Mud: DVD Review

Though it was in competition for the 2012 Palme d’Or, Jeff Nichols’ Mud opened in theatres almost a year later. Once there, it garnered a couple of critical nods and faded away without much fuss. Don’t believe the (lack of) hype. Funny, dark and wise, Mud is a terrific film about the importance and danger of hero worship.

The film begins in earnest with the singular image of two young boys, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), gazing awe­struck at a boat stranded in a tree on a desert island. When they discover fresh supplies stashed inside, they realise there’s someone living there. That someone turns out to be a mysterious drifter who goes by the name of Mud. He treats the boys like grown-ups, confiding in them, admitting that he’s on the run for killing a man. As Ellis’ parents start out on the road to separation, Mud becomes a compelling – if somewhat inap­propriate – father figure for the young boy.

Matthew McConaughey plays Mud as a mixture of smarts and bad judgment. He’s charismatic enough to get the boys looking out for him, fetching food and supplies and keeping him informed. But he cannot get himself to accept the fact that his semi-girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), the reason behind his camping out on the island, might not be willing to go out on a similar limb for him. Perhaps he’s gotten so used to spinning tall tales that he’s accepted his own idealised love story.

This is the third in a series of lively, dark films set in the Ameri­can South that Nichols has made. The earlier two, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, had starred Nichols' weirdo muse Michael Shannon. Shannon turns up here as well, a comic cameo in a film that makes great use of its supporting players. Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson are very moving as Ellis’ parents, while Sam Shepard plays Mud’s grizzled mentor (filial relationships, involving both fathers and father figures, are at the heart of this film). The two boys are ornery and believable. McConaughey’s purple patch began here. Witherspoon alone seems to drift through the film without purpose or conviction.

The sentimental conclusion does seem at odds with the men­acing mood of the rest of the film. Yet, perhaps this was inevitable in a film founded on grand gestures like a shipwrecked man search­ing for salvation, a father trying to avenge his son, a young boy looking for someone to trust. Mud isn’t so much inspired by Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Great Expecta­tions or The Night of the Hunter as it is haunted by their ghosts. In a conversation with SundanceNOW, Nichols added Martin Ritt’s clas­sic Hud and Turner Browne’s photo book The Last River: Life Along Arkansas’s Lower White to the list of influences. Take our word for it: Mud could easily go 12 rounds with Hud.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Om-Dar-Ba-Dar: Review

Kamal Swaroop’s Om-Dar-Ba-Dar  was never released commercially in India. After premiering at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, it did a couple of rounds of the arthouse circuit and vanished from view. In the years since, it somehow got the reputation of being Indian cinema’s great avant-garde masterpiece. Filmmakers and critics spoke of it in hushed tones; Anurag Kashyap even paid tribute to it with the “Emosanal Attyachar” sequence in Dev.D. Now, with PVR and NFDC re-releasing the film in theatres, we have the sad duty of informing you that Om-Dar-Ba-Dar, while undeniably strange and uncompromised, is also vague, tedious and bordering on pretentious.

Any attempts to relay a plot would only serve to vindicate Swaroop’s wilfully scattershot narrative strategy. Suffice to say that the film consists of a series of vignettes involving a boy called Om, his palmist father, his 30-year-old sister, their movie star house guest, and a whole lot of frogs. You might want to make sense of it all – and good luck to you. We waited in vain for an underlying focus to emerge and bring some clarity to all the Jungian posturing. (We would have settled for no focus and great entertainment, but the film's satire is too heavy-handed to be much fun.) Swaroop is clearly aiming a several targets – the school system, the Congress government, the commercialisation of the Ajmer region the film is set in – but his attacks are simplistic, often infantile. You know there’s a paucity of good ideas when the level of satire has dropped to a man shitting diamonds.

