Taxi: Review

One of the ironies of the Iranian government’s 2010 decision to ban Jafar Panahi from directing films for 20 years is that this seems to have spurred him on creatively and furthered his influence. Had he stopped working after the ban, he would still have had a place in Iranian cinema history, having made films like The Circle, Crimson Gold and the remarkable Offside. But he didn't, choosing instead to subvert the diktat with a run of films that is as strong a statement of artistic freedom as anything in the recent arts.

His first project after the ban, 2011’s This Is Not A Film, appeared to be a little home movie about Panahi coming to terms with the ban. It’s actually a high-wire act. Panahi can’t seem like he’s directing, yet he can’t stop directing either—it’s his natural state. The film was smuggled out of the country on a flash drive hidden in a birthday cake, and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Panahi’s next film, Closed Curtain (2013)—about an artist who’s afraid he’s being watched, as Panahi most certainly was—was a more cerebral piece, and closer to an actual “filmed” film.

Taxi returns Panahi to the documentary style of This Is Not A Film, but the ruefulness has been replaced by a wry humour and a surprising ebullience. The film takes place almost entirely inside a taxi, with the director as driver, carrying forward the conceit of Panahi not officially “directing” the action. There’s a camera in front that the passengers acknowledge, but it’s obviously not the only one being used. It’s all an elaborate joke, one that most of the “passengers” are in on. “Mr Panahi, that man and woman... they were actors, right?”, a seller of pirated DVDs asks about the previous fares. Panahi just smiles.

Taxi is funny and revealing enough to be enjoyed without any knowledge of its subtext. The passengers include a street tough who argues for capital punishment, two pushy old ladies with a goldfish, an injured man and his frantic wife (whose story reaches a deliciously dry conclusion off-screen). There’s Panahi’s schoolgoing niece, whose movie project for class allows the film to send up the Iranian censors: One of the rules is that she avoid “sordid realism’”, another stipulates that the good guys have beards. And there’s Panahi’s friend, a lawyer, who, in a heart-warming moment, offers a rose to the audience, the “people of cinema”, who “can be relied upon”.

This isn’t the first time an Iranian director has done the whole drive-around-Tehran-in-a-car thing. Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, for instance, was modelled along similar lines. But Taxi is hardly a retread: the two films are very different in tone, treatment and subject matter. Kiarostami’s film, less playful than Panahi’s, was mainly about the position of women in modern Iranian society. Taxi, on the other hand, revolves around broader themes of freedom, censorship and subversion. Both were widely acclaimed: Ten was included in film journal Cahiers du Cinéma’s “Best Films of the 2000s” list, while Taxi won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale earlier this year. Both are films for the ages.

This review appeared in Mint.

Main Aur Charles: Review

Heard of this chap called Sobhraj? Great guy. Well-read. Well-dressed too. Good cook. And quite the ladies’ man—every time you see him, he’s with a new girl. What’s that? He killed 12 people in cold blood? I heard something like that. But if you get to know him, you’ll see he’s a really nice person.

Such is Main Aur Charles’ position on Mr Charles Sobhraj, serial killer, escape artist and celebrity. Movies have been glamorizing criminals from the days of hand-cranked cameras, but half an hour in, Prawaal Raman’s film is in danger of massively overselling its protagonist. The film’s hardly started when Sobhraj (Randeep Hooda) is described as “intelligent, hypnotic, ruthless and brutal” (he’s called “hypnotic” again later). At one point, he’s compared to Robin Hood. “Whenever I see you, I want to have sex with you,” says Mira (Richa Chadha), one of his many, many girlfriends. The film seems to have the hots for him too.

The problem is, for the first half, we’re shown no evidence of anything that marks Sobhraj out as special, apart from his ability to bed a prodigious number of women. The film opens with one of his victims washing up on a beach in Thailand (we’re shown no murders—that would be so inelegant). The scene shifts to Delhi, a couple of years down the line, where Sobhraj is serving a jail sentence. He breaks out of prison and heads to Mumbai, then Goa, changing women along the way like so many peaked caps. After around 45 minutes of very little happening, he’s caught again. So much for the master criminal spiel.

