Filmi Geek

Baahubali (2015)

Dir. S.S. Rajamouli

When I first started watching Hindi movies, ten years ago, it took me a while to adjust to its storytelling idioms.  Its styles, archetypes, and antecedents were all unfamiliar to me.  With respect to the masala films of the 70s, some of which I watched quite early on in my studies, I have called this learning process "surrendering to the aesthetic."  But the process applies beyond masala, as the same narrative traditions that inform masala storytelling also influence other types of films.  

Obviously, Southern films draw on their own set of narrative traditions, their own idioms and archetypes. These are not entirely disjoint from those of Hindi films, but are nevertheless different. And I think at least a part of why the very evident craft of Baahubali is wasted on me is that I don't have sufficient familiarity with them to fully surrender to its aesthetic.  

I don't mean the visual aesthetic; the visuals of Baahubali are undeniably breathtaking, especially the towering and splendid waterfall scenes early on in the film.  The sweeping renderings of the palace complex where much of the film takes place are grand and impressive, of enormous scale and spectacle.  What takes adjustment for me is the narrative aesthetic of Baahubali, not the visual.  

The film's title character has two incarnations, both played by a curly-locked, barrel-chested, golden-smiled Prabhas: Shivu, a gentle giant of a young man who lives at the base of the waterfall and dreams of reaching its summit, and in flashback, as Shivu's biological father, a warrior prince of the mountain kingdom that Shivu eventually finds there.  In either avatar, Baahubali is a flawless superhero, spending most of the film Heroing Around Heroically.  

There is a gulf between the ordinary suspension of disbelief that movies require, and the complete dispensing with any nominal ties to physical reality that happens in a movie where a single man can support the weight of a hundred-foot-tall solid-gold statue.  Baahubali's demi-divine feats surely have a mythological resonance, drawn from classical epic episodes.  When Shivu, falling from a cliff, fires a precise, improbable arrow at a small stump of a tree, it recollects Arjun's feat of marksmanship at Draupadi's swayamvar.  Baahubali's superhuman strength recalls that of Bheema in the Mahabharata, or of Hanuman.  Perhaps it is this cultural fabric that lends appeal and entertainment value to a character like Baahubali and his extra-physical exploits, and makes them a hallmark of a certain South Indian cinematic style.

If all of this sounds very intellectual, it is.  There is yet a lot for me to learn from watching movies like Baahubali, but there is more of intellectual pleasure in it than emotional engagement. Superheroes bore me.  Baahubali is so powerful that nothing much challenges him. Throw one enemy or four or twenty at him, he will overcome them with identical violence.  And as if his physical strength isn't superhuman enough, he is so relentlessly good that he never makes mistakes, either tactically or morally.  His every decision is noble, his every word is truthful, his every obligation is honored. That the narrative centralizes on such a preternaturally gifted - and hence, to me, preternaturally dull - character just highlights the ways in which I do not have the right cultural calibration to be enthralled by a movie such as Baahubali.  

The warrior with whom Shivu falls in love, Avantika (Tamannah) begins with more narrative potential, but Baahubali, frustratingly, quashes it in short order.  Avantika is a serious badass; she lives with a band of rebel warriors, dedicated to rescuing the queen who has been held in captive humiliation for a quarter century by the usurper of Baahubali's throne. And while this mission drives Avantika, she also shows some hints of longing, or at least wondering, whether there is more to life.  The film assigns an infuriating interpretation to this longing:  As Shivu divines and then imposes on Avantika, all this fierce warrior girl really wants is to be pretty, adorn herself with makeup and jewelry, and twirl about in diaphanous skirts.  And as Shivu tears off Avantika's warrior clothes and decorates her to his liking, Avantika's indignation melts into desire, invoking that timeless idea that a woman's objection to being tossed about and disrobed is really just an invitation. 

