Filmi Geek

Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

दिल धड़कने दो 

Dir. Zoya Akhtar

Films about rich folks are nothing new in Hindi films.  For decades, from Tere Ghar ke Samne to Waqt to Hum Saath Saath Hain, the movies have offered stories about universal emotions - such as romance and loss, family and sacrifice - and lent them an escapist quality by setting them in the sparkling, enormous mansions and the shiny left-hand-drive convertibles of the colossally rich.  

Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do does the same, attempting to update the template for the cynical multiplex era. Her characters are not good-hearted innocents who undertake well-meaning but ill-fated deceptions on their way to happily-ever-after.  They are self-absorbed, manipulative, controlling, damaged modern people.  This doesn't take the movie in the dark direction of, say, Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, one of Hollywood's better forays into the privileged-people-doing-selfish-things narrative realm - rather, Akhtar plays these foibles mostly for laughs, only edging toward old-fashioned filmi heart-tugging at the very end.  And for the most part, it works pretty well.  The film has a few silly devices and can't consistently maintain the snappy pace of its best sequences, and it does not have anything profound or subtle to say.  But on balance it is highly watchable and even, in some moments, shines quite brightly.

Most of that shine is carried by Ranveer Singh, who is charming and funny as Kabir Mehra, scion of the wealthy-but-faltering Mehra family.  Kabir is perhaps the film's most delicately crafted character; he is part people-pleaser and part rebel, which if you think about it is not an easy combination to pull off.  He has no interest in taking over his father's failing manufacturing business, nor is he willing to marry the young woman his parents have chosen for tactical reasons (her father's quid-pro-quo investment could save the company), but he can't bear to hurt anyone's feelings in asserting these independences.  Too, he is a romantic, and he cannot resist either falling in love himself, or taking the opportunity to help another young couple get together.  And so in negotiating these competing aspects of his personality, he ties himself into the knots that drive much of the film's plot.   Zoya Akhtar has done a nice job inserting Singh's comic talent to break the tension of nearly every confrontational scene in the film.  Perhaps less intentionally, he's also the breath of air that revives the movie whenever its flags.  

Ranveer Singh doubles down on all that charm and energy in Kabir's romance with Farah (Anushka Sharma, tearing up the screen again in her third film of the year), the lead dancer in the stage show on the cruise ship that the Mehra family has commandeered and on which most of the movie takes place.  Kabir and Farah shine brighter than anything else in the film, with joyful and mostly unselfconscious energy.  The picturization of "Pehli baar" is the film's best sequence, though the song itself sounds peculiarly borrowed from 1980s bubblegum pop.  It begins with Kabir dancing goofily while Farah laughs, and ends with the couple tumbling joyously into bed - delightfully, still singing to one another.  Its magical silliness makes it more romantic than any slow jam and sexier than any item song.  

Compared to the energy between Kabir and Farah, much of the rest of the film feels somewhat flat.  The narration delivered by Kabir's dog (voiced by Aamir Khan) is a miscalculation.  The dog's "thoughts" (ugh, it makes me cringe just to write that) add exactly nothing that we viewers could not deduce from simply watching the story unfold, and it would been a less patronizing film without the "gee whiz, humans are funny" running gag.  As for the human performers, their work is all solid, and neither distracts nor detracts (except for the perennially irritating Farhan Akhtar, whom I wish would go back behind the camera and stay there).

On the other hand, there isn't much to the characters, either.  The cruise ship is populated by two generations of the Mehra family and friends, gathered nominally to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Kabir's parents, Kamal and Neelam (Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah).   For the Mehras, though, the cruise is more a matter of keeping up appearances that their marriage is perfect and that their business is flourishing.  They are serviceable, but not particularly incisive or insightful, characterizations.  Kabir's sister Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) is also saddled with a familiar conflict; she has both business acumen and ambition, but is pinned back by the old-fashioned values of her parents, who would never consider putting her in charge of the manufacturing firm.  She's also laced in by her husband Manav (Rahul Bose), an uptight chauvinist who is in denial about just how much trouble his marriage is in.  (This is a great role for Rahul Bose, whose skin is pulled so tightly across his skull that he looks tense and high-strung even when he isn't.  Bose also delivers an outstanding comical moment - all expression and body language, no line - when Ayesha beans Manav with a ferocious racketball shot.)  Like her parents' arc, Ayesha's is solid and not especially fresh, but in its deft execution Chopra again supports my theory that she is a real actor when she's given a real role.