The structural issue with Main Aur Charles is that there is actually a reason for Sobhraj’s apparent unimpressiveness in the first hour, but by the time this is revealed, the film has already lost much of its grip on the audience. It’s not that Main Aur Charles is difficult to sit through even when it’s meandering: There is a fair amount of pulpy pleasure to be had in Hooda’s preening and commitment to a French accent (not much worse than Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s in The Walk), Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s flashy cinematography, and the consistently overripe dialogue. Still, there’s little doubt that the last 45 minutes or so, when inspector Amod Kanth (Adil Hussain) gets Sobhraj back to Delhi and tries to build a case against him but is frustrated by everyone’s infatuation with the killer, is the strongest part.

It’s difficult to know what to make of a film that casts Chadha as a wide-eyed ingénue (surely there’s no shortage of those in Bollywood?) or suggests that Sobhraj is more victim than aggressor, something Mira tries to explain to Kanth without a trace of irony. Are we meant to take this at face value? Or is it just Raman’s way of showing how completely Sobhraj’s accomplices come under his spell? I wish the film hadn’t left it so late before it showed its central character doing something truly clever. Up till then, Hussain’s by-the-book but dogged 'Main' is a lot more intriguing than Charles.

Hooda’s Sobhraj is a cipher, a beautiful surface with no indication of the emotions—if any—that are raging underneath. Towards the end, there’s a scene with Kanth and Sobhraj talking in the inspector’s office, the criminal telling the cop about the pleasures of doing wrong. The words themselves are banal, but the look on Hooda’s face in that instant is transporting. It was the only moment when I felt like subscribing to the cult of Sobhraj.

This review appeared in Mint.

Titli: Review

Hope is in short supply in Titli. So are the other comforts we’re conditioned to expect in our movies: things like beauty, warmth, humanity. This is hardly an indictment of Kanu Behl’s film, which screened at Cannes in 2014 and is now getting a theatrical release here under the unlikely banner of Yash Raj Films. It is simply to say that the universe Titli inhabits is noxious and violent, and it never flinches or softens in its running time of nearly 2 hours. In a press conference last month, Behl warned that this would not be a “cathartic film”. He wasn’t kidding.

In the Shel Silverstein comedy number "A Boy Named Sue", a father tells his son that he gave him a girl’s name because he figured that would force him to “get tough or die”. Perhaps this was the intention behind the naming of Titli, the third of three sons (the explanation in the film is that his mother had wanted a girl, but had to make do with a girl’s name). If so, it seems to have had the opposite effect. As played by Shashank Arora, Titli is soft-voiced and slight of figure, at odds with the garishness and brutality of his surroundings. It’s clear he doesn’t belong, and the stylish upward curl of his hair is a small suggestion of the social climbing he would like to do if his dream of owning a parking space in the mall came true.

But, as Behl seems to suggest, east Delhi is where dreams go to die, and Titli’s plans are rudely squashed when his elder brothers, Vikram (Ranvir Shorey) and Bawla (Amit Sial), discover that he has stolen Rs 3 lakh from them to pay the builder (the money ends up with the police). The calmer Bawla convinces his father (Lalit Behl, the director’s father) and Vikram—who has already displayed his hair-trigger temper in a superbly orchestrated scene earlier—that what they need to do is get Titli married. He won’t run anywhere after that, he reasons. And a girl could also be useful for their business.

That the family business is carjacking is a joke so grim that it’s hardly a joke. There was certainly no laughter—or audible intake of air—when Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi), a day into her arranged and reluctant marriage, sees Vikram take a hammer to a poor car salesman’s face. If it wasn’t clear earlier that Titli’s brothers were capable of murder, we know now. It kicks the film into high gear. Neelu tells Titli she wants a divorce, and that she has a secret (married) lover. Titli, still nursing dreams of escape and mall parking ownership, tells her he’ll take her to see him—for a fee.

