Mission: Impossible—Fallout: Review

The Mission: Impossible franchise has been around for six films now, one more than the Antoine Doinel series, in which Jean-Pierre Léaud grew from a young boy to a 30-something man. Mapping out a similar progression with Tom Cruise, who’s played Ethan Hunt in all six films, would be largely pointless. He’s the Dorian Gray of cinema, his face practically unlined at 56, his feet pumping like pistons whenever he launches into the busiest sprint in modern film. A portrait might grow hideous in an attic somewhere, but on screen, Cruise ages only infinitesimally.

Still, it’s understandable that Mission: Impossible—Fallout would, in the scattered moments of calm between its expert, undulating action sequences, turn a little nostalgic. Old characters show up, earlier films in the franchise are referenced. Hunt’s ability to deliver just in the nick of time is brought up several times, both as a source of humour and comfort. Ving Rhames, whose Luther has been the other constant over six films, gets more lines to intone in that unhurried baritone of his than he did in the last few outings. This isn’t a psychologically rich series, but that doesn’t mean these characters haven’t grown on us.

Mission: Impossible films were always twisty and spectacular, but something special happened on the fourth, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol (2011), in particular with the Burj Khalifa sequence. In an era where Hollywood action choreography has become simultaneously more extravagant and less involving, here was a man hanging off the side of a very tall building, like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. Suddenly, Mission: Impossible wasn’t just the best action money could buy, it was also the most fun you could have at the movies (the expanded presence of Simon Pegg from this film helped). This was true of the next film, Rogue Nation (2015), and the latest, both directed by Christopher McQuarrie (who did an uncredited rewrite on Ghost Protocol).

Fallout is so convoluted that I gave up after a while and just accepted each reveal and double-double cross as it came. Hunt loses three plutonium cores sought by a group of terrorists known as The Apostles, led by the shadowy John Lark. There’s a “broker” (Vanessa Kirby, in a witty cameo), a sort of go-between for covert agencies and terror cells, and a minder—in the impossibly buff, incomparably square-jawed form of Henry Cavill—attached to the IMF team by the CIA. And Hunt’s rival/ally from the last film, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), is back to kill some and confuse the rest. These pieces are endlessly realigned as we move from Belfast to Paris to London to Kashmir, but the central reveal is half-hearted, as if it doesn’t really matter who John Lark is as long as it isn’t Hunt.

Thankfully, all the clarity missing in the plot can be found in the pounding set-pieces. It’s become increasingly rare to see well-cut, non-deceptive action in a Hollywood film, so there is some satisfaction in how Fallout keeps us close to Cruise, whether he’s skydiving or flying a helicopter, but not so close that we can’t make out if it’s a stunt double. There’s a close combat scene in a men’s room, with a lithe Asian man (Liang Yang) almost taking out Cavill and Cruise, which is reminiscent of the John Wick films. But the rest is pure M:I, especially the breathless car/boat/foot chase through Paris, and another on the rooftops of London, a signature frantic Hunt run made funny by his receiving instruction from Benji (Pegg), who’s reading the terrain all wrong on his laptop.

Leave aside the fact that he’s a 56-year-old carrying multiple action franchises, there’s something about Tom Cruise that still gets younger viewers excited in a way they aren’t for Dwayne Johnson or Jason Statham. I think it’s because he’s an analog movie star in a digital age. Audiences are fed so much CGI in their films now that the sight of someone performing real feats, making an honest effort, goes a lot further than it used to.

Dhadak: Review

Dhadak is pretty much the same film as Sairat. Then why does it feel so different? Shashank Khaitan’s film is, in many instances, a scene-for-scene remake of the 2016 Marathi film, but something’s missing—and not just the thrill of first discovery. In Sairat, Nagraj Manjule turned Romeo-and-Juliet clichés on their head through his lyrical, heady direction and by messing with archetypes (one inversion of viewer expectations involved the lower-caste protagonist being played by a fair-skinned actor, and his upper-caste lover by a darker-skinned one). Dhadak, on the other hand, smoothens out the differences.

Midway through a food-guzzling obstacle course, Madhukar (Ishaan Khatter) catches his first glimpse of Parthavi (Janhvi Kapoor). She’s the daughter of hotelier and local politician Ratan Singh (Ashutosh Rana); he’s the son of a restaurant owner—lower down in the social order, but not as visibly, uncomfortably low as the boy’s family in Sairat. Madhukar is instantly besotted, and we get a version of Sairat’s Yad Lagla, following the ecstatic youngster as he leaps into a lake, runs home, washes and changes, rushes to the well where Parthavi is, and jumps in. It’s a faithful reworking, with Ajay-Atul’s fine music given new lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya, though somewhat let down at the end by Kapoor’s gaze, vague and unreadable where Rinku Rajguru’s was both unimpressed and keenly appraising.

