Love, death and opera: Why 'Diva' still seduces

Seven years ago, I watched Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang for the first time at Deepak Cinema in Mumbai. One scene in particular I will never forget. Denis Lavant is standing by himself, smoking, as something melancholy plays on the radio. Then, the DJ announces the next track, David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’. As the famous chuk-chuka-chuk intro plays, Lavant starts lurching down the street, the camera tracking alongside. Never breaking his stride, he sprints and dances and caterwauls to the driving rhythm of the horns. When it ended, I felt I had levitated out of my seat. It might be my favourite scene in all of cinema.

Carax is one of three directors most commonly associated with Cinéma du look, a style that emerged in France in the 1980s. It favoured stylised visuals over realism, sensorial delight over unobtrusive technique. Carax had some success with Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf and remains an arthouse favourite today. Luc Besson made a splash with Subway and La Femme Nikita; he had a commercial movie career till a few years ago, when rape allegations surfaced against him. And then there’s Jean-Jacques Beineix.

When Beineix died in January this year, it didn’t really register. It had honestly been a long time—more than 30 years—since he'd made a film that everyone talked about. And yet, Diva is the quintessential Cinéma du look film. Now streaming on MUBI, it’s ripe for rediscovery—or is it just ripe? Everything in it is a touch too much: the arch references, the little tricks with camera and cutting, the knowing performances. It gave me the same intense pleasure that the Mauvais Sang scene did—less euphoric, more sustained.

“Every shot seems designed to delight the audience,” Pauline Kael wrote enthusiastically when the film came out in 1981. All these years later, you can see why Kael would respond to this odd, beautiful film. Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is a delivery boy in Paris, an opera fan on a mobilette. His days and nights are spent dreaming of American soprano Cynthia (Wilhelmenia Fernandez), whom he watches in performance at the film’s start, and records surreptitiously. He develops a friendship with breathless Alba (the delightful Thuy An Luu), girlfriend of the mysterious Serge (Richard Bohringer). There’s a prostitution ring and a murdered sex worker, a pair of assassins, another pair of Taiwanese blackmailers, and an assortment of detectives after two tapes, one a recording of Cynthia, the other with evidence related to the murder—both of which end up with Jules.

It’s so convoluted and flimsy a story you can imagine Beineix cracking up as he committed it to paper. There’s not much happening below the surface—but you don’t need much else if the surface is this enticing. Jules’ loft is a pop art fantasia of semi-pulped cars, recording equipment and huge Roy Lichtenstein-like paintings. Alba and Serge’s place is also singularly weird, a gigantic room where he assembles a puzzle and she skates around. Everything is strange, yet tactile and sensuous. There are two spectacular chases: one with Jules on a bike, descending into a metro station and leaving on a train, the other with him on foot, running to a parking garage and ending in a game arcade.

For a film with little sex, it’s a very sexy film. Alba’s shoplifting technique involves slipping an LP into a large folder; when the shopkeeper asks her to show its contents, it’s a series of arty nudes of her. After two or three, the shopkeeper stops in embarrassment and Alba has her free album. Jules’ relationships with both the women are seemingly platonic. Beineix teases us in the scene after Jules and Cynthia’s romantic walk. We had seen him being gifted a carved, chirping bird. The first scene the next morning is Cynthia asleep in her bed. We hear twitters even as the camera pans to reveal the bird, suggesting Jules slept in the same bed. But then we see him on a sofa, under a bedsheet but very awake, his mind evidently on people in other rooms.

It’s hard not to imagine Quentin Tarantino watching this and taking notes. About 10 years before the Jules of Pulp Fiction quoted Ezekiel 25:17, the Jules of Diva signs off a phone conversation with “Abyssus abyssum invocat”—the deep calls the deep—from “the Vulgate Bible”. If Tarantino adapted the Madison dance from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande À Part, Beineix might have had in mind Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo walking down the Champs-Elysées in Godard's first film. The sequence in Diva is as playful as the one in Breathless. “Is it opera?” Jules asks, referring to the building printed on Alba’s skirt. “No,” she replies, “it’s my butt.”

 This piece is published in Mint Lounge.

Modern Love Mumbai: Review

‘The secret ingredient is love’ isn’t just a cliché, it’s an embarrassment. It says a lot that two unconnected stories in Modern Love Mumbai, a six-episode series based on the popular New York Times column, have a variation on this line. At least one of them—the otherwise delightful Mumbai Dragon—uses it in passing, possibly in jest. Baai has it right at the end, capping a heavy scene. “The secret ingredient is… coriander” may not be poetic, but it’s better than making the viewer groan as someone is dying. 

Let’s start at the top. Mumbai Dragon is perfectly pitched, engaging with history and identity and prejudice without seeming laboured. Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj and co-written with Jyotsna Hariharan, it’s the story of Sui (Yeo Yann Yann), a third-generation Mumbaikar. Her grandfather came here from China and, if a flashback is to be believed, invented sweet corn soup. Food has helped them build bridges ever since; Sui used to sell dim sums at Nariman Point. But it becomes a comic barrier when Sui’s son, aspiring singer Ming (Meiyang Chang), brings home his chatty girlfriend, Megha (Wamiqa Gabbi). She doesn’t eat meat or even garlic, which makes Sui defensive and tetchy. She takes a vow not to speak Hindi anymore until Ming agrees to marry someone from their community. 

Bhardwaj draws a lovely sardonic performance from Yann, whom some might know from the Singaporean films Ilo Ilo and Wet Season. Ming resists Sui's emotional blackmail, but we can also see he’s unable to disappoint her (Megha’s fridge is overflowing with Sui’s lunch boxes for her son), and realise that eventually she’ll have to come around herself. Tassaduq Hussain makes masterful use of cramped spaces. The cultural exchange in the languages—an Indian Chinese woman speaking Hindi, a Punjabi man speaking Cantonese—is very Bhardwaj and also very Mumbai.  

The fear of abandonment prompts another remarkable comic performance. In Raat Rani (written by Nilesh Maniyar and John Belenager, directed by Shonali Bose), Fatima Sana Shaikh plays Lalzari, a Kashmiri woman living with her security guard husband, Lutfi (Bhupendra Jadawat), in a modest one-room that's apparently in shouting distance of Shah Rukh Khan’s house. When Lutfi leaves one morning and doesn’t return, a frantic Lali heads out to look for him. His absence forces growth upon her: she gets the house fixed, learns to ride a bicycle, starts selling kahwa.

Like in some of her recent films, Shaikh is on the receiving end of injustice. But here she’s allowed the space to be desperate, silly, unsure and funny. There’s a euphoric scene where she’s riding her bicycle on Worli Sea Link at night, a ‘two wheelers not allowed’ sign prompting her to launch into a litany of things she’s been denied in life. “And when your husband leaves you, being happy is NOT ALLOWED,” she yells. But there’s a huge smile on her face.

The other four episodes are less successful, for various individual reasons, and for one common one: they have a heavy touch. Baai (written by Raghav Raj Kakker, Kashyap Kapoor, Ankur Pathak and Hansal Mehta; directed by Mehta) might have the heaviest. Manzu (Pratik Gandhi) is a singer who comes out of the closet over the course of the film. Hanging over everything is the memory of the Bombay riots, evoked through a nifty action scene possibly modelled on the single-take from Children of Men. The two strands are connected by Manzu’s grandmother (Tanuja), whose bravery saved the family during the riots, and who’s now dying without the knowledge that her beloved grandson is happily married. In the past, Hansal Mehta has been a deft observer of spiky family dynamics and difficult romances; this, though, is laboured and rather sappy, taking in too much for its 33-minute runtime, with achingly sensitive music poured over everything.

Viewers who skip the opening credits of My Beautiful Wrinkles might nevertheless recognise it as a Alankrita Shrivastava film, given her earlier forthright treatments of unlikely relationships. Here, it’s between a woman in her 60s (Sarika) and a much younger man (Danesh Razvi)—first a friendship, then a flirtation. There’s a teasing waltz that reminded me of ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ but the film lacks the delicacy and wit that might prompt further comparisons to In The Mood for Love. Dhruv Sehgal’s I Love Thane (co-written with Nupur Pai) looks at modern dating through the largely unsuccessful efforts of landscape designer Saiba (Masaba Gupta). As she texts with and meets a series of unavailable or undesirable men, and finds herself drawn to a sincere architect (Ritwik Bhowmik), the film settles on a tame take: that people on dating apps are mostly shallow and duplicitous and the ones who aren’t on it (and live in ‘real’ neighbourhoods like Thane) are genuine. Of Cutting Chai (written by Devika Bhagat, directed by Nupur Asthana), I'll only say that the musical-style fantasy moments are a good try and it’s always a pleasure to see Arshad Warsi (I like that the film gently suggests Chitrangda Singh is out of his league). 

Modern Love Mumbai will do for a rainy afternoon. But it’s alarming how quickly streaming TV in India has started to resemble Hindi cinema: the same directors, the same actors, the same music and editing and thinking. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge established filmmakers a chance to work in a new medium. At the same time, if streaming doesn’t bring forth new voices, is it just another little Bollywood? The horror! 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Jayeshbhai Jordaar: Review

A suitable girl has been found for the already married Jayesh, one who might give him the son his autocratic, female foetus-aborting father so desires (this film is set in the 21st century). Jayesh’s sister tries to dissuade the prospective bride, lying that her brother beats women. The girl looks alarmed for a second, then says calmly, “I must have done something to deserve it.” 

While the world makes rightly harrowing films about abortion, Hindi cinema gives you a female foeticide comedy, where the best joke is about wife-beating. This is pretty subversive, especially when you consider it’ll be watched as a ‘family film’ sandwiched between the violent fantasies of KGF 2 and Prithviraj. Jayeshbhai Jordaar, written and directed by Divyang Thakkar, runs hot and cold: it’s funny but not often enough, straining for effect when it should play the emotion of a scene. But it also turns dark fact into manic humour, and conservative attitudes into farce.