Apart from Manav, the characters are firmly divided on generational lines - all the older folks are old-fashioned, sexist, and controlling of their children, while all the young folks are chafing, rebellious,  and progressive.  It might have been clever to have some character defy this clean division.  But the young people are fun, and fairly well-drawn in the limited screen-time they get.  Like Kabir and Ayesha, they are all boxed in by their parents' expectations.  Nagged to dress the right way, act the right way, show the right interest in marriage, they skulk along with sullen submission; only in their midnight gatherings on the top deck, amongst themselves, do they snap to life.  There's a hint here, too, of a thread that Akhtar might have wanted to suggest but not tease all the way out: One of the young women, judging by the way all the young people squirm whenever the adults discuss finding her a husband, is plausibly (and also plausibly deniably) a lesbian, though no one dares say it out loud.(*)

Even the progressive points that the movie does make out loud are watered down.  When Manav brags that he is such a forward-thinking guy that he has given his wife permission to run her own business, he is challenged by a character who points out that the marriage is hardly equal if Manav retains the power to grant or deny such permission.  The house in my Boston theater, packed with young expat desis, cheered at this line.  But the line is delivered by Sunny (Farhan Akhtar), Ayesha's ex-flame.  Ayesha spends the whole film trying to assert herself, to get the credit she deserves and the respect she craves, but nobody who matters listens until a man comes along to speak on her behalf.  (This is arguably not the movie's fault, but rather a reflection of reality.)  In Dil Dhadakne Do's favor, its bumpy climax leaves the Mehra family tentatively bonded, but we don't really know what will happen when their boat reaches the shore.  In a film that deals so superficially with the tensions that pull at people too concerned with their own image and their own needs to really listen to each other, too much resolution would have been far too facile. 

(*)  The same could be said of Zoya Akhtar herself - I have long suspected that she is Reema Kagti's partner in more than scriptwriting, but the internet is remarkably silent on this point.

 

Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015)

Dir. Anand L. Rai

 

Let me start with what's great about Tanu Weds Manu Returns:  The comedy, the dialogues, Kangana Ranaut - and Kangana Ranaut.

Lesbian horn-dog Carla: So, butch Kangana is cute and all, but femme Kangana really turns my crank.  There were times I actually caught my breath when she appeared on screen.

Feminist, analytical, serious Carla: Oh, for heaven's -- you again? I'm trying to write a review here. Go home and watch Revolver Rani. Again.

LHDC: Great idea! You stay here and do ... whatever it is you do.

This second installment of the story of Tanu and Manu (Kangana Ranaut and Madhavan) is very, very funny, playing with broadly painted characters and lots of regional humor.  Some is quite broad indeed, like a bunch of Sardars dressed in florid Gujurati costume, dancing dandiya to Bhangra music to celebrate the marriage of a Punjabi woman to a Gujurati man.  Others are harder for a foreigner like me to get; there are times when the audience in the cinema hall roars, yet the joke I see in the subtitles doesn't justify that reaction.  Still, I have learned enough over the years to appreciate the craft that goes into this kind of rapid-fire, clever bantering.  

As the film opens, Tanu and Manu have lived four years in England. Tanu's English has improved quite a bit since she sneered "London returned!" at Manu in the first installment.   But when Tanu loses her cool - she's detailing the failures in their marriage to a panel of psychiatrists - her homegrown Kanpuri dialect finds its way out, and she has to translate her own exclamations for the doctors.  Later, other characters again have trouble understanding each other - as when Manu's still-hilarious buddy Pappi (Deepak Dobriyal, as much a scene-stealer as he was in part one) has to explain a colorful metaphor about getting squashed like a squeak-toy - and the cross-dialect jokes fly fast and freely.