Madhukar sets about wooing Parthavi—scenes debased by the film’s use of his friend, Purshottam (Shridhar Watsar), significantly shorter than the other characters, as a comic prop. This is the sort of desperate shtick you’d think Indian cinema had given up in the ‘90s, but Khaitan does seem to have a fondness for it, resurrecting the predatory gay figure in Badrinath Ki Dulhania. Here, Purshottam is dressed in a school uniform and sent to profess Madhukar’s love, a scene as head-scratchingly weird as it is offensive.

There was always the danger that Bollywood would play down the caste narrative of Sairat. There are two mentions of caste in Dhadak—both by Madhukar’s father when he warns the boy not to pursue the upper-caste girl. Yet, these do not arise organically from the material as it did in, say, Mukkabaaz, where caste is in the air, in the food. Parthavi’s family doesn’t mention caste at all. The film ends with an intertitle about lives lost to “honour killings”—the same ballpark, perhaps, but a dilution.

Soon, the young lovers are on the run, moving through Mumbai and Nagpur and settling in Kolkata. There they start to build a new life, renting a tiny room, Madhukar working as a waiter, Parthavi as a helpline employee. Khaitan, who captured with some accuracy the rhythms of Uttar Pradesh life and speech in Badrinath Ki Dulhania, fumbles here. Udaipur, a city with delightful wall art, is reduced to a set of tourist clichés: statutes, havelis, TV soap framing and a surfeit of meaningless aerial shots. Most of the dialogue is in Rajasthani-inflected Hindi, though it’s a nice touch when the action moves out of the state and Khaitan allows characters to speak in Marathi and Bengali without providing subtitles, allowing us to share in the isolation of the couple.

Whether by design or not, Dhadak comes to rest on the shoulders of its two leads. Ishaan Khatter, son of actors Rajesh Khattar and Neelima Azeem and half-brother to Shahid Kapoor, was impressively frazzled in Majid Majidi’s Beyond the Clouds. He has less to do in Dhadak but there’s a soulfulness to him that’s at odds with Hindi cinema’s current penchant for bratty, hyperactive onscreen male personas. Janhvi, daughter of the late Sridevi, is a more perplexing proposition—she doesn’t appear uncomfortable in front of the camera, but there’s a blankness that won’t leave her even when she’s emoting furiously. A little guidance might have helped; when she gulps “Kyun kiya mujh se pyaar (Why did you fall in love with me)?” her eyebrows do a little dance—an understandable, if distracting, tic, and an unexpected reminder of her mother, who could work miracles with a raised brow.

Sairat showed that it was possible to highlight caste in a bells-and-whistles commercial film, something Kaala did even more explicitly this year. By replicating the narrative but tossing in caste almost as an afterthought, Dhadak shows the limitations of mainstream Hindi cinema.

This review appeared in Mint.

100 years of film censorship in India

Film censorship was born of fire. Early film stock had a compound called nitrocellulose, which was used in explosives as guncotton. Mixed with camphor, it became nitrate film—not explosive, but still violently flammable. In 1897, a year and a half after the first ever film screening, a nitrate fire at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris killed 126 people. A spate of similar incidents over the next decade resulted in the world’s first cinematograph legislation being passed in Britain in 1909, to improve safety standards by controlling the issue of cinema licences.

One kind of control led to another. Since the 1909 Act made licences necessary for public screenings, local authorities used this to regulate not just the conditions in which the film would be screened but also the contents of the film itself. After a few confusing years with everyone making up their own rules, the British Board of Film Censors was formed in 1912.

By this time, Indians were not only watching films but also making their own. After dozens of home-grown newsreels and shorts, the first full-length feature, D.G. Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, released in 1913. In 1917, a Bill introduced in the imperial legislative council noted the “rapid growth in the popularity of cinematograph and increasing number of such exhibitions in India”. It recommended the creation of a law that would ensure both safety and the “protection of the public from indecent or otherwise objectionable representations”. Thus was born the Cinematograph Act of 1918, and, with it, film censorship in India.

A suitable film
The 1918 Act gave the district magistrate (or, in Rangoon, the commissioner of police) the power to issue licences to exhibitors, and the government to appoint inspectors to examine and certify films as “suitable for public exhibition”. It did not, however, mention what the inspectors were to look out for. What a suitable film was—or, at least, what it wasn’t—began to become clearer in 1920, when censor boards were set up in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Rangoon (a fifth was established in Lahore in 1927). To judge the appropriateness of films, both local and foreign, for release, these boards adopted a set of rules.

