20 on 20: Pulp Fiction

On May 12, 1994, Pulp Fiction premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. This was the second film by Quentin Tarantino, who’d barnstormed his way into the public consciousness with Reservoir Dogs two years earlier. By the end of the fortnight, Pulp Fiction had garnered the first of several breathless reviews and the festival’s grand prize, the Palme d’Or. It’s gone on to become one of the classics of modern cinema – an ambitious patchwork of interconnected stories that messes with time and cinematic conventions. On its 20th anniversary, here are 20 reasons why Pulp Fiction is the greatest film since Pulp Fiction.

1. It reaffirmed the promise of Reservoir Dogs
Despite budgetary limitations, Reservoir Dogs was a swaggering, confident debut. Its success meant that Tarantino had a sizeable budget and the chance to cast major actors in his next project. The result was a film that aimed higher and wider, and hit nearly all its targets.

2. It was going to be Paul the Bartender and anyone but Travolta
Tarantino’s uncanny casting instincts played a big part in the film’s success. Paul Calderon, who ended up with a bit part as a bartender, was earmarked for the role of Jules Winnfield until Samuel L Jackson turned up and gave a scarily intense audition. Also, John Travolta was cast as Jules’ partner only after Tarantino overcame the strong objections of producer Harvey Weinstein.



3. Ezekiel 25:17
Hitman Jules has a habit of quoting from a Bible passage before he kills people. When we hear him read from Ezekiel 25:17 for the first time, the emphasis is on phrases like “furious anger” and “lay my vengeance upon you”. Yet, when he recites it in the closing scene, the delivery is rueful, and we notice “his brother’s keeper” and “shepherds the weak”. It sets up Jules’ ultimate decision to let Honeybunny and Pumpkin live – which is also the grace note on which the film ends.



4. It’s a mutated Cassevettes homage
Those riffs on pop culture and philosophy that go nowhere? Tarantino told Elvis Mitchell on his radio show The Treatment that the scene with the hitmen and the terrified kids they’ve come to collect from was him “trying to write one of [Cassevettes’] big improv-y set pieces”.

5. It’s got a crackling soundtrack
Like Scorsese, Tarantino mostly takes a jukebox approach to scoring his films. Pulp Fiction brought back old hits like Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man”, and immortalised Dick Dale’s “Misirlou”, the song that hurtles past in the opening credits.

6. It’s movie-mad
Before he became a writer-director, Tarantino worked a video store. And it’s a video store clerk’s sensibility that flows through all his films, the idea that that Antonioni and Argento may well be found on the same shelf. Pulp Fiction has a wealth of movie references, from French New Wave films like Alphaville and Jules and Jim to blaxploitation classics like Coffy and forgotten gems like The Warriors. My personal favourite is the scene where Butch is in the taxi and the rear projection is very obviously from an old black-and-white movie. It’s Murder, My Sweet, a 1944 adaptation of a novel by Raymond Chandler, the original king of pulp fiction.

7. It made twisted time games acceptable
After Pulp Fiction, it became okay for filmmakers to structure their films in tiny loops (Memento), giant loops (Irreversible), and generally mess with time and viewers’ heads. David Denby wrote as much in a March 2007 New Yorker piece, in which he argued that the modern trend of ‘disordered narratives’ – from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Babel – followed in the wake of Tarantino’s film.

8. Everyone’s welcome
Critic, regular moviegoer, snob, genre enthusiast, exploitation buff, film theorist: you could belong to any of these camps – or none of them – and still love Pulp Fiction.

9. Minutiae 
Unlike other ‘important’ movies, Pulp Fiction isn’t really bothered with weighty ideas like honour and freedom. What makes the movie special is its focus on the smaller stuff: TV pilots, foot massages, the metric system, potbellies, wristwatches, gourmet coffee...



10. It’s endlessly quotable
All Tarantino films are quotable, but Pulp Fiction is in a league of its own. You can tell how big a Pulp Fiction fan someone is by the relative obscurity of the quotes he or she favours. “You mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down?”: Run-of-the-mill fan. “That’s thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten”: Proper fan. “My name’s Paul and this shit’s between y’all”: Devotee.