This is not merely a matter of balancing Avantika's warrior impulse with something more socially feminine; rather, the film is rather literal in declaring the warrior persona a mask, and the soft-and-pretty persona Avantika's "true self", and the only expression of her womanhood that could truly satisfy her.  This disrespect for Avantika's drive culminates in Shivu's unilateral usurpation of her mission.  Though Shivu admits he knows nothing about the quest for which Avantika has trained her whole life, he announces that he will save the queen for her, and she need not worry her pretty little head about it any longer.  Shivu doesn't offer to join Avantika's quest; rather, he shoves her aside and takes her place in it.  In short, Avantika exists as a device, merely to give purpose to the hero's superhuman masculinity. It's Shivu's job to Be The Hero, and Avantika's job, as a woman, to supply him opportunities for heroism.  And so her own opportunity for heroism becomes his to claim away from her.  

It was somewhere around here that I tweeted, "This is all so wasted on me."  But I am not completely without capacity to be entertained by spectacle, and there are parts of the film that I do find quite enjoyable.  The early sequences with the backdrop of the massive waterfall are spectacular.  And the sequence in which the young barrel-chested hero hoists the shivlingam and trudges it across the rapids and down the slope is delightful. He does this to save his beloved mother a thousand and one treacherous trips to the Shiva shrine and back, as she prays for his safety.  Te sequence is, of course, an illustration of Shivu's superhuman strength - the shivlingam presumably weighs several tons. But it is also a clever way to show the young man's love for his mother, such a staple quality of Indian heroes that a new and sweet way to demonstrate it is always welcome.  More than that, it reveals a streak of playfulness and even irreverence in the strong-armed one, and is one of the more sparkling moments of character that he gets in the film, as contrasted with superheroic heroism.  

There are other characters who, unburdened by a shivlingam's weight in heroic requirements, get to have more character throughout, and these are enjoyable as well.  The bodyguard-armsmaster-slave Kattappa (Sathyaraj) is the film's most interesting character, with his ever-shifting obligations yet never-wavering loyalty. (That the film's cliffhanger centers on him may be enough for me to watch the sequel, despite being underwhelmed by this first installment.) He is introduced in a delightfully filmi encounter with a Pathan arms dealer, who, having challenged Kattappa to a duel and been defeated at it, becomes his friend for life, Sher Khan style.  

The other women who, like Avantika, provide heroic opportunities for our uber-man are also fun to watch, despite their ancillary standing.  The captive queen Devasena (Anushka) constantly sports a mad expression of defiance that is delightfully over-the-top.  And the previous queen Sivagami (Ramya Krishnan), the adoptive mother of the warrior-prince version of Baahubali, is magnificently fierce, making her statecraft decisions in a rational, considered manner, yet not shrinking from violence when it is necessary. When Sivagami draws a knife and cuts and armed man's throat with one hand while cradling a tiny baby with the other, it is every bit as improbable as any of Baahubali's feats.  Yet it is tremendously more satisfying, somehow, both for its emotion and for what it conveys about Sivagami, as a character and as an archetype. 

And so there are points of engagement for me that prick through the otherwise stifling fabric of this movie, woven as it is with a warp of Baahubali's relentless flawlessness and a weft of interminable melee and battle scenes.  (I feel caught up in one of Baahubali's clever tentcloth-and-catapult-stone contrivances, before he sets it on fire.)  I know this is the stuff of entertaining movies for lots of folks but I just find the endless fight scenes oppressive.  I can't bear the violence for its own sake, and the film makes a crucial error in failing to assign any narrative importance to the enemy, the Kalakeyas, apart from being convenient landing points for maces and spears.  Even leaving aside the racist caricatures that they embody, the Kalakeyas are an unforgivably lazy plot device, an enemy manufactured from air when the film wants to provide a large-scale battle, rather than a foe woven organically into the backstory.  In a film that wants to be an epic there is room to give the battle some emotional heft, to create an enemy that matters in some way, but Baahubali cannot be bothered with this, and it's both a wasted opportunity, and an insult to the audience.  

To pass the time in the insufferable final half hour of the film, I forced myself to ponder the impressive technical craft that must have gone in to creating these battle scenes.  They are surely a marvel, especially the sweeping long shots with tens of thousands of soldiers.  Narratively, though, they are unbearably dull.  The story screeches to a halt while swords clash, bones crunch, blood spurts. How many blackfaced enemy skulls must we watch getting clocked with maces, before we get the point?   