After six miscarriages, Jayesh (Ranveer Singh) and Mudra (Shalini Pandey) are expecting again. The previous ones have all been girls, detected through pre-natal screening and aborted on the insistence of Jayesh's father (Boman Irani), the village sarpanch, who cares about nothing but the family name being carried forward. Jayesh already has a daughter—“pehli galti maaf” (pardon the first mistake) is the casually chilling reason why she was allowed to live—and would happily welcome another. He won’t stand up to his father, so he plots an escape instead: Mudra will pretend to take him hostage and they’ll drive to a village in Haryana where the sex ratio is so skewed the remaining men have become vocal feminists. 

The plan comes undone, of course. And in the series of escapes and captures that follows, the film comes undone too. There’s one excellent gag: when the sarpanch demands a photograph of Mudra so he can alert the authorities, they take out the wedding album, only to find she’s wearing a ghoonghat in all the pictures. But the other scenarios are laboured and silly: a chase halted because of a black cat; a mass drugging; a deus ex machina Bengali; Jayesh threatening to castrate himself. 

YRF, which turned out some of smartest scripts of the 2010s, might need a screenwriting intervention (Jayeshbhai was preceded by Mardaani 2 and Bunty Aur Babli 2). Having “chehra chhupa ke rakhna” (keep your face hidden) play over the image of women in ghoongats is referencing without bite—less ‘think of the implications’, more ‘we made Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’. A recurring bit is that Jayesh and Mudra have never kissed, and are looking for the right moment to do so. Thakkar miscalculates by having Jayesh blather on about the healing power of a kiss in a scene that was, until he takes it over, about the collective pain of abused women. The crowd I saw it with kept giggling every time Singh said pappi, and who could blame them? It finally happens at a moment when kissing ought to be the last thing on either person’s mind.   

For someone who's mostly played hypermasculine jocks—warriors, ruffians, cops, athletes—Ranveer Singh has always suggested softer shades in real life. It’s no surprise, then, to see him slip with ease into the halting, dweeby and steadfast figure of Jayesh (he looks somehow de-muscled). Another good idea is pairing him with a child—and Jia Vaidya is a riot as the loud, confident Siddhi, essentially playing the Ranveer role. Irani adds another author-backed antagonist to his collection, but seems to be held back from true nastiness. Despicable as the sarpanch is, the frequent comic touches make him less formidable. 

The news that the US Supreme Court might be striking down Roe v. Wade has challenged people in other countries to examine their own record on abortion. Arriving a fortnight after that, and days after the Delhi High Court delivered a split verdict on the marital rape exception, a film that looks at forced abortion and patriarchal cruelty could not be timelier. Jayeshbhai Jordaar is on the right side of history—rather painstakingly so. There’s only so many times a film can ask a viewer to praise its moral choices. It’s become important for films to project goodness; audiences only care that a film be good. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Thar: Review

Making a film without a moral centre is tough. The only Hindi director who does it successfully is Sriram Raghavan. In his Badlapur, the pendulum of audience sympathy swings slowly, inexplicably away from Varun Dhawan towards Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who starts the film by killing a mother and child. It takes a high degree of skill to manage that, which is why most films, even extremely dark ones, find it easier to have at least one character function as a kind of North Star for the audience.

Thar has a moral centre in Anil Kapoor’s police inspector Surekha Singh, who's investigating a spate of killings. But really, it feels like there’s no centre at all. Raj Singh Chaudhary’s film goes in all directions, bouncing between revisionist Western, neonoir and (unconvincing) action film. The pieces seem to belong together—dacoits, drugs, border issues, misogyny, caste prejudice—but they’re never assembled right. It’s a great setting, a lot of the detailing has promise (like the central character being an antiques hunter, hiring cheap labour from villages that probably made the artefacts in the first place), but it won’t cohere. 

Taciturn city boy Siddharth (Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor, Anil's son) rolls into the Rajasthani village of Munabao, on the border with Pakistan. Soon, he’s kidnapped daily-wager Panna and two of his friends, holding them in an abandoned fort. There he visits upon them sickening, slow violence. We see skin ripped off, large nails driven through feet, ears sliced, fingers broken. We don’t find out why till much later, an excruciating wait for any viewer who doesn’t confuse torture porn with provocative art.

Siddharth's reasons turn out exactly as I guessed they might. Yet it's the placement of the reveal towards the end of the film that's the real puzzler. If the idea is to generate sympathy for Siddharth, who spends seven-eighths of the film a sadistic cypher, shouldn't it come earlier? Or are we supposed to suspend judgment in anticipation of an explanation? Or does the film not care what we think about him? He’s polite, the ladies like him, he’s compared to a Hollywood star. He also ends up chasing a child off a ledge. Like the film, Siddharth just doesn’t add up. 

A lot of that is down to the actor. Normally, a role in which Kapoor has to largely remain silent and show little emotion would seem a good fit. But there’s an art to being stoic on screen; just look at any Jaideep Ahlawat performance to see what a stone face can convey. Kapoor should be scary as hell by the end, but instead he looks like one good hug could cure his problems. 

I liked some of the supporting turns, especially Jitendra Joshi as a truly menacing Panna and Shubham Kumar as a randy local. And it’s a pleasure to see Anil Kapoor and Satish Kaushik banter and hold up the film. There’s a world-weariness to their characters, and a touching concern for each other, which made me wish the film was about these old-timers seeing out their lives in this dead-end village. Kaushik gets the film’s best line, when he offhandedly remarks that he likes being a cop because the uniform hides his caste. There’s an echo of this later on, when he hesitates to share a smoke with an old man, and is reassured, “Cigarette ki koi jaati-paati nahi hai (cigarettes don’t have a caste)”.

The path tread by Thar has been traversed more successfully by neonoirs like Manorama Six Feet Under and Raat Akeli Hai, which are smarter and funnier while being a lot less obviously transgressive. For everything that goes right in Chaudhary’s film (a clever score by Ajay Jayanthi), there’s something that falls through (the two chase sequences are unable to establish any sense of spatial integrity). This is a film that can invent a superb throwaway detail of labourers playing cards on the back of a moving open jeep, but isn’t able to make a dacoit who’s significant enough to take a major character’s life seem like anything but filler to keep the Surekha storyline going. In the end, Thar is a nasty bit of work, exacting an emotional toll from the viewer that’s never repaid. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Anurag Kashyap on 'Gangs of Wasseypur', a decade later

It’s hard to believe Gangs Of Wasseypur turns 10 this month. Anurag Kashyap’s film still feels a step ahead of Hindi cinema today, just as it did when it released. There hasn’t been a Hindi film in the intervening time with its mix of ambition, energy and cinephilic appetite. The five-and-a-half-hour film premiered as part of Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival on 22 May 2012. It released in India in June and August, split into two parts.

Fledgling screenwriters Zeishan Quadri, Akhilesh Jaiswal and Sachin K. Ladia drew from longstanding feuds between gangsters in the Wasseypur neighbourhood of Dhanbad city in Jharkhand. Inspired by the kinetic Brazilian gangster film City Of God (2002), they turned this into a story of rival clans vying for control of the coal mafia, intertwined with one family’s decades-spanning quest for revenge against politician Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia): first Shahid Khan (Jaideep Ahlawat), then his son Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee), and his son Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). This was woven into a dense tapestry of shady businessmen and gun-runners, wives and lovers, everyone wisecracking and desperately trying to emerge with the upper hand.

The crew was a mix of unknowns and cannily selected veterans. The biggest name in the cast was Bajpayee, whose career had stalled. The other leads had, at best, one notable credit to their name: Nawazuddin Siddiqui was the inspector from Kahaani (2012), Rajkummar Rao the young man from Love Sex Aur Dhokha (LSD, 2010), Richa Chadha the girl from Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008). Tigmanshu Dhulia was a well-regarded director but had hardly acted in films. Pankaj Tripathi and Jaideep Ahlawat weren’t known at all. Composer Sneha Khanwalkar and editor Shweta Venkat were just a couple of features old.

It‘s not difficult to make a case for Gangs Of Wasseypur as the most influential Hindi film of the 2010s. With its dense sprawl, the film pointed the way towards the long-form storytelling that would kick off in a few years with the arrival of streaming platforms. It gave the industry a couple of cricket teams’ worth of talented actors and technicians. It hastened the already ongoing relocation of the gangster film—and much of Hindi film in general—to non-metro north India. Mukesh Chhabra’s work was a watershed in casting. Khanwalkar’s eclectic, earthy soundtrack made pioneering use of samples and found sounds. The film’s profane flow has been imitated by countless other films and series, though no one has managed to do it with the same hip self-awareness and humour.

Kashyap has returned to gangsters (Bombay Velvet, Sacred Games) and small-town north India (Mukkabaaz) in his subsequent work. But he has been wary of repeating Wasseypur, even as Bollywood remains hell-bent on finding someone who can. Lounge catches up with the director over Zoom and asks him about the antecedents, chaotic production and legacy of Gangs Of Wasseypur. Edited excerpts:

What was the run-up to Cannes like?

In my head I was not even looking at Cannes. I was coming off That Girl In Yellow Boots (2010) and I really needed to make a commercial movie. We were pitching The Lunchbox (2013) at Berlin. (Former director of the Venice, Rotterdam, Locarno film festivals) Marco Müller literally forced me to show him Wasseypur. I was surprised they liked it.

Did it screen as one film at Cannes?

It was screened together. I remember I was very nervous when the film was playing. I just sat outside for five hours, drinking. I didn’t think this is the kind of movie that plays at festivals. Only once in my life I made a film keeping in mind a festival, to figure out how the selling and marketing works—which was Yellow Boots.

The reception was crazy. They showed the movies back-to-back, with just a 10-minute break, but everyone stayed. There was total madness. The actors were getting stopped on the street. We were dancing late into the night.

Is the film more personal than it might appear at first? You shot a lot of it in your childhood town.