11. It made Samuel L Jackson a star
Jackson had been an actor since the early ‘70s, but Pulp Fiction made him a star, setting him on the road to Shaft and his recurring roles in the Avengers and Star Wars movies.

12. It created a template for the new gangster film
Pulp Fiction casts such a long shadow over the modern gangster film that it’s difficult to separate the films that were simply inspired by it from those that wouldn’t exist without it. Still, without Tarantino’s film, we probably wouldn’t have Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, In Bruges, The Sopranos...

13. Gregory Peck may not have approved of the delivery method…
…but it’s customary for the boy to have his father’s watch.



14. It still makes people mad
Though there’s nothing as gratuitous as the ear-cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs, there’s still enough violence to get people jumpy about recommending Pulp Fiction. I also have a friend who can’t see past Jimmie’s “dead nigger storage” line – though I’d argue that this scene is an illustration of how badly Jules needs the obnoxious Jimmie’s help at that moment. (It’s also worth noting that Jimmie’s wife is African-American, and that the film’s cast is a Benetton ad of white, black, British, Portuguese and Hispanic actors).

15. The MacGuffin
The initial idea was to have a briefcase with diamonds, but Tarantino and his co-writer Roger Avary realised that it would be more interesting to leave the contents up to the viewer’s imagination. So we never actually find out what’s in the briefcase that Jules and Vincent are to deliver to Marsellus, only that it glows and renders anyone who looks at it momentarily speechless.



16. The twist
Uma Thurman and John Travolta’s dance at Jack Rabbit Slim’s is a goldmine of movie allusions. First, there’s the obvious reference to the white-bread teen movies of the ‘50s. Tarantino asked Thurman to imitate the famous ‘Madison’ sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part, as well as Duchess’ moves from the Disney movie The Aristocats. There’s also Travolta’s history as a dancing star from Grease and Saturday Night Fever.





17. Shot through the heart
If you’re Tarantino’s muse, you’re going to suffer. This has long been the fate of Tarantino heroines: from Alabama in True Romance to The Bride in Kill Bill. But the height of twisted romance is Mia Wallace overdosing in Pulp Fiction and being brought to life with an adrenaline shot to the heart.

18. The little studio that could
Miramax had scored with its 1992 release of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape – made for $1.2 million, it grossed $24 million. Five years later, Pulp Fiction blew those numbers out of the water, netting a cool $100 million. Harvey Weinstein later referred to his company as “the house that Quentin built”.

19. Le Big Mac
It’s almost certainly the liveliest, least obviously arty film to win the Palme d’Or in the past 20 years.

20. Because Tarantino has never been as good since
Jackie Brown, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained all have their moments, but I’d trade them just for the “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife” segment from Pulp Fiction.

This piece appeared in The Sunday Guardian.

Dial L for Latin

Wrote this for GQ's March issue.

The late 1990s and early aughts were an exciting time for Latin American cinema. In Brazil, Walter Salles directed Central Station (1998) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), while Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made City of God (2002). And in Mexico, the trio of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón – ‘the three amigos of cinema’ – found their distinctive voices. Today, nearly all these directors have shifted to Hollywood, working on projects ranging from Gravity to Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Their departure notwithstanding, the fertile Latin American market continues to yield new directorial talent. Here are three South American filmmakers likely to be on Hollywood wishlists soon.

Pablo Larraín

Pablo Larraín had already made two films about the Pinochet years (Tony Manero, 2008; Post Mortem, 2010) before he teamed up with actor Gael Garcia Bernal for No. Fittingly, for a film that completes a loose trilogy, No focuses on the 1988 plebiscite that marked the end of the Pinochet regime and the unlikely role that advertising men played in this success. Bernal is René Saavedra, an adman who gives members of the opposition party the same pitch he sells to a Cola company at the start of the film. Improbable as it may seem, the cheery, cheesy ‘No’ campaign helped the opposition win the plebiscite.