Given the huge success of Baahubali, the vast number of people of many perspectives and backgrounds who are enthralled by its scope and story, I do feel I've missed the boat, in that the best enjoyment I have got from it came not from watching it, but from pondering why it's so crushingly dull for me and so brilliantly compelling for others.  There are certain films I wouldn't watch if they weren't Indian, and Baahubali is one of these.  The corollary is that what interests me about Baahubali is primarily what is especially Indian about it.  And so I don't regret having seen it, for what it's given me to think about.      

Khuda gawah (1992)

ख़ुदा गवाह

Dir. Mukul S. Anand

There are certainly some ways in which this movie is a hot mess, but it really doesn't matter;  Khuda gawah is thoroughly enjoyable in its bombast and excess all the same.  As a ferociously proud Pathan, Badshah Khan, Amitabh Bachchan delivers every speech in a thundering string of capitalized abstract concepts:  MOHABBAT!  IZZAT!  JURM!  INSAAF!  And it works, because Badshah Khan is himself a capitalized abstract concept given flesh.  He is not a character, not a man, but a walking complex of pride and honor.  Each time he booms "MAIN PATHAN HOON PATHAN!" it is clear that Badshah Khan is driven not by the force of reason but by the force of that legendary heritage.

Thus Badshah Khan's plot-driving bond with Ranvir Singh (Vikram Gokhale), the Rajput jailor who arrests and imprisons Badshah Khan, and also becomes his lifelong friend.  Badshah Khan sees in this man a brother who also has an impossibly prideful lineage to live up to, and if "Tum Rajput, main Pathan" becomes almost a call of love between them, so too does the classic trope of respect between lawbreaker and law enforcer.  When Badshah Khan requests a 30-day furlough for his marriage, Ranvir Singh bets his career on his faith that the Pathan will keep his word and turn himself in at the end of the month. Of course Badshah Khan makes good, and both Rajput and audience are deeply satisfied. 

Then there are the two characters played by Sridevi, who are, both separately and put together, all over the map.  First is Behnazir, who in the film's visually awesome opening (more on that below), proves a serious badass in the tribal competition of buzkashi, where horse-mounted contestants vie to collect a goat carcass from the wilderness and deliver it to the village. Behnazir matches Badshah Khan gallop-for-gallop in this (presumably) uber-mardaani pastime, and her ferocity in that wins his heart.  (His subsequent courtship of her is shown in a grand and marvelous song, a hilarious filmi exoticisation of an Afghan tribal musical gathering. Great stuff, and completely commensurate with everything else that is BIG and entertaining and unintentionally silly about Khuda gawah.)  

 
Badshah Khan and his sidekick Khuda Baksh (Danny Denzongpa, supergreat here as a good guy) gobsmacked when the champion buzkashi rider turns out to be Behnazir; Badshah Khan gets ready to take a chomp out of Behnazir. 

Before surrendering her heart in return, though, Behnazir sends Badshah Khan on a mission to India, for revenge on HABIBULLAH (name always pronounced in all caps), the man who she says killed her father.  One is left to wonder why a woman with the chutzpah and skills to hold her own in the buzkashi fray can't, you know, exact her own revenge.  That would have been a pretty good movie, too.  But it isn't Khuda gawah.  Benazir has a few minutes of badass screen time, and then promptly begins her descent.

When told that Badshah Khan has died in India in pursuit of vengeance (spoiler: he hasn't), this once-fierce Behnazir loses her shit completely, and caroms into the realm of the "filmi mad" - mussed hair, muddy face, clad in a shapeless caftan, with but two modes of communication: the Mutter and the Wail.  So much for the ferocious buzkashi champ that turned Badshah Khan's head.

Badshah Khan's successful revenge mission earns him the lifelong enmity of HABIBULLAH's brother Pashahhhhh (name always pronounced in an elongated whisper) (Kiran Kumar), a man who menaces the mountainous countryside dressed as a scarecrow.