“No generally and rigidly applicable rules of censorship can be laid down.” The general principles of the Bombay Board of Film Censors began with these encouraging words, then proceeded to lay out 43 objectionable subjects (most of them taken verbatim from a famous list compiled by politician T.P. O’Connor for the British censors in 1917). Rules 21 and 22 were key: “Scenes holding up the King’s uniform to contempt or ridicule” and “Subjects dealing with India, in which British or Indian officers are seen in an odious light”. Film-makers were also advised to steer clear of “Gruesome murders and strangulation scenes”, “Unnecessary exhibition of feminine underclothing” and “Indecorous dancing”. No.40—“Confinements”—must have struck Indian directors as grimly ironic; 1920 was the start of the non-cooperation movement, and jails all over the subcontinent were full.

With one eye on the freedom movement, another on the barrage of Axis propaganda, the British government in India ordered a cinematic fact-finding mission. The Indian cinematograph committee (ICC) of 1927-28, chaired by a former Madras high court judge, T. Rangachariar, was the first comprehensive inquiry into movie viewing, censoring and exhibiting habits in the country, and an acknowledgment by the British of cinema’s increasing popularity in India. In 1921, there were an estimated 148 movie halls in India; by 1927, this number had doubled. Despite Hollywood films accounting for roughly 80% of the shows in those early years, it was the Indian titles which really got the public going. In its report, the committee said: “The crowds which flock to witness a popular Indian film (and many of them are popular) are really remarkable.”

The ICC’s sensible suggestions—setting up a central board of censors, a system of appeals, classifying titles as U and A—were not put into practice, a fate which would befall other painstakingly compiled reports on Indian cinema in the years to come. Still, the report and its attendant documents are a fascinating snapshot of Indian movie-going in the 1920s, with interviewees ranging from Phalke to Lala Lajpat Rai (didn’t like Charlie Chaplin) and M.K. Gandhi (didn’t like cinema). The responses testify to the hold cinema had over viewers in this country—that unique ability to transport, to transfix and to linger on—even before the introduction, in 1931, of sound, and with it, the signature genre of Indian cinema: the musical. “The Picture House possesses all the attractions of real life,” a Lucknow judge, Bhagwat Prasad, wrote to the ICC. “We find ourselves in the midst of people in the screen and become interested in them. Our tears for their sorrows and our delight at the successes are immediately called forth. The effect which is produced in our minds is instantaneous and it is not soon effaced.”

No politics, please
Despite the long list of objectionable subjects, Indian cinema wasn’t exactly prurient in the 1920s and 1930s. Hamarun Hindustan (1930) had an intimate scene with Sulochana and Jal Merchant. Film-maker J.B.H. Wadia recalled, years after the fact, Lalita Pawar kissing her co-star “without inhibition” in a film, and Jal Merchant and Zubeida “kissing each other quite often” in 1932’s Zarina (depending on which account you read, Zarina had a total of 34, 48 or 82 kisses). Actors kiss in the Franz Osten-directed Shiraz (1928) and A Throw Of Dice (1929). And there’s the famous kiss in Karma (1933), which has gone down in legend as being 4 minutes long, though it lasts only a minute and involves a snake and a tearful Devika Rani trying to bring a comatose Himanshu Rai to life.

The British had bigger problems than a few onscreen kisses. “The main preoccupation of the British censor was not the passionate love scenes then common in Indian cinema but the threat of communal discord and the expression of nationalistic sentiments,” Suresh Chabria writes in Light Of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema, 1912-1934. Mentioning British excesses, the Indian National Congress, self-governance, or even revolution in other countries (Juarez, a 1939 Hollywood film about the fight for self-rule in 1860s Mexico, was forbidden by the Bengal censors) was enough to earn your film a cut or a ban. “It’s a strange phenomenon which we find in this country to see the Government-sponsored Indian News Parade claiming to give all the news to the Indian people while the Censors black-out the Nation’s beloved leaders who make the most news,” cine-journal Filmindia complained in 1945, noting that even framed photographs of national leaders were cut from films.