It is a very personal interpretation of the real story. We could not shoot in Wasseypur. The budget was very controlled. The only way I could maximise everything was to go back to where I grew up. I used all my father’s goodwill he had accumulated over the years to make the film. People opened their houses because of my dad, and because of them feeling I am one from amongst them who’s now making movies.

I shot in the house I grew up in. The house where Richa Chadha gives birth is where my brother was born. The imagery is from my childhood: the mountain I used to sit on, the mines, Tashkent Colony. The powerhouses my father worked on are there in the film. The sequence with the first fridge, the way the family sits together, the way the singer adopts male and female voices—those things I grew up with.

You've said that when the screenwriters first approached you, the film sounded like ‘City Of God’.

That’s a first-time writer thing, using a famous gangster movie as a template. What I read was City Of God set in Dhanbad. Zeishan was offended when I said that. He brought a bunch of newspaper cuttings and footage to show me it was all true.

I told Zeishan, I want the whole story. Where did Fahim Khan start from? Sultana daku was a great place to begin, because this figure is omnipresent across north India and every village has a story about him. He went off and wrote a 150-page novella (which became the basis of the film).

I was very affected by a six-hour movie called The Best Of Youth (2003), which chronicled the history of Italy. I thought, this is an opportunity to tell the political history of Bihar. We shot a lot of material that we later took out—I got carried away with the politics of the land and the history of the mines.

 

You dedicate the film to the “Madurai triumvirate” of Bala, Ameer Sultan and M. Sasikumar. What about their work influenced you?

Watching Sasikumar’s Subramaniapuram (2008) made me realise, this is how I have grown up. I thought, why am I not telling these stories? The opening of Bala’s Naan Kadavul (2009) is shot in Banaras (now Varanasi). I grew up there, and some other film-maker is shooting that. (The 2010 Hindi film) Udaan did the same thing to me. When (Vikramaditya) Motwane wrote the draft, I was like, this is supposed to be my film, how dare you write it.

I was also watching a lot of Ken Loach movies then. My father worked as an engineer; that world of powerhouses I had not seen in the cinema. Somehow it also came together with this story.

I was averse to making a gangster film. After Satya (1998) and Black Friday (2004), I thought, what is left to be told? But I found these gangsters to be very funny and childish. What arrested me was Zeishan’s story about how Fahim Khan brought guns from Kolkata to Dhanbad by marking the outside of the train, then standing on the platform for days waiting for it to arrive.

It marked a decisive shift for the genre. The gangster film largely moved out of Mumbai after this.

I was very excited about making what I thought would be a commercial hit. I was genuinely not thinking about anything else. I just wanted to tell a very north Indian story, with north Indian humour.

We wrote the first film before shooting; the second was written while shooting the first. UTV backed out three days before the shoot. We were there with little money and little time. We couldn’t have gone and just come back. When you are working with a controlled budget, you come back with a finished film, otherwise it will never get made.

In telling the larger story, we realised the problems with the real story. The Ramadhir of the film is a mix of three characters. The main guy died of a heart attack—but you can’t have a film where a villain dies of a heart attack. So we had to combine this guy, his brother and his son to make one Ramadhir Singh, and keep him alive longer than he actually was.

We assembled the cast based on the promise of how the real-life characters panned out. But some characters in the film didn’t pan out that way. It was like a promise unfulfilled. I had this guilt, which is why I kept pushing Hansal (Mehta) to take Rajkummar Rao in Shahid (2012). 

Would you have made it with bigger stars if you could?

No. That’s the reason UTV didn’t work out, because they wanted bigger stars. They had talked to some. What happens with a bigger star is you have to have a definite story, a heroic ending—and you can’t have them play an idiot. Everyone comes with a sense of entitlement. It wouldn’t have been the same.

I was so fixed on Nawazuddin and Huma Qureshi. I didn’t see anyone else but Nawaz. On the first day of shooting, there was a massive problem because he decided to play Faizal like a gangster. I had to stop shooting. Nawaz and I went back to the hotel and had green tea and a long discussion. I said, this man knows he’s a gangster, he doesn’t have to act like one.

The two casting ideas that really worked were Tigmanshu Dhulia and Pankaj Tripathi. Pankaj, I think, was working on (the TV series) Powder around the same time. (Director) Atul Sabharwal used to talk about him a lot. And Manoj Bajpayee was the one who said, do you know Tigmanshu is a very good actor? He told us that Irrfan imbibed Tigmanshu to play the character in Haasil (2003). 

A lot of the cast came from (Bedabrata Pain’s) Chittagong (2012). Manoj Bajpayee recommended Jaideep Ahlawat, Nawaz was already on my mind, Rajkummar I liked from LSD. Richa Chadha gave the most brilliant audition for Chanda in Dev.D (2009). A lot of actresses turned down the role of Nagma because no one wanted to play Nawazuddin’s mother. But Richa said yes.

They really don’t look like mother and son.

They don’t. In the “baap ka, dada ka, bhai ka” scene, I got so scared because they look like a couple. Right after shooting that, I wrote the sequence where Nawaz and Huma talk (about Faizal looking older than he actually is).

There are these interludes in the film which give a real sense of time and place. I am reminded of how you accompanied Gerard Hooper when he shot the street footage that was later used in montages in ‘Satya’.

If you look at it, it actually comes from there only: the shots of Paharganj in Dev.D, even Mukkabaaz—using city as a landscape, as a set. That learning has come from the sets of Satya with Gerry. So you are spot on, because that is ingrained in me. Right from the beginning, I have always had a second unit director on my films. And their job is to shoot the atmosphere. During the shoot, if there’s a festival, a ceremony, even a procession, the second unit director’s job is to go and shoot that.

As a young writer, you couldn’t digest the way Manoj Bajpayee’s Bheeku was suddenly killed in ‘Satya’. In ‘Wasseypur’, you give Bajpayee the most long-drawn-out death.

(Laughs) We wanted to end with Jiyo Ho Bihar Ke Lala, it’s such a beautiful song. The thing is, it had to play out on Manoj Bajpayee—I didn’t want to shoot anything more. You know, that shot that became iconic, where the gun jumps and goes off when the wheel goes over it—you can’t do that, it doesn’t happen. It just jumped by chance. The gun going off we added in CG.

I have to ask—was the goat in the ‘permission’ scene planned?

Happenstance. That goat just appeared in the background. (Cinematographer) Rajeev Ravi is very instinctive. The actors weren’t ready, the lighting wasn’t done. We were like, the goat is there, let’s shoot, let’s shoot. That’s the advantage of having good actors—there’s this moment going on, and there’s only one take.

Is there anything you would re-do?

Just the climax, with blood pouring out of Ramadhir’s body... oh god. When I watch it, I want to kill myself.

Was it always planned as two films?

At one point it was almost a three-parter. Then Motwane cut it down. It was Shweta’s first big feature film; she was also pregnant at the time she was editing. Nitin Baid and Neeraj Ghaywan practically lived in the editing room. I wouldn’t listen to anyone. They were so happy when Motwane took over the editing room for a month when I was in Brazil.

When I came back, I was aghast to find a stripped-down, four-hour version. I asked them, were you all here when he destroyed my film? I started putting things back. Everything I liked went back, and still my film was down from seven hours, 10 minutes to five hours, 40 minutes.

There’s a real pace and energy to the montages.

That is exactly what Motwane did. He took the soundtrack of The Dark Knight (2008) and cut the montages to that (Motwane remembers editing to the score of the 2009 film Moon).

It’s altogether rare today to find a Hindi film like this, where all the primary characters are Muslim.

Yeah. I don’t think you could make a Wasseypur today. I don’t think even Mukkabaaz would be easy to make.

(The censors) did not cut anything in Wasseypur. Only one sequence where Danish knifes a man in the eye, they asked to mute the sound because it was too gruesome. Kudos to (censor board head) Pankaja Thakur, who said, this film is an authentic representation and it will not be cut. Even with Yellow Boots, she had told me, you need to go to therapy, but she did not let anyone cut the film.

What effect do you think ‘Wasseypur’ has had on Hindi cinema in these 10 years?

I don’t know if it’s a positive or negative effect. There’s so much north Indian gangster stuff now—a lot of it is nowhere close to how it is (in real life).

Unfortunately, what people borrowed from Wasseypur is abuses. The whole idea of getting the pehlwaan to say “chal bhosdike” the right way to Manoj Bajpayee—that’s not really abusing, it’s like dismissing someone. But what I see now is people abusing for the sake of it. And what bothers me is people saying, this is what Anurag has taught everyone.

If you made ‘Wasseypur’ today, would it be a series?

Definitely. I like the long format, and there was much more story to be told. There are a lot of my movies I would have done as series if OTT had existed then.

A decade later, how do you regard the film?

I know why I made the film but I don’t understand why people go crazy about it. I don’t understand why “Beta, tumse na ho payega” is such a massive thing. “Chaabi kahaan hai” was improvised. The only line in the film with which we consciously wanted to make a statement was, “Hindustan mein jab tak cinema hai, log chutiya bante rahenge.”

I still can’t understand how Wasseypur became what it did. I don’t think any of the actors except Manoj Bajpayee got paid, it was made for such a low cost. It did not stay at the box office, it was pushed out by a Salman Khan movie. Viacom still calls it a flop. People keep expecting me to make the same film. It has derailed me in a way. Everything I do is compared to that. It confuses me, because I do not want to make another gangster movie.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Runway 34: Review

Ajay Devgn’s Runway 34, which he directed, produced and stars in, is nowhere as ludicrous as Heropanti 2, the Tiger Shroff vehicle that also released this week. But if you watch Hindi films regularly, ludicrous is often preferable to dourly uninteresting. Indignation at least keeps you awake. 

Captain Vikrant Khanna (Devgn) is a commercial airline pilot, embarking on a flight from Dubai to Kochi. They encounter some turbulence on the way, which becomes worse as they near their destination. Vikrant takes a difficult decision: they’ll divert to Trivandrum instead of the normal backup, Bangalore. A warning from air traffic control—cyclone incoming, don’t land in Trivandrum—goes undelivered. By then the plane is almost out of fuel and Vikrant must execute an incredibly tricky landing on runway 34. He’s successful, the plane coming to rest at the end of a precipice. One hundred and fifty passengers are saved (one dies of a heart attack later, which shouldn't be relevant, but, for grossly sentimental reasons, is).