Time passes, as it does in the movies, and before long Behnazir and Badshah Khan's daughter Mehndi (also Sridevi) is grown.  Mehndi is the kind of Sridevi character who makes you want to plug your ears, because SCREECH, and lament the utter squandering of Sridevi's talent that was the 80s and 90s.  Mehndi is that effervescent, hyperactive, dog-whistle-pitched type of heroine that makes you wonder if the filmmakers have ever met or spoken to an actual spirited young woman - or, more cynically and probably more truthfully, if the filmmakers believe that their principal audience never has.

In her favor, though, Mehndi drives in road rallies for amusement - a clever updating of her mother's horse-riding chops, and a funny one too, because the first half of Khuda gawah seems to be set in the 17th century, while the second half is in the present.  And Mehndi shows some ferocity of her own, like the 1.0 version of her mother; at the end, she participates fully in thrashing the bad guys, together with her Rajput counterpart, Ranvir Singh's daughter, Heena (the also always fierce and often underutilized Shilpa Shirodkar, whom I will always adore because Mrityudand).  (Badshah Khan's and Ranveer Singh's bonding ritual includes this cute choice of names for their near- simultaneously born daughters; they give the two girls the same name, with a little cultural twist, so Khan's girl gets the Hindu version of the name and Singh's girl, the Muslim version.  But it's notable that while Mehndi inherits her father's propensity to bellow "MAIN PATHAN HOON PATHAN!" at every opportunity, the best Heena can muster is "Main Rajput ki beti hoon!"  In the universe of Khuda gawah, at least, Pathan knows no gender but only boys can be Rajput.)

All of this is just delightfully silly, bombastic, over the top, and often unintentionally hilarious, making for a completely entertaining film.  But at the foundation of it all is some truly remarkable technical craft for which Khuda gawah must be given complete credit.  I do not know the technical vocabulary but the picture quality is much sharper and richer than many films of its era.  The opening scenes especially, of the buzkashi players' thundering gallops across the bleak, baked Afghan landscape, are actually jaw-dropping.  

 

Not gonna lie, it's beautifully shot.  Click on the still for full-sized glory.

Lahu ke do rang (1979)

लहू के दो रंग

Dir. Mahesh Bhatt

I chose this movie out of Shabana Azmi completism, but what I got turned out to be pretty satisfying masala in its own right. Its backstory is set forth with rare specificity in time; the film opens at the end of World War II, when Indian freedom fighters were operating in exiled cells in east Asia. In this “exotic” setting, a very appealing relationship forms between a delightfully angsty Vinod Khanna and Helen in an unusually non-dancing, non-vamp role.  

Fast forward to the present (as masala films do) and you're in pleasingly familiar masala territory: the martyred freedom fighter Vinod Khanna has left an illegitimate son (Danny Denzongpa) in Hong Kong with a distraught Helen, and a legitimate son (also Vinod Khanna) in Bombay with his grave and serious mother (Indrani Mukhejee, who is super-fabulous and intense in this role, and makes me wonder why she's never jumped into my consciousness before, despite the half-dozen or so films I've seen her in). The two young men are, of course, unknown to each other and, of course, on opposite sides of the law - Vinod a proud police inspector, Danny falling in with the smuggling ring that holds Shabana hostage.  

   
No one does man-pain quite like Vinod Khanna.

Highlights include Danny doing kung fu, a very sweet ballad picturized on Helen, and even a taste of filmi-paagal in the form of Shabana Azmi's character's mother, tortured and abused to madness by the villain, Kader Khan (accompanied in this standard-issue villainy ensemble by Ranjeet).  There's a pretty cute set of sequences where Danny falls in with a plucky orphan girl called Shabbo; together they engineer some minor cons and become fast friends.  Shabana Azmi is as wasted as she ever is in such masala fare, but she does get to wear some super pantsuits and tromp around Darjeeling looking pouty and fabulous. There's really nothing not to like here – an enjoyable bellyful of masala comfort food.

   

Happy Ending (2014)

Dir. Raj Nidimoru, Krishna DK

Goodness knows I have little love for the man-child archetype. Hindi films of this decade are strewn with impulsive, indolent young men who won't even consider pointing themselves on a trajectory toward adulthood until some eye-rolling, exasperated, competent young woman inspires them to grow up. From Humpty Sharma to Vicky Donor, young men have spent the last few years cavorting across screens singing Yeh jawani hai diwani and cooking up Luv-shuv tey Chicken Khurana. It's a well-worn narrative arc, at best, even when played out upon men who are forgivably young – we can't really expect early 20-ish types to know better, after all.

