The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni

 

Soad Hosni starred in more than 80 films, became an Arab cinema icon, married four times, and finally, committed suicide in 2001. A straightforward biopic on her life would have been intriguing enough, but Lebanon-born Rania Stephan decided to go a step further. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni, which plays at Khoj Studios this fortnight, uses clips from the actor’s films, allowing Hosni to narrate her own “story”. Stephan spoke to Uday Bhatia about using an artist’s work to rewrite their life.

What made Hosni such a compelling subject for you?

I was born and raised in Lebanon, but I did my cinema studies at the University of LaTrobe in Melbourne. We studied world cinema, from Hollywood to experimental cinema, from new wave to Japanese cinema, everything except Arabic cinema. One day, I stumbled upon a Soad Hosni film at an aunt’s place. She used to watch Arabic films on VHS [tapes] that she’d borrow from the local Lebanese grocer.

I was subjugated by Soad Hosni and the film and realised that I didn’t know this popular Egyptian cinema. I decided to do my BA Honours thesis on Soad Hosni. My fascination dates from back then. Ever since, I always felt that I owed her something, because she brought me back to a cinema that spoke my language, Arabic.

What did Hosni mean to viewers of Egyptian cinema?

Soad Hosni is the symbolic daughter of modern Egypt, that of the 1952 Revolution. Her career spanned from the late ’50s until the early ’90s, a golden age of Egyptian cinema. At the time, cinema reflected the concerns at stake in society as well as issues the Revolution wanted to promote, such as mixity between girls and boys, marriage of love versus the old-fashioned arranged marriage, girls in public spheres, schools, leisure and work places. Hosni was not the only actress embodying these roles; however, her particularity stems from this unique persona she created, a mix of sensual, sweet, affectionate, naughty, cute, physical and witty, which is rare in cinema.

She was neither the stereotypical femme fatale nor the effaced girl next door. She was versatile, she could sing, dance, act as a comedian and a tragedian. The “Zoozoo” character she plays in Take Care of Zoozoo (1972) made her a star, because in representing this special mix of qualities, she epitomised the modern Arabic woman at the time.

You’ve used clips from Hosni’s films to present a portrait of the artist. What were the advantages of working in this fashion?

Soad Hosni died in a tragic manner in London in 2001. This provoked a shock wave in the Arab world. Nobody believed that “The Cinderella of the Egyptian Screen” could die. For me, it triggered the desire to make a film and pay homage to her talent.

The only person that I would have liked to meet, talk to and film was her, but she was gone. So I thought that the best way to know an actress was to investigate her body of work, to revisit it, question it, and ask, what does this material tells us? This is how the idea of using only excerpts from her films came about. It was the first fundamental principle of the film.

The second was this intuition that the use of fictional elements could create another fiction in themselves. This intuition was confirmed only when I finished editing. During the whole time, I was oscillating between great pleasure in working with images from cinema and fiction films and great anxiety, not knowing if it was going to work.

You were working on the film during your residency at Edgware, which is where Hosni died. Did that affect the way you went about making it?

The project started in 2001, right after Hosni disappeared. I started to collect the VHS material, view the films, break them down etc. The film took ten years to achieve! The Edgware Road Residency, which came in 2010, was a great opportunity to reflect on my work and further confirm my intuition – being around the place where she died – that I didn’t want to dwell on her “real” life but only deal with her filmed existence, her persona.

How did you get hold of the hundreds of clips that make up this film?

All the material comes from tapes that I brought from a local VHS store in downtown Cairo – 76 films out of the 82 of her body of work.

You were quoted in an interview as saying that the film is “a tribute to [Hosni’s] work, not about the person”. Would you argue against viewing this film as a biopic?

The film is built as a tragedy in three acts, told by a dead actress. It works on many layers. I did a lot of research about her and there are many references in the film to her “real” life. But one of the main points of the film is to show how an actress is forever stuck in her image and can’t escape it; even when she dies, it is she who cries on her dead self.

