Rogue One: Review

How fitting it would be for Gareth Edwards were hired to direct a DC movie. He loves the dark. He hasn’t any particular sense of humour. His ear for dialogue is about as finely tuned as Christopher Nolan’s: exposition, clunky stirring line, repeat. After his no-budget breakthrough Monsters, he made Godzilla—occasionally spectacular, but lacking in wit and rather a slog to get through. The same is the case with Rogue One, the first Star Wars spinoff, of which DC’s favourite villain might reasonably ask, “Why so serious?”

Rogue One begins with a sequence that’s reminiscent of the protracted opening of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. This is not a useful comparison for Rogue One to bring upon itself: Tarantino has penned few better things than that initial pas de deux, while the writing in Edwards’ film has, at best, a meat-and-potatoes solidity. Perhaps there were too many writers involved—the screenplay is credited to Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, the story to John Knoll and Gary Whitta. Then again, Casablanca had a roomful of writers and that worked out fine.

Rogue One is set in the period preceding the events of A New Hope. The film is built around a solid kernel of an idea: the Death Star is being conceived and for that, the Empire needs a former employee, scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), who’s hiding out on a deserted planet with his wife and daughter, Jyn. An Imperial squad, headed by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), tracks him down, but Jyn manages to escape. Years later, she’s tracked down by the Rebel Alliance, a ragtag group battling the Empire. An Imperial pilot (Riz Ahmed) has defected and is carrying a message from her father concerning the Death Star. Jyn (Felicity Jones) is sent to track him down with the help of Rebel officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna).

Anyone who’s seen A New Hope will have an idea where this story must end. This makes Rogue One more of a ‘how’, rather than a ‘what’, film—nothing new for the franchise, which includes George Lucas’ prequel trilogy, the longest ‘how’ in cinema history. We know that the Death Star was eventually constructed, and that details of its weakness were eventually smuggled to the Jedi. The only questions left are mundane ones. Will Jyn ever crack a smile? Can you fell multiple Stormtroopers with a stick, as Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) does so spectacularly? Is Moody Cassian the new Emo Kylo Ren?

It’s rare for Hollywood franchises to sport genuinely multiethnic casts (the Fast and Furious films are exceptions), so all credit to Rogue One for including British Asian (Riz Ahmed), Mexican (Diego Luna), Danish (Mads Mikkelsen), Australian (Ben Mendelsohn), Chinese (Jiang Wen) and Hong Kong (Donnie Yen) actors in key roles. Yet, very little comes of all this. Luna and Jones are fine dramatic actors, but they can’t seem to access the lightness of touch necessary to power a film like this; the charm of Daisy Ridley and John Boyega in The Force Awakens is sorely missed. Mikkelsen is too subdued; Whittaker could do with some subduing.

I did enjoy Yen, one of Asia’s biggest action stars, as a blind man who wields a mean stick—his character seems to be a tribute to Zatoichi, the classic blind swordsman of Japanese cinema, though it also returns the Force to its zen-wuxia roots. There are also a couple of city- and planet-levelling explosions that are incongruously beautiful. But moments like these, when the screen comes alive, are rare. Maybe fans of the franchise will appreciate Edwards’ attempts to add to Lucas’ universe without playing spot-the-reference, as J.J. Abrams did shamelessly but entertainingly in The Force Awakens. Speaking for myself, by the time the galaxy was done being saved, I’d drifted far, far away.

This review appeared in Mint.

China girls and future nostalgists

In film lab parlance, a “China girl” was the image of a woman that appeared in the countdown leader of a reel. It was used by technicians to match skin tone and colour density. No one is sure how the term came about, but the most widely accepted origin theory is that, sometimes, instead of women, porcelain figures (hence “china”) were used as models.

In his documentary Electric Shadows: Journeys In Image-making, Avijit Mukul Kishore juxtaposes one China girl with another: Helen dancing to "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu" in Shakti Samanta’s 1958 Hindi film Howrah Bridge. Clothed in a cheongsam, eyebrows arched, Helen is a delightful Orientalist cliché, no more Chinese than the women on the film leaders. It’s a potent comparison, one that uses film history and technique to point to the medium’s capacity for deception.