All this unsavoury business takes place in an environment that seems to inspire such behaviour. To call Titli a kitchen-sink drama would be a disservice to kitchen sinks. Behl designs his east Delhi environs with the same detail that producer Dibakar Banerjee did his west Delhi ones in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! Every tacky poster on the wall, every mention of sattu chicken, is a clue to the very specific world. The sound design by Pritam Das is even more remarkable —an infernal background score of hacks, coughs, gargles and radio jingles that’s as distasteful as some of the violence on display.

The emotional and physical violence in Titli is wince-inducing, but even more oppressive is the atmosphere of mistrust and desperation that Behl and his co-writer Sharat Katariya build up. The actors appear to breathe in this fetid air and spit it out at the audience. Shorey’s performance in particular is remarkable, both in its brutality and its unpredictability. In the scene where he finds out about the stolen money, he starts beating his brother, then breaks down when Titli calls the house a living hell: He genuinely cannot understand why someone would want to leave their family. He’s the most magnetic thing in the movie, though Raghuvanshi is a blast as Neelu, the pawn who refuses to be played like one.

Titli has the energy and daring of a first film, and a couple of the blind spots of one. Some of the plot turns seem more motivated by screenwriter cleverness than by strict character logic. The visual solutions are also a little trite at times—spiders spinning webs, Titli staring wistfully at a bird in the sky. But Behl shows great maturity in other places. Nine out of 10 directors would have made a big deal of Bawla’s sexuality, but Behl just drops it in matter-of-factly, another unaddressed source of tension in an impossibly compromised family. And there are little touches that add colour to a very grey narrative: a fixed deposit offered as dowry; Neelu saying “marketing” instead of “shopping”.

Unrelentingly grim, morally unmoored, Titli festers like a sore on your consciousness. Yet, from time to time, it’s important that a film like this get under our skin and remind us why we value catharsis so much.

This review appeared in Mint.

Scenes from a film festival: MAMI 2015

Mami 2015 came to a close on 5 November and, with it, the 16-hour days, the hastily grabbed lunches and overpriced coffees, and the frenetic, combative, transportive movie-watching. The drama wasn’t always limited to the screen, which is why my list of memorable moments doesn’t just include scenes from films, but also events that involved those watching it.

A rose for the people of cinema in ‘Taxi’
In Taxi, his third film since he was banned from directing by the Iranian authorities, Jafar Panahi drives a cab around Tehran and records his conversations with a variety of passengers. As with This Is Not A Film and Closed Curtain, what appears to be a documentary is actually something much more complex and playful. Many of his passengers are in on the joke; they see the camera in front, laugh and tell him that they know he’s making a film but that he can’t acknowledge it. The most poignant moment comes when a lawyer friend of Panahi’s places one of the roses she’s holding in front of the camera and says, “This is for the people of cinema.” It’s a small thank you from Panahi to his movie-watching brethren the world over.

Christopher Doyle’s response
The Christopher Doyle masterclass would have been memorable for its sheer weirdness. Yet, when the veteran cinematographer (In The Mood For Love, Hero) wasn’t riffing on drugs or film school’s effects on one’s sex life, he had a lot of practical wisdom to impart. At one point, he explained the importance of reacting to the location instead of changing it. “People keep asking me about my style,” he said. “I don’t have a style. I have a response.”

The convoy in ‘Chauthi Koot’
In Chauthi Koot, director Gurvinder Singh and cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul combine as effectively as they did in Anhey Ghorey Da Daan. The stillness of the frame accentuates those moments when Nagpaul’s camera moves swiftly and decisively, always to a purpose. One of the most memorable examples of this is the scene with the convoy of tractors heading towards a village. Some of the men and women start singing a folk song; soon, everyone has joined in and the air is full of cries of Bole so nihaal. The camera, which had been among the singers, is now above them, panning forward rapidly until they’re a blur. The screen, largely bereft of sound and movement till now, is suddenly overflowing with it.

The line for ‘Lobster’
On the first day of Mami, the Juhu screening of The Lobster was cancelled. Though it was rescheduled for later that night, many people pinned their hopes on another screening in Juhu a couple of days later. Those hopes were rudely dashed. The unreserved line went all the way around the room, like a snake intent on eating its tail. Some stood for an hour and a half, and still didn’t make it in. Yorgos Lanthimos, known for his arthouse films Dogtooth and Alps, would have been most gratified to see this.