And then there is Kangana, who inhabits Tanu with absolutely riveting intensity. Her eyes almost glow when she's angry, shine when she peals out laughter, sparkle with mischief in one of her whirlwinds of impulse.  And when Tanu cracks with vulnerability toward the end of the film, her entire body language changes, the crackling energy drained. It's a thrilling performance, an actor masterfully embodying a fully realized theory of her character. (These swings from fire to vulnerability are becoming a calling-card of Kangana's talent; I have more to say about this in my written-but-not-yet-posted comments on Revolver Rani, another explosively engaging performance and a terribly underappreciated film.)

And it's only half of what Kangana does in this film, because she also offers up Kusum, a young student on athletic scholarship in Delhi.  But it's not just the thick Haryanvi accent or the short hairstyle that distinguishes the two women. Kusum is every bit as confident as Tanu, but she is considerably more measured, less impulsive.  Her confidence is chin-forward, more about forging her own path through the world than about the rebellion-for-rebellion's-sake that sometimes seems to motivate Tanu.  Kusum's body language is completely different, too; square and confrontational in contrast to Tanu's flirtatious and playful demeanor.  Kangana's finest execution in the film comes in the Kusum avatar, in the climax. It is a deeply vulnerable moment, but Kusum strides past a crowd of onlookers, radiating dignity.  And the instant she is out of sight, she pulls a door shut behind her with shaking fingers, and crumples. It is a wrenching and perfectly-delivered dose of self-possession in anguish.

Still, this second chapter harder to swallow than the original, because Manu is even less appealing as a lover and hero than he was in the first.  When Manu courted Tanu, there was enough substance to make up for his wet-noodle personality, enough sweetness to overcome the initial creepiness of how he fell for her as a lifeless doll, not as the spitfire she actually is. Here, though, Manu's pursuit of Kusum is twisted from the beginning, and doesn't get better. Manu, with his paunch and his moobs and the dusting of grey at his temples, is the picture of middle age in crisis, and Kusum has the right initial reaction to his stalking and ogling: revulsion and anger.  Manu is fascinated with Kusum because she looks just like Tanu.  And perhaps out of naïveté, Kusum softens to Manu when she learns this, rather than finding him all the more creepy for it.  But it is clear to the audience, and to other characters in the film - if not right away to Kusum - that Manu's attraction to her is pathological. Manu thinks he loves her for who she is, but he is deluding himself; while proposing to her, he calls her Tanu.  

Manu starts off sympathetic during the film's oddly-crafted opening sequence, in which he is committed to a psychiatric treatment center for basically no reason at all (this sequence, while funny, is so nonsensical that as it reached its peak I expected it to turn out a dream).  But he burns that capital pretty thoroughly with his sicko seduction of Kusum.  The stakes are high, because there's no way that this inappropriate relationship should succeed.  At the same time, though, there is almost no actual interaction between Tanu and Manu during the film, and so not a lot of reason to root for their reconciliation, either.  And this is perhaps the movie's most serious misstep, neglecting to provide much reason to think that reunion is the right result for Tanu and Manu.  The movie puts a lot of effort into its comedy, clever rapid-fire dialog and absurd situations, but very little into the actual relationships that should drive the story.  It's fun, but ultimately not very satisfying.

A few folks have read this film as regressive. I don't see it that way.  Tanu, after a vacation-like stretch of the sort of flirty, impulsive freedom she enjoyed before meeting Manu, comes to mourn the apparent failure of her marriage, and shows some depression and regret over it. This is not regressive; it is not a spirited, modern woman broken by or succumbing to the weight of tradition. Rather, it is a human being coming to see the value in a relationship that she had previously taken for granted.  Likewise, there is nothing regressive in Kusum's cautious sacrifice. Her actions are a matter of self-preservation, and demonstrate the measured insight, the hint of maturity, that separates her from Tanu.  If Kusum had not questioned the idea of marriage to a man twice her age who clearly wants her only for psychologically messed-up reasons, that would be a less agentive and considerably more problematic portrayal of a young woman.