Since Larraín knew he’d be using the actual campaign ads, he took a crucial stylistic gamble. Instead of shooting on digital or even 16mm, he used a dodgy, ancient format called U-matic to make the rest of the film look as tacky and dated as the ads. This paid off in droves: No had the look and feel of a documentary shot in 1988. Larraín later explained to Sight & Sound: “If you can see the difference, it destroys the illusion.”

Sebastian Lelio

When Gloria played at Berlin Film Festival last year, it was warmly received; its lead, Paulina García, eventually won best actress. It also charmed the pants off the audience I saw it with at the 2013 Mumbai Film Festival. The film – the fourth by Chile’s Sebastian Lelio – is about a 58-year-old divorcee called Gloria aggressively pursuing the singles scene in Santiago. She’s worked out a routine: she dresses up, goes to the club, drinks, locks eyes, dances and, if there’s a spark, takes the party to a hotel room. This is how she meets Rodolfo, another divorcee, but one who’s more strongly tethered to his family than Gloria is to hers.

Lelio’s direction is at once wry, sympathetic and unsentimental. An English-language remake would probably tone down all the (gasp!) senior citizen sex, but García’s physical exposure is certainly in tune with her exposed emotional state – open to scrutiny by Rodolfo and the audience. Lelio balances out the drama with some outlandish moments, such as one character’s deadpan explanation for how cats ended up on Noah’s Ark, and a climactic bout of you-go-girl paint gun glory.

Carlos Reygadas

It’s difficult to imagine any Hollywood studio – indie-friendly or not – green-lighting Post Tenebras Lux (2012). Before its release, its director, Mexcio’s Carlos Reygadas, was bracketed with ‘slow cinema’ proponents like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. But Post Tenebras Lux deserves another label: weird cinema. It’s not just that bizarre things happen in this film – and they do, from a swingers club with rooms labeled Hegel and Duchamp to appearances by a suitcase-carrying, neon red devil – it’s how little these events seem to connect with each other. Yet, the film is often mesmerising, especially the opening scene, with Reygadas’ own toddler running in a sodden field with dogs, cows and horses.

Reygadas’ earlier films – Japon (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005) and the interminably slow Silent Light (2007) – all courted controversy, but have proved popular on the arthouse circuit. Of the three directors mentioned here, he seems the least likely to be tempted by a Hollywood project. Then again, maybe some far-thinking exec will hit upon the idea of getting Reygadas to reinvent the slasher film (you have to watch the last few minutes of Post Tenebras Lux to see why).  

Children of War: Review

Google “Bangladesh War” and one of the first results you’ll get is a Wikipedia entry for “Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War”. This is testament to the centrality of systemised sexual assault by Pakistani forces in the nine months of conflict before Bangladesh became independent. Some 400,000 Bangladeshi women were estimated to have been raped during this time. Many subsequently had abortions, fearing that the children they were bearing would be ostracised – as several were. It’s worth noting that Children of War was earlier called “The Bastard Child”.

Almost from the start, the screenplay is split into three parallel stories, each of which echoes a key strand of the actual conflict. The first involves Fida (Raima Sen), who is raped in front of her husband, journalist Aamir (Indraneil Sengupta), and then taken away and interned in a camp run by the sadistic Malik (Pavan Malhotra). The second is about two young siblings attempting to cross the border into India. We also see how Aamir ends up joining the Mukti Bahini, the blanket term for armed Bangladeshi rebels.

Children of War is a very difficult film to watch. The director, Mrityunjay Devvrat, making his feature debut after a couple of documentaries, evidently feels strongly enough about the events of ’71 not to dilute them. You’re dragged, wincing, through rape and torture and slaughter. There’s no let up, and for most of the running time, no catharsis. During the first half in particular, the film’s relentless onslaught feels more numbing than powerful.

The film nearly messes up things for itself trying to find aesthetic solutions to all the sadness. The camerawork by Fasahat Khan is best when it’s kept simple: there’s a very jarring POV sequence, and slo-mo is used too often for it to be effective after a while. And there’s one unmitigated disaster, a scored montage just before the interval which begins as a sort of torch song and then unexpectedly changes into a rock number. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the accompanying visuals – shots of crying babies, flowing blood, a boy running with a Bangladesh flag – look impossibly staged and arty, like someone trying to trick you into feeling bad.