Walkouts in ‘The Forbidden Room’
The Forbidden Room was very likely the weirdest film of the festival. Directed by Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, this is an unholy melange of exploitation, schlock and silent cinema—though no amount of description can do justice to the sheer perversity of its oddness—and it was evidently too much for many. I could feel the old couple sitting next to me shifting uneasily in their seats as a beautiful amnesiac flower girl writhed sensually and sang the music of Aswang the vampire. I think they finally gave up when Udo Kier’s character opts for open brain surgery to cure him of his love of human behinds, while a lilting number called The Final Derriere plays in the background.

Jia Zhangke sings ‘Awara Hoon’
Those who found themselves watching Walter Salles’ Jia Zhangke: A Guy From Fenyang were in for a lovely surprise. In the film, Zhangke, one of the most highly regarded Chinese film-makers in the world, recalls that when he was growing up, many of friends turned to petty thievery because of the tough times, but also because they were inspired by a certain film that had released there, Raj Kapoor’s Awara. He then goes on to sing the chorus from Awara Hoon, getting the tune right and all the lyrics wrong.

The first glimpse of Sharmila Tagore in ‘Apur Sansar’
There were a few sentimental sighs from the Bengalis in the audience when Soumitra Chatterjee casually appears on screen right at the beginning of Apur Sansar, the third film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Later, you get a first glimpse of Sharmila Tagore (it was her first time in any film), decked up for her wedding. You could hear the collective intake of breath in the hall.

The entirety of ‘Victoria’
It’s 138 minutes long but it doesn’t have a single cut, so who is to say Victoria isn’t one very long moment—a film in a breath. That this experiment by Sebastian Schipper is a technical and organizational tour de force is hardly worth mentioning; what makes it truly compelling is how deeply one ends up feeling for its impulsive characters.

The Threshold: She's leaving home

Included in the India Story section at this year’s Mumbai Film Festival is a film that might not have grabbed your attention at first glance. The Threshold, after all, is not a title that suggests a whole lot of action. Neither does a plot précis: this is a two-character film in which a wife decides to leave her husband after decades together. Yet, when you walk out of The Threshold, you feel like you’ve seen something real and raw and honest, attributes which aren’t necessarily present in some of the more heralded Indian films of the festival.

“I don’t think we should keep such a thing from him.” The film opens with this line, spoken by Rinku (Neena Gupta) to her husband, Raj (Rajit Kapoor). The ‘him’ is their son, whom we never see: he’s got married the previous day in the couple’s Tirthan valley home, and has left along with the other guests. Sometime after that, Rinku has told her husband that she is leaving him.

You expect the film to tell you why she took this decision—to at least come up with a third-act revelation which puts you on either character’s side. Instead, director Pushan Kripalani undercuts the audience’s need for a revelation. Few explanations are given, and the most you can do is try and pick up clues from the couple’s fragmented, often inarticulate bickering. In one scene, Raj grabs at Rinku impatiently. His wildness in that instant, and her bowed, submissive body language, carry within them the possibility that he might have been somewhat more violent in the past with her. But you can’t be sure, and The Threshold isn’t telling.

Kripalani, whose first feature this is, has worked as a theatre professional (he’s one of the co-founders of the Industrial Theatre Company) and a cinematographer in the past. The Threshold began with an idea by Kausar Munir (also the film’s lyricist), after which Kripalani, writer Nihaarika Negi and the actors worked for months to create the characters from the ground up. One of the strengths of this Mike Leigh-like process is that Raj and Rinku really do seem like a couple who’ve been arguing for years. They switch from Punjabi to English to Hindi as they correct each other, tear up, snap and seethe. He calls her stupid, stubborn; she uses that quintessential north Indian epithet: nitthalla.

There are comparisons that can be made, not just to Leigh (the celebrated British director whose influence—acknowledged by Kripalani in a conversation I had with him—can be seen in the fade-to-black scene transitions) and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight but to the master of toxic relationship films, Ingmar Bergman. The Threshold might be seen as a gentler Scenes from a Marriage, though Kripalani pointed out that there’s no specific debt owed to the Swedish director besides the fact that he grew up seeing his films, as any film buff might do.