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni will screen from Sat Aug 3-Sun Aug 18 at Khoj Studios. 

Chor Chor Super Chor: Review

If you’re a Deepak Dobriyal fan, you might want to skip Chor Chor Super Chor. It’s too much to take, watching him light up the screen every chance he gets and yet be reduced to mouthing lyrics like “Gaali dete hoton ko main pappi deke jod doon”. A song sequence, by the way, in which he and his friends literally abduct his crush and push her around on a moving bus. In Delhi. At night. Sometimes you have to wonder whether our filmmakers actually think about what they’re putting on screen.

Even those familiar with the post-interval self-destructiveness of our films will be surprised by the nosedive this one takes. Some crisp direction by first-timer Rajesh K sees Chor Chor Super Chor through to the interval without any major dents to its pride. Satbir (Dobriyal) is part of a gang of conmen, but wants to go straight. He meets a nice girl, gets a job dressing up as giant samosa, the usual. But once he and his former associates are exposed, he has to undo the damage by pretending – and here’s where the film loses the plot – that the cons they pulled were all a big joke.

Whether the screenwriters ran out of ideas or decided that they didn’t want to do a movie full of little cons is up for debate. Whatever the reason, by the time the film starts to skewer – or mildly poke – reality TV, it’s all over. Yet, there’s enough in that enjoyable first half to suggest that Rajesh and his crew, especially cinematographer Rakesh Haridas, have a smarter caper movie in them. As for Dobriyal, he’s the Nawazuddin who never got a break. Someone give him a proper role in a good movie.

This review appeared in Time Out.

The Pope is Dead: Phil Ramone (1934-2013)

This appeared a while ago under the title 'In the Backroom of Pop' as an op-ed in Indian Express. 

Last week, on March 30, Phil Ramone died of a brain aneurysm at 79. If you feel like you’ve heard the name before but can’t quite remember where, go fish out your old Billy Joel or Paul Simon CDs. Chances are, one of them will have “Produced by Phil Ramone” written on the back. Four words, seen on scores of album sleeves; words that meant the difference between an unfinished thought and a hit single, a limited release and a gold record. Ramone’s fingerprints are all over rock, pop and jazz history. From the tortured sounds of Blood on the Tracks to the polished Genius Loves Company, his discography was — to borrow a phrase from another of his collaborators — river deep, mountain high.

He began as a musician himself. A violin prodigy, he moved from his native South Africa to New York and studied classical music at Juilliard. A stint as an assistant in JAC Studios was his first up-close look at the world of sound recording. In 1958, at 24, he launched his own studio, called A&R. Soon he was working as an engineer on albums by John Coltrane and Ray Charles. It was in these early years that he made one of his most famous recordings. Remember Marilyn Monroe breathily singing, “Happy Birthday Mister President” to John F. Kennedy in 1962? Phil Ramone recorded that — and received a thank-you kiss from the star later on.

An important breakthrough came via a 1964 album that paired saxophonist Stan Getz and pianist Antônio Jobim with guitarist João Gilberto and his wife, a charmingly monotone singer called Astrud Gilberto. Getz/ Gilberto set off a bossa nova craze in the US and won Ramone a Grammy for Best Engineered Sound. Ramone later explained that the “hushed intensity” of songs like “The Girl from Ipanema” was achieved by miking the session as if it was a nightclub gig, huddling the musicians together and dimming the lights. Over the next few years, he’d record Quincy Jones and Frank Sinatra (both of whom he’d have long associations with), Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, Paul McCartney’s Ram, Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me” and BJ Thomas’ “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head”.

As the 1960s came to an end, Ramone made the shift to production. When Paul Simon’s regular producer Roy Halee couldn’t make a session, Ramone oversaw the recording of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”. This led to Ramone producing several key Simon albums (the two reunited on 2011’s So Beautiful or So What). More successful still was his partnership with Billy Joel. On the 1978 album The Stranger, Ramone helped the singer achieve a bigger, tougher sound. Joel, in turn, never forgot to mention his fellow New Yorker’s role in his transformation from semi-successful singer-songwriter to stadium-filling rockstar. In between, Ramone also helped Bob Dylan spill his guts on record with the alternately vitriolic and self-lacerating Blood on the Tracks.