So far, so Sully. But Runway 34 isn’t content to steal from just one Hollywood film. It begins with Vikrant partying in Dubai the night before his flight. Later, we see him—apparently—sneak a drink mid-air. He chain-smokes, so we’re encouraged to think he has a drinking problem as well. Once the flight takes off, he tells his copilot, Tanya Albuquerque (Rakul Preet Singh), to take over, and goes to sleep. The 2012 film Flight had a similar setup—unstable pilot, turbulent flight, miracle landing. The big difference is that, in that film, Denzel Washington’s pilot really does have a drinking problem; the film reckons with it honestly after the landing. But if you think Devgn is going to end up as anything less than an exemplary hero in his own production… well, you're the film's intended audience.

Runway 34 is based on an actual incident from 2015, which involved a ‘blind’ landing and a subsequent civil investigation. This was how Sully was structured as well, down to a crucial scene in a flight simulator. In Devgn’s film, investigator Narayan Vedant (Amitabh Bachchan) tears Vikrant and Tanya to shreds in court. But he’s so unlikeable that the viewer has no choice but to root for Devgn’s taciturn, weary bore. Singh looks terrified throughout and breaks down frequently. Boman Irani plays a Vijay Mallya-ish tycoon; in the scene where he spars verbally with the owner of another airline, they do shots and smoke cigars like Bond villains. 

It's to the film’s credit that the high tension of the flight is believable despite atrocious CGI. A Jasleen Royal song is deployed at the worst possible moment—and it somehow works. But the last hour is an unrelieved drag, with Bachchan’s gleeful prodding, Singh’s weeping and Devgn’s tired dutifulness. Vikrant’s parting shot, to a young pilot asking for advice, is, “Always take care of your passengers.” Had Runway 34 cared for its passengers, this flight might have been more bearable. 

 This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Heropanti 2: Review

Heropanti 2 gives you so much to think about it’s really a banquet for the mind masquerading as a feast for the eyes. For instance, the scene in which a bullet is removed from Tiger Shroff’s butt. Why is there a stripper doctor? Why does she say where she’s from (Bulgaria) while introducing herself? Why is she wearing a sash with ‘Prom Queen’ on it? Why is there a horse watching?

When Ahmed Khan’s film dropped its first poster, everyone pointed out it looked like that of John Wick 2. Unsurprisingly, poster art isn't the only thing borrowed from the Keanu Reeves franchise. A gaggle of assassins is sent after Babloo (Shroff), a hacker in hiding. He fights them in suit and tie. His contact is a man who goes by The Architect. It would seem the comparisons end there, but then you might remember that in John Wick 3, the character played by Asia Kate Dillon is non-binary (as are the actor themself). And in Heropanti 2, the big bad is Laila, a gender fluid magician who runs a crime syndicate.

Had the film been matter-of-fact about this choice, had Nawazuddin Siddiqui not chewed up every bit of scenery in sight, it might not have been so bad. But Laila—cackling, sashaying, maniacally stabbing—is just a punchline for Siddiqui, Khan and writer Rajat Arora. It continues Hindi cinema’s practice of making villains and freaks of those who don’t conform to traditional gender norms. It would be offensive if it wasn’t so stupid.

Laila wants to hack every bank in India on the last day of the financial year. Babloo is hired to run the operation. Like all Shroff heroes, the hacker (“Dimaag se tez aur badan se fit”) quickly grows a conscience and becomes a government agent. This simple enough story is told in hopelessly convoluted fashion, with Amrita Singh playing Babloo’s mother by bank loan and Tara Sutaria his love interest, Inaaya, also Laila’s sister. I don’t have the words to describe what Sutaria does in this role, except that no one should have to sit through this if the big payoff is Tiger.  

The general line on Shroff is that his somewhat dopey screen presence should be overlooked because he’s the only major star with genuine fighting skills. This is not in dispute. But what’s the point if the action scenes we get from him are so consistently inane? In this film, Shroff seems like he’s auditioning for Cirque du Soliel rather than fighting. One showdown in a basement parking is 10% violence, 90% fancy jumps. After eight years, if we know anything it’s that Tiger can do backflips. Show us something new.   

You will scarce believe some of the things said in this film. “There’s a zombie party down the road,” stripper doctor tells Inaaya. “This plumber will open all your pipes,” Babloo growls (double that entendre please). Best of all, Laila to Inaaya—“I’ll order four sisters like you, cash on delivery.” 

During the climactic showdown, Babloo is attacked by giant moving chess pieces. He gets buffeted, then shatters a knight with a flying kick. A reasonable metaphor for the cinema of Tiger Shroff, where physical leaps trump mental ones and games of skill are transformed into displays of daft force.   

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

'Chess of the Wind' still has the power to shock

 Every once in a while, there’s a little miracle involving a lost film. Rumours of its greatness, the memories of the few who had seen it, echoing down the decades. And then, out of nowhere, something turns up in an archive, in a spring cleaning—and there is a resurrection. For almost four decades, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess Of The Wind was as good as lost. Screened only once, at the 1976 Tehran International Film Festival, it was banned during the Iranian cultural revolution. A bootleg copy was passed around among cinephiles over the years, but no one thought they would ever see the film as it was meant to be. Then, in 2014, as if willed by the movie gods, the director’s son found the negative in an antiques store in Tehran.

The film can now be seen, in its startling original form, on MUBI. It takes place in a gothic mansion somewhere in the early 20th century (though the last shot in the film is the Iran of 1976, when the film was shot). Autocratic Hadji Amoo (Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz) rules over the household, which has recently come into the hands of the wheelchair-bound Lady Aghdas (Fakhri Khorvash), his stepdaughter, who is being wooed by one of two adopted brothers (the other is having an affair with her maid). When Hadji Amoo tries to take the house from Aghdas, she takes an extreme step (in a chilling bit of foreshadowing, one of the servants remarks how Aghdas’ mother, the former owner of the mansion, was handy with acid). And so Chess Of The Wind becomes a psychodrama, and a ghost story, building to a truly feverish last act.

If this sounds nothing like the Iranian cinema you have seen…that’s probably the case. Chess Of The Wind is far from the social realism of Abbas Kiarostami or the poetry of Mohsen Makhmalbaf. This is high melodrama, textured to an almost suffocating degree. The film is more like Rainer Werner Fassbinder in its vitriol, its grasping characters and its decaying grandeur. Just a few years before its release, the German had made The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, two women confined to a luxurious room—not unlike Aghdas and her maid (Shohreh Aghdashloo, who later acted in Kiarostami’s The Report and now works in American film and TV), down to the lesbian overtones in the scene where their hands intertwine in an erotic caress. This was surely a big reason for the film’s banning, though the scenes where the servants discuss forced conscription must have been politically explosive too.

This is an erotic film, but devoid of tenderness. Everything teeters on the edge of perversity. Hadji is rumoured to have a preference for young boys. After he’s felled by a blow of a flail, Aghdashloo’s heavy breathing as she helps carry the body out of the room seems to suggest other exertions. Later in the film, what starts out as a playful love scene between the maid and her lover morphs into one of violence. The music, though played on Iranian instruments, sounds like avant-garde jazz. Even the elements acquire an unstable feverishness as the film progresses, with the Greek chorus of women washing clothes finding themselves in the midst of a sudden storm.

It’s possible to imagine a phantom stage production of this film—most of the scenes are conversations between two, three, four people in one or the other palatial room or on the staircase, which sees several acts of violence. Yet, Aslani’s intricate long takes and close-ups of faces, objects and hands—especially hands—explodes the neutrality of theatre viewership.

Like Barry Lyndon (1975), this film is shot exclusive in natural light and candlelight. “At the time the story takes place, there was no power,” Aslani told The Film Stage. “So, realistically, it should be shot with candlelight for all of the obvious reasons, but the main point for me is about the shadows and what they hide. This light is a kind of cinematic expression, it enhances the obscurity of everything. Whatever these lights are revealing at any moment, they are hiding something at the same time.” The candles lend the proceedings an appropriately horror-movie flicker, never more effective than the surreal, hellish red sequence where Hadji suddenly appears, like the devil in Häxan, and Aghdashloo rises from a bath and creeps across the room like an awakened vampire.

At the start of this piece, I left out the step between rediscovery and rerelease—the restoration of Chess Of The Wind by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, under the aegis of The Film Foundation. The organisation’s invaluable work is getting an extended showcase on MUBI, with Aslani’s film, Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1981), Mário Peixoto’s Limit (1931) and Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa’s The Child Of Another (1975) already streaming on the platform. They will be joined in the coming months by Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960), Med Hondo’s Oh, Sun (1967), Sergei Parajanov’s The Color Of Pomegranates (1969), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object At Noon (2000), Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), and others. There’s no better place to start than Chess Of The Wind, which will shake up your notions about Iranian cinema.

This piece was published in Mint. 

A Hero: A good deed is punished

“How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a naughty world,” Portia says in The Merchant of Venice. We know by now that, in Asghar Farhadi’s films, it’s only a matter of time before well-intentioned candles are snuffed out. The Iranian is one of cinema’s reigning pessimists. He’s not a moralist in the traditional sense but someone interested in testing the limits of moral behaviour, especially when such behaviour is not to one’s advantage. More than any other director working, his films ask with uncomfortable directness: What do you think you'd do?  

A Hero, which played at Cannes last year and won the Grand Prix, begins with Rahim (Amir Jadidi) starting a two-day release from prison by meeting his brother-in-law on a construction site near the statue of Xerxes. We see him slowly make his way up the scaffolding. Farhadi doesn't usually favour the long drawn-out shots you'll often see in Iranian films; his cutting is more Hitchcockian. Farhadi making us aware of his protagonist's laboured ascent is a warning: Rahim’s happy to be out of prison and may have had a secret windfall, yet this will be a difficult slog. 