Then there was the ultimate taboo: Gandhi. Listed in the Journal Of The Motion Picture Society Of India (1937) are the titles of banned newsreels—Mahatma Gandhi’s Historic March, Gandhi Sees The King, Bombay Welcomes Mahatma Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi After his Release, and several others—short non-fiction reports that the British clamped down on. In fact, Gandhi was the hidden subject of the first film to be banned in India. The protagonist of Bhakta Vidur (1921)—with his Gandhi cap, Khadi clothes and spinning wheel—was deemed, quite rightly, to be a stand-in for the Mahatma. Thyagabhoomi (1939) met the same fate; in The Encyclopaedia Of Indian Cinema, it’s mentioned that the Tamil film had documentary inserts of the leader, and that protagonist Sambhu Sastry “is portrayed as the Gandhi of Tamil Nadu, sitting on a dais spinning with a charkha”.

It wasn’t just a case of official paranoia over newsreels, then shown before all feature film screenings. Indian fiction film directors were finding ways to talk about the ongoing freedom struggle without mentioning it directly. "Door Hato O Duniyawalo", the hit musical number from Kismet (1943), is ostensibly a warning to the Germans and the Japanese, but the actual target is clearly the British. In a 1970 interview, writer-director K.A. Abbas mentions historical films like Umaji Naik (1926) and Swarajya Toran (1930), which replaced the British with other invading forces, and social films like Wrath (1930) and Apna Ghar (1942), which spoke in a kind of code to Indian viewers. “There was ferment all over the country,” Abbas recalls, “and it was reflected in the arts and the cinema.”

In the 1940s, the policing of Indian cinema grew more stringent. Out of 1,774 films seen by the Bombay censors in 1943, 25 required modification before they could be released; that number went up to 464 (out of 3,099) by 1948. Through the Film Inquiry Committee report submitted to the government in 1951, we get a picture of what censorship was like in the years leading up to, and just after, independence. Things were, to put it mildly, chaotic. The five censor boards examined films separately, and each had their own set of rules and local pressures. Often, a title passed by one would be rejected by another. In addition, the government—of India, or of a particular state—might deny a certificate to a film passed by the censors, a fate which could befall a noir (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946) or a war film (All Quiet On The Western Front, 1930) as easily as it could a propaganda newsreel (Inside Nazi Germany, 1938).

This was also the decade that saw the disappearance of the kiss from Indian cinema—a curtailment so long and stifling that it hasn’t fully returned yet. Crucially, this wasn’t due to a change in censor rules, but because of a societal shift towards moral caution and “Indian” values. In film critic and historian B.D. Garga’s words, “Kissing disappeared from the Indian screen not because of a fiat of the censor but because of pressures brought on by social and religious groups.” It was a sign that film censorship in free India would depend not only on official sanction but on societal approval.

One board to rule them all
In the Bombay Calling column in the February 1949 issue of Filmindia, Baburao Patel praised, in his combative way, a recent development. “We have been asking for this for the last 15 years,” he wrote of the move to centralize film censorship, before suggesting the puritanical Morarji Desai as a possible chairman. Over the next few years, a Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC, renamed as Central Board of Film Certification in 1983) was set up, regional boards were abolished, and U and A were adopted as certification categories.

The scrapping of the 1931 Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act after independence effectively abolished newspaper pre-censorship in India. Yet, as Arpan Banerjee notes in his essay Political Censorship And Indian Cinematographic Laws: A Functionalist-liberal Analysis, there was no corresponding move to free cinema of that restriction. “The Act of 1918 was repealed, but it was later replaced with a law not dissimilar in scope,” he writes. This was the Cinematograph Act of 1952, the cornerstone—and, in many ways, the millstone—of film censorship in India.

The 1952 Cinematograph Act sets out the structure of censorship as it stands today: the chairperson at the top, then the board members, then the advisory panels (members of the initial examining committee and the revising committee, which do much of the actual examination of films, are drawn from these). Everyone, from the chairperson down to the advisory panel members, is a government appointee. And every government at the Centre has taken advantage of this, staffing the CBFC with party loyalists eager to make cuts and deny certificates to films critical of the establishment. The Emergency saw the most blatant use of this power, with Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975) and Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka (1977) banned, and Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1975) stuck in a bureaucratic tangle, because they were perceived as critical of the Congress government.

What makes the Cinematograph Act such a problematic piece of legislation? In short, it gives the CBFC—technically, a certification body—vague and vast powers to play censor. The crux is Section 5B of the Act, which states that any film that is against the “interests of [the sovereignty and integrity of India] the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or involves defamation or contempt of court or is likely to incite the commission of any offence” can be denied a certificate. It further asks the government to frame rules according to which the CBFC will function.