In 2011, a film festival called You Don’t Belong: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema was organized by West Heavens Project, a cultural exchange programme. Kishore, whose Snapshots From A Family Album was part of the line-up, travelled to Beijing and Shanghai. The plan was for him and the other film-makers from India to make a film on the festival. That film never materialized, but Kishore was sufficiently intrigued to return in December 2014 to shoot a documentary of his own. Along with architect Rohan Shivkumar, he travelled to Beijing, Shanghai and Kunming, interviewing a range of people, from film curators to Mao-era memorabilia shop owners. This became Electric Shadows, whose title is the literal English translation of the Chinese word for cinema—dianying.

Even with its slight running time of 40- odd minutes, the film manages to touch upon Bruce Lee, Mani Kaul, The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin, state censorship, 1920s Shanghai and Jawaharlal Nehru and still find time for a sequence in which Kishore flies over fields and cities dressed like a warrior out of a Zhang Yimou film. When I met him and Shivkumar, Kishore told me that he’d set out to explore how image-making and propaganda affects culture. The film also shows easily we can reduce a culture to its most popular export, like the scene in which Shivkumar gets requested for photographs by a series of young girls who either believe he’s Shah Rukh Khan or feel he looks close enough for it not to matter.

Electric Shadows suggests that the long-standing embargo on culture during the Party years left the Chinese people somewhat unmoored. Johnson Chang, director of the West Heavens Project, speaks of his frustration with what he sees as a loss of contact with Chinese history. “Because of that we get indigestion from what is coming in from the outside,” he says. “The way the Chinese consume images, it’s like the image has no history at all,” Shivkumar says. As a young man from Shanghai puts it: “It’s a nostalgia only for the present.”

This statement seems to be the jumping-off point for the other Kishore film screening this month. Nostalgia For The Future, co-directed with Shivkumar, is a meditation on home and belonging, architecture and the nation—themes Kishore has explored previously in documentaries like Vertical City and Snapshots From A Family Album. It explores various houses, from the Laxmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara to B.R. Ambedkar’s modest dwellings in Mumbai, and through these, various ideas of “home”: as raw communion with nature (Le Corbusier’s designs), as pure spirit (Gandhi), as engineering (government housing in Delhi).

As Kishore points out, the film has something else in common with his previous work: it’s exploration of film form. Kishore is a cinematographer; he majored in the discipline at the Film and Television Institute of India and has shot, apart from his own films, Ashim Ahluwalia’s John & Jane, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s The Immortals and several others. In Nostalgia For The Future, he mixes digital with 16mm footage and clips from Hindi films and old Films Division documentaries. The 16mm interludes, in black and white and colour, tie in with the title of the film: they’re present-day scenes, but the hazy images and the rounded corners of the screen impose a nostalgia of their own.

Nostalgia For The Future isn’t a difficult film, but it’s definitely a thoughtful one. Though he’s used a voiceover for the first time, Kishore refrains from imposing any definitive conclusions. You could get happily lost—as I did at times—in the beautifully precise images, or you can try and unpack the ideas about architecture, philosophy, nation-building, city planning, class and caste that keep coming at you. Sometimes, you may find the film triggering a personal response. As I heard Nehru defend the architecture of Chandigarh by saying that sometimes India needs to be hit on the head in order for it to think, it struck me that I’d heard similar sentiments voiced in the last few weeks by supporters of the demonetization drive.

If you live in Mumbai and are interested in documentary, chances are you’d have run into Kishore and Shivkumar. They frequently take on curatorial work: for the Movies at the Museum sessions at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum and, in the past, for the Mumbai Film Festival and Films Division’s happily revived weekly programme, FD Zone. I ask them whether they agree with something Chang says, that to be a film curator you have to be optimistic. “You have to be an optimist, period,” Shivkumar says, laughing. Kishore agrees, adding, “There are so many films that will never make it to the market. What is possible to do is more important than what you might not be able to.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Befikre: Review

Befikre begins with "Labon Ka Karobaar" – literally, the business of lips – a musical number that would appear to double the number of kisses that have ever taken place in Hindi cinema. It’s a Benetton advertisement’s-worth of making out: kisses cutting across race, age, sex. And there’s more kissing to come in the film – chaste pecks, fairly carnivorous attacks, sloppy ones that make you want to avert your eyes – most of it accompanied by swoony camera movements. A kiss, no matter how much Aditya Chopra would want you to believe, isn’t just a kiss, it’s an event.

