Filmi Geek

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. 

 

The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

Dir: Lasse Hallström

This Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg co-production is pleasant enough while it is happening, but like an empty meal that leaves you hungry an hour later, doesn't stand up to much contemplation afterwards.  It is so watered-down and so Hollywooded-up as to leave nothing satisifying to chew on.  It is a better movie to watch than to think about.

As a story of an Indian family putting down roots in the French countryside, it could have something to say about clash of cultures, but nothing here ventures beyond the facile and obvious; for the most part the family fits seamlessly into French life and are welcomed comfortably by everyone in the little town except for one exceptionally snooty chef and a handful of overtly violent xenophobes.  As the story of a young man discovering his culinary passion and talent in the blending of his native Indian cuisine with the structured formality of French cooking, it could have been a richly glorious food movie; but there is surprisingly little in the way of cooking or food presentation or even interesting food talk.  Imagine a food movie made by filmmakers who aren't all that interested in or knowledgable about food.  In one scene the budding chef Hassan (Manish Dayal) asks his French friend and rival Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) what to do with fresh corn.  Grill it over an open flame, Marguerite suggests, and Hassan looks as though the whole brilliant world of sophisticated French technique has opened to him - the filmmakers either don't know, don't care, or assume the audience won't know that fresh corn is grilled over an open flame on every other streetcorner in Hassan's native Mumbai.  In the universe of The Hundred-Foot Journey, Hassan learns French cooking from books, not in a kitchen; the many hours of trials and failures that must have accompanied his self-taught mastery of the five basic French sauces (Hollandaise, Béchamel, etc.) are not even hinted at. Instead, we are only shown the revelation of his perfectly-executed samples to a stunned Marguerite.  Again and again this film skips the interesting parts of the culinary odyssey and cuts to mastery by fiat, genius because the script says so.  

Equally silly is the representative traditionalist's reaction to Hassan's injection of Indian ideas into the established culinary landscape of the French countryside.  Consider this exchange between film's haughty representative of La Grande Cuisine, Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren) and the boy wonder Hassan, as he instructs her to add such exotica to an omelette as chili powder and cilantro.  "Why change a recipe that is two hundred years old?" Mallory asks, horrified.  Hassan replies, "Maybe two hundred years is long enough."  Cue swelling score, remove tray of freshly-baked eyerolls from the oven.  The amount of pearl-clutching Mallory does in scenes like this is as bizarre as the notion that a Michelin-starred chef in the 21st century would be gobsmacked by chili powder and cilantro.  

On the other hand, it's Helen Mirren, amirite?  Nobody goes to a movie like this one for novel or trenchant observations on East and West and whether the twain shall meet.  They go to see Helen Mirren and Om Puri (as Hassan's father, Abbas Kadam) chew up the French scenery.  And in this respect, The Hundred-Foot Journey absolutely delivers.  Om Puri is big and loud, offering his trademark combination of gruffness and charm in a role that hits just about every stereotype there is of the bombastic Indian patriarch and still manages to be sweet and winning and a lot of fun.  (Fans of Indian films - that is, nearly all of you reading this - will appreciate a vanishingly brief cameo by Juhi Chawla in the film's opening scenes, as Hassan's mother.  Haila!)

And for her part, Helen Mirren's Madame Mallory is by turns pinched and uptight, and utterly exasperated, deflating in that sigh of disgust that is so stereotypically French.  And as long as she is villainous, pursing her mouth in that uniquely Gallic sneer of contempt, she is fun, even if she is twirling her proverbial moustaches.  In one scene, the mayor warns Mallory that her crusade against the Kadams runs the risk that the townsfolk will perceive her to be in sympathy with the ugly, overtly racist strain of sentiment in the town.  "Monsieur Mayor," she returns, with a French accent thick as vichyssoise, "I am rarely perceived to be in sympathy with anyone." It is a decent laugh, and there are many such that season the script. 