These guidelines, which have only increased in number over the years, make for depressing reading. Censors are tasked with ensuring that films provide “clean and healthy entertainment” and do not “deprave the morality of the audience”—instructions broad and stodgy enough to cover anything from a raised middle finger to an orgy. Many of the rules that the CBFC can cite to demand cuts are the same as those followed before independence (no endangering of public order, no depicting the modus operandi of criminals)—which gives one an idea of how archaic our censorship mindset is.

Not all these rules are followed to the letter; if they were, hardly any films would make it to theatres. But they exist, vague and convenient, and that is enough. No Central government has made serious attempts to change them, because they are so useful. You cannot release a film in theatres without a CBFC certificate. And you can’t get a certificate without having a government-appointed body passing judgement on your film.

Taking censorship to court

In his early days as a critic, K.A. Abbas pushed for the censure of blithely racist Hollywood films like Gunga Din (“It is not enough even if we manage to get the film banned in India,” he wrote in 1939). It’s somewhat ironic, then, that he was the one person (until an attempt by Amol Palekar last year) to challenge the idea of pre-censorship in court. In 1968, Abbas—already well-known as the screenwriter of Awara and Shree 420—made a 16-minute documentary, Char Shahar Ek Kahani, which had scenes showing prostitution in Mumbai. The CBFC’s examining committee handed the film an “A” certificate; after Abbas protested, the revising committee reached the same conclusion. After a fruitless appeal to the Central government, Abbas petitioned the Supreme Court, arguing that pre-censorship was antithetical to freedom of speech and expression.

The court ruled against Abbas. “The censorship imposed on the making and exhibition of films is in the interests of society,” said the judgement, though it also asked Parliament and the government to do more to separate the objectionable from the socially valuable. Though Abbas’ suit was probably doomed from the start, it did have one useful fallout: the formation, in 1981, of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), a quasi-judicial body headed by a retired high court judge, which one could approach if unhappy with the decision of the CBFC’s examining and revising committees.

This is pretty much where things stand today. There have been some minor developments in the years since—films must now carry no-smoking advisories, and it’s almost impossible to shoot a scene with a live animal. In addition to the ever-arbitrary demands of the board—a blurred brassiere here, a bleeped “virgin” there—censorship by mob has emerged as a disturbing issue. Bal Thackeray demanding his own cuts in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay in 1995 and the Shiv Sena’s protests against Deepa Mehta’s Fire in 1998 have acted as a blueprint for violent political groups, which have threatened the makers of films from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil to Padmaavat into deleting scenes and delaying releases. Though most directors, writers and actors today are affected by censorship, the film community—especially Bollywood—has shown little willingness to band together on the issue. “Bollywood does not care,” director Dibakar Banerjee says, “because it knows it will somehow navigate through the bureaucratic red tape to survive. It’s a vestige of the licence raj.”

Hope seemed to surge through the film world when Shyam Benegal was appointed head of a committee to look into censorship in 2016. Those who greeted this as a stepping stone to dismantling censorship were probably unaware that there was a similar committee in 2013 under Justice Mukul Mudgal, whose report made many of the suggestions that the Benegal one did—and which was never implemented. Or that, back in 1969, a committee headed by G.D. Khosla, and counting amongst its members K.A. Abbas, Umashankar Joshi and R.K. Narayan, recommended an autonomous, independent censor board. Letting important reports gather dust is a time-honoured tradition for an opaque bureaucracy like India’s, something that the 83-year-old Benegal seems to have made peace with. When I met him at his office in Tardeo, Mumbai, he said: “I have no idea how much (of the report) has been accepted. I have reminded them any number of times until I’ve lost interest in it.”

In an interview to The Hindu in January 2002, Vijay Anand, director of Guide and Jewel Thief and the CBFC chief at the time, was asked whether the media was right to pick on the board’s decisions. “Why not?” he replied. “We are the visible mouthpiece of a moralistic society.” This is an uncomfortably honest self-assessment, but there’s some truth to the idea that the board, whether headed by Anand or Leela Samson or Pahlaj Nihalani, isn’t entirely to blame. Film censorship in India can only be fixed if the rules governing it are overhauled. This, in turn, means changing an attitude that has persisted since the days of the British: the tendency to treat the viewer as incapable. Every week, movie-watchers across the country make hard decisions—to go by the review in the morning paper or by their neighbour’s thumbs-down, to spend ₹200 on a predictable big film or on a small, uneven one. Deciding whether a particular film will offend their sensibilities should also be left to them.

This piece led off the '100 years of censorship' package in Mint Lounge.

Isle of Dogs: Review

If stop motion didn’t already exist, one gets the feeling Wes Anderson would have invented it. It’s difficult to imagine any other animation style working as well for him. Every characteristic of stop motion is reflected in his cinema: the detailing, the tactility, the slight formality, a world of effort concentrated in a single gesture or frame.

