Leftist classic 'Amma Ariyan' remains unmatched

I first heard of John Abraham's Amma Ariyan while watching Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s documentary Celluloid Man (2012), which has a scene from the Malayalam film. A camera careens down a long line of people standing in line for rations, an incredibly kinetic vision in grainy black and white. I tried to seek out the film but couldn't find a DVD version, and though it had been uploaded on YouTube, the picture quality was abysmal. The search for a decent version of Amma Ariyan finally ended this August, when a very watchable transfer with English subtitles turned up on a YouTube channel called The Potato Eaters.

Amma Ariyan released in 1986—if released is the word—some months before Abraham died. The film was produced by the Odessa Collective, a group which the avant-garde director founded with a few peers with the aim of taking cinema to the common man, bypassing regular means of funding and distribution. It was crowdsourcing in its purest form, funded with small contributions by individuals and film societies, and then shown to people in small towns and villages (Odessa stated its intention to “distribute good films in 16 mm through the length and breadth of Kerala”).

The film begins with a spoken manifesto: “Odessa tries to communicate the reality of how a film cooperative can reach out to people.… We must help each other sincerely by creating new standards of social awareness.” It isn’t the most inviting start, but Amma Ariyan balances the polemic and the artistic like few other Indian films have. It’s a road movie of sorts, which starts with a young man, Purushan, who is leaving home for a job in Delhi. On the way, in Wayanad, the jeep he’s travelling in is stopped by the police, who commandeer it to transport the body of a man who has died by suicide.

The dead man looks vaguely familiar to Purushan. He immediately puts Delhi aside—bluntly and somewhat cruelly informing his girlfriend, who was supposed to go with him— and makes it his mission to find out who the man is and to go and inform his mother. This takes him on a journey from the local police station and the morgue, where the man is identified as tabla player Hari, and then from town to town across Kerala, meeting Hari's friends and associates. It ends in Kochi, where they finally meet Hari’s mother.

Amma Ariyan is not so much informed by as constructed out of the leftist politics of the time. Hari was picked up by the police for being involved in Naxalite politics and his playing hand brutally crushed. We arrive in Angamaly in the midst of a medical workers’ strike. This was an actual strike, and though Abraham couldn’t film it live, he caught the charged spirit of it (in a discussion about the director on the same YouTube channel, Amma Ariyan’s editor, Bina Paul, says, “It’s not a fiction film at one level but it is a fiction film at another level”). The same goes for the dramatic mill workers’ strike shown in the film. This had happened two years prior to filming in Kottapuram. Abraham and his crew spoke to people who participated and then recreated it for the film.

There are several references to revolutionary art and politics. Purushan recites Pablo Neruda’s Nothing But Death (“It is the tongue of death looking for the dead/ the needle of death looking for the thread”). A man reads from Che Guevara’s diaries as the camera pans past posters of Che, Karl Marx and Mao Zedong on the wall. The lyrical black and white photography, dramatic compositions and mobile camera are reminiscent of Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 classic, I Am Cuba. The film also owes much to the Third Cinema of the 1970s, stylistically as well as ideologically (Odessa’s aims are strikingly similar to those put forward by the movement’s progenitors, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino).

Abraham won’t let the viewer settle down. The rhythms of the film are choppy, the narrative mostly linear but fragmented. The score comes and goes: flute pieces, percussion, devotional song, reggae. Everything is in motion: the camera, the people walking or in jeeps, buses, boats. As Paul recalls, “The whole crew journeyed together from one place to another…. The energy of the film is that spontaneity. It could not have been scripted in a sense.” Apart from the famous shot I mentioned at the start, there are other wonderful isolated moments: a group of men training in karate on the beach; a demonstration and a song of revolution, the lit torches of the protesters reflected in the water; Hari holding his battered hand in front of his face, as the tabla he will never be able to play is heard on the soundtrack.

Women are a peripheral, somewhat deified presence in the film. Their function is limited to handing the boys money, singing, praying, telling them to write home, asking them not to leave. The sense of purpose is limited to the boys, talking in terse sentences, always walking rapidly.

In the 1990s, non-commercial Malayalam cinema was synonymous with arty festival titles by directors like Shaji N. Karun and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. In the last few years, an energetic, more easily digestible strand of Malayalam film—enabled by streaming—has become popular across the country. Amma Ariyan lies between the two iterations, a thrilling medley of sound and image with a raw political edge.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 1 October 2020.

Seeing brown, singing gori: Hindi film music's colour problem

By the afternoon of 7 September, Khaali Peeli was in trouble. The film's first music video had just dropped, a dance number called Beyonce Sharma Jaayegi, composed by Vishal-Shekhar and picturized on Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday. The refrain went: “Tu jab kamar yeh hilayegi/Tujhe dekh ke goriya, Beyoncé sharma jaayegi (when you shake your hips/watching you, even Beyoncé will blush)".