These muddled ideas are delivered by actors rendered catatonic either by design or by the effort of making sense of the enterprise (the exception is Anita Kanwar, who shone in Salaam Bombay! the same year). The film certainly has the courage of its crazy convictions: it is genuinely, hair-clutchingly strange. You could look for years and not find another film made in this country that brings within its ambit terrorist tadpoles and family planning, space travel and double-knotted pyjamas. There are also brief moments when everyday small-town life is refracted into something monstrous and magical. The cinematography, by Ashwin Kaul and Milind Ranade, is frequently astonishing, and provides something to hold onto whenever the film wanders off on one of its many, many spaced-out trips.

If only there’d been a little less invention and a little more organisation of thought, Om-Dar-Ba-Dar might actually have ended up the subversive masterpiece so many are convinced it is. One need only see Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou or anything by Jean Cocteau to understand why Swaroop’s film isn't the real deal. It’s not even the first avant-garde film made in India: SNS Sastry and Pramod Pati’s shorts for Films Division in the late ‘60s were just as trippy – and far more fun. Re-releases of cult Indian films are few and far between, so we won’t go as far as advising you to avoid Om-Dar-Ba-Dar. Just remember that you don’t have to be bullied into liking it.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.  

Straight to video

This piece appeared in GQ's January issue and on their site. 

Last August, the trailer for Spike Jonze’s Her appeared and thrilled fans of the director who’d waited the requisite four years for his next film to surface. Jonze made a remarkable debut 15 years earlier with a Charlie Kaufman-penned story about a vent in an office that transports people inside the head of actor John Malkovich. Though Being John Malkovich marked him out as a bracingly original voice – something confirmed by his later movies Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are – Jonze was famous long before 1999. If you grew up during MTV’s initial days in India, you might have seen the video for Sonic Youth’s “100%”, with a skateboarding Jason Lee, or the one for The Breeders’ 1993 smash “Cannonball”. Both are by Jonze.

As he became better known, Jonze was able to stretch out and experiment with the form: “Sabotage” was a parody of 1970s cop shows, “Buddy Holly” was made to look part of a Happy Days episode. Working mostly with alt and indie bands, Jonze’s work was oddball but heartfelt – qualities also evident in his films. His video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” showed an inept (and fictional) dance group rehearsing in public. In someone else’s hands, it would have been a good gag, but Jonze managed to turn it into a celebration of the joy of performance. It was voted the number one video of all time in a 2001 MTV poll.

Jonze is one of the directors who marked the beginning of the “auteur” generation of music videos, where the maker’s personality informed the output. An accepted signpost is 1992, the year when MTV started mentioning the names of directors along with the singers. However, even MTV’s first decade yielded some major Hollywood players. Any random hour of MTV Classic is likely to have a David Fincher contribution: he was responsible for Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” and Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun”. By the time he made his film debut with Alien 3 in 1992, Fincher was already developing that dark, glossy look he’d use in Se7en and Fight Club: you can see it in Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love”. Michael Bay also started out in the late '80s; his mini-movie for Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was as cheesy and high-octane as any of his Transformers films.

Another contemporary filmmaker to make the transition from music videos to features and retain some measure of signature style is Michel Gondry. The Frenchman was the Jan Švankmajer of the music video; like the Czech surrealist, he used lo-fi visual effects to create a distorted, beyond-the-looking-glass world. The constant changes in scenery in his recent film Mood Indigo are in a similar vein to his innovations for Bjork’s “Human Behaviour”, while his very affecting video for Gary Jules’ “Mad World” points to the melancholia of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) and Anton Corbijn (Control) have also taken aspects of their video-making style and put them in their films.

Is there a certain music video director approach to filmmaking? One could draw parallels between the films of Dayton-Farris and Mike Mills, or Corbijn and Mark Romanek, but such comparisons can be more misleading than helpful. For every example of a former video director cutting to music, you have a Wes Anderson (who’s never made a music video) doing the same, only better. More to the point is the way video and cinema have kept influencing each other. MTV-style editing is ubiquitous in cinema today, but its roots lie in Soviet filmmakers’ experiments with montage in the 1920s. A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 film starring the Beatles, was a major influence on the genre, as were DA Pennebaker’s vérité documentaries. Music videos, in turn, have given cinema new directors, sounds, faces, slogans, moves. It may have killed the radio star, but video is certainly repaying its debt to the movies.

