्ध सत्य

Dir. Govind Nihalani

About two-thirds of the way through Govind Nihalani's Ardh satya, a retired rural cop (Amrish Puri) laments the difficulties that his son, Anant Velankar (Om Puri), is having as an urban police officer in Bombay. The senior Velankar paces, distraught and muttering. He taught his son how to conduct an "encounter" without leaving marks that could support brutality charges. And he urged his son not to move to the city - in the countryside, he thinks, it's much easier to work out deals and cover-ups when things do go pear-shaped.  In the city, there is too much pressure and too much oversight.

The senior Velankar is himself a violent, abusive man, and the son he raised did not want to be anything like him. Anant wanted to study philosophy, not join the police force.  And having joined the force to appease his rageful, controlling father, he wants to do the job well and with integrity.  As a young Bombay police inspector, though, Anant's idealism is quickly broken as he learns what the rules of the game that cops and gangsters play really are.

Anant's struggle with the truths and half-truths about the operation of evil in that society form the core of Ardh satya's bleak and sad and riveting study.  The film is not merely an exposé of police corruption and misconduct - it's likely that Nihalani's audience would have been all too aware of such happenings and would not have needed them exposed. What makes the film so powerful is what it reveals about the toll these realities take on a human being who wants to rise above them but, being merely human, struggles to find the strength to do so.

Anant's superiors dance to the tune of the local gang boss, Rama Shetty (a chillingly charismatic Sadashiv Amrapurkar), a Bal-Thackeray-like figure who both runs illegal gambling and smuggling operations, and runs for political office.  Anant arrests some of Shetty's men, and is appalled to see Shetty have them released with a single phone call.  Soon after, Shetty extends an invitation to Anant, offering a sort of deal where each can benefit from the other's position.

 

Both Amrapurkar and Puri do intense things with their eyes.

Anant refuses, in disbelief and disgust. Still, while he won't make openly corrupt material deals with crime bosses, Anant is no shining Dudley-Doright type; the violent temper he got from his father and a tendency to overdo the brutality in encounters gets him into trouble with his superiors, even in the context of the vicious practices of the Bombay police force.  And when Anant does find himself facing discipline, the same shady palm-greasing that thwarts his own attempts to serve justice on Shetty now work to his benefit.  The hypocrisy tears him apart.

Niahalani's telling of this bleak tale is deeply effective.  With all his anger and flaws, Anant is a startlingly sympathetic character, with an anguished yearning to right his path, brought into sharp focus by his tender relationship with Jyotsna (Smita Patil), a college instructor with whom he shares philosophy and poetry.  Jyotsna is Anant's respite from the vicious dark of his job; she seems to ground him in the world he wants to live in.  But her hold isn't strong enough as the stresses mount; Anant begins drinking, even as a cautionary tale pops up now and again, in the form of a disgraced and pathetic ex-officer, an alcoholic named Lobo (Naseeruddin Shah), who cannot let go of the fantasy that he will someday get his job back.

Jyotsna observes Anant's increasing distress with a loving but skeptical eye; as he becomes more troubled and erratic, she gives him mamy chances but ultimately chooses to protect herself, rather than get more deeply involved with a man so clearly headed toward tragedy.  This is an unusual sort of agency to see in films, where women are generally self-sacrificing and dedicated to shouldering any burden to benefit the men they love.  Instead, Jyotsna chooses to liberate herself, and it is both a relief and a heartbreak.  Anant too achieves a sort of liberation in the end, consistent with his principles but in a far more tragic mode.

These are just a few of the unflinching elements that make Ardh satya shine though all its hardness and grit.  The film is like a police thriller in which the filmi elements have been stripped away, leaving gut punches in place of dishoom-dishoom, and raw feeling in the place of melodrama.  In one scene, Anant and his colleagues visit a dank den in which a bar dancer wears an outfit and does moves that wouldn't be out of place in a Helen song. But the sparkly escapism of Helen's songs is drained out of the image; it's monochrome and dark, tinged with a sour kind of dread, and the men leer the way filmi villains do, even the sympathetic Anant.  In scenes like this, turning movie tropes on their heads, Ardh satya gets right under the skin.    