Without the comparison to Beyoncé, it’s possible the goriya (fair-complexioned woman) that precedes it might have flown under the radar, like the thousands of other goris and goriyas in Hindi film songs in the last 80 or so years. But lyricists Kumaar and Raj Shekhar made the mistake of name-checking the most famous singer in the world—someone who’s celebrated dark skin in her music and art. Suddenly, Indian Twitter was screaming racism. The face-saving also left something to be desired—six days later, the song was retitled Beyonse Sharma Jaayegi, which only brought on more ridicule. Finally, it was changed to Duniya Sharma Jaayegi and the original video removed from YouTube. Director Maqbool Khan said, "We assure you that the lyric in question was never intended racially. In fact, the term 'goriya' has been so often and traditionally used in Indian songs to address a girl, that it didn’t occur to any of us to interpret it in the literal manner."

That Hindi cinema has a colour bias is not even up for debate. Darker-skinned actors continue to be rare—a Radhika Apte here, a Nawazuddin Siddiqui there. Worse, fairer actors are often darkened when they’re playing roles associated with a lower economic class or oppressed caste. The fascination with white skin dates almost to the beginning of cinema in the country. In Mother Maiden Mistress: Women In Hindi Cinema,1950-2010, Bhawana Somaaya, Jigna Kothari and Supriya Madangarli write that, in the 1920s, “It was white-skinned actresses... who were more popular and in demand, with advertisements of plays often highlighting the presence of a ‘Gori Miss’ (white lady) or ‘houris’ (fairies) from paradise."

Hindi film music has, often unwittingly, perpetuated this colour bias. The word gori and its variants appear in countless tracks over the years, from folk numbers to item songs. The list is endless: Gori Zara Hans De Tu (Asli Naqli, 1962), Go Go Go Go Gori (Baadal, 1985), Chura Ke Dil Mera Goriya Chali (Main Khiladi Tu Anari, 1994), Gore Gore Mukhde Pe (Suhaag, 1994), Gori Gori (Main Hoon Na, 2004) and hundreds more have the word in their title, thousands have it in the lyrics, and there are cross-language variations like Chittiyaan Kalaiyaan—literally, ‘white wrists’ (Roy, 2015). “I don’t think the usage of gori and goriya is intentionally a racist slur," lyricist-screenwriter Kausar Munir told me over the phone. “There’s a long tradition in our Hindi-Urdu poetry of using these to praise a woman’s beauty. Having said that, that doesn’t make it right, especially in the modern age."

Sometimes there’s a poetry to the use of the word that merits its inclusion, like with Gulzar’s Mora gora ang lai le/ Mohe shaam rang dai de/ Chhup jaaungi raat hi mein, from Bandini (1963). Most of the time, though, it’s dropped in as an unthinking term for a beautiful woman. Munir calls it a default setting and gives another example: sanam. “It actually means statue," she says. “But it has developed the connotation of 'beloved'."

Lyricist-screenwriter Varun Grover says that history, caste, poetics and gender are “interlocked in various proportions in this innocuous-sounding word". “In many Hindi songs, gori is not even an adjective anymore but a proper noun (goriya chura na mera jiya) which could just be a mindless (but in-meter) replacement for any other term of endearment like jaaniya, sajna, piya, saiyyaan etc. It's a blind spot aided by culture and cliché." This is the problem in a nutshell—the word continues to extract a heavy toll in society but is largely shorn of its original meaning when placed in songs, which encourages its widespread usage.

Most actresses in Hindi cinema are on the fair-to-‘wheatish’ spectrum, but even when they aren’t, they’re apt to get addressed as gori. A much-quoted instance of this is Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein from Baazigar (1993), in which Shah Rukh Khan sings “yeh gore gore gaal (these fair, fair cheeks)" to Kajol, a relatively dark-complexioned actor. The same can be seen in Chitchor (1976), with Amol Palekar singing “gori tera gaon bada pyara" to the dusky Zarina Wahab. And in Lagaan (2001), Aamir Khan stretches goriya over three elongated syllables singing to Gracy Singh, who, ironically, is jealous because he’s spending time with the 'gori mem' who’s teaching the villagers cricket.

Sometimes the problem is in the visuals, not the words. Hum Bewafa from Shalimar (1978) had extras dressed up as tribal people, faces darkened, in skimpy clothes, shouting “jhingalala". So many have tried to block out from their happy memories of Mr. India (1987) the sight of dancers in blackface in Hawa Hawaii. The popular Amitabh Bachchan number from Laawaris (1981), Mere Angne Mein, is a fascinating example of Hindi cinema’s ease of othering dark skin. In the comic song, Bachchan suggests the virtues, in turn, of a tall, short, dark and fair wife. He appears as the wives himself, in drag—all except for the gori one, for which the camera settles on actual women. Drag and blackface for the kaali biwi are fine but poking fun at fair complexions is apparently a bridge too far.