Tanu Weds Manu (2011)

Dir. Anand L. Rai

In one of my favorite scenes in Tanu Weds Manu, Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) and her best friend Payal (Swara Bhaskar) collapse on a bed in squealing laughter.  This comes after the two young women have been out for a late-night campfire with Manu (Madhavan) and Payal's fiance Jassi (Eijaz Khan).  Jassi coaxes Payal away from the other pair, into the dark, hoping for sex, but Payal storms back, fiery and hollering with indignation. Even though it's just days before their wedding, the scene seems to say, Payal is a seedhi-saadhi ladki, not that kind of girl. 

But then cut to Payal and Tanu yukking it up, and you realize they've had one over on Jassi - and you realize you have no idea whether Payal is that kind of girl or not.  And that is what I like best about Tanu Weds Manu:  It lets its young women be as they are, without making too much of its own progressiveness.  Tanu and Payal are not overtly chaste filmi types, but they aren't threatening or caricatured vamps either. They smoke, but it doesn't signify anything; rather, it just reflects that some young women smoke.  And they aren't punished or humiliated for any of it either. In one scene, Tanu skulks around during Payal's pre-wedding festivities hoping to score some liquor; she succeeds, and takes a few generous plugs, but she doesn't go on to make a fool of herself or say things she'll regret, as heroines under the influence so often do.  Instead, the booze loosens her up just enough to sing a charming, jaunty, folksy song(*) for the guests.  

Tanu Weds Manu is what would happen if you made a movie about one of the heroine's-sassy-saheli characters who sometimes popped up in movies of the 60s, played by actors like Laxmi Chhaya and Shashikala.  Indeeed, in this movie the sidekick, Payal, shows a good deal more class and level-headed sense than the heroine.  Tanu is all sass; she ribs Payal on the eve of her wedding, comparing men to horses, and rolling her eyes at Payal's readiness for adulthood.  Tanu (beyond the smoking and drinking) is impulsive enough to get a guy's name tattooed on her breast the day after she meets him. Later, though, she tells Manu that guys come and go, and she's not particularly attached to any one of them.  (She's hedged her bets with the tattoo by using the guy's surname.)  Tanu even owns that she likes girls, too - this bold admission passes unremarked, another way that the movie presents young women living adventurously without either judging them for it or smugly congratulating itself for not doing so. 

As with any pure romance, the conclusion of Tanu Weds Manu is foregone; the film acknowledges as much with its very title. The romance begins as the principals' parents attempt to arrange a marriage between them. Tanu, looking to sabotage the match, swallows a handful of downers; she is nearly comatose when her mother dresses her in a heavily embroidered saree and presents her to Manu. But her nonresponsiveness is no deterrent to Manu, an NRI medical engineer, and he somehow falls in love with Tanu on the spot.  This is a weak serve; love by scripted fiat is never especially satisfying, and it's not clear why, if Manu loves Tanu as a catatonic china doll, he loves her all the more after their first conversation, in which she is a cigarette-smoking spitfire who scowls at him with contempt.

But the movie makes up the lost ground by giving the two several fair chances to get to know each other, and by the time Tanu does wed Manu, the pairing actually seems to make sense.  And even though Manu is a measured and reserved fellow and Tanu a wild child, the story doesn't so much hew to the typical manic-pixie-dream-girl arc; Manu enjoys and even admires Tanu's vivacity, but there's no sign she has fundamentally changed his worldview or personality.  Rather, Manu's steadiness brings Tanu round to a more grounded, Payal-like way of interacting with the world. Tanu's missteps are driven by an overdeveloped taste for drama and rebellion for rebellion's sake; a round scolding from Payal helps put her priorities in order.   Manu is rather spineless and overweeningly self-sacrificing for much of his arc; until the very end, his boldest action is a weaksauce attempt to sabotage Tanu's elopement with the guy in the tattoo - an attempt so half-assed that even Manu seems ashamed of it.  And so it is sweet that what finally kicks Manu into action are some encouraging words from his father, to the effect that it's worth doing something once in your life that you can look back on with pride.   