But Saif Ali Khan is too old for this archetype, isn't he? A character he plays really should be over it by now. If childish hedonism is irritating in a man of twenty-something, it ought to be unbearable in a man of forty-something. And yet Happy Ending pulls off something a little clever – it's better than it ought to be, given the space it occupies.

Happy Ending works best when it exposes the vulnerabilities of its man-child, Yudi (Khan), a one-time successful novelist. Yudi has squandered every royalty check and every advance from his publisher, and has not produced a follow-up to the bestseller that made him briefly famous. And he's blown through a series of girlfriends who ditch him when they discover his resistance to commitment. (In what must be some sort of invocation of Chetan Bhagat, we are told that Yudi had eight-and-a-half girlfriends in five-and-a-half years.) But he does these things not out of arrogance, but out of insecurity.

The film lays bare Yudi's insecurities in a number of ways. One employs the device of his weird alter ego, Yogi (also Saif Ali Khan, with a long unkempt scruff of hair and beard and a mouth full of junk food). Yogi appears at Yudi's lowest moments of self-doubt and calls Yudi out on his attempts at self-deception, revealing the truth about Yudi's fears. Another clue to what's really going on with Yudi is a stash of half-completed manuscripts, smartly revealed relatively late in the film. Yudi's failure to produce a second book is not, as he proudly claimed early in the film, a product of willful refusal to work when he can have much more fun partying away his earnings. Rather, it's a profound imposter syndrome, a deep fear of being outed as a talentless hack who got lucky with his first novel.

Happy Ending addresses these insecurities by setting Yudi to work writing a romantic script for an aging Bollywood star, Armaan (Govinda, hilarious but underused). The script that Yudi writes becomes the meta-structure for the main story of Happy Ending itself, which is a straightforward romance between Yudi and another author, Aanchal (Ileana D'Cruz), and the act of falling in love and pursuing it is also the act that allows Yudi to finally finish a piece of writing. But what Aanchal teaches Yudi doesn't come in the standard format of a dour, mature girl lecturing a gadabout man-child until he tames himself for her sake. Aanchal throws Yudi's resistance to commitment right back into his face. She, too, is opposed to love and commitment; she cynically writes hit romance novels and scoffs with contempt at her own audience for lapping them up. And when Yudi finds, to his surprise, that he wants to advance the relationship with her, she gives him the same stiff-arming and euphemizing (“we can still be friends”) that he has given to his girlfriends throughout the movie.

Happy Ending's meta-narrative and twisty take on conventional romance stories is not without flaws. Wallowing in immaturity with Yudi is his best friend Montu (Ranvir Shorey), married to a shrill termagant who meets every hateful cliché of the old life-ruining ball-and-chain a movie wife can meet. This is unnecessary, and not funny. The film's attempt to balance this perspective of adult life as enslaved misery comes in the form of Divya (Preity Zinta), an ex-girlfriend of Yudi's, now a mother of three, who shows him a more nuanced view of the tradeoffs of growing up. But there is not enough of Divya to make up for the ham-handed use of Montu's horrible wife. Another serious wrong note comes toward the end, when a more recent ex-girlfriend, Vishakha (Kalki Koechlin), resurfaces to kick off a lengthy detour that could have been omitted entirely; the sequence serves not only to delay the inevitable climax of the story, but worse, to demote Vishalkha from a sympathetic if utterly annoying and delusional person (hilariously rendered by Koechlin) to another horrid misogynist stereotype, that of the woman who “traps” an unwitting innocent man with a pregnancy.

These missteps are frustrating because what is smart about Happy Ending has so much potential. But the movie does remain watchable and entertaining despite the clunkers, on the strength of the charm and likability of its principals, and the relatableness of their shared fear of making themselves vulnerable, whether by exposing their real work to the reading public or by exposing their hearts to love. Toss in a Govinda dance (what movie isn't improved by a Govinda dance?) and the result is a romantic comedy – a “romedy,” as Armaan would say - that isn't a half bad way to spend a chilly afternoon.