Having introduced one major theme (in France, people kiss a lot), the film immediately sets about establishing another (relationships are messy). Dharam (Ranveer Singh) and Shyra (Vaani Kapoor) are having a knock-down-drag-out fight that ends not with her throwing a TV out of the window, surprisingly, but with him calling her a “French slut”. She leaves, and the film jumps back a year to show us how they got together in the first place. You know how it goes: two Indians meet in a European city, hook up/make out, decide later that they’ll just be friends. Cocktail had the carnal version, Tamasha the chaste one. More worryingly for Befikre, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil explored similar territory little over a month ago.

While the copious smooching (and a split-second shot of a bare behind) will probably be cited as evidence of Befikre’s progressive outlook, there’s more substance in Dharam unexpectedly apologizing for his slut remark. It was my inadequacy that made me judge you, he tells Shyra. You expect such a sentiment from Ranbir Kapoor, a star with an unusual propensity for exploring weakness, not so much from the cocksure Singh.

For the first hour, Befikre goes back and forth in time, tracking the pair’s progress from hook-up to live-in couple, and returning periodically to their uneasy present. Watching Singh and Kapoor try and out-brazen each other is amusing at first (there’s a whimsical scene, built around a cornflake, which takes place in a department store) but eventually, I began to wonder when the stakes would be raised, if there were to be stakes at all. Complications do surface, but Dharam and Shyra, with their dares and their rebellion and their annoying energy, are more t-shirt slogans than characters in whom one can emotionally invest. For a film about relationships, there’s little insight offered into why we behave the way we do in love and lust, just a reiteration of that old chestnut: former lovers can’t be friends.

Befikre is set entirely in France, and doesn’t seem to have any qualms about resembling a glossy travel ad, building scenes around the Eiffel Tower and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont Bridge. At one point, it’s announced that the characters are headed to the “exclusive region of Picardy”. This love of all things French is matched by the film’s disdain for all things Delhi. Whenever Dharam says something unfortunate, Shyra retorts with “Kar di na Dilli waali baat (There’s that Delhi thinking again)”. I’m surprised that a film with such a monumentally shoddy (and casually cruel) final set-piece can afford to point fingers at anyone else’s thought process.

When the Befikre trailer released, a friend told me she was worried Kapoor would be playing a version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She isn’t, and there’s a directness to her gaze and her speaking voice that suits the forthright Shyra. If there’s a manic pixie in the film, it’s Singh, who preens and struts around like he’s on uppers. They’re well-matched, these two actors, and it’s unfortunate that the material they’ve been handed is so slight. A parting plea: could Bollywood directors reign in the self-referencing? There are three explicit nods to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which only serves to remind those who aren’t charmed by self-homage that Chopra’s reputation as a director rests almost exclusively on a film made 21 years ago.

This review appeared in Mint.

Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh: Review

Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh isn’t a sequel to Kahaani, but it may as well be. I’m not talking about the shared setting (West Bengal) or lead actor (Vidya Balan, playing Vidyas in both) or genre (urban thriller). Instead, the films are inextricably linked because the narrative tricks of the first colour the viewing experience of the second. The 2012 film hinged on a lying flashback: protagonist Vidya Baghchi’s memories turned out to be deliberately—and significantly—misleading. The film was a success, but from point on, Ghosh had been put on notice: he’d cried wolf once.

If someone has lied to you before – and a false flashback, no matter how clever, is a cinematic lie – it’s difficult to put the thought out of your mind that they might do it again. This, at least, was how I made my way through Kahaani 2: two hours and ten minutes of second-guessing and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I actually spent the intermission trying to convince my friends that Jugal Hansraj’s blatantly obvious villainy was a smokescreen, that his hamming was a subtle hint that we were dealing with an unreliable narrator. I won’t tell you if my guess was right, but if one of Ghosh’s goals as an artist is to mess with his viewer’s heads, then he’s totally succeeded with me.

In a film that’s essentially one twist after another, it’s difficult to separate the spoilers from the bare bones of the plot. Here is my attempt at parsing. Vidya Sinha (Balan) is living with her wheelchair-bound daughter, Mini (Tunisha Sharma), in the small West Bengal town of Chandannagar. They’re almost set to leave for the US, where Mini has been slotted for an operation that could restore the use of her legs. But the girl is kidnapped and Vidya, running frantically to reach the address texted to her by the abductor, is hit by a car.