The windfall is a discovery his girlfriend, Malileh (Maryam Shahdaei), made while he was inside, a purse with no identification and 17 gold coins. Their plan is to sell the gold to pay off the large debt he owes Bahram, his ex-wife’s brother-in-law (he was in prison for non-payment). But somewhere along the way, Rahim’s conscience kicks in; his sister’s questions about the mysterious purse and delays at the merchant’s store seem to him divine warnings. And so, over the disappointment of Malileh, he leaves a message at the bank that he has someone’s gold coins. Soon, a distraught woman turns up and takes the bag from his sister while he’s out. 

At this point the story takes a very Farhadi turn. Rahim’s good deed is publicised by the prison authorities and picked up by the local media. All of a sudden, he’s a celebrity. A charity organization hosts a fundraiser so he can pay off Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh, wonderfully sceptical). It’s going so well, and then—like so many characters in Farhadi films—Rahim, rattled by a stony HR executive, makes one error of judgment. And everything unravels.

Did Farhadi have that moment himself, when he asked his student to sign over the idea to her film to him? Azadeh Masihzadeh participated in a workshop by Farhadi in 2014-15, where she made a short documentary called All Winners, All Losers (it’s on her YouTube channel, with English subtitles). The subject was one Mohammad Reza Shokri, whose story is clearly the basis for Rahim’s. Masihzadeh said she discovered and researched the case, and was shocked when Farhadi’s film turned it into fiction, giving her no credit. She filed a complaint with the Iranian Alliance of Motion Picture Guilds, who ruled in Farhadi's favour. Farhadi sued Masihzadeh for defamation. Masihzadeh sued Farhadi for copyright infringement. This month, Farhadi lost the defamation suit. The other case has gone before a second judge. 

Whatever you feel about the case—and the courts seem inclined towards Masihzadeh till now—Farhadi doesn’t come off well, possibly a plagarist, at best taking advantage of a power imbalance. But watching A Hero with some knowledge of the ongoing trial is a richer, if more conflicting, experience. The film asks what it means to be moral when reputations and livelihoods depend on you bending the truth. It’s possible to feel for Masihzadeh and to marvel at the thought of a director obsessed with moral grey areas landing himself in one: a meta-tale worthy of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up. 

Amir Jadidi plays Rahim as someone who’s self-aware enough to know that his open nature and ingratiating smile might open doors that his moral strictness has closed. We know Rahim isn’t making up the purse story but it’s nevertheless interesting to see Bahram complain that he was taken in by his innocent manner when he lent him money. Farhadi, as always, builds tragedy as an accumulative, causal thing. No single action of Rahim’s is irretrievably damaging. But placed in order, they snap together like locks.

 This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Dasvi: Review

Maddock Films once made a good movie, Hindi Medium, about education and personal betterment. A spiritual sequel, Angrezi Medium, showed diminishing returns but was kept afloat by the tenderness of Irrfan Khan in his final performance in a theatrical release. Dasvi is another variation, and by far the least essential. Tushar Jalota’s film, co-produced by Maddock and Jio Studios, is direct-to-OTT in the way films used to be direct-to-video: not worthy of a release in theatres, thrown out like so much chum into the vast seas of undiscriminating content on Netflix and JioCinema.

From the very first scene, where Ganga Ram Chaudhary (Abhishek Bachchan), chief minister of the fictional Harit Pradesh, mispronounces the names of Putin, Trudeau and Biden in a video, you know the kind of laboured ‘family’ comedy this will be. Chaudhary is soon behind bars in a teacher recruitment scam, but not before installing his wife, Bimla Devi (Nimrat Kaur), on the CM’s seat. After rebelling ineffectually against the tight ship run by superintendent Jyoti Deswal (Yami Gautam), he surprisingly decides to study and clear his 10th standard exams from prison.  

There’s nothing in Dasvi that doesn’t feel lazy. It looks like it’s been shot on two basic sets and Bachchan’s front lawn. A no-nonsense female professional is repeatedly reduced to the cliché of an angry cat. Sachin-Jigar underscore the jokes (such as they are) with brass farts and clownish keys. The graphics in the Twitter-storm montage—a dreaded mainstay of social media-era Hindi cinema—are stunningly amateur. There's no consistency in the lessons for the exams: Chaudhary is studying advanced math but doesn't know his letters or basic grammar. Then there’s the bit where he’s shown participating in the Indian freedom movement: so obvious, so stupid.

The film draws inspiration from political stories that are decades old: Ganga Ram and Bimla inspired by Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife, Rabri Devi, who did a similar switch back in 1997. Bimla posing with a handbag and getting a statue of herself made points to Mayawati’s time as Uttar Pradesh CM—another dated reference. The only recent parallel is former Haryana CM Om Prakash Chautala, who also served jail time in a teacher recruitment scam and sat for his 10th class exams there, in 2017. 

The film can’t seem to decide if Chaudhary is an oafish thug, a lovable scamp or a good soul gone astray, so Bachchan plays all these possibilities, often in the same scene. It’s not very impressive—Bachchan’s always had a heavy hand with comedy—though hardly as monotonous as Gautam’s straight-ace cop. Only Kaur has some fun with the blithely ambitious Bimla. Because she’s seduced by power almost from the start, we don’t get the satisfaction of seeing her break bad. But she’s the closest thing in this film to an actual unfeeling, power-hungry politician; Ganga Ram Chaudhary is sentimental whitewashing. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

What to watch after The French Dispatch

The pandemic may have deprived us of the chance of seeing Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch on the big screen but there’s some comfort in the fact that it’s finally streaming in India (on Disney+ Hotstar). The film is a triptych of stories (plus a prologue) set in Paris, each centring on a different piece by a fictional New Yorker-like magazine called 'The French Dispatch'. Working with his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman, composer Alexandre Desplat (in witty form), and a cast too expansive to list here, Anderson pushes his singular ornamental style to its limits. For those who were delighted (as I was) by the film and are keen to stay immersed in that world, here’s a selection of related features, documentaries and film criticism.

My Journey Through French Cinema (2016)

The French Dispatch is studded with references to Gallic cinema. If you are in the mood for more, there’s no better overview than the two cine tributes Bertrand Tavernier made towards the end of his life. In My Journey Through French Cinema, Tavernier talks about his inspirations—from François Truffaut and Jean Renoir to lesser-known figures like Guy Gilles—for over three hours, mixing anecdote and film appreciation. Not satisfied with this, he then made a companion series called Journeys Through French Cinema (2017), spread over seven hours.

La Chinoise (1967)

The middle story in The French Dispatch concerns two young students, played by Timothée Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri, and their participation in the fictional “Chessboard Revolution” of 1968. Though it unfolds mostly in black and white, it’s reminiscent of a 1967 colour film by Jean-Luc Godard about a group of young Maoists in Paris debating the merits of violent revolution. Shot in ravishing bold colour by Raoul Coutard, La Chinoise is alternately provocative, frustrating and tartly funny. This is Godard at the end of his first golden period, a year away from embarking on explicitly Marxist film-making. Anderson mimics the almost surreal fervour of Godard’s firebrands discussing politics. There’s another borrowing, on the soundtrack: a cover by Jarvis Cocker of the Mao Mao number from Godard’s film.

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1973)

As an American food writer named Roebuck Wright, Jeffrey Wright gives The French Dispatch’s most moving performance. We see him first as an older man, being interviewed on TV, where he’s asked about a famous piece he had written. We then see a younger Wright, on assignment to write about a chef, getting dragged into an adventure when his host, a police chief, gets a phone call saying his son has been kidnapped.

Wright is partially based on James Baldwin, another black, gay author and critic who lived in Paris for decades. In a documentary short from 1973 (streaming on MUBI), we see him spar with white English reporters and later relax in the company of black expatriates. It’s a fascinating mini-portrait, made poignant by Baldwin’s attempts to alternately evade and get through to his obtuse interviewers. The pain and pride of Baldwin finds an echo in Roebuck’s “solitary feast” monologue, in which he says, simply, “I chose this life.”

How Wes Anderson’s Style Changed After Animation (2019)

Anderson has such a distinct aesthetic that dissections of his films constitute a small cottage industry. One excellent theory about Anderson’s evolving style is put forward in this 11-minute video essay by Julian Palmer on his YouTube channel, The Discarded Image. Palmer argues that Anderson’s style underwent several subtle but recognisable changes after he made his first animation feature, Fantastic Mr Fox (2009). The films that followed were more “designed”, with increasingly complicated action choreographed like one would with stop-motion figures.

La Belle Noiseuse (1991)

In the first story in The French Dispatch, Benicio Del Toro plays a painter in prison and Léa Seydoux a guard who poses in the nude for him. This is a miniature riff on Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse. This 240-minute film is a deconstruction of the artistic process, a gradually unfolding power struggle between a great painter and a nude model.

Mon Oncle (1958)

There are several references to French director Jacques Tati, whose intricate gags have been an inspiration for Anderson in the past. The most pointed is in the very first scene. A waiter carries a tray laden with liqueurs up the winding diagonal stairwells of The French Dispatch building. This is a tribute to a scene in Mon Oncle in which Tati’s Monsieur Hulot takes a similarly circuitous path up the side of a building that looks much the same as this one.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Filming with fire: Behind Indian documentary's biggest year

(This was a cover story for Mint Lounge. It won a Red Ink award in 2023.) 

Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh were inside the plane, on the tarmac at Delhi airport. The makers of Writing With Fire knew the Academy would be announcing the shortlist of 15 for the Documentary Feature Oscar anytime. Their expectations were tempered—no Indian film had gotten this far. Thomas opened her phone and checked WhatsApp. She let out a shriek: “We made it!” Some six weeks later, Thomas and Ghosh were on solid ground—and on camera—when they became Oscar nominees: the fourth Indian feature ever, the first documentary.