Payal, Manu's father, Tanu's patient yet vexed father (Rajendra Gupta), a goonda with a romantic soul (Jimmy Shergill), Jassi, and especially Manu's loyal and passionate sidekick Pappi (Deepak Dobriyal) make up a large and colorful cast of supporting characters that help Tanu Weds Manu stand out in its genre. Unlike, say, Shuddh Desi Romance, with its weirdly isolated leads, Tanu Weds Manu situates its principals in a more traditionally Indian context of family and community.  Tanu and Manu are orbited by many opinionated satellites who exert powerful and competing tidal pulls on their relationship  as it develops.  The film is Tanu Weds Manu, as opposed to just Tanu and Manu, because just as a wedding involves and affects a whole set of extended families beyond the betrothed couple themselves, so does the movie involve this broad range of people.  And they add a great deal of dimension to the film, lending a grounded sense of community to the central pairing, and making the ride toward the titular and preordained conclusion that much more delightful.  

(*) "Kajra mohabbat wala," from the Biswajeet and Babita flick Kismet - thanks to Anindita for reminding me.

 

Piku (2015)

Dir. Shoojit Sircar

Even when embedded in smart banter and delivered flawlessly by Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone, a poop joke is still a poop joke.  I feel guilty for leading with this thought, because there is so much to delight in about Piku, with its gentle and loving presentation of a relationship between a difficult man and his prickly daughter, and for me the toilet humor doesn't spoil the delight.  But Piku is, um, flush with lines and situations that revolve around the bowl.  Bhaskor Bannerji's (Amitabh) thoughts pertain excessively to the function and dysfunction of his bowels, and so do his conversations with his daughter Piku (Deepika).  They snipe and bark and snap at each other, and it's almost always something about poo. That's a whole lot of poop-talk to cram into one movie, and it is is only funny to the extent that you find poop funny, something upon which reasonable minds may differ.  

But the framing of these conversations is just terrific.  The dialogues are quick-paced and witty, staged in the rapid cross-talk style that one associates with quirky Western films about family dysfunction.  Bhaskor and Piku live in a constant swirl of griping, poking, insulting banter with the other people who move in and out of their home - such as Bhaskor's dead wife's sister (Moushumi Chatterjee), his indulgent physician (Raghuvir Yadav), the beleaguered owner of a taxi company, Rana Chaudhary (Irrfan Khan), who gets stuck driving the pair all the way from Delhi to Calcutta, and even various servants.  The repartee is fun to watch and almost dizzying at times in its acerbic swiftness.   

Piku and Bhaskor, and to a degree Rana, aren't exactly nice people.  Bhaskor is the sort of man who says outrageous and even offensive things, only to put on a "What, what did I say?" act when the people around him bristle in response.  He's the sort of man who blurts Piku's sexual status (viz.: not a virgin) to any young man she introduces him to.   And Piku is even more abrasive; there are running jokes in the first half of the film about how awful she is, as Rana's drivers hide when she calls for a cab, and her business partner (and sometime lover) Syed (Jishu Sengupta) begs her to be a shred more diplomatic with clients.  A series of household servants have quit rather than stay caught in the middle of Piku and Bhaskor's squabbles.   (The film's few unwaveringly nice people, like Syed, are steamrolled by the kinetic force of their bickering.)  

But in the light of her dynamic with Bhaskor, Piku's acidity is understandable; they are metaphysically connected, so that his intestinal discomfort manifests in her sourness.  One has the sense that the film joins Piku long after she has reached a breaking point; mean and impatient comments fly out of her mouth in all directions not because she is a horrible person, but because she has long since exhausted the energy it takes to contain them.  And so there is a general feeling of goodness around Piku despite all her cranky rudeness, a sense of the love she has for her difficult, aging father, though it takes about a third of the film before she even shows a flicker of a smile in his direction, while watching him dance around his room to "Jibone ki pabona."  Bhaskor's love for Piku is no less, and it is both liberating and possessive; he doesn't want her to marry partly because he needs her full attention, but also because he believes that marriage, the service of a husband and production of his children, is a waste of a woman's human potential.  And as this relationship takes shape under the push-me-pull-you of Piku's need for independence and Bhaskor's need for Piku, it becomes the heart and soul of the film.  What makes all the poop jokes endurable is this universally relatable tension of caring for an aging parent, and of negotiating the parent-child relationship when the child is an adult and the parent begins to have child-like needs.  