Isle of Dogs is Anderson’s second animated feature after his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, and the first he’s built from an original story. And I do mean original. One can picture Anderson telling studio executives, “So, there’s this evil mayor of a dystopian Japanese city who banishes all the dogs to a trash island after an outbreak of canine flu. Tilda Swinton is a pug named Oracle. I’m thinking I’ll make it mostly in Japanese.” And, after an awkward silence, “Bill Murray’s in it.”

In a prologue rendered in ravishing still images, we’re told that the cat-loving Kobayashi dynasty had once waged war on dogs, nearly wiping out the entire population, before a boy samurai killed the head of the clan. But the ancient grudge has persisted; the mayor who orders the exile of the dogs is named Kobayashi. He starts with Spots, the bodyguard hound of his young ward, Atari. Soon, all dogs in Megasaki—unused to fending for themselves, many of them down with snout fever—have been deported to the trash heap of an island off the coast.

Even in a Wes Anderson film—not the most canine-friendly environment—you apparently can’t keep a boy and his dog apart. Atari crash-lands his plane on the island and is discovered by Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). Despite Chief’s protests—he was a stray back in Megasaki, and feels no kinship towards humans—they decide to help him look for Spots.

It’s easy to get lost in the off-kilter rhythms of stop-motion—all those famous voices charmingly out-of-sync with the facial movements of the characters—but try and tear your gaze from time to time to the ingenious, ever-changing backdrops. The trash piles up scene after scene like so many art installations (a cave constructed out of used sake bottles—the dogs did that?), and a couple of the landscapes left me short of breath, as when we look down on Atari and the pack walking in single file, a row of rusted trucks on one side, a sheer drop on the other, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s I Won’t Hurt You gently throbbing on the soundtrack.

In the wake of the film’s release, some have expressed discomfort with what they think are Japanese stereotypes that Anderson has used. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone to not feel culturally offended, but it’s worth noting that Anderson’s style has always been dependent on archetypes, from artistic, high-strung New York Jews to suave, sexually flexible Continentals. His vision of India in The Darjeeling Limited struck me as neither offensive not authentic—just Anderson looking, in his peculiar way, at a part of the world that fascinates him. Similarly, I’d hesitate to attach deeper significance to the deportations in Isle of Dogs—if Anderson’s a political filmmaker, he keeps it well-hidden. One charge against him I’ve never agreed with, though, is that he’s too clever, not emotional enough. Show me another director who can take a conversation between two dogs, strangers speaking in uninflected voices in the dark of night , and make it hurt like a Raymond Carver story.

This review appeared in Mint.

Sanju: Review

When Sanju broke for an interval, I hurried out to buy that cup of coffee without which a 160-minute film feels like, well, a 160-minute film. When I returned, the 20-something man in the seat next to mine asked what I’d been writing in my notebook. I told him they were notes, and asked why he was at an 8 am show when he could’ve watched the film later in the day. “In a way, this film is my story,” he said. He told me he’d been on drugs. He was in a coma for 15 months. He’d attempted suicide, gone to jail for accidentally firing a gun while running from a hospital. He was three years clean now, and finishing college. He hadn’t been able to sleep the previous night out of excitement. There was a faint smell of alcohol on his breath.

I have no idea if anything my neighbour told me was true. But it was a useful reminder that what might seem to one person an impossibly exaggerated story could be as real as documentary to someone else. I looked at the screen and saw Ranbir Kapoor doing an often-uncanny Sanjay Dutt impression. He looked up and saw his past missteps. Somewhere in between these two viewings and a theatre-full of others, Sanju was unfolding.

When it was announced that Rajkumar Hirani was making a Sanjay Dutt biopic, there was a good deal of scepticism. Hindi biopics are nearly always uncontroversial, and often worshipful—and this was a film about the star of Hirani’s breakout film, Munna Bhai MBBS. The prospect of Hirani, expert locator of the surreal in the everyday, taking on a real-life subject was admittedly intriguing, but it didn’t seem like there was any way the film wouldn’t go soft on its subject.

Sanju isn’t a hagiography—but it’s also careful about how it takes Dutt to task. We’re shown the actor’s struggles with drugs and alcohol in graphic detail, but the blame is eventually pinned on his supplier (played by Jim Sarbh). Similarly, though the film doesn’t paper over the time he kept AK-56 rifles, sourced from a terrorist, in his home, this too is put down to a combination of fear, naïveté and bad advice. Often, when Sanjay is shown doing something truly horrible—like turning up high to meet his ex-girlfriend when her father has just died—the scene is given a comic tone. It’s a warts-and-all film that hedges its bets: Sanju baba is rarely kept apart from the viewer’s sympathy.