There’s also the temptation to view this as an extension of Kripalani’s earlier work in theatre. It’s true that the purely visual moments in the film are brief and few: a disoriented Raj dunking himself in the freezing spring; Rinku observing half-amused, half-concerned her husband’s inability to make a decent omelette. Yet, even in the dialogue-heavy scenes, there’s little staginess. Kripalani shoots the film himself, eschewing flash; the shots are never distractingly beautiful, though God knows he has the right scenery for it. He also varies the movement within scenes, and the various degrees of stillness and fidgeting exhibited by the characters becomes expressive in itself.

“I was interested in the transmission of experience, not of information,” Kripalani told me when we spoke. This would certainly not have been possible without actors as fine as Kapoor and Gupta, who convey all the affection, exasperation and weary sync that can only come from decades of living together. Though the film is mostly them disagreeing, their concern for each other provides some of the most touching moments, such as when Raj helps his wife pack her suitcase for what might be the last time. When The Threshold ended, I felt a little pang that I hadn’t gotten to see these characters, both of whom I now felt attached to, in happier times.

The serious business of sleep

 “Have you ever wondered why people sleep on dividers during summers?”

Shaunak Sen’s Cities of Sleep opens with this conversation-stopper. The answer—that gusts of wind from passing vehicles keep the mosquitos at bay—is both reasonable and mind-bogglingly surreal, a combination which recurs time and again in Sen’s film about the unofficial sleep shelters of Delhi. The 75-minute documentary, which will premiere at the Mumbai Film Festival starting next week, is the Delhi-based video artiste and PhD student’s first feature-length effort.

Sen became increasingly interested in the social and political ramifications of sleep while doing his PhD in cinema studies from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. His starting point was French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Nights Of Labor: The Workers’ Dream In Nineteenth-Century France, which re-examines the 1830 Revolution through close readings of worker diaries, newspapers and poetry. “When I first read it, I was very interested in just thinking about the night, and the kind of pressure sleep exerts within urban spaces,” Sen says over the phone from Delhi. “That was the initial hunch. On the basis of this, I started going to night shelters, trying to figure out the landscape of sleeping structures in Delhi.”

When he began in mid-2013, Sen visited the official shelters run by non-governmental organizations. However, he soon became aware of the informal structures—the “cities of sleep” of the title— which cater to the many who cannot be accommodated by the government-sanctioned rain baseras. “The city is almost partitioned into different types of sleep units in the night, especially in the central and Old Delhi areas, where there’s a huge population of daily-wage migrant labour,” says Sen. “Because these people obviously need to sleep, different kinds of industries spring up every night. Some of them have existed for many years and have become like well-oiled machinery.”

The first shelter we see is one of the well-oiled ones—Jamal bhai’s, in Meena Bazaar, Old Delhi. Thousands sleep here every night on cots rented from him. Jamal comes across as a hard-nosed businessman, insisting on payment—or, in a disquieting scene, a musical performance—before allowing someone to sleep in his area. One man asks him for a cot, says he’s poor and will die. “No, you can’t die here,” Jamal deadpans immediately. “That’ll cost me 1,250 bucks.”

At the other end of the sleep spectrum is the video house run by Ranjeet near Loha Pul (the local term for the old two-tiered Yamuna Railway Bridge). Here, people can watch up to three films—or, alternatively, tune out the noise and sleep for 6 hours—for just Rs 10. This unusual set-up is made even more fascinating by the steady stream of philosophy that keeps issuing from Ranjeet, a former rickshaw-puller: pronouncements that range from Sun Tzu-like aphorisms (“If you want to seize control over someone, never let him sleep”) to lines that are some sort of rough poetry (“We ingest the night”). Sen describes Ranjeet’s operation as almost a “commune”; and there is a hippie-ish quality to his shelter, especially when compared to the pragmatic capitalism of Jamal’s area.