Gore Gore O Banke Chhore, from Samadhi (1950), applied the fair-skin standard to the man. But heroes rarely had to be gora, and Hindi heroines almost always had to be gori. There’s a mythological underpinning to this. In most tellings, Radha is fair and Krishna is dark. In fact, shyam (dark-hued) is another name for the god, and is imbued with appropriately desirable qualities. The charming Shyam Rang Ranga Re in Apne Paraye (1980), picturized on Amol Palekar and sung by Yesudas, is from the perspective of someone intoxicated by Krishna’s dark hue, “as Meera was, as Radha was".

Shyam also turns up in the Bumbro number from Mission Kashmir (2000). A reworking of a popular Kashmiri song, in it the groom, or bumbro (bumblebee), is 'shyam rang'—though some versions have it as shaam (evening) rang, also meaning dark-hued—while the palms of the bride's hands are gori. A more emphatic placement of darker shades in song is Kaala Re, a moody track from Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) written by Grover. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s gangster is in the coal business and everything about him is kaala—his clothes, his words, his heart and his skin. The word is sung 43 times, as if to make up for the paucity of black in Bollywood lyrics. Grover said he “just wrote a song celebrating a man who did illegal stuff in a coal-town". “Not all art is subversive by design," he added. Six years after Wasseypur, the Tamil film Kaala used the colour to celebrate Dalit-Bahujan identity and subvert notions of purity associated with white.

While no one's writing lyrics like "hum kaale hain to kya hua dilwale hain (so what if I'm black, I have a large heart)" anymore, it will be a while before gori leaves Hindi film music. The debate stirred up by Beyonce Sharma Jayegi might be a good conversation-starter, Munir feels. “We can’t put everybody (who’s used gori) from time immemorial in the katghara (witness box)," she says. "But in today’s day and age we have enough knowledge to, if nothing else, just be careful." There is, however, one usage of gori we can get behind. In Aao Gori Aao Shyama, from Tansen (1943), a woman calls her grazing cattle home at dusk. Charmingly, Gori and Shyama turn out to be a white cow and a black one.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 20 September 2020.

Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare: Review

There’s a simple but effective directorial touch 40 minutes into Alankrita Shrivastava's Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare. Kaajal (Bhumi Pednekar) is speaking to Pradeep (Vikrant Massey). She works at a gift shop that employs women to talk to horny men through an app and sell them chocolates and plastic flowers. Pradeep is a client, but she’s falling for him. Pednekar is shot in dreamy red shades almost throughout their conversation, till the point he asks her real name. She almost tells him it’s Kaajal, then recovers and says it doesn’t matter. For that one moment, we see her in the white light of a call centre office.

Kaajal’s just falling in love and already her rose-coloured glasses are slipping. This kind of return to reality is becoming a signature Shrivastava move. Both Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016) and this film turn on moments when the scales fall from its protagonists' eyes and they start seeing things for what they are. The wisdom is almost always hard-won. At the film’s start, Kaajal tells her cousin Dolly (Konkona Sensharma), whom she lives with, that her husband, Amit (Aamir Bashir), is handsy with her. Dolly laughs it off, telling Kaajal it’s probably because she’s attracted to him. Dolly isn’t ready to explode her family life yet—she has rose-tinted glasses on too.

Kaajal moves out when she gets the job at the gift shop, leaving Dolly to confront problems she’d rather keep buried: the delayed work on the new apartment they’re trying to purchase, her stalled sex life, and her young son’s fascination with dolls. She's in some ways similar to the supressed housewife Sensharma played in Lipstick, who finds unexpected joy in taking up a sales job in secret, though Dolly is more assertive, even in denial. Kaajal, meanwhile, is negotiating being a single girl in Noida. There’s the telling detail, familiar to so many broke young people working jobs in big cities, of her piling her plate high with food at the office—likely her only real meal of the day.

A date in a graveyard. Virginity lost in an under-construction building. Shrivastava’s films are about the messiness of desire, the way it overwhelms and disappoints and races ahead of good sense. Kaajal falling for her smooth-talking client isn’t sensible but Pednekar, in a beautifully open turn, makes it seem like the only possible course of action. Similarly, Dolly’s attraction to a polite delivery boy, Osman (Amol Parashar), is clearly heading towards complication. Yet, they jump in, Kaajal head-first, Dolly more warily.