Five videos you didn’t know were by famous directors

“Under the Bridge” (Gus Van Sant)

Gus Van Sant (Elephant, Milk) directed this uncharacteristically calm RHCP video. He also cast bassist Flea in My Own Private Idaho.

“I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” (Sofia Coppola)

Reasons to watch: It’s a bonkers cover of a Burt Bacharach song by The White Stripes; it’s by the director of Lost in Translation; it has a pole-dancing Kate Moss

“Sunday” (Harmony Korine)

A typically unsettling video for Sonic Youth by the director of Spring Breakers, featuring Macaulay Culkin

“Fight the Power” (Spike Lee)

Since it was Lee who asked Chuck D to come up with an anthem for Do The Right Thing, it makes sense that he’d direct the video

“Dyslexic Heart” (Cameron Crowe)

The Almost Famous director made this warm video for Paul Westerberg’s “Dyslexic Heart”, featured on the soundtrack of his 1992 film Singles

Dedh Ishqiya: Review

We first encountered the uncle-nephew conman team of Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khalujan (Naseeruddin Shah) in Ishqiya, the 2010 debut of former Vishal Bhardwaj aide Abhishek Chaubey. That cheerfully profane film introduced, among other things, the idea of a foul-mouthed heroine to mainstream Hindi cinema. Defenders of public decency will be relieved to know that its sequel Dedh Ishqiya has a lot of shayari and very little by way of “chutiyam sulphate”. Yet, if you look beneath all the Urdu poetici­sing, you’ll find that the lusts and orneriness of the earlier film are very much intact.

Dedh Ishqiya starts off with a robbery, during which Babban and his uncle are separated. The scruffy Khalu resurfaces as Ifthekhar, a dapper poet vying – in a shayar showdown of sorts – for the hand of the widowed
begum of Mahmoodabad (Madhuri Dixit-Nene). Nephew tracks down uncle, and discovers that while the elderly con is genuinely infatuated with Begum Para, he also has an eye on her fortune. Babban finds his own object of desire in Muniya (Huma Qureshi), Para’s handmaid, who naturally harbours agendas of her own. There’s also Jaan Mohammad (Vijay Raaz), a thuggish local MLA and rival suitor of the begum. What’s the Urdu for “double-cross” again?

There’s the cinema of big payoffs, and there’s the cinema of small pleasures. At its best, Dedh Ishqiya is one example after another of the latter. These pleasures could be as simple as Ifthekhar being diagnosed by an ancient hakim as “mareez-e-ishq”, or an elaborate gag like the Mexican standoff that lasts through the night. Some viewers might find their bliss in the refined lilt and subtle allusions of Chaubey and Bhardwaj’s script, where the pointed use of a word like “lihaaf” can function as a nod to a 1942 Ismat Chughtai short story. Chaubey’s narrative control has grown more assured since his debut, and though the film goes off the rails in the last ten minutes, it’s still massively enjoyable. Bhar­dwaj’s lines and Gulzar’s lyrics take centrestage, as they ought to, but do take a moment to note the fine work by Clinton Cerejo (score), Subrata Chakraborthy and Amit Roy (production design) and Setu (cinematography).

Warsi and Shah, having done the hard work in Ishqiya, coast through this film. Shah in particular performs with uncharacteristic tenderness; it helps that he doesn’t have to overreach while speaking chaste Urdu. Qureshi and Raaz keep their faces straight and their cards close to their chest. As for Dixit, this is that one sublime performance to accompany her dozens of hits from the ’80s and ’90s. As befits one of Indian cinema’s best dancers, she’s holding us with the eyes; we see the loneliness and desperation in them, long before motivations are explained and secrets revealed. It’s difficult to look at anything else when she’s onscreen. 

Ismat Chughtai's Lihaaf.

Review appeared in Time Out Delhi. 