Cities Of Sleep could easily have been built around Ranjeet, but Sen had already found himself an even more striking central subject—a shifty wanderer called Shakeel. Sen and his collaborators—associate director Aman Mann, assistant director Sunderram Arjun and co-cinematographer Salim Khan (Sen was the other director of photography)—came across him at Jamal’s camp. Shakeel kept approaching them, insisting that only he could give them the low-down on the night-shelter scene. Eventually, Sen interviewed him and noticed something unusual: Shakeel kept changing the details in his stories. Only one thing remained constant: his obsession with where he would sleep. “His life seemed to be so dependent on different sleep decisions,” Sen says. “It was such a central, dominating narrative over his life that he was the perfect navigating agent for a film about the pressures that sleep exerts.”

Shakeel’s shape-shifting ways become apparent as the film goes on; there’s a revelation about his name that lands like a ton of bricks. He’s an unreliable narrator, and an unlikeable one: The scene where he talks about beating his wife is disturbing not just because of the violence being described but also because he’s seemingly unconcerned about the camera recording what he’s saying. He wanders in and out of the film, an irritable, wheedling malcontent in perpetual search of a good night’s rest, the physical opposite of Ranjeet’s intermittent Zen-like voice-over.

Sen said he can’t stand the sort of documentary film-making that uses close shots of subjects to invoke “empathetic suffering”. “As a political decision, we decided we wouldn’t shoot a single close-up,” he says. That decision was suspended for the scene when Shakeel breaks down in front of his father—the one moment Sen felt his subject was being genuine. The film ends with him convincing the proprietor of a children’s shelter to allow him to spend the night. Seeing him slumped in a chair, lost to the world, I was reminded of something Ranjeet had said earlier in the film: “Poverty means that you can’t choose what wears you down. All that’s left up to you is how many hours you will sleep.” A singular statement, and a singular film about the people who live out its implications.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Rock The Kasbah: Review

I haven’t felt a stronger urge to walk out of a screening all year than I did during Rock The Kasbah. It wasn’t just the laziness of the writing or the gimmickiness of the set-up. It’s the astonishing condescension on display—the idea that Afghans need Americans to show them how to treat their women right. Rock The Kasbah wants to win hearts and minds, which makes it a lot more offensive than some blockheaded action movie in which wild-looking 'Arabs' chop off heads and say “infidel” a lot. It even climaxes with a teary performance of "Peace Train", perhaps forgetting that the author of the song had once demanded the very un-peaceful end of Salman Rushdie.

Rock The Kasbah takes a while to become truly offensive; initially, it looks set to be another fish-out-of-water Bill Murray comedy. Murray plays Richie Lanz, a washed-up rock tour manager in California. In desperation, he books his client, Ronnie (Zooey Deschanel), on a United Service Organizations tour to entertain the troops in Afghanistan. There is some comedy in the way Deschanel’s panic bounces off Murray’s fake cheer, but when she runs out on him—and out of the movie—things begin to spin out of control. The spiral intensifies when Richie is floored by a Pashtun girl’s singing and decides to book her on the American Idol-like TV show Afghan Star.

This film is dedicated to Setara Hussainzada, who angered traditionalists when she danced without a hijab on Afghan Star in 2007. Rock The Kasbah takes her story and turns it into a mess of stereotypes. Salima (Palestinian actor Leem Lubany) can’t just be any regular oppressed girl, she has to be the daughter of a warlord. And it has to be the American agent who emancipates her, who has the great wisdom to write off the studio audience’s cool reaction to her with: “They want to go with her. They just can’t go with her because they’re in a group.”

You just know that there’s a certain level of uncaring—and an assumption of audience ignorance—when an Afghanistan-set film is called Rock The Kasbah. Richie’s daughter actually points out that kasbahs are mainly associated with African countries, but that’s the film’s title anyway, not just because it’s a Clash number but because director Barry Levinson probably feels the viewer won’t know, or won’t care. The only thing more depressing than the horse-and-warlord clichés and the moralizing is Murray’s commitment to this rubbish, whether it’s warbling "Can’t Find My Way Home" in the shower or deadpanning, “Well, that’s wartime”, when an army man finds him tied to a bed wearing lipstick and a blond wig.

This review appeared in Mint.