Self-effacing though he was, Ramone’s suggestions often had a transformational effect on the tracks he engineered and produced. Talking to Alec Baldwin on the internet radio show Here’s the Thing, Joel likened working with Ramone to collaborating with a great musician. “He knows how to play the studio like we know how to play our instruments,” he said. He recalled how Ramone rescued “Only the Good Die Young” from its early avatar as a reggae number, and how he came up with the idea of a “backward samba” rhythm for “Just the Way You Are”. A similarly innovative solution was provided by Ramone for the two Duets albums Frank Sinatra recorded in the 1990s. He devised a fibre-optic system that connected singers in different locations, allowing Sinatra in Los Angeles to duet, in “real time”, with Tony Bennett in New York and Liza Minnelli in Brazil.

With 14 Grammys — 15, if you count the lifetime achievement award he received in 2005 — Ramone is one of the most successful producers of all time. Still, it’s difficult to deny that many of his clients tended to be inoffensive and radio-friendly. Unlike Phil Spector or Jerry Wexler, Ramone would never become synonymous with a particular genre of music; unlike Sam Phillips, he’d never be credited with birthing a new style. (“If you think you have a style and you perpetrate that onto people, you’re hurting the very essence of their creativity,” he said in an interview with Billboard magazine.) Even his moniker, “the Pope of Pop”, seems to connote wealth and success, rather than energy or daring.

Debates over his artistic legacy notwithstanding, Ramone’s place in music history is secure. “Am I fussy?” he asked in his 2007 memoir, Making Records. “You bet, and the music world is a better place for it.” He extended that fussiness to everyone who sought his help, from André Previn to James Morrison. That he was not just respected but loved by his collaborators is evident from the tributes that poured in after his death. “His immense talents were only surpassed by the gigantic size of his heart,” posted Quincy Jones on his website. Stevie Wonder was even more emphatic: “Truly a tragic loss for us on earth but what a wonderful blessing for heaven”. Amen.

Bajatey Raho: Review

Most great directors will tell you that the trick is to assume the audience is a step ahead. Of course, those of us fed on a steady diet of Bollywood have more realistic expectations. We’ll settle for not being viewed as ten-year-olds with short attention spans, which is how the makers of Bajatey Raho obviously see us. Maybe they aren’t that far off. Midway through the film, as plot holes filled with the steady rain of logical inconsistency and forced humour, we had the very childish urge to get up and say, “No more. We don’t like.”

What's an easy way to negate a dependable comic cast headed by Dolly Ahluwalia, Ranvir Shorey and Vinay Pathak? Add a palpably confused Tusshar Kapoor to the mix. The foursome is out to get Sabharwal (Ravi Kishan), a crooked businessman whose ponzi scheme Ahluwalia’s husband inadvertently ran, and who died shortly after he was arrested for it. For some reason, the court orders Mummyji (Ahluwalia) and her son Sukhi (Kapoor) to pay the investors back their money. We expected a copy of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less to turn up on screen at some point, but apparently the writers weren’t done consulting it.

We could forgive director Shashant Shah (Dasvidaniya, Chalo Dilli) if the cons pulled were inventive or unexpected, but Bajatey Raho’s plot twists can be seen from space. An uninspired script makes matters worse, forcing the actors to work hard and sell laughs that just aren’t there. Like so many Hindi movies nowadays, this one has half its dialogue in Punjabi, Bollywood’s new shorthand for insight into Delhi living. Yet, no one with the slightest feel for the city would ever use the drab Ansal Plaza as a shooting location. Our advice: stay home, re-watch Khosla Ka Ghosla and Special 26, and pray that Bajatey Raho was an attempt to rip these off and not Tower Heist.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.  