The amusing villainy can't last, however; one thing that makes this story so very Hollywood is that Madame Mallory is fully redeeemed and then some, eventually so thoroughly defanged and even cuddly that it is almost sweet when a little romance develops between her and Abbas Kadam.  This about-face is abrupt and too perfectly complete, obliterating any possible lingering stain on Mallory's character.  When the movie shows us some of that nasty xenophobic element to which the mayor referred, both the script and Madame Mallory fall all over themselves to make completely clear that her rageful, irrational hatred of the Kadam family is nothing like their rageful, irrational hatred of them.  She may be a hyper-traditionalist, controlling loon, but she's no racist.  The result is that another character's bad act turns Madame Mallory from the villain to the prodigal hero's chief supporter, literally overnight.  It doesn't make a great deal of narrative sense. 

And what of that hero?  Hassan's odyssey is nominally the central narrative of the film - the titular hundred-foot journey is his, from the chaotic, curry-infused kitchen of his own restaurant to the precise classical formality of Madame Mallory's restaurant across the road.  But this is too much told in shorthand, in a script that seems to place the art of cooking in ingredients rather than technique, and a director who must think that cooking isn't all that interesting to watch.  The long and unnecessary epilogue could have been elided to make room for the good stuff that is missing first two-thirds.  Still, the end of the film is pleasant, the prodigal son's return, as he realizes that the best ingredients are those that come from home, whether home is Mumbai or a little forest by a little town nestled in a little French valley.  

 

An American in Madras (2013)

Dir. Karan Bali

There are peculiar and fascinating stories tucked away in many corners of the 100-year history of Indian cinema.  Fortunately, there are also filmmakers like Karan Bali who have a passion for exploring that history and telling those stories.  Ellis R. Dungan was an American filmmaker who, astonishingly, became one of the top directors of Tamil films in the 1930s and 40s.  Bali's documentary An American in Madras explores how this midwestern man came to Tamil films, and the tremendous mark he made on them.

An American in Madras uses archive photographs, interviews with Dungan's friends and Tamil-film contemporaries, and footage from a fascinating Doordarshan interview with Dungan himself, to place Dungan's films in their context.  In addition to telling Dungan's story, the film provides insight into the themes and trends in Tamil cinema of the period. 

In that way the film is about more than just the curio of a white American creating popular cinema in a language he did not speak and for a culture so vastly different from his own.  Dungan inhabited a fertile and innovative period in the history of Tamil films, and An American in Madras explores why Tamil cinema was open to giving an utter outsider a chance to contribute to it.  Dungan's success required openness on his part, too - to styles and themes quite different from those he had studied at the University of Southern California's brand new film school, and to trusting his scriptwriters and actors to understand and deliver stories that would resonate with the Tamilian audience.

Dungan was not the only foreigner to contribute to Indian cinema during this era.  An American in Madras notes others, such as Franz Osten, who directed Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani in Achhut Kanya in 1936.  An American in Madras touches on the zeitgeist that made such infusion possible, what these foreign directors learned from Indian cinema and what Indian cinema learned from them.  Dungan worked with some of Tamil cinema's greatest stars, still revered as such today, including M. K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar (MKT) and M. S. Subbulakshmi.  The latter starred in Meera, Dungan's best-known work, popular and influential enough to have been remade in Hindi.

Dungan returned to America after Meera, but never came close to replicating the success he had enjoyed in Tamil cinema.  An American in Madras presents a careful and fascinating study of the confluent streams that created this unique moment in Tamil-film history, and of the man around whom these streams merged.

An American in Madras is, as of this writing, being screened in  various festivals and presentations around India.  Please follow the movie's Facebook page for updates on screening and distribution.

 

 

Midnight's Children (2012)

Dir. Deepa Mehta

Deepa Mehta is a profoundly frustrating filmmaker. She has a marvelous visual sense and occasionally conveys deeply compassionate insights into human desires.  At the same time, her movies can be weighed down with unsubtle allegory and heavy-handed social agendas.  I love Fire beyond all reason, but as close to my heart as that movie is, I have to acknowledge its warts.  It is as self-consciously provocative as it is sensitive, which lends it a lurchy, uneven tone. Her unfortunate (and later regretted) choice to make the film in English did nothing to defuse criticism that it was exploitative pandering to Western stereotypes about Indian family life, and at the same time compromises the movie's realism. Mehta's Water suffers from unforgivable casting choices; neither Lisa Ray nor John Abraham are up to the tasks that Mehta sets for them.  Only Earth is nearly flawless, a story perfectly balanced between the personal and the political with actors who can bear its weight while mastering its delicacy.  And Earth is an adaptation of a novel, not a Mehta original story.