As the film switches between the two dovetailing stories, a list of small and large rebellions are recorded. Dolly starts sneaking drinks. Her son insists on going to the doll museum with the girls in his class instead of the rail museum his school is sending the boys to (Dolly’s curiosity about her own tomboyish nature as a child leads to a jagged, fascinating scene). Kaajal eases into her job and lets her hair down in the company of the supportive Shazia (Kubbra Sait). The film also spends time detailing the restrictions these people are trying to escape. Dolly is stuck in a civil but emotionally abusive marriage, her husband having convinced her she’s frigid. Kaajal is nearly raped on an evening out, but somehow even more shocking is her second “romance" call, where the client switches in a second from talking about his pet cat and making tea to addressing her as "saali" and masturbating loudly.

Sometimes the film piles on more conflict than it can properly reckon with. A scene with goons harassing lovers to the accompaniment of an angry rap number comes out of nowhere. A similar scene towards the end is worse, seemingly inserted to resolve loose ends. Kaajal saying she belongs to a backward caste—to Dolly, who would know that—feels like a way to add to the list of obstacles the character has faced, but little else. Osman being Muslim does lead to something, but it’s not clear the film needed that either.

With two storylines to deal with, instead of the four of Lipstick, Shrivastava’s writing is more relaxed. It ties up a little too neatly, but there are memorable turns of phrase—Dolly gushing over a “modern nalka" in her otherwise unconstructed flat, Kaajal’s boss saying “Changa tha, buddy" after she ends a call—and moments of supreme discomfort. When Dolly asks her estranged mom why she abandoned her as a child, the response is brutally honest: “I wasn’t happy with my life. So I left, that’s all." This is echoed in a later scene where Kaajal confronts her cousin with the emptiness of her life. She calls her existence napunsak (impotent)—which, given Dolly’s worries about her frigidity—stings her badly. This word was famously used back in 1983, in Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya, about a volatile and emotionally repressed young man. It’s quite something to see it turn up all these years later in a film about women trying to break free.

This piece appeared on 18 September 2020.

Bebaak: Review

Bebaak opens with a quote by Alejandro Jodorowsky: “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness". I braced myself for the hallucinatory mumbo-jumbo that usually comes from fans of the Chilean director, but Shazia Iqbal’s short film is focused and sharp. It was to premiere at the 2018 Mumbai Film Festival but was dropped, along with a handful of other Indian films, at the last minute (Iqbal protested the decision in an open letter). The film is now streaming on MUBI.

Fatin (Sarah Hashmi) is an architecture student who lives in a small apartment with her parents, two younger sisters and brother in Mumbai. She's running late on the latest instalment of her course fees, and won’t be able to continue much longer if she can't come up with them. Her father simply doesn't have the money, so they decide to approach a religious trust for funds.

In its opening minutes, Bebaak (fearless) sketches a deft portrait of a lower middle-class Muslim household. It’s the kind that is usually termed "progressive"—Fatin and her sisters don’t cover their heads, they wear knee-length skirts and jeans, their neighbours aren’t Muslim. As Fatin is leaving, her mother (Sheeba Chaddha) tells her to wear a dupatta on her head because “woh log Bhendi Bazaar ke hain". The English subtitle—“The people in Bhendi Bazaar are conservative"— makes clear what the line in Hindi leaves unsaid. Fatin’s immediate complaint (“Am I going to a dargah?") and victory (she doesn’t cover her head), speaks to the openness of her household and explains why the events that follow affect her so deeply.

Fatin and her father (Vipin Sharma), who backed her up when she didn’t want to cover her head, take the bus to the trust’s headquarters. On the way, Fatin almost texts a (Hindu) boy in her class that the interview is in Bhendi Bazaar, but instead writes that it’s in upwardly mobile, faith-neutral Town—a telling little detail that suggests the kind of image she'd like people to have of her. When they arrive, the first thing they see are a roomful of children in caps and scarves, reciting the Quran. Fatin is approached by two young girls. They ask her if she’s from an English medium school—those are the only Muslim girls they know who don’t wear a hijab—and talk about djinns possessing women who don’t cover themselves.

The interview is almost immediately unpleasant. The trust secretary, Niyaz Sheikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), says with barely masked disapproval to Fatin’s father, who works in a recording studio: “So the house runs on money made from music?" He sets aside the file with Fatin’s grades and starts to quiz her about her religious education. He then comments on her “small and tight" suit, short sleeves, uncovered head. As Fatin looks on, shocked, her father mumbles to her to adjust her stole. Sheikh ends with a proposal: he will give them the money if she comes back the following day in a hijab.

Bebaak lasts just 21 minutes; a longer running time might have allowed a less pointed contrast of home and world. Some of the metaphors are on the nose, like Fatin staring at burqa-wearing mannequins in a store window, or her yelling at her father that he shouldn’t have had so many kids if he couldn’t afford them as an azaan plays in the background. But Fatin’s anger and humiliation burn through, and her father’s sympathetic helplessness and mother’s pent-up frustration are evident as well. There’s a moment, beautifully played by Chaddha and Hashmi, with Fatin’s mother praying as her daughter morosely ties a hijab, probably the first in a while. She finishes, looks over as Fatin and says, “Don’t overthink it. Do what feels right."

