Filmi Geek

Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013)

गोलियों की रासलीला राम-लीला

Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Bhansali films have been a mixed bag for me. For instance, while I am very fond of Khamoshi and Bajirao-Mastani, Saawariya hits some terribly wrong notes, and my seething hatred of Devdas is well-documented. Bhansali's aesthetic sense is strong, and even if he doesn't always pull it off, it's clear that he always has a grand vision in mind. In Ram-Leela, Bhansali fires on all cylinders.  Everything that Bhansali sets out to do in all his films with such mixed degrees of success, he achieves in Ram-Leela - his fairy-tale settings, his superstars so sexy it almost hurts, his visuals so splendid they are almost edible. For me, Ram-Leela turns out to be a nearly flawless film, and one that has only improved with repeated viewings. 

"Inspired by Romeo and Juliet," as the title cards put it, Ram-Leela sets its love story in the fantastical city of Ranjaar, and like any good fairy tale, it is firmly fixed neither in place nor in time. Ranjaar sits on the Gujarati seacoast, although bits of it are quite recognizably shot in Udaipur. And while the characters carry mobile phones and talk about Twitter, nearly all wear elaborate, traditional-style dress, dhotis and shawls and turbans. Only Ram Rajadi (Ranveer Singh), the rising scion of one of Ranjaar's two warring families, wears jeans and button-front shirts.  And from the moment Ram comes rolling on screen, reclining in a beefcake pose on a motorcycle that seems to drive itself, propelled by Ram's awesome sexiness alone, it's clear that he's the black-sheep rebel of Ranjaar.

In Ranjaar, an astonished tourist tells his friend at the film's opening, guns and gun-sellers are as common as bhel puri and sugarcane juice stands in Mumbai.  The half-millennium feud that dominates this landscape pits the smuggling Saneras against the gun-running Rajadis, and no one, not even small children, is exempt from the fight.  Alone among both families, Ram longs to set down his weapons and make love, not war. In pursuit of this noble goal Ram strides boldly into a holi celebration in Sanera territory, and a few colorful and smoking-hot flirtation scenes later, is bound in love to the Sanera scion, Leela (Deepika Padukone).  

But you can't grow up in an environment steeped in toxic masculinity without absorbing some of it into your own blood, and Ranjaar is nothing if not a sultry breeding-swamp for testosterone-fueled violence. It is the kind of place where completely absurd and reckless dick-fights routinely end in bloodshed. In one such contest, instead of dropping their dhotis and breaking out the measuring sticks, a group of virile young Rajadis and equally manly Saneras each decide to prove their superiority by shooting bottles off of the others' heads, William-Tell style. Unsurprisingly, Ram's brother is killed. In response, the peace-loving Ram loses his cool, and pumps Leela's brother full of bullets.  In the aftermath, Ram and Leela flee, vowing to end the cycle of violence. But their families scheme to put a quick end to their elopement, and thus comes the thin end of the wedge that drives our lovers apart.

Ram-Leela puts one entertaining twist on its testosterone-soaked fever dream: The leader of the Saneras is a woman, Dhankor Baa (Supriya Pathak), Leela's mother. Dhankor is as vicious and ruthless as any of her deputies. She is also a treat to watch. Supriya Pathak both chews scenery and adds subtle emotive touches that keep her grounded. As hot as Ram and Leela are, Dhankor is the real scene-stealer of their movie, alternating carefully calibrated bursts of vicious temper with unctuous displays of measured wryness.  It is a brilliantly controlled melodramatic performance.  On a recent rewatch I found myself wondering what Ram-Leela would look like with Shabana Azmi in the role of Dhankor; I quickly realized that such a movie exists, and is called Godmother.  Like Rambhiben of that movie, Dhankor Baa operates far outside the sphere of traditional femininity, wielding nearly incontestable power and commanding terrified respect.  But Rambhiben is embedded in a matrix of realism, while Dhankor resides in a fable. And that gives Supriya Pathak a little more latitude to have fun with her menacing role.

 

I didn't even get to mention Richa Chadda, almost unbearably hot and fierce as Leela's bhabhi. 

Though the film at first hews pretty closely to the Romeo & Juliet outline - warring families, clandestine balcony rendezvous complete with an adaptation of the "rose by any other name" line, brothers slain in revenge, secret elopement, even a suitor for Leela (a hilariously bumbling NRI archaeologist) - in a rather thrilling embellishment, Bhansali ups the stakes with events that propel both Ram and Leela to the heads of their respective families. And so the final showdown begins as a face-off and negotiation between Ram and Leela themselves, standing for Rajadi and Sanera in toto - an intense blending of business, vengeance, and passion.