Likewise Midnight's Children, adapted by Salman Rushdie for Mehta from his novel of the same name.  But Midnight's Children doesn't sear and soar as Earth does; rather, it displays the same bumps and inconsistencies that plague Mehta's other films.  A love letter to the nation, seasoned in equal parts by magical realism and thick political allegory, Midnight's Children is at its best enchanting, clever, and even magical.  But it fails to hang together; it never quite exposes its own emotional core.  The result is a movie that is, as one reviewer summed it, "watchable without ever feeling essential." 

Some of the blame for Midnight's Children missteps falls squarely on Rushdie's shoulders.  Perhaps it is a peculiar challenge for a novelist to adapt his own work for the screen.  Rushdie probably should have elided more; he is not as ruthless to serve the constraints of the cinematic format as an experienced adapter would be.  (It's hard not to imagine what kind of magic the late Ruth Prawer Jhabvala could have wrought with Rushdie's story.)  The film opens with a leisurely set of sequences that reach all the way back to the meeting of the narrator Saleem's grandparents, in Kashmir.  The film then recounts a first marriage of Saleem's mother, as well as her marriage to his father, before finally reaching the narrative's most salient symbolic moment, Saleem's birth at the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947, the very instant that the indpendent Indian republic was born.  These early episodes have a languid charm, and Mehta executes them superbly - the scenes in Kashmir are especially breathtaking.  But they do not lay any necessary foundation for the core of the story, Saleem's relationships (both earthly and magical) with the rest of the "Midnight's Children," all of those born in the same hour of the republic's birth as Saleem.  The scenes could have been cut without compromise to any of that, and this would have left more time for detail in what instead feels like a hurried and cramped main body of the film. (I say this even knowing that skipping this introductory hour would excise my beloved Shabana Azmi, as Saleem's grandmother, from the film.)

There is something funny, too, about the English delivery of most of the actors in the film.  The problem may be Rushdie's dialogue, Mehta's direction, or some kind of bad interaction between the two.  The characters occasionally emit a phrase or two in Hindi, for immersive effect I suppose, but this code-switching is more jarring than atmospheric, especially because the rhythm of their speech tends to sound so much more natural in Hindi.

But enough dwelling on flaws.  There is more than enough beauty in Midnight's Children to make it satisfying while it's happening.  The story's central symbolic idea is that the generation born into independent India are united by ties deeper than their superficial differences in religion, social status, customs, education.  In telling this story, Rushdie draws on traditions of magical realism - the children born in that first hour of independence are granted paranormal abilities.  But he also draws on the broad popular traditions of Hindi films - the midnight baby-switch engineered by the maternity nurse, Mary (Seema Biswas), is a fully masala touch.  The boys who have switched places grow up crossing each other's paths, on opposite sides of the chasm of class, on opposite sides of the law, and even on opposite sides of the India-Pakistan border.  This is the stuff of several blockbuster fillums rolled into one.   

Saleem's own peregrinations reach across class and political borders as well.  As a boy (played by Darsheel Safary) of a wealthy Muslim family, he travels from a lush Bombay bungalow to a lush Karachi haveli, where he plays a small part in helping his uncle, the bombastic General Zulfikar (Rahul Bose) plan a coup.  Later, as young man (Satya Bhabha) he loses his memory, gets dropped (quite literally) in East Pakistan during the battle for Bangladeshi independence, finds his way to a cramped Delhi slum, and thence into prison.   Saleem not only contains within his magical nose the power to draw all the diverse children of India into the same room; he contains, within his own life, a diverse sampling of the vast range of experiences that belong to the children of the subcontinent. 