 

Yeah, this is no Helen song.

Finding Fanny (2014)

Dir. Homi Adajania

Finding Fanny is a self-consciously quirky story about weird, broken people.  At times it tries a little too hard, but for the most part, its peculiar humor works.  It is not as sinister as Homi Adajania's earlier Being Cyrus, but it's of the same genus, poking at the soft spots of peculiar people in an insulated, inward-turned community.  Instead of a Parsi family, Finding Fanny points its magnifying glass at the denizens of a forgotten Goan backwater.  "Don't try to find Pocolim on a map," says the film's narrator, Angie (Deepika Padukone), of the town, conveying at once the remote, insular nature of life there, and the somewhat fantastical nature of the film's narrative. 

The film's web of relationships portrays some that are disturbing, and some that are touching, even if they do not always make sense.  The tenderness with which Angie looks after Ferdie (Naseeruddin Shah) is especially sweet. Ferdie has the air of a wounded animal about him, a nervous stray, responding with a frightened flinch to Angie's attention.   This is such a delightful performance from Naseeruddin Shah; woolly-haired and woolly-brained, Ferdie slumps and stammers and weeps with charmingly comical sincerity.  It is Shah doing the great work that we know he can do, rather than the familiar charismatic rogue character he's played so often of late, which begins to feel phoned-in, even if it is entertaining.  Ferdie is sad, a broken-down loser, and yet utterly lovable. 

Angie refers to Ferdie in her opening narration as her "best friend".  This is the first sign that there is something a little strange about Angie.  Angie is the narrator of this story, and perhaps that is why Finding Fanny is explicit in exposing the weirdness of all its other principal characters, while leaving Angie's to be read from between the lines.  Why is Angie's best friend a confused, hapless old man? Why is a smart, vivacious young woman seemingly content to live in a tiny, lost village with her dour, officious mother-in-law Rosie (Dimple Kapadia)?  Angie tells us about the socially maladjusted Savio (Arjun Kapoor), tells us that something broke in him when she decided to marry their childhood best friend, Gabo (Ranveer Singh in what the whimsical credits call an "all too brief special appearance").  But Angie omits to tell us that something broke in her, too, when Gabo died during their wedding celebration, and left her frozen in time and space.

Less sweet than Angie's relationships is that between Rosie (that's Mrs. Eucaristica, to you) and Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur), a pervy artist who can't take his eyes off Rosie's copious derriere and longs to capture her on canvas.   Pankaj Kapur chews up the scenery as much as anyone ever has, but his character is just too weird and the mouthfuls of dialogue he has to deliver are sometimes more than even his talent can manage.  And the fate that Finding Fanny doles out to Don Pedro is more mean than funny - it's where the film's black humor waxes a little ham-handed.  The film is cruel to a feline character as well, but acknowledges and in its own way apologizes for that excess with a cute nod to it in the finale, in which another cat narrowly avoids a similar end, to smiles and cheers of gathered villagers.  

Going into Finding Fanny, I had no doubts that Deepika Padukone would be able to hold her own amongst seasoned veterans like Kapadia, Kapur, and Shah; though most of her work has been mainstream and commercial, Padukone has shown herself a more than competent talent and I continue to believe she will only get more interesting as she gets older.  I had less confidence in Arjun Kapoor, who seemed the odd man out amongst these performers.  But he delivers Savio with a satisfyingly dense physicality.  He still doesn't have to do much beyond pout and scowl, but it is a substantive pouting and scowling, and there is an agency behind the stupidity of Savio's demeanor; it's not merely the vapid look of an actor who doesn't know how to look any other way.  