As is often the case, it takes an outsider to give this squabbling pair new perspective on their bond, and help them resolve their discordant themes.  The outsider is Rana, who has family strain of his own, a mother and a sister he seems to despise; indeed, escape from them is a strong motivation for him to drive Piku and Bhaskor to Calcutta when all his employees refuse the assignment.  Rana, too, is irritable and abrasive, but he quickly learns that humoring Bhaskor is the only way to survive sharing close quarters with the duo.  When, while doing so, he draws a diagram of the lower digestive tract complete with emergent oblong excretions, the toilet humor reaches apotheosis; but Rana is deliberately pushing the poop talk over the edge, teasing Bhaskor by goading him in his ridiculous obsession with excrement.  

Piku's long-suffering bitterness mixed with affection is rendered with charming precision by Deepika Padukone.  This film is a great and different use of Deepika's by now well-established talent; she is usually either perfectly glamorous or preternaturally sweet, as she was in another quirky-group-takes-a-road-trip movie, Finding Fanny.  Here, she is more natural than ever, with minimal makeup that even allows some slight unevenness in her usually flawless complexion to show.  It's humanizing and appealing, and allows her to be all the more lovely even while scowling.  For Irrfan Khan, naturalness is practically a signature; he complements it here with deadpan comic timing that bolsters some of the film's biggest laughs.  Amitabh's performance, while endearing, isn't exactly natural.  He manages to embody a frail and quirky character while still remaining Amitabh Bachchan the elder statesman of superstars; to the extent his performance is restrained, he nibbles on the scenery rather than broadly chewing it.  But it's all lovely, and makes for a charming and rewarding ride through one man's digestive tract and across northern India.

 

NH10 (2015)

Dir. Navdeep Singh

The lawless countryside does have a law of its own, explains a character in NH10.  The laws established under the Constitution make sure everyone drives on the left side of the road, and if someone deviates, people die.  Likewise, this character says, in offhanded justification of an honor killing, if you deviate from the rules of the countryside - know your caste, know your role - there is a price to pay.  NH10 presents this argument but does not endorse it.  It does not take the side of so-called honor killers, of the people who enforce the rules by killing their sisters and daughters.  But it does present a troubling moral conundrum.  

NH10's violent spiral begins when Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam) attempts to protect a young man and woman, strangers to him, from a vicious beating and abduction.  These precipitating evens are a clash between two different types of toxic masculinity. Satbir (Darshan Kumar) and his cohort, the enforcers of the village code, represent one type; when Arjun confronts him, Satbir spits "she's my sister," as if that assertion of ownership both explains and justifies his brutality.  But Arjun's reaction to witnessing Satbir's brutality against his sister and her husband is also an expression of masculinity at its most aggressive and damaging.   In his rage, Arjun turns inward, refusing even to speak to his increasingly alarmed wife, Meera (Anushka Sharma), gripping the steering wheel of his SUV until his knuckles go white, and finally ordering Meera to stay in the car - his work is man's work - while he storms after Satbir with a gun.

There is no question that Arjun's actions are foolish and dangerous and wrong.  Indeed, his wife, Meera, a grounded voice of reason until the film's relentless tragedy pulls her down into its darkness, begs him not to interfere in this internecine violence.  But what should Arjun have done?  Certainly turning a blind eye toward the violence he witnesses cannot be the morally right answer.  And even if it isn't apparent when Arjun makes his costly bad decision, the film makes amply clear that calling the police wouldn't have helped either.  None of Arjun's options - get involved, contact authorities, do nothing - is satisfactory.  NH10 presents the dilemma but does not resolve it.  The bleak truth is that there is no right answer. The vicious injustice of honor killings is a terrible wrong, but there is nothing that the righteous anger of a city boy in an expensive car can do to right it.