Bebaak isn’t an ostentatious film but Iqbal knows how to shoot Mumbai; Fatin walking on a railway platform as a train hurtles just behind her in the opposite direction is a beautifully melancholic shot. Though the focus is ostensibly on orthodoxy within Islam, Sheikh’s mention of Islamophobia while parroting his nonsense is pertinent: religious extremism used as an excuse for conservatism, begetting othering and further extremism. Another comment by Sheikh is even more telling, when he says that all religions require women to dress modestly. “Modernity doesn’t mean we let our women run loose," he says. Later, Fatin’s mother argues with her husband that the real issue is men trying to control women's movements and bodies. In the final analysis, Bebaak reveals itself as an explicitly feminist text, albeit one that’s tied, as most everything tends to be in India, to religion.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 8 September 2020.

25 years, 25 reasons to love Rangeela

Rangeela came at us in waves. First Rangeela Re landed on TV and everyone went crazy about Urmila Matondkar. Then, as song after wondrous song released, everyone was talking about A.R. Rahman and his first original Hindi soundtrack. Then Asha Bhosle, singing Tanha Tanha like she hadn’t aged since the 1970s. And finally, on 8 September 1995, Ram Gopal Varma’s film released, and people couldn’t get enough of Aamir Khan’s streetwise tough, or tapori.

It’s hard to explain to those who didn’t experience it first-hand how exciting the run-up to the release was. Director Vasan Bala, 16 when the film released, remembers the feeling of elation coming out of the theatre. “We hadn’t seen the Bombay lingo done this way since Amar Akbar Anthony. We knew guys like Munna from our own lives, we could relate to him. We had gone in looking forward to the music and seeing Urmila—Aamir we did not expect." (Bala included a musical tribute to the film in his own Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota.)

Twenty-five years on, Rangeela is a time capsule of mid-1990s styles and trends—not just Rahman’s music but Ahmed Khan’s choreography and Manish Malhotra’s styling. Through the story of an ambitious backup dancer, Mili (Matondkar), who must navigate her first brush with fame and the attentions of two men, her tapori friend Munna (Aamir Khan) and film star Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff), it crystallizes the post-liberalization mood in India, an exciting array of dreams and choices to be made. To mark its 25th anniversary, here are 25 reasons to love Rangeela.

1. Its opening credits combine the film's two worlds

Rangeela is a near-constant explosion of colour and sound but its opening credits are restrained. Framed against a black background, each name is accompanied by a still image of an old movie star (Madhubala, Dev Anand, Amitabh Bachchan). Instead of a composed score, we hear the sounds of Mumbai: traffic plying, buses honking, dogs barking, the crash of ocean waves. It’s a canny juxtaposition of the two states this film exists in simultaneously—the glitzy world of Hindi film and everyday middle-class Mumbai.

2. 'Rangeela Re'

The first shot in Rangeela is of a girl in boots and a colourful dress by the roadside peering into a bioscope (which explains the downward-scrolling vintage stills in the opening credits). She flings out her arms, stands up, throws on her hat. As the beat kicks in, we see her high-kicking her way down the street in slo-mo, her short dress flying. There’s a sharp clap, followed by Asha Bhosle, her voice unaccompanied except for percussion, singing Yaai re, yaai re, zor laga ke naache re. If you were young and impressionable then, this song resembled something like freedom. Everything—Rahman’s music, Ahmed Khan’s choreography, Matondkar’s exuberance—came together like a mighty wave.

3. It's the ultimate post-liberalization film

Few films captured the headiness of post-liberalization India like Rangeela. Brands pop up in lyrics (Cadbury, Amul, Horlicks, Complan) and in conversation (MTV). A stable government job isn’t the dream; instead, as Mili sings in Yaaro Sun Lo Zara, she wants a car, house, TV, video player, fancy clothes, bank balance. The wide world is within reach: Khaled’s Didi and Michael Jackson’s Jam play in the car and on TV, a flying sofa takes Munna and Mili on a trip to New York in a song. The consumerist ebullience is encapsulated in the frank question posed to Munna in the track of the same name, “Mangta hai kya (what do you want)?"

4. It brought AR Rahman to Bollywood

By 1995, Rahman was already a star outside his native Tamil Nadu thanks to the Hindi dubs of Roja, Thiruda Thiruda (story by Varma) and Kadhalan. Having delivered one classic that year in Bombay, Rahman followed it up with Rangeela, his first original Hindi soundtrack. Danceable and electrifying, it signalled a new era for Hindi film music. It earned Rahman his first Filmfare award for Best Music Director; he won four of the next seven.