Things become even knottier when Inderjit (Arjun Rampal), the cop assigned to Vidya’s case, recognises her as someone he knew named Durga; fitting, considering Balan was a figurative Durga by the end of Kahaani. Soon, we’re in a flashback derived from Vidya’s diary entries— a perfectly reasonable storytelling device, but one that set off a series of unreliable narrator alarm bells in my mind. The film cuts between the two storylines, adding characters along the way: Inderjit’s comical boss (Kharaj Mukherjee), Jugal Hansraj and Amba Sanyal as Mini’s relatives, and a female assassin who isn’t a patch on Bob Biswas, the sad sack killer of Kahaani.

At times, Kahaani 2 is a little too reminiscent of Kahaani for its own good. It’s almost as if Ghosh is convinced that these films (and perhaps Te3n, which he produced, and which has plenty in common with Kahaani 2) constitute a franchise, and that he has to live up to the expectations of fans who’d be disappointed if the new film didn’t have an assassin, two cops (one straight ace, the other morally compromised), and a moment of high drama that turned out to be visual deception. It’s not that Ghosh doesn’t have a fresh story to tell — some of the subplots in this film could sustain a whole feature by themselves. Still, by the time the (fairly shaky) denouement arrives, you can feel the narrative strain to top Kahaani’s final reveal.

Ghosh’s eye is just as keen as it was four years ago. There’s a wealth of visual detail scattered across the film; one of my favourite throwaway moments is when Inderjit chases a fake-passport supplier through his workplace and we catch a split-second glimpse of art forgeries stacked in a room. You can’t fault the pace either: editor Namrata Rao, a Kahaani alum, hurries the scenes along. You can fault some of the acting: Hansraj is very broad, as is the actor playing the assassin. Balan is convincingly harried, but the spark of a few years ago is somewhat dimmed. Rampal’s low-wattage performance, though, might be his best.

Compared to the vivid Kahaani, this film has a blanched look, perhaps in keeping with its dark subject matter. It’s a frenetic 130 minutes, but I never really felt for Vidya Sinha the way I did for Vidya Bagchi. Perhaps I was just too caught up waiting for Ghosh to fool me twice.

Captain Kirk

Two months ago, in an article for The Huffington Post, Kirk Douglas wrote, “My 100th birthday is exactly one month and one day after the next presidential election. I’d like to celebrate it by blowing out the candles on my cake, then whistling ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’” One hopes that Douglas – a lifelong liberal – would have recovered from the US election result by the time 9 December comes around, and will allow himself a fond look back at what has been an extraordinary career.

He made his screen debut in 1946, opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and never seemed to look back. Unlike established stars like Cary Grant and John Wayne, whose screen personae were fixed in the minds of the public, Douglas was tougher to slot: he was a boxer in Champion (1949); a cynical newspaperman in Ace in The Hole (1951); an archetypal Hollywood wheeler-dealer in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952); Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956); an upright colonel in Paths of Glory (1957). Outspoken and wilful, he was instrumental in breaking the Hollywood blacklist: as co-producer of Spartacus (1960), he saw to it that Dalton Trumbo (who’d been writing for years under a pseudonym) got a screenwriting credit, which paved the way for other discarded Reds to return to the Hollywood mainstream.

Spartacus sealed his popular image as a rugged action star, but Douglas rarely gravitated towards un-ironic heroics in his films. As he noted in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, he portrayed more than his fair share of heavies, but his real talent lay in suggesting that even his protagonists were a few drinks and a bad breakup away from violent implosion or explosion. He could have easily built a career out of his singular glowers and sneers. Instead, he used his scenery-chewing like a smokescreen, the bluster barely able to hide the emotional nakedness.

As the man turns 100, we raise our glasses to Spartacus, to Chuck Tatum, and to these five scenes made indelible by Douglas’ presence:

Meeting Whit 

In Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Kirk Douglas was handed one of the most effective introductory scenes in the noir canon. By the time we lay eyes on Whit, 11 minutes in, he’s been established as a man not to be messed with – ‘a big op’, in the words of the Robert Mitchum’s doomy hero, former private detective Jeff. In flashback, we see the two of them meet for the first time. Whit hires Jeff to find his girlfriend, who shot him and made off with 400 thousand dollars.

Most actors – especially those acting in their second film, as Douglas was – would have played Whit as overtly menacing, and the scene would probably still have worked. Whether some instinct told Douglas to resist this, or whether it was Tourneur’s idea to have Whit be mild-voiced, even genial, is anyone’s guess. At any rate, from his first line – “Smoke a cigarette, Joe,” to a hyperventilating henchman – Douglas is a study in offhand cool, perhaps taking a cue from the Zen-like presence of Mitchum across the table. The only time he allows his face to darken is when he says “I won’t touch her” – a canny choice by the actor that tells us all we need to know about Whit.