Happy New Year (2014)

Dir. Farah Khan

I didn't hate Happy New Year as much as I expected to. 

That extremely faint praise is a sign of how far the mighty can fall.   Seven years ago I began my review of Om Shanti Om with the words "God bless Farah Khan."  And though I misread Main Hoon Na the first time I saw it, it grew on me with rewatching.  So it says something - and not something terribly flattering - that I went into Happy New Year with dire expectations indeed. 

And in many respects, Happy New Year met those low expectations.  The opening sequence is painful, an interminable, violent, and totally gratuitous fight sequence featuring Shah Rukh Khan, covered in mud and hosed down in extreme slow-mo.  The introduction of Sonu Sood doubles the shirtless muscley-chest quotient, which I guess is okay if you are into that sort of thing.  Sood's character has hearing damage, so his main contribution to the story is an endless and thoroughly unfunny string of misheard words. ("I'm Laila."  "Kela?  Oh I love bananas."  Yes, really.)  Abhishek Bachchan is as goofily cute as always, except for his character's bizarre trait: the ability to throw up on demand.  (Who even thinks up such things?)  And a good third of the movie goes by before the movie offers us anything resembling a woman, save the shrill, obnoxious elderly mother of Boman Irani's character.  

The one female main character, when finally introduced, is Mohini (Deepika Padukone), brought on board to teach our band of misfits (the gentlemen listed above, plus the ever-adorable naif, Vivaan Shah, as a youthful hacker-nerd) to dance, so that they can enter a dance competition that will put them in proximity of a batch of diamonds they would like to steal for entirely noble and principled reasons.   Mohini has some potential and Deepika Padukone is lovely and at times almost fierce.  Yet when she's not teaching the team to dance, she's serving them tea (!) and sewing their costumes (!!).  It seems she isn't hired just to be their dance teacher but also their mother and maidservant.  But what really shoots the legs out from any personality Mohini might want to have is that she falls in love with Charlie (Shah Rukh Khan) only because he speaks English, and remains in love with him despite hearing him say awful, deplorable, degrading, and cruel things about her - not just once, but twice.  For some who prattles on about "ijjat" as much as Mohini, she sure doesn't demand a lot of respect from the man she loves.

This is the problem with Happy New Year:  The more I think, the more it crumbles.  I am not usually an advocate of checking your brain at the door while watching Hindi films - you will miss a lot of richness if you do - but Happy New Year almost demands it.  Despite its many weaknesses - the patently stupid plot points, the juvenile snickering at homosexuality, the almost complete neglect of female characters, and on and on - while it is happening, it is mostly watchable.  Its full three-hour runtime went by pretty quickly, in a cinema full of laughing people.  It's full of the kind of self-referential jokes with which Farah Khan loves to stuff her movies, and most of these are reasonably cute.  The characters acknowledge the filmi nature of Abhishek's "double role" - he plays both a member of the team and the son of the chief bad guy, whom he impersonates, Don-style, at a key point in the heist.  Mohini's introduction is a nod to Tezaab, coming in a nightclub full of fans chanting "Mohini! Mohini!" A brief appearance by Prabhu Deva also evokes classic Madhuri, as he reprises some moves from "Kay sera sera." 

There are flashes of the smartness that was much more consistent in Main Hoon Na and Om Shanti Om.  The very notion of a dance competition as the dramatic focus of a movie is pure throwback - think Disco Dancer and Hum Kisise Kum Nahin - that most filmmakers who are not Farah Khan would not even consider updating.  And the smartest and funniest moment comes during that competition, when Mohini tries to pep-talk the team (at this stage Mohini isn't in on the heist plan) with an adaptation of the "sattar minute" speech from Chak de India, while Shah Rukh Khan rolls his eyes in winking exasperation.  Somehow, in the moment, these signs of life make it possible to forgive the unutterably stupid (like a completely baffling scene in which the characters have a telepathic conversation in an elevator), the juvenile, even the offensive.  Somehow, on balance, I smiled more than I groaned.