In his memoir, Guns And Thighs, Varma described Rahman’s symphonic sound. “If the melody is the story, the various instruments and the way they are recorded, played and their inter-volume levels and tones are like art direction and cinematography." Listen to Tanha Tanha, with its lush synth, flute and piercing vocal, and you'll know what he means. But Rahman could also strip a song down to its basics. He uses the faintest of basslines in Yaaro Sun Lo Zara, which gives Udit Narayan’s voice a freedom that matches Munna’s boasts.

5. It launched Ram Gopal Varma's Hindi film career

Varma started out in Telugu cinema in 1989, a stellar run which included his debut, the action film Siva, the Sridevi-starrer Kshana Kshanam and the horror film Raat. By the mid-'90s, he was looking to break into Bollywood, not the easiest thing for a southern director. Rangeela’s commercial success and cultural impact allowed Varma to embark upon one of the most influential, unpredictable and ultimately frustrating careers in Hindi cinema. He pretty much created the modern Hindi gangster film with Satya and Company and, through the films he produced, gave a leg up in the industry to everyone from Sriram Raghavan and Anurag Kashyap to Jaideep Sahni and Shimit Amin.

6. It got everyone talking like a tapori

The best scenes in Rangeela involve Aamir Khan’s tapori and his colourful, speedy, uniquely Mumbai way of speaking. Munna’s lines, written by Neeraj Vora and Sanjay Chhel, jump across grammar and language barriers with impunity. “Ye area mein apun world-famous hai (I am world-famous in my neighbourhood)," he growls at a banana-seller. “Uska bad luck hi kharab tha (his bad luck was rotten)" is his summary of his friend’s difficult life.

Munna is at his most free-flowing when he has an audience, like when he loudly protests a policeman searching him for movie tickets, which he’s selling in “black". “Kya masti hai, yeh toh zabardasti hai (what’s going on, this is unnecessary)," he freestyles while parking the tickets in the cop’s cap, adding that people who trigger riots and stock market scams go scot-free while blameless citizens like him are picked on.

7. It won Asha Bhosle a new generation of fans

One of A.R. Rahman's superpowers is an unerring sense of who would be right for a particular song. For the two solo female numbers, Rangeela Re and Tanha Tanha, he tapped Asha Bhosle. Then 61, Bhosle adjusted her voice to suit the 21-year-old she was singing for. “When I have to record a song for a film, I ask for the heroine’s name and then sing, keeping her face and personality in mind. Like I knew for Rangeela I was singing for a dubli patli si ladki (thin girl)." The instant popularity of the tracks revitalized Bhosle’s career.

8. Dance like everyone's watching

The 1990s were a rich time for choreography, with Farah Khan and Shiamak Davar marrying MTV flash to existing Bollywood styles. Ahmed Khan was Saroj Khan’s assistant before Varma told him to take over the film’s dances (Saroj Khan choreographed Tanha Tanha; both are credited). There’s a profusion of styles across the numbers, from the conventional star-and-backup-dancers of Rangeela Re (albeit with a crackling energy) to the Broadway stylings of Mangta Hai Kya and the freewheeling Yaaro Sun Lo Zara. Khan won the Filmfare for Best Choreography, quite an achievement in the year of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Madhuri Dixit dancing up a storm in Yaraana and Raja.

9. It changed Aamir Khan's image

With a few exceptions like Raakh, Aamir Khan had been playing wholesome romantic leads since he started out as an actor. By 1995, he was clearly looking to toughen up his image, appearing in the cop drama Baazi and the gangster film Aatank Hi Aatank. But it was the fast-talking, soft-hearted Munna that allowed him to branch out into the even tougher tapori of Ghulam and the complex antagonist of 1947 Earth.

10. It's a Middle Cinema film at heart

Despite all the surface flash, Rangeela is basically revved-up Middle Cinema. “I remember seeing Chitchor seven times...," Varma wrote in Guns And Thighs, “and the simplicity of narration that I learnt from it was pretty much what shaped my vision of Rangeela."

Varma took from Basu Chatterjee’s Chitchor and Rajnigandha the idea of a spirited girl caught between two fundamentally decent guys. Mili’s family—sharp mother, sardonic brother, loopy father—is also Chatterjee-esque. The father’s story about travelling in the same bus every day as his lost love could be a scene from Chhoti Si Baat. And it may not be a coincidence that the central character is called Mili—there’s a 1975 film by that name by Middle Cinema exponent Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

11. Munna at the movies

On the shortlist of great scenes in cinema halls is Munna and Mili’s trip to the movies. Mili’s there to watch Kamal, Munna is only interested in turning everything into one-man theatre. He walks into the hall talking loudly (the movie has begun), asks for the fan to be switched on, teases the old man in the seat behind. When he puts his foot up on the seat in front, its occupant protests. “Tu pair dekh raha hai, picture dekh raha hai (are you looking at my foot or the movie)?" is Munna’s memorable response. There’s a scuffle, and Munna and a furious Mili are ejected from the hall.