Hollywood or bust

In the opening minutes of Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1951), movie star Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) and screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) all dodge calls from their once-collaborator, studio head Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas). When the three of them are brought together by a producer, we’re told, in a flashback that lasts most of the film, about their respective relationships with – and eventual break from – Shields.

A key scene in the film is the one in which the casually ruthlessness of Shields’ ambition is laid bare. Fred, his collaborator from the start, waits nervously outside a financier’s office while Shields applies for funding for their new movie. Suddenly, Shields bursts through the door, delighted – they have the million dollars they were looking for. He’s so excited, chattering about what they could do with the money, that he doesn’t notice his friend’s face darken when he lets it slip that Fred has been replaced by an established director.

As Fred protests, there’s an immediate change in Douglas’ demeanour; his face, animated a few seconds ago, becomes impassive. His voice, too, drops an octave as he says, “Fred, I’d rather hurt you now than kill you off forever.” In this moment, we feel both the burning ambition and cold calculation of Shields. It’s quite something to watch this scene and be reminded of Michael Douglas, Kirk’s son, deploying a similarly devastating poker-face years later in Wall Street.

Rick falls apart

One of the underappreciated aspects of Douglas’ screen-acting is how often he belied his rugged image and showed weakness – physical, emotional or spiritual – in his onscreen roles. He was drunk and intriguingly unsure in his debut, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, and equally drunk and emotionally turbulent four years later, in Michael Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn. In the 1950 film, Douglas plays Rick Martin, a character based on real-life jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. It’s an uneven film, beautifully photographed and scored but also shrill and puzzling if you can’t figure out that Rick’s wife, played by Lauren Bacall, is supposed to be gay (films at the time couldn’t explicitly say this, which makes Douglas and Bacall’s scenes together very strange).

At the end of the film, Rick is wandering the streets of New York. His wife has walked out on him, his mentor is dead, he’s flubbed a recording session and now he’s drunk and falling apart. In a black jacket and partially unbuttoned white shirt, Douglas walks around in a daze, bumping into passers-by, getting into a fight, buying a beat-up horn. It’s not what most would consider heavy-duty acting, but when I think of Douglas and the film, this is what I remember. It’s a reminder that, so often, what we think of as ‘performance’ is actually the sum total of lighting, camerawork, shot selection, music and a dozen other big and small decisions, almost none of which are in the hands of the actor.

Cowboy blues

As Jerry Goldsmith’s score sweetens into a wistful lilt, the woman hears the clip-clop of hooves, sets aside her cooking and hurriedly washes her hands. She turns around just as he enters. The look they share in that instant has their entire backstory: affection, compromise, regret, loneliness. “Hi,” he says, face creasing into a grin. “Hi,” she replies, with a hint of a smile. “Welcome home.”

The film is David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962), a modern-day Western in which Douglas plays an outlaw of sorts – not a criminal, just someone unsuited to the restrictions of modern life. The woman is his best friend’s wife; they were in love once, but it never worked out. It’s a simple scene – she makes him breakfast, he tells her that her husband is fine – but Douglas and Gena Rowlands play it with such feeling that you can feel the weight of the years.

The last action hero

Along with George Miller’s The Man from Snowy River, The Fury represents the best of late-period Douglas. In this 1978 film by Brian De Palma, he plays Peter Sandza, an ex-CIA agent who survives an assassination attempt and resurfaces years later in search of his telekinetic son, who’s been kidnapped by a shadowy intelligence organisation. Pursued by his son’s captors, he takes two bumbling beat cops (one of whom is played, hilariously, by Dennis Franz, future NYPD Blue star) hostage and commandeers their vehicle. De Palma, master of the elaborate chase, wasn’t fond of cars, a possible reason why the sequence is played mostly for laughs.

De Palma gave impetus to several fledgling actors – John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Margot Kidder – in his early films, but this was the first time he worked with a huge star. And Douglas is very much the old-school pro in the film, and in this scene. He deadpans through most of it, which only serves to make the panic of his co-passengers more hilarious; his sideways glance when one of them says, belatedly, “Somebody’s after you, is that it?”, is a minor classic). Few actors over 60 would have consented to ending a big action sequence with their pants around their ankles. That Douglas does this without looking ridiculous is testament to his willingness to subvert his own virile image, and to his belief in his own star quality.