End of Watch: DVD Review

After The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, The Shield, Rampart and a dozen other such dramas featuring morally compromised law enforcers, it’s a relief to finally see a film about cops who are relatively law-abiding and sane. Brian and Miguel are LAPD patrol officers, played with bromantic ardour by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña. Neither is excessively bright, but they’re good company, and good at their job. Director David Ayer (who wrote Training Day and directed Street Kings, both about crooked cops) takes his time, allowing us to observe their banter and bursts of action. Then, just when we're wrapped up in their lives, things turn tense.

End of Watch is an entertaining cop flick, but it isn’t above pretension. The shaky, odd-angled images look like they’ve been captured on spy cam. This is attributed to Brian making a video for a film class he’s joined, but the conceit isn’t followed through (the deliberately amateurish visuals aren’t limited to his point-of-view). Though this may have been intended as a comment on reality shows such as Cops, it’s more of a distraction than anything else.

Anna Kendrick brings humour and warmth to an underwritten role. Her willingness to goof off onscreen makes her a good fit for the amiable Gyllenhaal. Their chemistry notwithstanding, the real love story is of the two brothers in arms. The film acknowledges this, but stops short of puncturing this cliché of clichés. Still, while we continue to wait for a film about cops who aren’t crazy and/or in love with each other, End of Watch is a good interim option. No special features.

This uninspired review appeared in Time Out Delhi. 

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: Review

Milkha Singh’s life has been so dramatic that you’d get a pretty remarkable film out of it just by sticking to the facts. A child of Partition, he rose from almost nothing to become India’s greatest sprinter. He also became a national sporting icon in a country that, till then, had reserved its veneration for cricket and hockey players. Bhaag Milkha Bhaag takes these facts and heightens them, gives them the old Bollywood shine. Whether or not you care about an embellishment here, a liberty taken there will probably end up determining how you react to this film.

Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra starts off on a curious note, with Milkha’s most famous error of judgment. After a strong start in the 400m at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Milkha turned while running and lost momentum. He ended up fourth by a whisker and retired without ever winning an Olympic medal. Among the many theories as to why he looked back, Mehra’s is probably the most inventive. He suggests the runner was distracted by the ghosts of Partition, an excuse wrapped in a personal tragedy.

After this perplexing opening, the story unfolds in flashback. We see Milkha as a happy, mischievous kid in Multan, telling his lame father (metaphor!) that he wants to become a fauji; later, his parents are killed before his eyes and he escapes across the border with his sister. There, he becomes a knife-wielding thief, before deciding to join the army to make something of himself and win the love of Biroo (Sonam Kapoor). There, he’s helped by a triumvirate of mentors (Prakash Raj, Pavan Malhotra, Yograj Singh) and gradually transforms himself into the legend we know.

Rakeysh Mehra’s term papers must have been hell to grade because he’s never made a point that he didn’t immediately underline. We know that Milkha became a national-level runner against some odds. But did he really break the national record after having had shoe spikes driven into his legs by jealous rivals the night before? Or take, for instance, the reasonable assertion that Milkha was a natural athlete. Mehra isn’t content with indicating this, or even having several people say it in different ways. No, he’ll take us into a long and unnecessary flashback, with schoolboy Milkha running across the burning sand.

When it isn’t off chasing phantoms, Bhaag Milkha is a solid sports film. The races – and there are a lot of them – are fast and convincing. Farhan Akhtar must have worked hard to acquire that whippet-like physique, but he also very successfully conveys the self-belief and mulish determination at the heart of Milkha’s success. Raj and Singh supply the tough love, and Malhotra is outstanding as the coach who first spots potential in the callow young recruit who runs simply for extra rations.