Despite this passage – and two similar ones later – the film manages to pull itself together. After a key cameo by Tillotama Shome as a rebel fighter, there’s a rapidly accelerating build-up to a climax that’s as concerned with everyone’s survival as it is with whether Aamir will accept Fida now that she’s pregnant with a “war baby”. The film also links to the controversial war tribunals initiated in 2008, which tried and sentenced several “razakars” (the term used for Bangladeshi informants).

The actors commit admirably to the material – despite the incendiary potential in most of the scenes, there isn’t as much playing to the gallery as one would expect. Pavan Malhotra’s Malik is as odious and mesmerising a figure as Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List. Less showy, and equally effective, are Riddhi Sen and Rucha Inamdar as the siblings; Sen’s hardening into a young guerrilla is one of the more subtly tragic things in the film. Like Madras Cafe last year, Children of War is a welcome indication that some Hindi filmmakers are starting to look outside India for stories. That Devvrat tackles his subject head-on is something else to feel encouraged about.

This review appeared in Time Out.

Master of Shadows: VK Murthy

What do we love when we love Guru Dutt? Most people simply love the films – Mr and Mrs 55 and Pyaasa and Kagaz Ke Phool. Some direct their affection more specifically; at Abrar Alvi's writing, perhaps, or the idea of Dutt as a self-defeating romantic. Myself, when I say I love Guru Dutt, what I actually mean is that I love VK Murthy.

The only time I saw Murthy, who died last week at age 90 at his home in Bangalore, was when he travelled to Delhi in 2010 to accept the Dadasaheb Phalke Award. This is the highest cinematic honour in the country, and till then had only gone to actors, directors, producers and musicians. Not only was Murthy the first cinematographer to be given this honour, he was also the first awardee from any technical department. It’s fitting that he was the one to break this glass ceiling, for he was the only Indian cameraman whose name transcended the narrow boundaries of cinephilia. Put another way, a regular cinemagoer who’s never heard of Subrata Mitra may just have heard of VK Murthy.

His early years were spent learning the violin, watching movies for free courtesy a cousin who worked as an accompanist for silent films, briefly taking part in the Quit India Movement and learning cinematography at SJ Polytechnic in Bangalore. In 1947, he got a job assisting the great Fali Mistry, first at Laxmi, then at Famous Studio. It was there, on a film called Baazi (1951), that he got his big break. V Ratra, cousin of the film’s star Dev Anand, was the lead cinematographer, but Murthy – as he recalled in an interview with Raqs Media Collective – was doing “lighting, camera placement, operation – everything”. One day, the director, a moon-faced former roommate of Anand’s, was pondering over a camera angle for “Suno Gajar Kya Gaaye”. Murthy offered an elegant solution, the shot was successful, and the director – unknown but utterly ambitious – sought Murthy out and told him that they’d work together on his next film. And so it was that a 16-second shot in a little-remembered song in a minor film launched the twin legend of Murthy and Guru Dutt.

True to his word, Dutt hired Murthy as lead cameraperson on Jaal (1952). As in Baazi, there’s a strong noir feel to the lighting in this film, with large portions of the screen shrouded in darkness and patterned shadows everywhere. Aar-Paar (1953) was both a continuation and an improvement: Murthy’s increasing mastery of light and shade transforms one basic chase sequence into a mini-masterpiece. Murthy’s other great glory was the song sequence. In “Yeh Raat Yeh Chandni” from Jaal, the camera practically sighs as it dollies toward and away from Dev Anand and Geeta Bali. And the dramatic tracking shots at the beginning of “Babuji Dheere Chalna” in Aar-Paar are a precursor to the mujra in Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam, one of the great dance sequences in Indian cinema. Murthy attributed his success at filming dance to his musical training, though Dutt’s background as a choreographer probably came in handy as well.

While rushing through the Jaal shoot, Guru Dutt told Murthy that he’d soon do a film for the two of them, which Murthy could take his time over. That film turned out to be Pyaasa (1957), which established Dutt as the world-weariest hero of all time and Murthy as Gregg Toland to his Orson Welles (though there’s more Robert Krasker in his approach). There are sequences to admire in Pyaasa, and there are sequences to fall in love with: the barely-lit scene by the railway tracks, the haunting images of “Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye Toh Kya Hai”, the dramatic resurrection of Dutt at the end. It could have been a career high for both men, but there was more to come.