Hirani is one of the great deflators of solemnity in Hindi film. When his instinct to subvert works, it works beautifully. But it can also result in scenes that push for laughs while being actively distasteful. If you laughed at the “balaatkar” scene in 3 Idiots, you’ll probably find the sequence in Sanju where Dutt sleeps with his best friend’s girlfriend amusing. Sanjay Dutt is trying to help Kamlesh (Vicky Kaushal), a virgin, “open his account”. He’s there in the build-up to the big night; he, not Kamlesh, hands the girlfriend lingerie to wear; and when she emerges to find Kamlesh passed out, he’s still around. He confesses the next day, but it’s a comic moment, and there’s a terrible echo of a punchline later in the film when Kamlesh jokes that they’ll be even when he sleeps with Dutt’s girlfriend after he passes out.

Sanju is recognisably a Hirani film—you see it in the eccentric touches. A roomful of militant goons stand with their fingers in their ears, like kindergartners. A barber explains in a few crisp lines why he’s in jail, and Dutt decides against getting a shave. Sanju is dancing with his dead mother in one scene; in the next, he’s cha-cha-cha-ing in rehab. Also characteristic of Hirani and his long-time co-writer, Abhijat Joshi, is the emotional directness. Dutt might be a complicated guy, but this is a simple film, with a phalanx of violins to alert you whenever it’s time to shed a tear. At one point, Sunil Dutt (Paresh Rawal) is called “terrorist ka baap”. After his son makes good, someone calls him “Munna bhai ka baap”.

A clue to how the makers would like Dutt’s story to be received by viewers is there in the evolving attitude of Winnie (Anushka Sharma). Hired by Dutt to write his life story, the frizzy-haired writer is ostensibly a sceptic, initially refusing the project and, later, walking out on it. But she’s also moved to tears by his reminiscences, does no research of her own, and seems to take everything her subject says at face value. For a film that casts an acerbic eye at news media, Sanju presents a thoroughly compliant alternative.

It makes sense that Hirani would get Ranbir Kapoor—whose characters are often directionless—to play the ultimate lost boy of Hindi cinema. The imitation (astonishing at times) takes over the performance; I found myself more impressed than affected by it. There is one scene that stood apart, though. Sunil Dutt has just finished telling Sanjay a story about his mother, Nargis, and smuggler Haji Mastan. He starts singing “Na moonh chhupake jiyo”; his son joins in reluctantly. After some time, Rawal stops, and Kapoor continues, rapt, in a voice that sounds nothing like Sanjay’s. The audience in the theatre responded to this moment with appreciative shouts, as if encouraging him to take wing.

This review appeared in Mint.

Ocean's 8: Review

It begins like the other one did: an Ocean sibling in prison, explaining to someone off-camera why they should be released, leaving prison better-dressed than most people in the normal course of their lives, immediately seeking out their partner in crime. But then, Ocean’s 8 does something Steven Soderbergh’s earlier films would never have. When Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) meets Lou (Cate Blanchett) for the first time after prison, I wondered if they’d slip into the dry, finishing-each-other’s-sentences rapport that Danny and Rusty had. Instead, as Debbie sits in the car, Lou darts it from outside the frame and gives her a hug and a quick kiss. That’s more emotion displayed than the entire Danny Ocean trilogy.

Moments like these help distinguish the all-female Ocean’s 8 from its male-fronted predecessors, but there aren’t nearly enough of them. Instead, Gary Ross’ film does its best to be like the earlier ones, cherry-picking them for personality types and narrative devices and character beats. Turns out a group of highly talented female cons isn’t that different from a bunch of male criminals—which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility, just disappointing if you’re looking for new rhythms, fresh ways of approaching a set formula.

Debbie’s been hatching a plan while incarcerated, a heist involving a rare diamond necklace, to be taken off the person of actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) while she’s at the Met Gala (like Danny’s plan in Ocean’s Eleven, Debbie’s also has a personal angle involving an old flame). She and Lou put a team together: Rose (Helena Bonham Carter), a once-prominent designer down on her luck; Constance (Awkwafina), a pickpocket; Tammy (Sarah Paulson), a fence; jewellery expert Amita (Mindy Kaling) and dreadlocked hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna). Ever since Seven Samurai, the recruitment montage has been one of the signal pleasures of mainstream cinema, but only Carter’s introduction is eccentric enough to stand out here. The rest are boilerplate, especially Kaling’s, which is hampered by the overused trope of Indian mothers worrying their daughters about getting married and the comedian speaking unconvincing Hindi.