This piece appeared online in Mint On Sunday.

A la la landmark

Minutes into La La Land, we were picking our jaws off the floor.

There hasn’t been a purer distillation all year of why we go to the movies, and why cinema isn’t ready to be replaced by home viewing, than the opening sequence of Damien Chazelle’s new film. It opens with a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway. As the camera pans along the gridlock, we hear the sounds of radio stations, hip hop and salsa and R&B. This chaotic soundscape is interrupted by a sound of a young woman singing. Another motorist picks up the tune, then another. People get out of their cars and dance. In a matter of minutes, the freeway is hosting a musical number for the ages.

Even edited, this would have been a spectacular sequence, but Chazelle elects to shoot it in a breathless single take. It must have taken weeks of planning and rehearsal to nail all the individual and group movements—some close to acrobatic—and weave them into a flowing, ecstatic whole. Linus Sandgren’s spectacularly mobile camera tilts, pans, dips, races: this must have been what German film-maker F.W. Murnau was dreaming of in the 1920s when he spoke of an “unchained camera”. The song is an up-tempo, Latin-infused number called "Another Day of Sun", and people were pa-pa-pumming it while leaving the theatre.

This sequence might remind some of West Side Story because of the way it marries location shooting and dance, but Chazelle found inspiration in another musical from the same era. In an interview with Variety, La La Land composer Justin Hurwitz spoke about how they “wanted to have a big production number that really pulled you into the world”. He mentions the opening sequence of Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, which creates a jazzy musical number out of two trucks and a barge, before seguing into a vibrant bit of group choreography.

Demy’s influence on La La Land is visible throughout. He was the swooniest of the French New Wave directors, his films full of bright colours and witty nods to Hollywood musicals. La La Land borrows his palette—especially those pastel shades—and his signature sound, forged in collaboration with the great Michel Legrand. In the same Variety interview, Hurwitz mentions the French composer’s ability to combine a jazz rhythm section with a full-blown orchestra and end up with something danceable. Legrand probably wouldn’t mind being cited as the inspiration for tunes as perfectly constructed as City of Stars or A Lovely Night.

Chazelle first came to wider notice when Whiplash, a film about a young jazz drummer and his martinet of a teacher that he wrote and directed, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. It went on to become an unprecedented hit, garnering five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and winning three (Editing, Sound Design and Supporting Actor). Few are aware that this wasn’t Chazelle’s first film, or his first stab at reviving the musical genre. His directorial debut came in 2009 with Guy And Madeline on a Park Bench, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Like Miles Teller’s drummer in Whiplash and Ryan Gosling’s traditionalist pianist in La La Land, it had a jazz musician protagonist: a trumpet player named Guy.

Guy And Madeline began as Chazelle’s thesis film at Harvard. And it feels like a first film, shot on grainy 16 mm stock and showing the strong influence of another debut film, John Cassavetes’ landmark 1959 independent film Shadows. Yet, parts of it also seem like a dry run for both his subsequent films. The jumpy editing and hand-held camerawork would be used to greater dramatic effect in Whiplash. But it’s also a bona fide musical, with tap dancing and characters breaking into song. Hurwitz’s score, like his one for La La Land, is equal parts jazz and classic Hollywood symphony. There’s even a musical number done in one long, unbroken shot.

La La Land is set in present-day Los Angeles, but you get the sense that the central characters would have preferred to belong to an earlier era. The Gosling character, Sebastian, loves Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell and wants to open a club where people can hear “pure” jazz. The actor Mia, played by Emma Stone, seems to hark back to a time when people who came to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune were discovered performing one-person plays rather than, say, off a YouTube short. The film’s enthusiasm for jazz “as it used to be” is matched by its nostalgia for studio-era Hollywood (the flip side of this could be David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive, which has a similar dreamlike air but is pessimistic about Hollywood’s intentions). The coffee shop Mia works at is across the road from the window Bogart and Bergman looked out of in Casablanca. Sebastian can’t believe she hasn’t seen Rebel Without A Cause; they go for a screening, then head to the Griffith Observatory, the setting for one of Rebel’s memorable scenes.

Inevitably, there is tribute paid to the great Hollywood musicals. "A Lovely Night", an old-timey bantering duet shot in one take, has Gosling and Stone doing their best Astaire-Rogers. At one point, Gosling even hangs from a lamp post like Gene Kelly in Singin’ In The Rain. And as the film progresses and Sebastian and Mia begin to measure the size of their dreams against their ambitions, there are also echoes of sombre musicals like A Star Is Born and Meet Me In St Louis.