This moral question is troubling enough, but NH10 goes further; Arjun's choice is only the beginning, and it sets Meera on a harrowing trajectory of pure descent.  Though Arjun's agency creates the nightmare, Meera is the one who lives it.  In a chilling bookend to the explosive displays of masculinity that spark the narrative, the film concludes in a grim accord of sorts between two willful women, Meera and Ammaji (Deepti Naval in an electrifyingly forbidding avatar), whose relationship to the story I do not want to spoil here.  All the women of NH10 bear burdens placed upon them by the patriarchal rules of their society, and each is uniquely damaged by them.  Even on opposite sides of a conflict, they can agree on that basic truth.

For most of the film Meera is driven only by survival; when she breaks, and her motive morphs into revenge, it completes the tragedy.  Meera's arc is a precipitous plummet, not an arc of wrongdoing and redemption.  And it amplifies the challenging morality of the film, which pits two facets of modern India in opposition, progressive city values against the regressive, caste-bound rule of the fist; Nehru against Manu.  NH10 seems at first to stand in judgment of the vicious law of the countryside, but its narrative questions whether the difference between the two worlds might not be so great after all. One of the Haryana men refers to Meera as an "English" girl; another shakes his head knowingly when he learns that Meera has never even been taught what her jati is.  NH10 establishes a distance between Arjun and Meera on the one hand, and the Haryana countryside on the other, the world inside their SUV and outside of it, a distance which early in the film the characters either do not attempt or completely fail to bridge.  Shown as it is through Meera and Arjun's eyes, the brutality of the honor killing is an obvious wrong, something the society which shapes them has moved beyond, risen above, left in the past.  But Meera's modern modern world is only marginally better in key ways; when Meera narrowly escapes a carjacking, a police officer who can barely conceal his indifference asks Arjun why he allows her to travel alone at night in a city that he compares to an unruly child.  And then, what happens to Meera, the point of utterly broken detachment she reaches at film's end, suggests that under the most extreme conditions, all the western education and progressive values in the world do not tame the primal human beast.  No matter our background or our upbringing, we may all be capable of cold-blooded brutality. 

NH10 embeds these challenging questions in a matrix that is emotional and brutally effective.  It's a superbly crafted, taut, terrifying experience, driven by what could be a career-redefining performance from Anushka Sharma, who renders terror so relatably and without melodrama that my fingers went cold.   And brace yourself; NH10 is incredibly violent; people are beaten, shot, stabbed, run over, filmed with an unflinching camera and popped with stomach-turning sound effects.  But unlike Meera, you can close your eyes until the worst is over.  NH10 makes you ask yourself if you could be as strong as Meera during her ordeal. And if you can be as strong as Meera you can break too, as badly as Meera does.  

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Post Scriptum: Proofreading this post, I find it extremely detached in tone.  I think I resist reliving any part of the emotional experience of watching NH10.  It is a fantastic piece of art, both affecting and thought-provoking, and very, very difficult to watch.  I have a notoriously low tolerance for film violence.  I was scared away from watching Gangs of Wasseypur, and have even complained about violence in masala films like Dabangg.  So NH10 was hard for me.  Yet I am glad that I watched it, even if I'm not sure I could ever watch it again.  Although I hate film violence, it is (like film sex) a valuable tool when a filmmaker uses it appropriately to tell an affecting story.  The violence in a film like NH10 has a point; it is not entirely gratuitous.  (It's probably not entirely gratuitous in Gangs of Wasseypur either, and having survived NH10, I might pull up my big-girl shorts and give Kashyap's opus a try.)  But while it makes for a stimulating cinematic experience, it isn't a pleasurable one.  Someone just asked me if I liked NH10.  I think it is an excellent film, but "like" is absolutely the wrong word.  

And here is my convenient catch-all to cover all the observations I haven't made:  Violence aside, NH10 is an incredibly rich text that supports many other readings besides the ones I've sketched here. It has much to say about class, and tradition, and as a friend just said, about "what it means to live in this country, especially as a woman."  I feel I could keep pondering and jotting down ideas for days. But I will take my leave here.