By film's end all the characters (well, except Don Pedro) have emerged somewhat from the shells of obsessive self-absorption in which they began and have figured out how to let other people into their mental universes.  Angie and Savio learn how to talk to each other, overcoming what seems to have been a lifetime of mutual sulking.  The feckless Ferdie has found his voice, and seems ready to face the world a little, without the abject terror that kept him fetally curled up within himself for years. Even Rosie Eucaristica seems prepared to allow herself a little happiness.   And so the occasional warts are forgivable in a movie that is otherwise enjoyable, delivers some real funny moments, and is anyway rather brief. 

 

3 Deewarein (2003)

३ दीवारें

Dir. Naganesh Kukunoor

Maybe it's just the character that Naseeruddin Shah plays – the charming criminal with a penchant for poetry and philosophical ponderings – that gives 3 Deewarein the feel of Ishqiya if Isqhiya were not a comedy. It starts off as a sensitive story about the soft, chewy center of hardened criminals. Then, it takes a rather masala turn and becomes an entertaining sort of thriller.

3 Deewarein is composed of disparate elements that hang together as the movie takes you down the garden path. It focuses on three men, all convicted of murder, from different strata of life. The three men are interviewed by Chandrika (Juhi Chawla), a reporter making a documentary film about the experience of facing execution. Chandrika seems to approach these men with naïve sensitivity and a great deal of affection. Jaggu (Jackie Shroff) is wealthy, cosmopolitan, suave and poetic, but resigned to his capital sentence, and remorseful. He is accused of stabbing his knife upon suspicion she was having an affair. Nagya (Nagesh Kukunoor), a middle-class man, is presumed to have pushed his nagging wife off a curb and into oncoming traffic.  Nagya is slight and sullen, vehement in professing both his own innocence and his belief in the system; he is sure that when his case goes to trial, justice will out.

The third man, Ishaan (Naseeruddin Shah), is the most breezy and fatalistic of the three. Ishaan shot and killed a bank clerk during a robbery gone wrong. He doesn't acknowledge any remorse, perhaps doesn't even acknowledge any responsibility for the killing. He is, while affable, thoroughly detached. This utter absence of connection doesn't stop Chandrika from apparently falling for him, and she helps him plan and pull off an escape from the prison on the eve of his execution.

I say “apparently” because Chandrika is not what she seems; 3 Deewarein's most interesting aspect is the shifting layers of deception between Chandrika and the rest of the world, as she perpetrates the falsehood of the documentary project and tries to convince her friends - perhaps even herself, for a while - that her marriage is happy.  The movie's change of tone comes with the revelation of her true motivations, with respect to both the documentary and the marriage.  Even in the shift from arty psychological study to gritty thriller, though, 3 Deewarein retains a focus on performance. There is a limit to how consistent the characters can remain through such a transition. Chandrika's reaction to her husband's emotional abuse – a long-delayed reaction, a pressure-cooker release after what seems to be years of submissive toleration – is the first sign of what lies beneath the surface of this mild, seemingly unsophisticated woman. It is also a disproportionate reaction, hinting that Chandrika is not merely savvier than she seems, but possibly also unhinged.

That is a lot of range to demand out of an actor, and Juhi Chawla is up to the task, adding a touch of masala in the film's final third that contributes to the tonal transition. Though she comes right up to the ledge, Chawla never completely goes over the top, and this touch of restraint even when the script, and her character, come unglued is what makes the film hers; the mild, deferential version of Chandrika risks getting lost in the drama of the murderers' stories. The other actors are mostly understated and less rangy; Nagesh Kukunoor focuses his own character in the space of sullen defiance, and Jackie Shroff carries his remorse very effectively in his heavy body, in drooped shoulders and a faraway gaze. Only Naseeruddin Shah seems to have phoned it in, rendering the same charming rogue he has offered so frequently of late, in the Ishqiya films and Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal and even in 7 Khoon Maaf. That it isn't Shah's rangiest or most challenging performance, however, doesn't make it less entertaining to watch; the charm of that character works just as well on the audience as it does on those around him. And the film's climax shows that while that kind of charisma can help a man like Ishaan talk himself out of scrapes, it doesn't provide more than a superficial shield from the terrible consequences of his bad actions.

