Gasoline Alley

The Tramp turns 100

On February 7, 1914, along with an educational short called Olives and their Oil, a six-minute comedy called Kid Auto Races at Venice played for the first time in theatres. The film bore the imprint of Keystone Studios, known for its manic comic shorts. It featured a strangely attired man interrupting the filming of a motor race by repeatedly walking in front of the camera. In those days, Keystone films had no credits, which meant there was no way of knowing the lead actor’s name. Still, after a few weeks, the studio started getting letters asking for more of that tramp fellow. Years later, some enterprising soul added this legend to a bootleg print of Kid Auto Races: “The first film in which Chaplin appeared in his world-famous costume”.

Kid Auto Races wasn’t the first Chaplin film to play in theatres – Making a Living released on February 2. Nor was it the moment when the Tramp was born. That happy accident happened during the shooting of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, which opened two days after Kid Auto Races. Asked by Keystone head Mack Sennett to put on any costume he could find, Chaplin opted for a shabby-looking coat, loose-fitting trousers, a bowler hat and a cane. “I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large,” he later wrote. Unsure what age he was supposed to be playing, he added a small moustache. The affinity he felt for the character was immediate. As Chaplin recalled, “By the time I walked onto stage, he was fully born.”

Mabel's Strange Predicament

‘Fully born’ may be overstating the case, but it’s worth noting how much of the familiar Tramp persona is visible in those two early films. The shuffling walk, the twirling of the cane, the habit of looking dead into the camera, as if willing the audience to read his thoughts – these habits would stay with Chaplin till the end. It’s also fascinating to note the little tics he ironed out. In his early appearances, the Tramp is somewhat aggressive and louche. Chaplin would replace this belligerence with body language more suited to his five-foot-four frame. The broad grin would make way for a tight-lipped smile. The moustache grew thinner, the movements more frantic. Tiny adjustments – shrugs and simpers, little bits with the hat and shoulders and eyebrows – were made from film to film. The Tramp was being assembled.

Very soon, the parts were in place. The rest is history. The Tramp conquered Hollywood, first in sublime shorts like Dough and Dynamite, The Floorwalker, One A.M and The Immigrant, and later in the classic series of features that began with The Kid and ended with The Great Dictator. Chaplin, who began directing his own films in 1914, realised that comedy might be made more compelling if it were layered with emotions like grief, loss and love. Like Alfred Hitchcock, that other great British import to Hollywood, Chaplin began working his childhood traumas into his films: Easy Street was informed by the tough London neighbourhood he’d grown up in, while the memory of being sent to a workhouse after his mother’s nervous breakdown was referenced in both The Kid and Modern Times. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein once wrote that Chaplin was able to “see things most terrible, most pitiful, most tragic through the eyes of a laughing child”. While Hitchcock seemed determined to scare the world as he’d once been scared, Chaplin Charlie turned the cinema into a child’s search for reason and beauty. The result was near-universal acclaim. He was loved by the man on the street, by his Hollywood contemporaries, by Nureyev, Picasso, Churchill and Einstein.

Seen simply as an actor’s creation, the Tramp is without parallel. His personality is as rooted in movement as it is in appearance. If someone skidding around a corner or making a hat jump reminds you of the Tramp, it’s because Chaplin reinforced these movements film after film until they became unique to him. In a 1949 article called “Comedy’s Greatest Era”, film critic James Agee stated that the finest silent comedians “combined several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the dancer, the clown and the mime”. Chaplin’s greatness lay in his ability to bring all these elements into play almost at once. Look at the scene in Modern Times where he’s a waiter trying to get an order to a customer. Every time he gets near, he’s swept away by a crowd of dancers, yet he still manages to keep the tray aloft. It’s as perfect a display of timing, grace, athleticism and comic clarity as you’ll ever see.

The Gold Rush

Agee wasn’t alone in feeling that no dancer or actor ever bettered Chaplin for “eloquence, variety and poignancy of motion”. In The Gold Rush, Chaplin plays a scene in a giant chicken costume. No Method actor could have conveyed as accurately – or hilariously – the panicked thoughts of a flightless bird facing a loaded gun. Chaplin could also be a startling dramatic actor when the situation demanded. One sees this side of him in the scene where Jackie Coogan is being hauled away by the state in The Kid, and at the end of City Lights, when his face registers the dawning and fading of hope with heartbreaking subtlety. Few actors have been as imitated: aspects of Chaplin’s style can be seen in performers as diverse as Jacques Tati, Jackie Chan, Marcel Marceau and Johnny Depp.

As Chaplin’s art progressed, the Tramp came to represent an evolving set of values. Some things remained constant: he was always enterprising, industrious, inventive; occasionally mischievous, but never malicious. From the beginning, he was a stand-in for the little guy; that’s why he’s forever kicking policemen and challenging bullies. The 1915 short The Tramp suggested for the first time that he might be an unlucky romantic. In Easy Street and The Immigrant, he identified more strongly with the downtrodden. He was assumed to represent communism in Modern Times, pacifism in The Great Director. Perhaps it was this constantly increasing metaphorical weight and its attendant difficulties, rather than the advent of talkies, which finally moved Chaplin to retire his alter ego. Yet, the Tramp lived on, past the intrusions of sound and colour, the fading away of other silent cinema icons and his creator’s death in 1977.

City Lights

Repertories across the world are planning screenings of Kid Auto Races on February 7. If the idea of celebrating the centenary of a short, mildly funny film seems excessive, I’d urge you to try and picture a Tramp-less world. For starters, it would be missing three or four of the greatest movies and a dozen or so of the most sublime shorts ever made. Slapstick and drama would still be kept apart. Walt Disney might never have found the inspiration for Mickey Mouse. Raj Kapoor would have had to come up with some other visual shorthand for enterprising playfulness in Shree 420. Buster Keaton would have been lonely at the top. For these and a hundred other reasons, allow Chaplinites their moment of sentiment. If the spirit moves you, you might even take out six minutes, go online and watch the film yourself.

Wrote this for The Sunday Guardian. You can see their very fetching layout here.

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.