This isn’t the only Indian non-fiction film in the past nine months to record a historic first. In February, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize , the top award for a non-American documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. And last July, Payal Kapadia’s A Night Of Knowing Nothing won the L’Oeil d’Or, awarded to the best documentary across categories at the Cannes Film Festival.

The critical success of these three films has propelled Indian non-fiction into a rare international spotlight. There have, of course, been several acclaimed documentary film-makers before them. Anand Patwardhan, the most well-known director currently working, won the top award at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), arguably the world’s biggest documentary showcase, for Vivek (Reason) (2018). Experimental film-maker Amit Dutta continues to churn out beautiful, idiosyncratic works of art. Still, over the last decade, something seemed to shift. Non-fiction cinema had always been the province of young, independent directors in India but increasingly, there was a willingness to experiment and push the boundaries of the form.

It started with small commercial releases—a rarity, then and now—for Jaideep Varma’s Leaving Home (2010), Faiza Ahmad Khan’s winsome Supermen Of Malegaon (2012), Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa’s sly Katiyabaaz (2013), and Nishtha Jain’s Gulabi Gang (2014). In 2016, Abhay Kumar’s Placebo, a hybrid documentary about the intense pressure on students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, streamed on Netflix. Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s An Insignificant Man (2016), a fly-on-the-wall look at the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, battled the censors before releasing in theatres. The Cinema Travellers, Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham’s film about mobile cinemas in rural India, premiered at Cannes in 2016 and was awarded a L’Oeil d’Or special mention. Rahul Jain’s Machines won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for cinematography at Sundance in 2017. “I really think better work has happened in India in non-fiction than in fiction (in recent years),” says Shaunak Sen. Certainly there’s more of a sense of individual vision, from the spooky animation in Placebo to the joyful musicality of Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar’s Up Down & Sideways (2017) to the jangly verité of An Insignificant Man.

And yet, the scene is far from ideal. For starters, you have to go to great lengths to see these films in India. Because there are barely any repertory theatres here, festivals are usually the only way documentaries make it to big screens. Even that isn’t possible a lot of the time—despite multiple festival showings and small commercial releases abroad, A Night of Knowing Nothing, Writing With Fire and All That Breathes have not screened in India yet. OTT platforms have shown little interest in showcasing creative documentaries. A good many of the Indian fiction films that have won international prizes in the last decade are streaming somewhere. But it’s as if Indian non-fiction doesn’t exist.

It’s tough to get an independent film made in India. It’s even tougher to make independent documentaries. Creative-minded independent documentaries with a political edge… really, it’s a miracle they exist. State funding in India is negligible; studio backing is non-existent. This means a good many of these films are being made with foreign grants or funds or as co-productions. The pool of talented personnel is small; a great fiction cinematographer or editor need not be as adept at documentary work. And, very often, there are political hurdles to cross. All this adds up to a complex, exciting moment for Indian non-fiction film.

Mud on the lens

Years before the elation on the tarmac, Thomas was on a dirt road in Uttar Pradesh. She was tracking Suneeta as she reported on illegal mining, a damaged road and a dharna in progress (Ghosh was filming at another location). Their shoes were caked with mud, they were tired from walking. Bigger problems presented themselves when an all-male crowd threatened to turn hostile. In the film, we see Suneeta gather herself several times before soldiering on, explaining that it’s to their benefit if she gets to talk about their issues. Finally, the crowd relents.

Suneeta is a journalist with Khabar Lahariya, a Dalit-led news agency run entirely by women. Thomas and Ghosh, who are married and have worked together for over a decade, approached them in 2016 to explore the possibility of a film. It helped that the women had seen their work and “knew our political lens”, Ghosh tells me when we meet in south Delhi. It was a fortuitous time, with Khabar Lahariya about to pivot away from print (it’s primarily digital now, with 555,000 subscribers on YouTube). One of the early scenes has Meera—one of three characters the film follows—explaining the basic functions of a mobile phone to the gathered reporters, several of whom have never owned one. In another scene, Meera teaches the English alphabet so they can identify the phone buttons.

Writing With Fire begins in 2016 and continues up till the 2019 general election. “We had a conversation with them, saying this is going to take time,” Thomas tells me. “Initially they would ask us, aren’t you finished yet? Then, after the first year, they just got bored.” We see Meera, Shyamkali and Suneeta at work, reporting on strikes, rapes, murders and the elections. In one tense sequence, a Hindu Yuva Vahini member Meera is interviewing pulls out a sword. We also see the women at home, with their sceptical families. On more than one occasion, they return from a long day’s reporting to immediately start cooking dinner at home.

The inequities of the caste system hang over the film from the first frame. The women being Dalit informs everything from their living conditions to the access they get to the stories they report (there’s one on the government’s failure to build free toilets). “In our region, if you are a journalist, it meant you were upper-caste,” Meera says (the film-makers too are forward caste). An old man tells Meera his house is out of the way because the whole village considers him untouchable. He ends by saying he can’t name anyone because they might kill him. (In a statement on their website on 21 March—a little over a week after the 2022 UP elections, won by the Bharatiya Janata Party—Khabar Lahariya said the film incorrectly showed them as “an organisation with a particular and consuming focus of reporting on one party”, indicating the BJP and its affiliates. The directors responded over email that their engagement had been “long and sustained”, and they believe the film “fairly represents their journalistic practices and the range of work that they do”.)

Writing With Fire looks like a layman’s idea of a documentary: skilful, unadorned handheld images. The makers split up to follow the women as they reported, Ghosh shooting on his own, Thomas with cameraperson Karan Thapliyal. They used Canon DSLRs and relied on natural light and the rugged backdrops to do their work for them. “It looked really cinematic,” says Ghosh, “like something out of Sholay. You are really going back to that Panavision landscape.”

“We are very different as people and as directors, so every time we collaborate there are lots of fireworks,” Thomas laughs. Ghosh edited as they went along, both to get a handle on the material and to be able to pitch for funding, while she worked on “bread-and-butter” commissions for Black Ticket Films, the company they started. “That saved our life,” Ghosh says. “If you are looking at something you shot in 2017 two years later, you won’t have the context of the day unless it’s edited.” In 2019, they stopped shooting, and the film started to shape up. The first lockdown of 2020 helped, with Ghosh and Thomas decamping to a house in Himachal Pradesh to work on the edit. “Editing can be a brutal process, so being in a healing space really helps,” Ghosh says. The film came together in time for a Sundance 2021 premiere, where it won the Audience Award and the Special Jury Award: Impact for Change.

Experiments with truth

“Intervention is a good word,” says Payal Kapadia. I'd actually said 'invention', but agree that 'intervention' has a nice ring to it—of formal practice, and also a tension between material and creator. I'm speaking to Kapadia, writer-director of A Night Of Knowing Nothing, and Ranabir Das, the film’s producer, editor and cinematographer, over Zoom. It has been eight months since the film premiered at Cannes, enough time for it to sink in that they beat directors like Todd Haynes, Andrea Arnold, Marco Bellocchio and Sergei Loznitsa to the L’Oeil d’Or.

A Night Of Knowing Nothing had its genesis in their time as students at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). In late 2016, Kapadia and Das started shooting on campus and interviewing their friends. They had no plan for what they wanted to do with the footage. “We would shoot now and then, when something came up,” Kapadia says. “It was going on, like a parallel life.” It was only in 2019 that things began to coalesce. A French producer Kapadia was working with suggested she make this while they awaited funding for a fiction project. “If you are making films independently,” she says, “you have to do two-three things at once, otherwise it’s very difficult.”

Around this time, Kapadia and Das found the connecting thread. At regular intervals in the film, a woman identified only as L reads her own letters to a lover who has stopped replying. We learn later that he belongs to a forward caste, while hers is an oppressed one, and that his parents oppose the relationship. L is the invention (or intervention) I was referring to: The letters were written by Kapadia and fellow FTII student and film-maker Himanshu Prajapati. The interviews Kapadia and Das had amassed over the years, and their own experiences, informed the letters, which are bruisingly intimate and politically charged. Beautifully read by Bhumisuta Das, they reminded me of the ghostly narrators in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), films that blend documentary into their fictional narratives.

Kapadia, who mentions Marker as a favourite, says they didn’t want to make a film that was “simply factual or chronological”. “I was very interested in this kind of hybrid, which can very seamlessly use fiction and non-fiction to complement each other,” she says. L’s words are overlaid on everyday scenes from the FTII campus, shot in ghostly black and white by Das (on digital, but treated to look like 16mm film), and images of student protests that marked the appointment of former actor Gajendra Chauhan as FTII chairman. Film-maker friends shared their footage of protests on other campuses. From various archives, they sourced vintage 8mm colour film of weddings and parties. The mix is hallucinatory and unsettling, underscoring L’s apprehensions about her relationship and the state of the nation.

At times, A Night of Knowing Nothing is right at the border of experimental cinema. In this it aligns itself with a long tradition of documentarists who use the techniques of experimental film. Kapadia herself pushed these boundaries with her student film And What Is the Summer Saying (2018), where hand-drawn images are superimposed on the landscape (that film’s dream imagery and voice-over seem to anticipate her first feature). Yet, A Night Of Knowing Nothing’s formal innovations accentuate, rather than obscure, its concern for embattled public institutions, religious minorities and critics of all stripes.

The sky is falling

In 2018, Shaunak Sen was in Cambridge on a fellowship. It had been three years since his first film, Cities Of Sleep, had released and he was eager to “pour (himself) into something”. That something turned out to be The Peregrine, a 1967 memoir by J.A. Baker. Sen had nothing more than a minor interest in ornithology but the author’s obsession with falcons spoke to him in a profound way. He also read Helen Macdonald’s H Is For Hawk, a dazzling 2014 memoir about loss and recovery. These texts attached themselves to an image he had been living with for years. “Before I have characters or a theme, I have some sense of vague texture at the back of my head—a sensorium,” he tells me over coffee. “For me, it was the grey hazy monotone skies you see in Delhi.”