Get any two Murthy fans talking and chances are the conversation will veer towards a breathless discussion of ‘that shot’. It occurs during the “Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam” sequence from Kagaz Ke Phool (1959), when Dutt’s director meets his protégé and unrequited love Waheeda Rehman in an empty studio. The song starts out in near-total darkness, but then a strange beam of light shines down and falls between the two, emphasising their separation. (Murthy achieved the effect with two mirrors; one outside the studio to catch the light, the other bouncing it towards the floor.) In a moment of wishful fantasy, their shadows walk towards the beam. Murthy then binds the characters in a brief, heart-rending 180-degree pan, before reality intrudes and they walk away from each other. It’s one of the greatest cinematic what-ifs ever filmed.

In Nasreen Munni Kabir’s 1989 documentary In Search of Guru Dutt, Murthy relates how their signature look became so popular that other directors asked him to shoot in ‘Guru Dutt style’. But was the style Dutt’s or Murthy’s? The answer to this sort of question is usually found in the director’s films with other cinematographers, but Dutt never made a film without Murthy (if one counts Baazi as a Murthy film that Ratra got credit for). And Murthy’s work with other directors is a mixed bag. His colour films for journeyman Pramod Chakravorty are understandably uninspired. On the other hand, Raj Khosla’s C.I.D (1956) has some beautiful outdoor photography, while Tamas, a 1987 mini-series by his former student Govind Nihalani, utilises his penchant for dark hues and filming movement.

Ultimately, Murthy needed Dutt’s vision as much as the director needed his eye. In his declining years, interviewers would ply him for details about how Dutt ‘really was’, and he’d trot out the same answers he’d always given. Perhaps he understood that their stories would always be intertwined, like Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nykvist, or Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Burks. As he admitted in Kabir’s film, one of his first thoughts upon hearing of Dutt’s death at age 39 was “My technique is also gone with him.” Luckily, it hadn’t. Whether they know it or not, every time someone’s thanking Guru Dutt, they’re also thanking VK Murthy.

This is a slightly expanded version of a piece that appeared in BLink.

2 States: Review

2 States may as well have been called 2 Films. At times, it’s an engaging love story with one foot in the real world and the other in Dharma Production land. But more often, it’s a dialled-up-to-11, take-no-prisoners melodrama featuring outsize caricatures who may as well be wearing signs that say “Chetan Bhagat just wants everyone to get along”. Bhagat wrote the novel Abhishek Varman’s film is based on, and, like all his work, it’s a homily wrapped in a middle-class drama. What’s surprising is that even with all its clichés and easy reductions, 2 States isn’t a total loss.  

Arjun Kapoor, who usually acts like he’s on uppers, reins himself in admirably to play an IIT-going-on-IIM wallflower. His Krish meets overachieving Ananya (Alia Bhat) over sambar and rasgullas in the canteen. They like each other pretty much off the bat, and though Ananya has to make the first, second and third move, they’re soon a very handsy couple. By the time their MBA is over, they’ve decided to get married. The only problem is, he’s Punjabi, she’s Tamilian, and both their families have major 1950s-size hang-ups about this.

So Krish goes to Chennai to woo Ananya’s family, Ananya travels to Delhi to return the favour, both families make a joint trip to Goa, and the film rapidly devolves into Ekta Kapoor Meets The Parents. Unlike Vicky Donor, where the Punjabi-Bengali divide was addressed in a fast, hilarious ten minutes, 2 States plods on with the regional caricaturing long past the time it’s funny or instructive. Do we really need another film which tells us that Punjabis are loud, uneducated, money-minded and dowry-obsessed, or that Tamilians are snobbish, effete and bookish? I happen to be part-Punjabi, part-Tamil, which basically meant that I winced through three-quarters of the film.