Parents' nightmare: Mardaani (2014) and Siddharth (2013)

By coincidence, in the span of one weekend I watched Siddharth (dir. Richie Mehta) and the latest Yash Raj production, Mardaani (dir. Pradeep Sarkar), two films both nominally concerned with India's terrible child-kidnaping and child-trafficking scourges.   A title card at the end of Mardaani notes that on average, a child is abducted every eight minutes in India.  This is almost too staggering to contemplate, and both films help you get your mind around this horrendous fact by personalizing it, giving name and face and voice to the children or the families.    And yet the two films could not be more different.  Siddharth, contemplative and meticulous, is a sad study, focused on one family's loss rather than the fate of the missing child.  Mardaani takes a broader view, making explicit what in Siddharth is left to the imagination.  And, it taps an emotional vein of vengeance more than pity.  Mardaani, brash and unsubtle, is all about rage.  

As Mardaani begins, the cop at its center, Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani Mukherjee) Dabanggs around Mumbai, all swagger and bravado. Unlike Chulbul Pandey, though, she is incorruptible - perhaps Shivani is more like Ajay Lal, the tough cop described in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City who broke the 1993 bombings.  Shivani uses interrogation techniques described in that book, like the merciless feeding of sweets without water, to wrest information from the criminals she collars.  She leads a dramatic raid on a medium-time gangster, earning exasperated sighs from her by-the-book commander, and spontaneously breaks up a politico-religious mob trashing a shop, slapping around its stunned ringleader, a guy twice her size.  But Shivani shows a motherly side too; she and her husband are raising a niece whose parents have died, and she serves as a surrogate aunty for an orphaned kid, Pyari, whom she rescued from the streets and and placed in a shelter.  Pyari goes missing, and the investigative trail that Shivani follows to find her leads to a child trafficking ring led by an arrogant psychopath who calls himself Walt (Tahir Bhasin).  Shivani's mission to break up the ring is professional, and it becomes increasingly personal too, as Walt taunts her with phone calls and worse. 

Rani Mukherjee, with a good script and in capable directorial hands, is a very good actor, and she handles the challenge of Shivani Shivaji Roy with an appropriate blend of cocksure strutting and vulnerability.  It is not an easy task.  Shivani's Chulbul Pandey routine edges on the cartoonish, and it might have been tempting to balance the brashness of it with exaggerated squishiness in the film's more emotional scenes.  For the most part, though, Rani handles both with adequate coherence, showing a consistent theory of Shivani's character.  At her best, she blends them perfectly, as in a scene right before the interval where, on the phone with Walt, she keeps her voice even and confident for his benefit, while her face twists with the beginnings of tears in a display of vulnerable emotion that only the audience can see.  Shivani Shivaji Roy talks a tough game and packs the punch to back it up, but in moments like these she is a human being too, and holding herself together through this chase does take some effort.  

And in the end, arguably, Shivani Shivaji Roy breaks.  The end of Mardaani, like the end of Mrityudand, is a sort of triumph of female will, a catastrophic bursting of the dam of oppression and suffering in a torrent of revenge.  It is not clear whether one is intended to cheer at this turning of the tables, or be appalled.  It is a terribly bleak idea, that the only way for a weak and oppressed class - children, or women, or both - to wrest power from merciless, violent men is to play the game on the same terms they do, with more merciless violence.  The mardaani of the title may refer to the kind of masculinity that endorses and patronizes and profits from the vile treatment of Pyari and the other kidnapped girls, who are dolled up, groped, auctioned, raped, and more.  Or it may refer to the kind of masculinity that Shivani works so hard to embody in her small, strong frame, the kind that speaks the language of the fist and the firearm.  Indeed, it may refer to both.  But it is grim and sad to think that the only way to defeat the exploitative type of masculinity is to adopt the values of the savage, bloodthirsty kind.