When Sen returned to Delhi, he began to look for people who had a deep relationship with the skies or birds. He chanced upon two brothers in west Delhi, Nadeem and Saud, who tended to injured black kites. Sen and a small crew followed the brothers and their associate, Salik, for two years. While that might seem excessive, Sen says this level of immersion is necessary to get a sense of the rhythm of a place. It also took time to get the brothers to stop noticing the camera. “The idea is to recede completely,” he tells me. “I would say to them, go about your work, aaj hum deewar hain (pretend we're a wall).”

Sen knew he wanted to make a film about non-human life in an urban setting, what he called “life writ large”. His team started by listing visual ideas—a snail crawling across a garbage dump, for instance—on a large board. “The footage we have of animals in the city can make three other films,” Sen says. He was clear they weren’t making a nature documentary, though—everything would be as the naked eye sees it. “None of us has any training in wildlife shooting, which is actually a good thing,” he says. “But it took forever.”

The majority of documentaries, even very good ones, are built around testimony and narrative. All That Breathes is unique in being driven by the visual. Sen uses slow pans and changes of perspective to construct scenes that reward the patient viewer. One gradually unfolding shot shows a spider web in the foreground, then reveals a night watchman and two dogs in the background, then shifts focus again to catch two lizards in the foreground. When we met, Sen spoke admiringly of the films of Viktor Kossakovsky and Gianfranco Rosi, masters of the languid, slowly revealed frame. He was able to get Ben Bernhard, cinematographer on several Kossakovsky films, to shoot part of All That Breathes; after the German left, the film was shot by Riju Das (Saumyananda Sahi, a cinematographer who straddles fiction and non-fiction, also worked on it for a while).

Sen knew the film he wanted to put together was tricky: staccato scenes of the brothers interspersed with three- or four-minute takes of natural life. He felt unhappy and adrift until he watched The Truffle Hunters (2020)—a documentary about old men and their dogs in Piedmont, Italy—and recognised its editing was the key to unlock his film. Fortuitously, he was able to hire Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, the Danish editor of The Truffle Hunters and The Act Of Killing (2012), arguably the most famous documentary of the last decade. Bengtsen encouraged Sen to go with his gut. “What is the stomach saying?” she would ask when he deliberated too long. Her process involved taking prints of the scenes and arranging them on a big board. Every day, Sen would turn up to find the scenes had moved position.

The stormy present

In All That Breathes, Nadeem, Saud and Salik have a brush with the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protests and the subsequent riots in the Capital. The toxicity of the skies and the air finds an echo in the ugliness of political polarisation. Indeed, these three very different films are linked, first and foremost, by their politics. The murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh is noted in A Night Of Knowing Nothing and Writing With Fire. The CAA protests are an important part of All That Breathes and Kapadia’s film. These film-makers studied at FTII, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia—universities that have been the site of frequent student protests against the present Union government and have consequently had to endure vilification and physical intimidation.

Anyone who embarks on a politically charged documentary in India knows they will have to deal with government censorship. Patwardhan’s Vivek, about sectarian and caste violence, was denied a censor exemption—standard procedure so films can play at festivals—by the Union ministry of information and broadcasting. It was only when Patwardhan appealed in the Kerala high court that it was allowed to play at the 2019 International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK). In 2017, in the run-up to the same festival, the ministry had refused censor exemptions for three documentary shorts—March March March, The Unbearable Being Of Lightness and In The Shade Of Fallen Chinar, all on politically sensitive subjects. That year, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) had asked the makers of An Insignificant Man to get a no-objection certificate (NOC) from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his predecessor, Sheila Dikshit, a bizarre condition that was finally quashed by the now defunct Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). Kamal Swaroop’s The Battle Of Banaras (2015), shot during campaigning for the 2014 Lok Sabha election (by then Gujarat chief minster Narendra Modi, among others), was rejected by the CBFC and the FCAT before the Delhi high court ordered its release (it remains mostly unseen). Director Ashvin Kumar battled the censors on Inshallah, Football (2010) and Inshallah, Kashmir (2012), even though both won National Awards. More recently, veteran documentarists Rahul Roy and Saba Dewan were named in a chargesheet by the Delhi police as co-conspirators in the 2020 riots for being part of a WhatsApp group.

In a worrying new development, several documentary makers told me, on condition of anonymity, that money due to them from foreign grants and funds was being withheld, for no clear reason. “It’s happening to particular kinds of films and particular kinds of film-makers,” one of them said. This, in turn, is raising concerns among funders in the West involved with politically sensitive Indian non-fiction projects.

If foreign grants become harder to access, it would greatly affect the means of funding for Indian non-fiction makers. There are only a few home-grown options for documentary funding: India Foundation for the Arts, Public Service Broadcasting Trust (currently not commissioning) and Films Division (whose fate is unclear given the announcement by the government to “merge” it with the National Film Development Corporation). As a result, Indian documentary-makers pitch for a variety of foreign grants and funds or enter into co-productions, which entails making a part of the film in the country offering the financial support. A Night Of Knowing Nothing was funded by a Sundance grant, the IDFA-Bertha fund, and regional and national funds from France. Writing With Fire also tapped multiple international funding agencies. All That Breathes was private equity funded, a process in which the funder recoups a prefixed amount once the film is sold and then enters into profit-sharing. The Cinema Travellers got money from six different grants, which Madheshiya and Abraham assured me is quite normal for an independent documentary.

A creative documentary is by its nature a long-term project. The films by Sen, Kapadia, and Thomas and Ghosh took four-six years to make. “Film-making is quite lonely if it’s not a big production,” Kapadia admits. After fighting to pitch a film, fund and make it and get it into leading festivals, it’s no wonder directors might feel that pushing for distribution in India—a country that watches little independent cinema—is one battle too many. Since physical media is all but extinct in India and documentaries hardly ever make it to theatres, I looked at some of the OTT platforms to see the options available if a viewer were inclined to watch a good Indian documentary. Disney+ Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video had almost no Indian non-fiction films. Netflix, which once hosted films like Fireflies In The Abyss (2015) and Celluloid Man (2012), has just a handful now. Only MUBI, with 24 titles in its library, offers some choice. The best option is still YouTube, where one can access the extensive archives of PSBT and Films Division, the works of directors like Patwardhan and Lalit Vachani, and recent milestones like Placebo and An Insignificant Man.

“There is no ecosystem,” Nilotpal Majumdar, head of the non-fiction incubator DocedgeKolkata, gently insists over the phone—no funding, no government support, no audience. Over the last two decades, Docedge has been trying to build one. This yearly event brings together in-progress documentary projects and various stakeholders (broadcasters, producers, distributors). The film-makers are mentored in intensive workshops, working with experts who help hone the pitches, before they present to potential collaborators. Docedge was the first incubator of its kind in Asia, and remains the only one in India, Majumdar says. Every film-maker I spoke to mentioned it as a game-changer.

Non-fiction film in India today is a tight-knit scene, with directors mentioning each other in conversation and being thanked in the credits of each other’s films. Some are trying to give back to the community. Directors Khushboo Ranka, Shaunak Sen and Archana Phadke (About Love) are planning an initiative called India Docs. “Other countries have funding for global projects; here we don’t have funding even for Indian projects,” Ranka tells me. “Development funding is the most difficult to get but it is the most critical. It becomes a magnet for additional funding.” India Docs will offer a development fund of Rs 5 lakh for non-fiction films to get off the ground.

Despite all the hurdles, there’s every reason to be cautiously optimistic. “The outside world was always curious about Indian documentary but now they believe in it,” Majumdar says. Sen thinks that in 10 years’ time, we will look back on the past year or two as a moment of major change. Recent Indian fiction films like Prateek Vats’ Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019), Achal Mishra’s Gamak Ghar (2019) and Arun Karthick’s Nasir (2020) have used the grammar of non-fiction in fascinating ways. Hopefully, the current will flow the other way as well, and documentaries will start using more of the techniques and visual strategies of fiction. In Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), an exquisite work of metafiction, the film-maker tells the cinephile conman he’s following, “This camera is here so you can explain things that people might find hard to understand or accept.” At a time when understanding and acceptance are in short supply, we can only hope cameras will be there to explain.

Published in Mint Lounge.

RRR: Review

RRR has the most amazing meet-cute. A bridge creaks as a steam engine chugs across. There's a mishap, and the river below catches fire. A boy on a raft is caught in a flaming circle, debris falling around him. It seems hopeless but then two men, one on the bridge, the other on the banks, lock eyes. Instantly, with no words exchanged, they start to execute a ridiculously complex rescue involving a horse, a motorbike, a long rope and a generous interpretation of the laws of physics. There’s also a flag with ‘vande mataram’ on it, which struck me as a needless detail until its function was revealed. It was a reminder that while S.S. Rajamouli’s action may not always seem sensible, everything’s usually there for a reason.

Though Raju and Akhtar are meeting for the first time, we’ve encountered them earlier, in their spectacular individual ‘entry scenes’. Raju (Ram Charan), an officer in the British army, singlehandedly pummels into submission a large protesting crowd. And Akhtar, actually a Gond tribal named Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.), fools a wolf into chasing him and ends up apologizing to a tiger (don’t ask). Bheem is in Delhi to rescue his niece, who’s been abducted by the sadistic General Scott (Ray Stevenson) and his evil wife and is being kept as an expert henna-applier. Raju, charged with finding Bheem, poses as a revolutionary. Neither knows what the other looks like, and they become fast friends after the bridge rescue.

Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem were actual early 20th century Telugu revolutionaries. RRR is not so much a biopic as a wildly operatic imagining of their partnership. These leaps of fiction allow Rajamouli to break with tradition and frame the freedom struggle in triumphant terms. Yes, there’s plenty of Indians tortured and killed, but the real point of the film is Raju and Bheem coming up with ever more inventive ways to exterminate comically evil white men. RRR essentially asks: what if we were the scary ones? It’s the same wishfulness that drove Inglourious Basterds, victimhood transformed into righteous superpowered strength. 