Yet, 2 States keeps pulling itself back from the brink, often with small, simple scenes, like the one in which Krish, son of an alcoholic, watches his potential father-in-law mellow over a drink. Kapoor seems happy to come across as a beat behind Bhatt, who gives her character a whole array of intriguing half-smiles and glances. Shiv Kumar Subramaniam is excellent as Ananya’s taciturn father, though Amrita Singh and Revathy as the moms stay just this side of all-out hissiness. The boldest bit of casting is Ronit Roy as Krish’s estranged father – his natural tendency towards harshness is just another disharmonious element in a film that’s teeming with badly-matched parts.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Out of focus: The slacker figure in Hindi cinema

An old piece I wrote for GQ and forgot to post.  

“We’re looking for a narrative…a focus…a direction” says an old producer in the first scene of Dev Benegal’s English, August. Narrative, focus, direction: three words that are anathema to what this 1994 film and its protagonist represent. English, August is a rare film that belongs unreservedly to a genre that’s never really taken root in India – the slacker film. That’s hardly surprising. The slacker film says that having no plan is okay; but in India, everyone from God to the tea-seller on the corner has a plan. The slacker film says it’s alright to drift in life; for the majority of Indian parents, drift equals death.

If one looks down the decades, it makes perfect sense why Indian cinema has so few slackers. The cinema of the ‘20s and ‘30s relied heavily on historical and mythological sources, not the kind of material that lends itself to inaction. In the ‘40s, there was a freedom struggle to complete and partition to endure. Slacking wasn’t just a non-option in those days, it was anti-national. The same went for the ‘50s, a time of nation-building and Nehruvian Socialism. That decade is now considered the golden age of Indian cinema, with directors like Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Mrinal Sen doing some of their best work, but it yielded few cinematic slackers.

Shammi Kapoor would have been a good candidate for Hindi cinema’s first slacker were it not for his tremendous energy (no true slacker is this kinetic). Other ‘60s stars also rule themselves out on various counts. Dilip Kumar is too earnest to qualify, and Rajesh Khanna put an unacceptable amount of effort into his onscreen wooing. Dev Anand, meanwhile, always seemed to be holding down a job; just look at the titles of his movies – Guide, Jewel Thief, C.I.D.

Come the ‘70s, it was angry young man time. While not every character Amitabh Bachchan played was gainfully employed, they were all men with a mission, decidedly un-slack. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s blissful comedies yielded a few slackers, though they usually spent the second half embroiled in some complex subterfuge involving the heroine’s dad which required them to be resourceful. On then to the ‘80s, and India’s first real slacker film.

From the very first shot tracing a cigarette’s journey from makeshift coconut ashtray to being passed between three hands (and a foot), 1983’s Chashme Buddoor is delightfully unpurposeful. Farooque Shaikh, Ravi Baswani and Rakesh Bedi are three Delhi University students on holiday, both from college and that terrible Indian affliction – a sense of responsibility. The trio spend their time smoking, chasing girls, roaming around on uncooperative two-wheelers, and smoking some more. The film doesn’t appear to cover more than a few months in their lives, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it returned five years later to find them doing the same thing. That’s the essence of slackerdom: lives without upward mobility or downward spiral, in a state of perpetual drift.

Two and a half decades later, Ayan Mukerji’s Wake Up Sid celebrated – and slyly deflated – this idea of drift. Ranbir Kapoor played Sid, a rich scion who’s content to watch the clouds roll by. So far, so drifty, except then he argues with his dad, who throws him out of the house. Sid moves in with Konkona Sen Sharma’s self-sufficient journalist, but continues to potter around. Kapoor’s gentle performance separates Sid from the kind of rich, brash loafers Shah Rukh Khan used to play in the ‘90s. He’s just a man without a plan, and though he eventually finds a job as a photographer, the movie makes it clear that his slackitude was a character trait, not just the lethargy of the privileged.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones usually surfaces as a trivia question (What was Shah Rukh’s first onscreen appearance? What 1989 film did Arundhati Roy write and star in?) What isn’t acknowledged – perhaps on account of it never having released in theatres or on DVD – is that this is one of the most acute, true-to-life films ever made about young people in India. It’s certainly the best Indian film about slackers. Radha, Annie, Kosozi, Mankind, Paapey may be in their final year at the Delhi School of Architechture, their theses may be woefully incomplete, yet no one seems to care. The movie goes by in a rooster-chasing, ping-pong-playing haze. Even the climactic gesture of rebellion by Radha – who makes her final presentation in a sari and a hat – is offhand, a futile protest in a losing game. In a movie whose soundtrack consists of instrumental versions of Beatles songs, these are kids who’ve taken John Lennon’s advice in “Revolution” to heart: they won’t do anything concrete, but they know it’s gonna be alright. 