Not that you have to catch any of these references to enjoy La La Land. There’s nothing cerebral about the boisterous poolside dance that ends "Someone in the Crowd", or the dazzling camera move during the same song in which you’re looking up at the sky one moment, down at the ground the next. Neither is it difficult for a lay viewer to recognize the ache underlying the charm of Gosling and Stone. When they say they don’t make movies like this anymore, they aren’t talking about musicals—they mean movies that give unironic pleasure, that draw spontaneous whoops from jaded viewers, and leave one light-footed and tingling when they’re done.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dead Zindagi: Review

In Dear Zindagi, Shah Rukh Khan plays Jehangir Khan (“Call me Jug”), a Goan psychiatrist who helps the mildly disaffected Kaira (Alia Bhatt) with her problems. His analysis is a bit fortune cookie-ish (“Don’t let the past blackmail your present to ruin a beautiful future”), but does that really matter? If there’s one thing we ought to be able to agree upon, it’s that none of us would mind Khan as our analyst. Who wouldn’t want her story listened to with that famous Shah Rukh concentration, her worries alleviated by that self-deprecating chuckle?

One of the heartening things about Gauri Shinde’s film—her second after the well-received English Vinglish in 2012—is its insistence that seeing a shrink isn’t something out of the ordinary. Kaira isn’t seeking help because she’s depressed or is hearing voices—she’s just having trouble sleeping. Over Skype, she tells her worried house help to think of Jug as a dimaag ka doctor, one you can tell your problems to. In a more heated moment, she asks her family why it’s acceptable to say that you’re visiting a doctor but not a mental health specialist. It’s a small blow, but the thousands of people seeking psychiatric help across India will probably be grateful for a film that articulates these very basic truths.

Dear Zindagi takes its time depositing its protagonist on the couch. In the film’s opening stretch, which unfolds in Mumbai, we find out that Kaira’s cheating on her boyfriend, Sid (Angad Bedi), with a colleague, Raghu (Kunal Kapoor), who loves her but whom she keeps at arm’s length. Freeing herself of both relationships, she heads to Goa and gets tangled up in equally fraught tug-of-war with her overly concerned parents. It’s not often you see a sexually liberated, commitment-phobic, parent-averse female character in a Hindi film. It’s almost as if the film’s inviting judgement; when Jug asks Kaira about her boyfriends, she immediately snaps, accusing him of mentally slut-shaming her (Khan’s pained reaction is one of his best moments in the film).

Despite a few nicely worked-out traumas, there isn’t much that disturbs Dear Zindagi’s placid surface. I can understand the urge to present Kaira—a cinematographer at the start of her career—as more than competent, but having her advise a director on how to reshoot his final scene, and his actually welcoming the suggestion is so far-fetched it’s almost science fiction. There’s a token gay character, whose only significant scene seems to exist to show how chill Kaira is. Goa looks as pretty and boring as a picture postcard. Laxman Utekar’s cinematography is glossy and impersonal, Amit Trivedi’s music inoffensive and over-used.

At times, I found myself wishing the film would flail about more. A relevant point of comparison might be Kapoor & Sons—another Dharma production about family secrets, one which didn’t allow its picturesque setting or devastatingly pretty cast get in the way of ugly confrontation. Dear Zindagi has one such explosion, but it’s awkwardly written and exists more as an excuse for Alia to be able to do a big shout-y scene. Shinde tries a couple of new-Bollywood tricks—interrupting songs with short scenes, for instance—but there’s little to quicken the pulse, let alone set it racing. And some of the choices are just plain silly, like the character who says “Lebanese” when he means “lesbian”, or the scene in which Kaira, angry with Raghu, breaks bottles of ragu.

Amid all this, Bhatt thrives. As always, it’s the little choices she makes within scenes—fiddling with the furniture, twitching her lip—that render her such a compelling actor. Shah Rukh Khan bears down with starry charm on the role of Jug, but his mountaineer anecdote just can’t compare with his co-star talking about herself in disguised third person earlier in the scene. Bhatt has a rare ability to make the emotional decisions of her characters look as if they spontaneously occurred to her. In other words, she gives the impression she’s winging it, which makes even the most ordinary scenes she’s in terribly exciting.

This review appeared in Mint.