Fans of the Baahubali films might miss the world-building; three hours long, RRR keeps a tight focus on Raju and Bheem. Yet, the three films have a lot in common. Rajamouli works through similar themes, lionizing the tribal strongman, with his connection to the earth and the forest, as well as the archetypal (Hindu) warrior. Though it’s more subtle than Baahubali 2, with all its talk of kshatriya valour, RRR’s emphasis on ‘lineage’ suggests that Rajamouli continues to be impressed by the neatness of the caste system (adivasis are referred to as sheep who become agitated when one of their lambs goes astray). There’s a good deal of Hindu iconography, with Raju transforming into a Ram-like figure and Alia Bhatt cameoing as his partner, Sita. 

When Bheem tells the tiger he’s sorry that he has to use him for his own purposes, I was expecting some sort of payoff. What I got was beyond my wildest dreams, with Bheem attacking a party at Scott’s mansion with a menagerie of wild animals. For five blissful minutes, the screen is a mess of tigers, wolves and stags crashing around, impaling and dismembering British soldiers. It’s the craziest of RRR’s set pieces, though the one in which Raju is perched on Bheem’s shoulders the whole time runs it close. The poor Brits lose on every front. When an officer tries to shame Bheem with his European dance moves, Raju kicks off the thumping ‘Naatu’ and the duo easily win the first revolutionary Indo-British dance-off. 

‘Naatu’ is a welcome light touch in a film that gets high on macho posturing. So strong is the male energy that the two love interests barely register as romantic figures (Olivia Morris' Jenny is there because she’s useful, Sita is practically a goddess). Desire is sublimated into the most ardent of male friendships. In one scene, Raju grooms his friend for a date (after, one imagines, bathing and dressing him). “He is a volcano,” he longingly says later. “When you looked at me like that,” Bhim says, “I just felt like competing with you.” If that’s what the kids are calling it these days. 

RRR subtly recasts the Indian freedom struggle as a primarily Hindu movement. Lord Ram literally appears at the end to defeat the British. There’s a lot of ‘vande mataram’ glimpsed and shouted. The song sequence that accompanies the closing credits pays tribute to freedom fighters across the centuries—as far as I noticed, no Muslims or Christians, one Sikh, the rest Hindus. Akhtar is merely a disguise for Bheem to cast off; Muslims and Sikhs figure only as powerless members of the crowd. RRR is delirious fun and not a virulent majoritarian film—it might just displace one from theatres—but it’s telling that the pan-religious overtures that used to be such a big part of Indian commercial cinema are now seen as unnecessary. When you buy a ticket to a Rajamouli film, you’re paying for the bonkers action fantasia. The benign Hindu rashtra fittings come free. 

 This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Bachchhan Paandey: Review

Without intending to be, Bachchhan Paandey is a neat commentary on the options available to talented character actors in Hindi cinema. You can play it straight and escape with your dignity (Saharsh Kumar Shukla, Abhimanyu Singh). You can ham it up and book yourself a dozen other teeth-grinding roles (Sanjay Mishra, Pankaj Tripathi). Or you can collect the cheque and hope no one asks you why you’re playing the mute mother of Akshay Kumar, who’s just three years younger than you (Seema Biswas). 

Then there’s Arshad Warsi, whose career has stagnated to the point that a third lead in a big film counts as an unqualified win. If you’re a Warsi fan—which is to say, a moviegoer with good taste—it’s impossible not to wince through the film’s ham-handed attempts to pay tribute to his legacy as a sidekick hero. “Secondary heroes often overshadow the real ones,” aspiring director Myra (Kriti Sanon) tells struggling actor Vishu (Warsi), citing Circuit in Munna Bhai MBBS. This is empty flattery; Bollywood is almost always at the service of the star. The one popular solo lead Warsi originated, the lawyer in Jolly LLB, was passed on to Akshay Kumar in Jolly LLB 2. 

Myra and Vishu are in the dusty Uttar Pradesh town of Baagwa to stalk dreaded gangster Bachchhan Paandey (Kumar) and gather enough detail to make a film on his life. This was also the premise of Karthik Subbaraj’s deliriously entertaining 2014 Tamil film Jigarthanda, which has now, somewhat belatedly, been remade in Hindi. But while Subbaraj is a director with style to burn, Farhad Samji is basically a writer who has churned out so much successful cringe comedy for so long that he’s making his own films now. When the stuttering jokes commenced, I braced for a long, familiar slog.

Yet, as the film went on, I found I was rather enjoying myself, not a feeling I'm accustomed to when imbibing something by the writer of two Golmaals, three Housefulls and the matchless Street Dancer 3D. It’s not that the film was particularly good—it just wasn’t bad for a surprisingly long time. Gavemic U Ary’s cinematography was quite fetching. There were some nice throwaway details, like gangsters playing flip the bottle in the background, and Warsi’s perfectly timed “What’s up?” to a henchman on a deserted road in the dead of night. And one brilliant gag: gangster Kandi (Shukla) racing home in anguished slow motion, Tadap Tadap blaring on the soundtrack, to try and prevent a family viewing of a blue film. 

After Paandey gets wind of his pursuers and decides to star in his own biopic, the film loses steam. Because it’s Kumar in the lead, there’s a tepid backstory that explains why Paandey became a brutal killer. Jacqueline Fernandez is mercifully dispatched after a few mispronunciations and a song; no such luck with Tripathi’s Gujarati acting coach. More fundamentally, the film never works out why Myra and Vishu, who are supposed to be relatable empathetic types, remain unperturbed by all the torturing and killing happening around them. 

In the opening scene, as Paandey takes his time setting a journalist on fire, Pendulum (Singh) tells the victim: “This is just a formality. You’re already dead.” The line isn’t there in the Tamil film—which is notable only because there’s hardly another moment where Samji’s film improves on Subbaraj’s. The remake is just a formality. Jigarthanda has already killed.   

 This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Jhund: Review

A man stands on the railway tracks, in the path of an oncoming train. He’s disheveled and frail, probably in his twenties but seemingly done with life. We brace for suicide by train. At the last moment, he jumps to safety. As he catches his breath, he hears the commentary from a football game. He climbs over the wall—there’s always a wall in Jhund—and joins the spectators. He overhears a team talking about a missing goalkeeper. And just like that, he’s in front of goal, making a save.  

Sports isn’t life in Jhund, it’s a lifeline. Time and again, the film reminds us: these are the stakes, this is what it means to be playing. On the one hand, there’s the same hard life, but with some self-respect and acclaim; on the other is disappointment, incarceration, even death. Most Hindi sports films dedicate themselves to the glory of the school, the nation, the struggle of the talented underdog. Jhund is about barriers erected by caste and the lengths those without privilege must go to surmount them. That it tells a tough story with colour and humour and style more than justifies the hopes placed on Nagraj Manjule’s Hindi debut.

It's an indication of where its gaze will be concentrated that Jhund doesn’t start with Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan). Instead, in a wonderful opening montage with an Ajay-Atul theme that splits the difference between Ennio Morricone and AR Rahman, we’re introduced to the youth of Gaddi Godam, a slum in Nagpur, snatching jewelry, cruising the neighbourhood, getting high. Bachchan doesn’t even get an ‘entry’ scene: instead, Don (the charismatic Ankush Gedam), on the run from upper-caste bullies, turns a corner and runs into him. It’s a wry nudge from Manjule—for caste to make it into a mainstream Hindi film, it literally needs to crash the party.

Vijay, a teacher at a local school, is intrigued by Don and his wisecracking friends. When he sees them play football in the rain with an empty canister, something clicks. The next day, he turns up with a ball and offers them five hundred rupees if they’ll play amongst themselves. He does the same the day after that, and on until they stop expecting to be paid but want to continue playing. As their skill increases, Vijay organizes a game with the school team. Symbolically, the jhund enters not from the front gate—where their friends are being denied entry—but by scaling the wall. They’re dressed to the nines: shades, suspenders, caps, boots, a statement of pride before inevitable defeat.

Manjule has fun staging the game—my favourite detail is the delighted spectator in a floral shirt of the sort Bachchan might have worn in the ‘70s—but it’s really made resonant by what comes later. Vijay’s team sits in his drawing room and, one by one, they start to talk about their lives. Though the mood is one of camaraderie, the stories are disturbing and sad, and everyone’s in tears by the end. This scene could easily have been inserted before the game, to key up its emotional impact. But Manjule knows that’s too easy, too quintessentially sports movie. 

Like Sairat, Jhund is a film of two contrasting halves. Another director might have ended with the school game, but Manjule keeps expanding the ambit, as Vijay tries to send his proteges and others like them across the country to a world slum soccer tournament. While this sacrifices the film's tight focus, it gradually helps reveal a vast, broken system. One subplot involves Rinku Rajguru’s tribal girl not being able to apply for a passport until she produces identity proof, which her family doesn’t have (there’s a pointed reference to the government’s ruinous citizenship drive). Their search for something this fundamental involves luck and a couple of good turns. Manjule isn’t known for giving his characters an easy time; here at least he places people with power in a position where they can do the right thing. 

Bachchan is at his gentlest, a quietly determined Vijay to rival the many explosive ones he’s played. There’s one concession to the audience—a big speech he gives in court. The curious thing is that while Jhund absolutely benefits from Bachchan’s presence, it’s not difficult to imagine the film with another actor. Yet, it’s unlikely the film could have been made, in Hindi and on this scale, without his participation. It’s not Vijay’s film, it's Don's and Baba's and Razia's and all the other youngsters. But, in one crucial way, it might also be Bachchan’s. 

There’s really nothing in recent Hindi cinema like Jhund. The grammar employed here can be found instead in other Indian language cinemas: Marathi (Manjule’s Fandry and Sairat), Tamil (Kaala, Pariyerum Perumal, Karnan, Sarpatta Parambarai), Malayalam (Kammattipadam) and others. It’s not just that these films concern themselves with the realities of caste and the rural and urban poor. They also seem more agile, more adventurous and alive to the world around them. Several times in the film, Vijay uses the word zariya: sports as a means to a better life. In its unflinching but euphoric manner, Jhund shows a way to a more charged Hindi cinema. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.