Jal: Review

Just before Jal got underway, a blurb from a Hollywood Reporter review flashed onscreen. “A breathtakingly photographed tragedy of Shakespearean proportions,” it read. This is hyperbole of Shakespearean proportions, but over the next two hours, our thoughts did turn to the Bard – specifically to slings and arrows, mentally aimed at screenwriter Rakesh Mishra, and to the quality of mercy, dropping like the gentle rain on co-writer and director Girish Malik.

That Jal is overheated is no surprise: it’s set in the salt-encrusted desert of the Rann of Kutch. Naturally, water is an immensely valuable commodity here – something the film never fails to remind us of every five minutes. It’s so valuable, in fact, that you can make a living, as Jal’s protagonist Bakka (Purab Kohli) does, as a water-diviner. Bakka’s success rate is middling: a result, perhaps, of his rather hopeful modus operandi; he twirls a couple of rods, puts his ear to the ground and spends the next couple of days digging and reassuring sceptical villagers.

Water divining is an actual profession in desert regions of India, and Jal might have done well to explore the trade in some depth. Instead, the film wanders off into a strange parallel plot involving a Russian ornithologist, Kim (Saidah Jules), who’s trying to save the migratory flamingo population, dying due to the brackish water. She enlists Bakka, who successfully points the giant drills she’s hired to the right areas and earns the goodwill of his temperamental but water-starved village. But his moment in the sun is short-lived: Bakka’s in love with a girl from an enemy village, and if Ram-Leela taught us anything, it’s that residents of Kutch take their Romeo and Juliet posturing seriously. Soon, there’s a murder, a pregnancy, a sandstorm, an excommunication, a near-rape and an actual rape.

In recent interviews, Malik has insisted that Jal isn’t an art film. He’s right about that. From the title down, the film goes out of its way to be literal. Twelve songs on the soundtrack reference water or the lack of it; one particular piece of background music goes “jal jal jal jal jal jal”. There’s hardly a single important piece of information that isn’t tossed back and forth between characters and verbalised in different ways, so that the audience isn’t left in the dark. Perfectly simple bits of information are further simplified (my favourite: “We’ve located two spots. This is spot one and this is spot two.”) And everything is blown out of proportion – Kim can’t just be a visiting conservationist, she has to have gone to “some of the best colleges in Europe”. Similarly, the village males can’t see her as another pretty white-skinned girl; they have to imagine she’s there to shoot a blue film.

Purab Kohli, in a rare lead role, tries hard to match the film’s conception of Bakka as a randy, preternaturally confident water god. Casting the good-natured Kohli as a virile charmer is a bold move, but he’s too easy-going an actor to get the audience worked up. (It might have been interesting if he’d dropped hints that Bakka is making it up as he goes along, like Shreyas Talpade did in Dor.) Kirti Kulhari brings some fire to her Juliet role, but has little to do in the second half besides look to her lover for solutions. Saidah Jules gets all the worst lines – “Take care of my birds, they’re like babies” are her last words – though it’s debatable whether better writing would have helped her performance.

As Ram-Leela and The Good Road have recently shown, there are few landscapes in this country as photogenic as the Kutch desert. Cinematographer Sunita Radia goes somewhat overboard – zooming over salt deposits, panning around camels – but at least we’re given something pretty to look at as the storyline becomes progressively sillier. Malik deserves some points for ambition (this is his directorial debut), but there’s no denying that Jal takes an interesting premise and runs it comprehensively into the ground. After about an hour, we were begging for closure, but the shadow of an ending we saw was only a mirage.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.