And yet, if the repugnant child exploitation of Mardaani is taken as a proxy for the horrendous high-profile rape incidents that have driven India's discourse about gender for the last couple of years - as I think it must be - then perhaps it reflects more than just the general statement that the only way the powerless can save themselves is to take up the weapons of the powerful and bash their heads in with them.  It reflects the tremendous unanswered rage that many women must feel in the face of one outrageous rape case after another.   In Mardaani, politicians patronize Walt's services, pawing and assaulting and dehumanizing the girls.  In the real world, politicians and judges make outrageously demeaning statements about women who ask for it by not keeping to their place.  In that world it's not entirely unreasonable to start to doubt the effectiveness of a political solution.  In that world, headlines about women striking back, attacking and beating and emasculating their attackers, become increasingly common.  Mardaani taps into a vengeful strain of the zeitgeist, and expresses it in a filmi form that is undoubtedly as satisfying for some as it is unsettling for others. 

***

Unlike Mardaani,  Siddharth leaves to the audience's imagination the fate endured by its titular boy.  Siddharth's father, Mahendra Saini (Rajesh Tailang), sends him from their home in Delhi to work a stint at a trolley factory in Ludhiana.  The boy never returns, and Mahendra sets out to find him, on a journey that takes him as much through his own heart as it does from city to city.  

Mahendra, a melancholy zipper-repairer struggling to make ends meet, is at first perplexed at the notion that there is anything irresponsible in sending Siddharth off into illegal child labor.  Why have a son, he asks, if not to put him to work?  As the story progresses, though, Mahendra bends under a growing burden of guilt.  Whatever Siddharth is enduring is left unnamed - the closest he comes to knowing that is a sort of urban legend given to him by another boy at the Ludhiana factory, that the children who vanish wind up in Dongri.  Mahendra, who lived all his life in Delhi, has never heard of this Mumbai neighborhood, and neither does anyone he talks to for a good while.  Dongri begins to take on a mythical quality, both the mysterious, sinister end-of-the-line for abducted kids and the mystical holy grail of Mahendra's search.  

Mahendra's distress is not just for the unknown whereabouts of his son, but also the anxiety endured by his wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee in a hard-eyed, tense, excellent emotional performance) and their little daughter (Khushi Mathur).  And so Mahendra grows increasingly determined to find Siddharth, though following the trail to Ludhiana and eventually Mumbai imposes great financial strain on the family.  At one point, Mahendra humiliates himself to an extortionate thug (Mukesh Chhabra) for the right to work the neighborhood near the Delhi rail station, hoping to find someone who knows where the mythical Dongri might be.  He sells Suman's jewelry, too, and reluctantly accepts cash from relatives. 

Siddharth is shot and acted in a street-level, realistic style that draws you right in to the swirl of the city.   Most scenes have no background score (save a few montage sequences with oddly swelling Western strains), so that when Mahendra sits on a streetcorner the ambient sounds of Delhi are vividly present; the constant honk of horns of all sizes, the putter of tuk-tuk motors, the clatter of bikes and scooters, the squeal and rumble of buses, the shouting of people.  Low camera angles put you on the ground, crouched beside Mahendra as he fixes zippers for people like him and people much wealthier, or inside the house beside Suman as dust motes swirl in lone rays of sunlight that find their way into the gali where they live.  

This is enormously engaging, this Delhi presented in unstylized style.  But the palpable realism of Siddharth also makes its grim and unresolved ending inevitable.  And yet the movie is so absorbing  that anything else would be gratingly false.  Like a Shyam Benegal film, it makes mind-boggling injustice accessible by projecting it on a human scale, a close focus on a small number of people deeply affected by a something that most people are accustomed to thinking of as a "global issue," described in human-rights reports in terms of vast numbers and statistics.  The result is a beautiful, harrowing film, deeply sympathetic, that exposes the raw realities left behind by a child abduction in a way that Mardaani, for all its explicit exhibition and all its fantastical acts of vengeance, cannot.