The film is full of sequences like this, full of amped-up explosive intensity.  Ranveer Singh pulls off this kind of barely-restrained mania like no other actor, and with both his oiled pecs (Leela actually makes fun of Ram's perfectly hairless chest) and Deepika Padukone on the screen, there is almost too much beauty to bear.  They look amazing together, and while this worked well enough in Bajirao Mastani, it is off the charts in Ram-Leela. The color palates of Ram-Leela are gorgeous as well; there is a running metaphor involving peacocks, and at times the whole film seems peacock-colored, shimmering blues and deep blood reds.  In one of the film's generous complement of songs, Priyanka Chopra looks good enough to eat on a backdrop that is somehow both infinitely parti-colored and soothingly pastel blue, a set that puts the excess of Devdas to shame in the way it successfully layers more and more and more and yet stays just this side of too much.

If there is a flaw in Ram-Leela - and this is such a nitpick - it is some ill-advised choreography.  In one song Ram and his army of background dancers do (and overdo) a move that must have been lifted out of a dandruff-shampoo commercial, flapping their palms on the backs of their heads long enough that you start to feel a little embarrassed for them. In another, Ram and Leela recall the 90s with some very goofy side-by-side dancing worthy of Govinda-Karishma or Jeetu-Sridevi.  Still these are such minor complaints. The songs themselves are marvelous, now recalling Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, now Devdas, and all visually dazzling. The film is just pure joy to watch, and to watch again - sexy, beautiful, gripping, and damn good fun.  

 

Shanghai (2012)

Dir. Dibakar Banerjee 

The events of Shanghai unfold in the fictional city of Bharatnagar, India City, a city that is any city in India, a microcosm of India. In Bharatnagar, political rallies halt traffic daily, working people's homes are bulldozed to make way for shiny commercial developments, and police and state officials collude to manipulate process. Shanghai exposes a strain of naivete in many of its characters, in a contrast to the hardened cynicism one might expect of people who live in that sort of city.

Shalini (Kalki Koechlin) spends the film on the edge of hysteria, barely contained. But her devotion is patently to her mentor and, it would seem, erstwhile lover, the professor-activist Ahmadi (Prosenjit Chatterjee). Indeed, she is devoted to the professor himself far more than to his cause, protection of poor communities threatened by the relentless pace of development that lines the pockets of the corrupt and unprincipled. Shalini's maid lets slip that the professor's life is in danger. But after she refuses to say how she knows this, Shalini fires her. The maid returns to her home, in the very neighborhood that the party is trying to raze to make room for the new high-class developments. The maid is one of the resettled people for whom the professor risks and loses his life, and Shalini casts her out without a second thought. Koechlin's performance in this role is frenzied and on edge, conveying a sense that Shalini is beyond all reason. Her naivete comes in believing that others in the professor's circle are as irrational as she; when the professor's wife expresses weariness at his constant exposure to danger, when she says that the professor's crusade is his and not hers, Shalini is uncomprehending.

The videographer, Jogi (Emraan Hashmi), is a character of surprising depth, a more realistically drawn version of the classic tapori hero with a heart of gold - think Aamir Khan in Ghulam, who like Jogi, also develops a rough-hewn sense of justice and goes up against powerful politicians. He starts the film a gaping idiot, all stupid smiles and even stupider come-ons to every woman he encounters. But Jogi's attraction to Shalini motivates him to help her uncover the professor's killer, even after he sees his own boss murdered - as the stakes get higher, Jogi's character becomes more focused, more purposeful, and takes greater and greater personal risks to help her. In Jogi's turning point, Shalini comes to Jogi to demand information. Jogi grabs and threatens her, and Shalini, desperate at this point, tells him he can do whatever he wants with her. Jogi lets her go, and gets to work on the footage she is asking for. Jogi is no longer the horny half-moron of the early parts of the film; he has become a man willing to take risks to expose the political conspiracy that he and Shalini are uncovering.

The young hired thug, Bhagu (Pitobash Tripathy), goes beyond mere naivete into fatal stupidity. He is cavalier about the work he does for the party, whether inciting riots or helping with the professor's murder. But he's also cavalier about his place in the party pecking order. He confronts the party's top hired heavy, demanding the return of the truck that he and his uncle Jaggu (Anant Jog) used for the murder, at a public rally in front of dozens of onlookers, threatening to rat if he doesn't get what he wants. How can Bhagu not see that this will get him killed? Bhagu is all id, high on his moment of importance, hopelessly incapable of foreseeing consequences to his actions. He is emblematic of the endless supply of prospectless young men to which the party has access to do its dirty work. 

In Bharatnagar, though, naivete is not limited to the uneducated or rough-hewn types. The bureaucrat T.A. Krishnan (Abhay Deol) is, in his own way, as shockingly naive as Bhagu. Putting him in charge of investigating the professor's death, Krishnan's boss Kaul (Farooq Sheikh) tells him in almost so many words that the investigation is a sham, its conclusions (scapegoating a junior police officer) foreordained. Krishnan seems not to believe what he has heard, and investigates in earnest despite Kaul's increasing frustration with him. By film's end Krishnan's goody-two-shoes innocence is broken, and he learns to use party machinations to further his principled ends. 

The interplay of these characters, with their blind spots, varying motivations, and waxing dedication as the stakes get higher, makes for a damn good story. I love films like this, films that expose the ways human needs and desires grease or gum up the grimy wheels of politics. Shanghai is a very satisfying exemplar.