Mr Joe B Carvalho: Review

In interviews leading up to its release, Arshad Warsi suggested that his latest had been designed as an antidote to crass, double entendre-wielding films. Mr Joe B Carvalho is certainly cleaner than the average Bollywood comedy nowadays, but something’s been lost in the rinsing. A foul mouth isn’t a crime, an unfunny one is. In that respect, this film, directed by Samir Tewari, is as guilty as Grand Masti.

Joe B Carvalho (Arshad Warsi) is a bumbling detective who’s been hired by a rich old man to find his daughter. This is roughly the task given to Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, though that’s about it as far as similarities with Howard Hawks’ sublime 1946 film go. Mr Joe B Carvalho is, as you might expect, a straight lift from the Pink Panther series: the poster, the bluesy sax in the title theme, and half a dozen scenes not so much inspired as translated and transplanted.

It’s a pity, because Arshad Warsi doesn’t look bad even in borrowed clothes (Jolly LLB didn’t suffer from stealing from My Cousin Vinny). There are moments when his commitment to the most insubstantial of jokes lifts the film off the ground. Yet, in scene after scene, it crashes, weighed down by dragged-out routines and an over-populated plot that includes a schizophrenic assassin (Javed Jaffrey), a “dabangg” lady police officer (Soha Ali Khan) and several assorted villains, including a wasted Vijay Raaz.

There is one truly bright spark in the film. Jaffrey’s performance brings back memories of the time he turned a VJing gig into a variety show with Timex Timepass. In this film, he turns up as a bai, a sadhu, a blonde girl and a man with a giant afro, in addition to supplying the voices playing in his head. One could make a case for the elevation of his Carlos to the pantheon of incompetent Hindi movie assassins, along with Tinnu Anand’s ice-pick killer in Pushpak and Anupam Kher’s deleted, never-seen cameo as “Disco Killer” in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Flashes of Hindi cinema in 2013

Started writing a year-end wrap of sorts, but scrapped it midway. Putting it up here anyway. 

In Indian cinema’s 100th year, things progressed as they always have – in fits and starts. Monster hits like Chennai Express and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani made one long for a little Whedonesque wit and surprise, but at least they were better than the rank offenders which ended up making tons of money, like Grand Masti and Raanjhanaa. At the other end of spectrum, Indian independent films were feted at Cannes, Sundance, Berlin and Telluride – and, for a change, released theatrically in their own country.

Several filmmakers continued down the path of gender insensitivity. In Chor Chor Super Chor, a lone female passenger on a bus in Delhi at night is pawed at and pushed around in a seemingly unconscious recreation of the December 2012 rape case. Incredibly, this was the setting for a musical number, played for laughs. Grand Masti and Besharam had rape jokes; the latter also had a stalker for a hero. The worst offender, though, was the ‘innocent’ male lead of Raanjhanaa, who stalks his childhood love, drives her into a river, slits his wrists when she rejects him, and sabotages her wedding.

Gangster of the year: Bholi Punjaban, Chadda’s tracksuit-wearing, tattoo-sporting, trash-talking gangster in Fukrey.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s “Hello saaar” interrupting Nimrat Kaur’s voiceover; the director’s POV morphing into that of a wedding photographer; the insistent tugging of a string filling in for unnecessary dialogue: All instances of the visual wit that rescued The Lunchbox from disappearing into the melancholia of its characters’ lives.

François Truffaut once divided the films of Orson Welles into those which have snow and those which have guns. Lootera had both guns and snow, but rather than Welles, Vikramaditya Motwane’s impossibly fluent direction brought to mind the melancholy romances of Wong Kar-wai.

The cinematic dust-up of the year occurred when the Film Federation of India sent The Good Road to the Oscars, and the phalanx of producers and promoters associated with The Lunchbox took up arms against them. Just when everyone was tiring of Team Lunchbox’s hissy fit, the FFI fired off a letter so pompous that suddenly, they were the bad guys. Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra put an end to the madness with a terse letter to the Federation, saying he’d moved on to “more productive pursuits”.

You had us at gulabi bhains. No film this year was as willing to risk looking stupid as Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola. 