Deepa Mehta's contribution to this story is to populate it with talented actors and bring it to life with brilliant visual power.  The casting is is largely a rounding up of the usual suspects, an art-house family reunion - Anupam Kher, Shabana Azmi, Rahul Bose, Seema Biswas, Kulbhushan Kharbanda.  The latter is delightful in a smallish but important role as Picture Singh, the Rajasthani patriarch of the Delhi slum where some of the film's later episodes take place. His gruff, avuncular presence is thoroughly engaging and convincing.  Seema Biswas - always one of my favorite actors - is a shining star here, giving a performance of emotional depth that spans decades of narrative.  Her Mary harbors her secret - that she switched baby Saleem with the itinerant street performer's son Shiva to give the poor boy a rich life and vice versa - until the guilt nearly breaks her, and Seema Biswas is masterful at conveying that kind of internal turmoil with the lines of her tired brow and the set of her sad mouth.  Siddharth is dry and filmi as the grown-up Shiva, who makes an off-screen transformation between gruff Tapori brawler and decorated military hero; Siddharth seems to channel Amitabh Bachchan and a kind of evil Vinod Khanna by turns.  Other notables in the cast include Rajat Kapoor, very dashing (and incredibly tall) as Saleem's grandfather, and Soha Ali Khan, serviceable (I guess) as Saleem's sister.  And one of the film's strongest performances comes from Shriya Saran, an obviously gifted actor from mostly Tamil and Telugu films who was previously unknown to me.  She plays Parvati, another of Midnight's Children who, in a symbolic way, bridges the gap between Saleem and Shiva, closing the circle that binds the children of independence into a whole that can forge India's future.

It is Mehta's visuals, though, not the who's-who cast, that make the most memorable moments of Midnight's Children.  At their best, the visuals are not just pretty but also rich with symbolism, such as the preoponderance of green in General Zulfikar's home that conveys the thickness of Pakistani nationalism in the air; Zufikar's wife, Saleem's aunt, is always clad in a green sari and is even named Emerald.  From a breathtaking Bombay sunset to the dusty but bright colors of a Delhi slum, Mehta uses color the way Rushdie uses class and social status and political borders, to paint the diversity of Indian experiences in vivid and palpable symbolism.  The movie may not hang together any more closely than the Republic does, but at its best it conveys some of the Republic's richness, strength, and beauty. 

 

Filling some gaps: Mini-reviews of Banaras, Slumdog Millionaire, Jaanwar aur insaan

With very few exceptions, this site contains a post about every Indian movie or India-related movie I have seen in the last eight years, even if just a paragraph or two.  Every once in a while, though, a movie slips through the cracks, and I neglect to write about it.  This offends my sense of order and completeness. 

And yet, for a variety of reasons, the chances are slim I will ever write a full review of some of these films.   So, here are brief notes that will fill in three gaps that have dogged me for months or years.

 

Banaras (2006)

Dir. Pankaj Parashar

Haay bhagwaan, this movie is awful.  It is the kind of awful I would have relished shredding in a full review, and I very much wish I had done so at the time I watched it.  But for whatever reason I did not get around to that, and I just can't bring myself to view it again as I would need to do to treat it properly.  Now, I remember little save the visceral shuddering sensation it induced, and the sense of embarrassment for the actors one feels when watching a truly horrendous work of cinema. 

Banaras, as I recall, is a dreadful, ham-fisted attempt to weave profound religious philosophy into the filmi archetypes of an inter-caste love story.  I can't say for sure that this idea is doomed from the outset; perhaps it has the potential to be a fine idea, and the film's near-unwatchability is due to irrecoverable flaws in execution.  Most of the film's cast is competent; Urmila Matondkar stars as a philosophical Brahmin woman, Raj Babbar and Dimple Kapadia play her parents, and Naseeruddin Shah makes an appearance as the enlightened mentor of the low-caste young man (Ashmit Patel) that Urmila's character falls in love with.  This Ashmit Patel is thoroughly outclassed in this company, and his stiff, breathy, awful performance contributes in no small measure to the cringeworthiness of this terrible movie. 

Having now been to the titular city in the years since I endured this film, I might at least enjoy its mystical setting.  There is something remarkable about being on the Ganga in Banaras; one can feel the holiness of the place in the collective sincerity of the pilgrims that flock there to worship.  But I would not risk desecrating those memories by superimposing this embarrassingly clumsy film on them.  It's just not worth it.

 

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Dir. Danny Boyle

I saw this movie when it came out, but I didn't write about it right away, and after a week or two it seemed so much ink had been spilled about it that I had nothing to add to the greater discourse.  Now, more than four years later, I feel much the same.  It is a good film, tightly scripted, well-acted, manipulative in all the right ways, entertaining and moving (*).  But as a western movie by a western director, it raises issues that make me uncomfortable, issues I am not sure how to address. 