Once Daphne becomes a bigger part of the narrative, things perk up—Hathaway is a hoot as the vacuous star, and Carter, sporting a scattered look and an Irish accent, plays off her hilariously. The plan, which takes up the last 45 or so minutes, is elaborate and precisely executed and all the things you’d expect it to be. All it lacks is a sucker-punch of a twist, something that might make a viewer crack an appreciative grin. A late revelation is surprising but far from convincing (it feels like the writers worked backwards from the twist), and the culmination of Ocean’s scheme is depressingly well-signalled.

Ross opts for a tone less compulsively glib than that of the Soderbergh films—the wisecracks are fewer, if not necessarily better. Nevertheless, there are some concise comic moments. I laughed out loud when Debbie, pretending to be German, bumps into Heidi Klum at the Gala and wings her way through a conversation with a facility that would’ve impressed Hans Landa. And there are other small pleasures: the intermingling of Irish, Caribbean, Australian accents; Daphne responding to “Barbie, but in a good way” with a tearful “Thank you”; everything Blanchett wears in the film but especially that dark green jumpsuit.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Occupy the Louvre

There’s been an explosion of visual pop art over the past few years that addresses and, in some cases, rearranges African-American history. It’s there in the chilling image of the Sunken Place in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, in the references to Warsan Shire, Julie Dash and Malcolm X in Beyoncé’s Lemonade, in Donald Glover’s deliberate minstrelsy in "This Is America".

There has also been a pointed effort by black artists to claim for themselves genres and spaces that have traditionally been regarded as foreign terrain. When singer Solange Knowles performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last year, she stressed that the goal wasn’t just inclusion. “I’m not settling for being allowed in these spaces,” she said afterwards, “but for tearing these f***ing walls down.”

Now, Solange’s sister is tearing down walls in an even more famous museum. On 16 June, Beyoncé and Jay-Z dropped a surprise album, Everything Is Love, and with it the video for its lead single "Apes**t". It unfolds in the Louvre, Paris, with the Carters in front of some of the best-known art in the Western world: Mona Lisa, Venus De Milo, Winged Victory Of Samothrace. Black bodies and faces are largely absent in the works on display—the camera has to zoom in on one painting to find coloured servants—but they are there in the video, occupying the museum space; some performing, others still. To see them and the world’s most famous celebrity couple in an environment practically devoid of coloured artists and subjects is enough to set the mind off. This isn’t just art, it’s art criticism—a series of juxtapositions that force us to examine something familiar with fresh eyes.

What makes this video especially potent isn’t just the connections that are explicitly drawn, but the fertile space created in which viewers might form their own associations. The cut from Théodore Géricault’s The Charging Chasseur—a cavalry officer on horseback, controlled even in the heat of battle—to an eerie shot of a black man standing on a horse, suggestive of a lynching, or the one from Hermes Fastening his Sandal to a formation of young men taking a knee is open to any number of interpretations. Every single work shown in the video may have a profound reason for being chosen, but even if that isn’t the case, it hardly matters. The Carters make you (and a million others) wonder why, and that’s a victory in itself.

When Jean-Luc Godard had his characters kill time by racing through the Louvre in 1964’s Bande À Part, it was both insurrectionary and playful—a raspberry blown at the solemnity of high art. Beyoncé and Jay-Z, though, aren’t playing around. Their target is more specific: the European art tradition that exists on the back of colonialism, slavery and the exclusion of non-white cultures. A similar revisionist approach can be found in the Uncomfortable Art Tours, started in 2017 by historian Alice Procter, which focus on the colonial, imperialist and slaver origins of the art on display at the British Museum, Tate Britain and other institutions. The tour description doesn’t mince words: “There are bloody handprints on the gallery walls, and the bodies of slaves and colonised peoples in the foundations.”

In its closing moments, "Apes**t" does a hop, skip and jump across 4,600 years of art history. As Beyoncé sings “I can’t believe we made it”, and Quavo, of the rap trio Migos, adds, “This is what we made, made”, we see the Carters silhouetted in front of the Great Sphinx of Tanis, the centrepiece of the Louvre’s Egyptian wing. Then there’s a close-up of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait Of A Negress, the only painting in the video in which a black (anonymous) subject is foregrounded. Finally, we see Beyoncé and Jay-Z standing in front of the Mona Lisa, which is kept out of focus as they face the camera. The painting is the backdrop, they’re the artwork.