Mere Apne (1971)

मेरे अपने

Dir. Gulzar

An old widow moves from her village to the city, is baffled by the coarseness and amorality that she encounters there, and finds her place as a surrogate grandmother to a clutch of antagonistic ruffians, bringing tenderness and compassion back into their jaded lives. Summarized in this way, Mere Apne sounds cloying and even simple-minded. Add in one bit piece of information - that Mere Apne is a Gulzar film - and you know you can expect more. Mere Apne, Gulzar's first as writer/director, is a remarkably rich story, knitting together several thematic strains with deeply moving delicacy.

Anandi (Meena Kumari) is taken to the (unnamed) city by Arun (Ramesh Deo), who claims to be a relative of hers; he insists that he could never leave an aunt of his alone when he has the means to care for her.  What Arun and his wife Lata are really after is cheap child care to support their lively middle-class lifestyle. Anandi slowly becomes aware that she has been duped - the final straw is when another man approaches her with the same story that Arun had used, word for word, hoping to bring her into his home - but not before she has been thoroughly shocked by the coarseness and crassness of the city and its inhabitants.

This shock veers too far toward cliché - indeed, Beth calls her a "truth-wielding bumpkin", and she's not wrong. There is overkill, such as when Anandi, seeing Lata in smart trousers on her way to the office, asks with alarm why she is wearing her husband's clothes. But there is nevertheless trenchant comment in the way Anandi is by turns neglected and then exploited by her younger relatives, who only think of her languishing alone in her village when they need something from her. Arun and Lata are obsessed with convenience and comforts like restaurant dinners, but they refuse to extend their good fortune so far as to allow Anandi to share a mouthful of food with a street waif. 

But the meaningful contrast here is not between city and village values, or traditional and modern values. Rather it is between narrow views of community and family and broad ones. Anandi is shocked by Lata's modernity but I don't think the film's point is to condemn that modernity itself; rather, it's to condemn the coarseness, the erosion of compassion, that seems to have come along with it. Anandi finds that lost sense of community among two warring factions of disaffected young men. Led on one side by Shyam (Vinod Khanna, young, buff, and hopelessly appealing) and on the other by Chaino (Shatrugan Sinha, less young and buff, but as delightfully morally complex as any Shotgun character), these boys have given up on finding any kind of employment, much less slick office jobs like Arun and Lata.  They cannot finish school because local political machinations keep causing their college to close. Instead, the young men have signed on as thugs for opposing politicians, and the two groups clash in that capacity, with a measure of proxy for a personal dispute between Shyam and Chaino. These boys join Anandi, along with her little street waif and his disabled sister, in a kind of impromptu family; her expression when Shyam addresses her as "Nanima" for the first time is one of the film's most affecting moments. Where Arun and Lata abuse even those they claim relation to, these disenfranchised folks make connections with strangers.

Where Meena Kumari is ill and muted - Mere Apne is one of her very last movies - and playing someone twice her age and even more muted, the young men bring the film its vitality, and in its best moments, their straining against the system that holds them back lends vivid energy. This is not seen as much in Shatrughan Sinha sneering with a switchblade or a gun as it in the song performed by Shyam's gang, "Haal Chaal Thik Thak Hai," which seems jarringly out of place until you realize that the lyrics are thoroughly sarcastic. Shyam's gang includes an extremely young Danny Denzongpa, whose character Sanju always has a puppet perched on his hand.  The puppet represents Sanju's creativity, and also expresses uncomfortable truths with inappropriate bluntness. (Sanju also always has a satchel slung over his shoulder; later in the film, this innocent-looking prop is filled with homemade bombs that he tosses in political riots.) When the puppet is destroyed, it represents an end to Sanju's aspirations, and he is anguished by its loss.

  

Also among the boys are some actors one normally associates with comic roles, Paintal in Shyam's gang and Asrani in Chaino's. They are not here for comic relief, though; instead, Gulzar archly gives the comic roles to Mehmood and Asit Sen as the rival political leaders fighting a bitter election campaign. Their buffoonery points up the stupidity of the system in which greed takes advantages of incompetence to squander the potential of the once eager, now disillusioned young men who populate this film. 

And so Mere Apne is a rich film taking on many social evils – the double-­edged sword of neglect and exploitation of old people, the erosion of traditional values, the waste laid to the younger generation by the corruption and violence of politics. Though Anandi begins the film as a stereotypical village bumpkin, she comes to represent a uniting principle that can set the country back on a prosperous path, provided it is not left to decay. And when Anandi is struck down senselessly, it is more than just an individual's tragedy. It is a representative tragedy that reflects an entire generation's sense of hopelessness. 

  

Anjaam (1994)

अंजाम

Dir. Rahul Ram

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Here are a few additional observations.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969)

গুপী গাইন বাঘা বাইন

Dir. Satyajit Ray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
More scenes from the ghosts' dance.

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

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

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