If that last bit reminds you of Paan Singh Tomar, you probably won’t be the only one. Yet, despite the many themes it shares with Tigmanshu Dhulia’s 2012 semi-indie, Bhaag Milkha is unapologetic about being a Bollywood biopic. Everything is larger than life: Milkha’s idea of making a point about corruption to a policeman is to drink two cans of ghee and do dozens of push-ups. Also very Bollywood is the relegation of all female characters to ceremonial roles. Divya Dutta is appropriately tearful as Milkha’s elder sister, Kapoor’s Punjabi accent remains untested, and Meesha Shafi – playing a national-level swimmer – might not have minded having little to do in a film that indulges in a fair amount of Pak-bashing.

Binod Pradhan, veteran cinematographer, indulges Mehra’s penchant for varied visual palettes in the same film. The soundtrack is by those masters of the generic, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, and the lyrics and dialogue by Prasoon Joshi. Go into it knowing that this race isn’t to the swift, and that you’ll be there for three hours.

This review appeared in Time Out.

Lootera: Review

O Henry’s short story “The Last Leaf”, published in 1907, is about a young artist with pneumonia who’s convinced she’s dying. What’s more, she believes that her final breath will coincide with the falling of the last leaf from the tree outside her window. Her downstairs neighbour, a painter, finds out about this and engineers a solution at once simple and brilliant. It is, as one might expect, a sad tale, though not a morbid one.

Vikramaditya Motwane takes more than this one leaf out of O Henry’s book. Not only does he subtly weave this story into the fabric of his second film, Lootera, he also manages that very O Henry-esque trick of making the actions of his characters, however misguided they might be, seem inevitable. And because the characters cannot help themselves, we do not judge them for it. Their missteps become ours.

The film opens in Manikpur, a village in West Bengal. It is 1953: Dev Anand is the big draw at the box-office, electricity is still making its way to the countryside, and the practice of zamindari is on its way out. This last development will soon make life difficult for a local zamindar (Barun Chanda). As of now, however, his only worry is the well-being of his daughter Pakhi (Sonakshi Sinha), prone to extreme shortness of breath. And even her future seems secure when Varun (Ranveer Singh), a polite young archaeologist who’s been digging on the outskirts of the zamindar’s land, asks for her hand in marriage.

The first half of Lootera passes like a dream. In the three years since his debut Udaan, Motwane has become a remarkably assured filmmaker. He elects to show the steady infatuation of Varun and Pakhi not as a scored montage – Bollywood’s favourite new cheat code – but as a series of short scenes that seem to melt into each other. (The editor, Dipika Kalra, also worked on Udaan.) Yet, as the two fall for each other in halting, reserved, ’50s style, there are little hints that things might unravel. Varun’s friend reminds him of a certain cold-hearted uncle. The zamindar’s family heirlooms are taken away abruptly by a government official. And there’s that title – lootera, thief.

It isn’t much of a surprise – though you can skip to the next paragraph now if your tolerance for spoilers is low – when it’s revealed that Varun and his friend are conmen. Once they make away with the zamindar’s riches, the scene shifts to Dalhousie, where Pakhi is now wasting away, her father dead, her cough diagnosed as tuberculosis. Motwane then plays his one “Of all the gin joints” card and throws Varun back into her life. He’s there on a job again; this time, however, police officer KN Singh (Adil Hussain) is on his tail. The dream is over – the visuals are stark now, the colours muted, the stately progression punctured by bursts of action and drops of blood.

If casting Ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha in a period drama seemed like a bold move initially, it’s unlikely anyone will question that decision now. Singh, best known for playing loud, sarcastic rakes, finds a Ripley-like mixture of shyness and cruelty in Varun. And Sinha – on nobody’s radar as a serious actress – is a revelation as the wilful Pakhi. Motwane finds poetry in their small and large gestures, and layers these with Amit Trivedi’s music, Mahendra Shetty’s rich cinematography and Anurag Kashyap’s dialogue. Everything comes together beautifully. It’s only halfway through 2013, but Lootera’s going to be the one to beat.

A version of this review is on the Time Out Delhi website.