12. Its female lead has all the agency

Rangeela is Mili’s story—it’s her dreams and struggles that drive the narrative. Munna and Kamal are options she gets to choose between (though she doesn’t know Munna is an option till the very end). We learn that she sat thrice for class X and it isn’t clear if she studied beyond that, but her family dotes on her and is supportive of her filmi ambitions. No one remarks on how she dresses, or her going on dates with taporis and movie stars. It’s an escapist fantasy, but an empowering one.

13. Most of its songs are conversations

The conversation song, once a staple of Hindi cinema, is rarely in evidence today, a casualty of the reduction in lip-synced numbers. Rangeela is a reminder of a time when such songs were built into the fabric of the narrative. Many of the film’s tracks are structured as one character responding to another, and Mehboob does a deft job writing lyrics that could almost be dialogue. In Mangta Hai Kya, Mili offers to show Munna great wonders; he responds saying he just wants her love. Mili and Kamal’s fantasy selves drive each other crazier with each line in Hai Rama. But the pinnacle of the conversation song is the Socratic dialogue of Yaaro Sun Lo Zara, with Munna sharing his carefree philosophy (“no TV-video, no suiting-shirting") and Mili countering with her own visions of contentment (“bank balance makes days and nights colourful").

14. All those cameos

As befits a film about film-making, Rangeela has a wealth of cameos. Choreographer Saroj Khan turns up, uncredited, as a dance director. Young Aditya Narayan raps his own lines in the opening number. Madhur Bhandarkar, then an assistant to Varma, plays a crew member on Mili’s film. Shefali Shah, so memorable a few years later in Varma’s Satya, is the starlet Gulbadan; her pushy mother is 1950s star Shammi. The film’s cinematographer, W.B. Rao, in his cowboy hat, acquits himself well in a few comic scenes. But the most memorable cameo is the one-scene turn by Rajeev Mehta, playing the hotel waiter calmly responding to Munna’s demands.

15. The tapori in the yellow suit

On his birthday, Munna picks Mili up from her home for a surprise outing at a hotel. He’s dressed in the colours of a Mumbai taxi, an open yellow shirt and pant, black vest and shades—to his mind, high fashion. There’s wonderful comedy in his demands once they reach the restaurant—“idhar ghuma na (swing it this way)," he says, when told the air conditioner is on—and his exchanges with an English-speaking waiter, but also an indication that Munna isn’t one to adjust his behaviour and will stick out in the new world Mili is destined for with her signing as a lead actor. This is underlined by the appearance of Kamal, whom Mili walks off with, leaving Munna with his huge lunch order.

16. Manish Malhotra's minimalist glamour

From knotted tops and hot pants to printed skater dresses paired with boots, the Matondkar look from Rangeela became a rage, imitated by young girls across the country. The film was also a game-changer in the way the industry approached costume design. After the success of Rangeela, Filmfare instituted an award for costume design, with the film’s designer, Manish Malhotra, winning the trophy. “It was the coming together of different energies. Ram Gopal Varma, a fabulous director, had the vision of Rangeela. Then there was Urmila, who was willing to change and work hard to achieve that. I wanted to do something new as well," says Malhotra.

On being approached for Rangeela, he travelled to Hyderabad to meet Varma. “For the first time, a director was narrating the entire subject to me and I was completely blown away. What he narrated was exactly what he made," recalls Malhotra. As the film came together, the team realized they were on to something special. However, what stamped the success of Rangeela was the way the clothes from the film could be seen everywhere. “With Rangeela, a more minimal but effective wear came into movies," explains Malhotra. It was a mix of a real and a glamorized look. “To me, fashion is colour. So, there was the tangerine dress in Tanha Tanha and the red chiffon dress that Urmila was wearing while running on sand, to the athleisure outfit when she was dancing."

He is all praise for the way the costumes were used in the film, and Varma’s openness to new ideas. For Hai Rama, Malhotra suggested exotic saris, and Varma immediately agreed. “In the portions shot in Rajasthan, I have given a drape-like feel to gadhchola and bandhini, making them tight and fitted. In a dance sequence featuring Aamir and Urmila, I have used hay and beige. Ramuji liked black, beige, ivory and off-white," says Malhotra. Many of the trends are back in vogue, especially the peplum-cut dress, both printed and plain, and athleisure in yellow and neon colours. “One only hopes that a film like Rangeela happens in one’s career," says Malhotra. “And in my case, it actually did happen." —Avantika Bhuyan

17. Sex, or something like it

With its heroine a girl-next-door who’s comfortable in figure-hugging dresses (but isn’t judged for this), Rangeela was labelled dangerously sexy on its release. Actually, none of the characters talks about sex or seems to have experienced it—not unusual for Hindi cinema in 1995. That said, things heat up as the film progresses. Matondkar’s attire and demeanour in the songs with Shroff—part of the film within the film—are frankly erotic, as is Varma’s gaze. Hai Rama seems to have got its title from what parents might say when they see Matondkar and Shroff circling each other like animals in heat.