The ongoing Ali-Frazier battle between Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Irrfan Khan. Siddiqui won the first round with his half hour of mastery in Bombay Talkies. Khan responded with Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns. They sparred with Aatma and D-Day, before going head-to-head in The Lunchbox. Yet, the best performance of the year came from Raj Kumar Yadav in Shahid.  

The Good Road and Ship of Theseus – two films joined at the hip by NFDC’s Film Bazaar, by the fact that they’re both debut features, by travelling shots, by terrific location photography and sound design, and by their contrasting fortunes on Twitter.

It must have been tempting to offer Milkha Singh the excuse of a lifetime – the memory of his father being killed in Partition riots – to absolve him from not placing at the 1976 Olympics. Yet, an excuse is exactly what it is, a bit of creative liberty that’s at odds with the meticulous recreation of other aspects of the runner’s life. If Bhaag Milkha Bhaag runs away with history, Kai Po Che! runs from it. It isn’t like the film refuses to acknowledge the 2002 Gujarat riots, it just refuses to acknowledge them in any meaningful way. After a few minutes of looting and burning, the narrative leaps forward to a teary reconciliation. There’s no rule that says that you must also come to terms with the history you put on screen, but failure to do so does leave one open to allegations of opportunism, or denial, or both.

Shuddh Desi Romance, which blew raspberries at middle-class morality.   

Supporting turns that ran away with films: Saurabh Shukla as a judge who really enjoys his lunch in Jolly LLB; the devastating Prakash Belawadi, running rings around John Abraham in Madras Cafe; Dibyendu Bhattacharya in BA Pass, chess enthusiast, philosopher, pimp.

A nod to PVR’s Director’s Rare banner, which released indie efforts like Tasher Desh and Fruitvale Station, regional films like Baandhon and Lucia, documentaries, restored versions of classics like Chashme Buddoor, and a lot more. Some releases were better than others, but they all had one thing in common – none of them would have gotten a theatrical release under normal circumstances.

The best tribute to Indian cinema in its 100th year wasn’t the much-hyped Bombay Talkies but the unexpected theatrical release of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s documentary Celluloid Man, about film archivist PK Nair, preserver of old prints at the National Film Archive in Pune and inspiration to several generations of filmmakers.

And the others: Short Term 12, Blue is the Warmest Color, No, The Selfish Giant, To the Wonder, Before Midnight. My favourite: The Great Beauty.  

What the Fish: Review

There’s been a lot of rubbish on the big screen these past few months. Yet, Gurmmeet Singh’s What the Fish is so irredeemably bad it stands out. For starters, this has to the worst movie title in decades. The plot is excruciatingly predictable. Not one character is worth rooting for. And you can judge its grip on reality by the fact that the tubby Manu Rishi Chadha plays a Casanova.

Sudha Mishra (Dimple Kapadia; bad-tempered and sadly unappealing) has left her house in Vasant Kunj in the hands of her niece’s boyfriend. She leaves two sets of instructions – feed the fish, water the money plant. Of course, in time-honoured tradition, boyfriend organises a party the minute she leaves, and things go south. A half-dozen or so characters, all deeply uninteresting, assume responsibility for home, fish and plant, and fail to do the needful in ways that are the opposite of amusing.

I won’t bother telling you about the Jat in love with a boxer from Manipur and trying to blackmail another boxer with a cross-dressing mujra MMS. Let me point you, instead, towards the rotten heart of the movie. It’s a ten-minute sequence involving a girl from Saharanpur who’s been left in charge of Sudha’s house by her fiancée. To make matters worse, said fiancée’s friend – whom he’d requested to keep an eye on her – comes on strong. There's a stunningly insensitive scene, played for laughs, where the Lothario scares her into inviting him into the house. Amazingly, he then cons his way into her bed. The next morning, instead of feeling violated or, at the very least, guilty, she looks happy. Turns out she’s so simple-minded she assumes that because they slept together, they’re husband and wife now. Welcome to the desert of the really stupid.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.