I don't think there is anything wrong, a priori, with people telling stories set inside cultures other than their own.  I do not think such stories are necessarily exploitative or colonial or presumptuous, although many are all of these things.  I do not even know whether Slumdog Millionaire errs in these respects, or whether its director Danny Boyle has treaded carefully enough to paint a legitimate picture.  But in a sense, it doesn't matter.  Western audiences with little knowledge of India will draw the conclusions they draw, regardless of how much care has gone into crafting the story. 

The portrayal of Bombay life  in Slumdog Millionaire may be faithful in some respects, but it is a faithful representation of only one of Bombay's multiplicity of truths, much less the truths of all of India.  Of course, no movie can explore all realities at once.  But there is an unfortunate tendency among western audiences without nuanced knowledge of India's many cultures to extrapolate from what they see in a movie like Slumdog Millionaire.  It is because of movies like Slumdog Millionaire that my mother accused me of neglecting the "real India" when I chose to take a walk on my own through Kala Ghoda and Fort rather than accompany her on a tour of Dharavi. 

After her visit to Dharavi, I showed my mother Dhobi Ghat (**), and I hope it helped her understand that the "real India" is in fact many real Indias, a layered and intertwined complex that cannot be experienced in an afternoon, whether one chooses to spend that afternoon in a poor or an affluent part of town.  But none of this means  categorically that movies about India shouldn't be made by western filmmakers and marketed widely in the west.  It has to be better for westerners to learn something about India, even if it is an oversimplified, undernuanced something, than to learn nothing at all.  Me, I would rather watch Indian movies made for Indians than western attempts at capturing Indian authenticities.  What I learn from, I suppose, is eavesdropping on the stories Indians tell each other.   But if even a small fraction of the westerners who filled theaters watching Slumdog Millionaire was inspired to go learn more, then the movie has already done more than a mainstream entertainer has any responsibility to do.

(*) I've been half-watching it while writing this, and I have to note that I am not finding it as well-acted or as moving the second time through.

(**) Once before our trip I had tried to show her Dharavi but she didn't get into it.

 

Jaanwar aur insaan (1972)

Dir. Tapi Chanakya

Shashi Kapoor made a lot of movies.  His work ethic is legendary, but he could not have been terribly discriminating in his choice of scripts.  The truly worst movies he ever made are probably - blessedly - forgotten, tucked away in dusty cans in some moldy storage locker in Bombay, never to be transferred to digital medium.  But others of his clunkers do remain.  And some Shashi Kapoor fans are devoted enough to be as undiscriminating in our choice of films to watch as he was in his choice of films to act in. 

When I stumbled across Jaanwar aur insaan on YouTube, I knew I had to bring it to Beth's attention.  In addition to Shashi Kapoor, it offered Rakhee, another favorite of hers.  I briefly scanned the file for subtitles.  It didn't have them, but I could tell it wouldn't matter; the scenes I watched had little dialogue, just Shashi Kapoor beating up bad guys and Shashi Kapoor stalking a tiger. This was a movie we simply had to see.

When I watched the movie in the company of both Beth and Amrita, we were not fully prepared for how dreadful it would actually be.  It starts out promisingly, with terrific overture music over the opening credits and legitimately impressive wildlife photography.  It treats you to some of the more hilarious fight choreography that Hindi films offer so richly, and Meena (Rakhee) in a memorabe sun-yellow pantsuit.  Make no mistake - the movie is stupid.  The plot, such as it is, consists mostly of Shekhar (Shashi) stalking a tiger which he remains unable to catch for much of his adult life.  There is also the obligatory "yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti" sort of story element, whereby tension is caused by Meena's father having murdered Rakhee's father. But for a while the stupidness is fun, at least when enjoyed with a like-minded friend or two.

Jaanwar aur insaan takes a decided turn for the WTF when Shekhar and Meena's child enters the picture.  Shekhar contends for father of the year in his approach to teaching his spoiled, miscreant child a lesson:  He takes the boy to the wilderness, ties him to a tree, and leaves him there to be sniffed and nuzzled by wild animals.  This is how Shekhar finally defeats the tiger that has troubled him for years: using his own son as bait.  The loyal Shashi Kapoor fan who suffers through this movie may wish that it was she tied to that tree instead.