18. It becomes a whole other film for a minute

There’s a sudden cut from the light-hearted bickering of Mili’s household to a scene that couldn’t be more different. A plaintive flute melody plays as we find ourselves in Kamal’s house, looking down on the city. The mood is ominous, the lighting sparse like a noir—we could be watching Jackie Shroff in Parinda. “It looks like the stars from heaven are on the ground," he says, “a house behind each star, each home with its own story. But it all looks the same from here." As a glimpse into the life of a lonely superstar, it makes perfect sense, but the abruptness (it’s over in less than a minute) and the tonal change make it seem like a fragment from a whole other film.

19. Real life in the background

With much of the film shot on the streets of Mumbai, it’s not surprising that real life creeps in at the edges of the frame. In the rap section of Rangeela Re, you can see passers-by staring up at the shooting (one of them has his head turned around while driving a scooter). And in Yaaro Sun Lo Zara, the people drying clothes on the rocks by the sea in the middle distance as Matondkar dances in the foreground don’t look like extras but, rather, ordinary Mumbaikars having an unexpected brush with cinema history.

20. It's a film about dreams and dreamers

This is a musical filled with literal and figurative dreams. The opening number, Rangeela Re, turns out to be Mili daydreaming (when she wakes up, she scolds her mother for interrupting her little fantasy). Other songs are dreams too: Munna hallucinates Mili in his visions of Mangta Hai Kya and Kya Kare Kya Na Kare, and Kamal seems to imagine the heavy-breathing Hai Rama. But there are also practical dreams: Mili working as a dancer in the hope that she will one day be famous; Kamal selling escapism by the reel; Munna’s friend, Pakiya (Rajesh Joshi), selling tickets in black to get his sister married.

21. Movie-mad Mumbai

From Munna’s dus-ka-tees entry scene outside a “houseful" theatre to Mili’s dad constantly singing film songs, from the squabble over seats at an industry screening to onlookers wisecracking while a shoot is in progress, Rangeela is an affectionate (and accurate) portrait of Mumbai as a city where real life is inextricably linked to the movies.

22. A film with no villain

Varma wrote that Rangeela had a problem which no one but Aamir Khan realized, that “if Mili was a nice girl, Munna a nice guy and Jackie also a nice guy, there was absolutely no drama anywhere". This makes Rangeela’s final act somewhat unusual—the film relies on its characters and charm rather than plotting to get over the finish line.

23. It's a prime example of pre-kiss Bollywood

Rangeela would have been the ideal film to break mainstream Hindi cinema’s unspoken ban on the kiss. But it holds back. There’s a cut away at the exact moment of a kiss between Mili and Munna in Mangta Hai Kya. A movie slate blocks a possible kiss during the shooting of a scene with Kamal and Mili. There are near-misses in the otherwise torrid Hai Rama and Pyaar Ye Jaane Kaisa Hai. It would be a far less likely Aamir Khan film, Raja Hindustani, which would break the ban a year later.

24. Mehboob's lyrics are underrated

In praising Rahman, people often forget the other half of Rangeela’s music: Mehboob’s lyrics. Yet, without his wordplay and wit, the songs wouldn’t be nearly as memorable. He was as adept at writing in the tapori style on Kya Kare Kya Na Kare ("aisa bolega, saala, waisa bolega") or the brilliant back-and-forth of Yaaro Sun Lo Zara as he was with the tripping-off-the-tongue lines of Tanha Tanha ("koi saathi nahi tera yahaan toh ye koi baat hai").

25. It's aged better than 'DDLJ'

Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge also released in 1995. It was a far bigger hit than Rangeela, and has been as influential, if not more, in the years since. Yet, seen today, Dilwale seems stuck in an archaic value system, one in which women are judged for drinking and getting a little wild and conservative fathers must be won over. Rangeela doesn’t judge, and for all its '90s trappings, is an easier film to relate to.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 5 September 2020.

Bayern Munich cap perfect pandemic run with Champions League victory

The night ended with Hans Zimmer’s score from King Arthur filling the emptiness of the Stadium of Light in Lisbon. It began with a different Hans and his decision to start Kingsley Coman in place of Ivan Perišić in the UEFA Champions League final against Paris-Saint Germain (PSG) on 23 August. The Croatian had started the last two games and participated in the demolition of Barcelona in the quarter-final. But there are few decisions that Bayern’s current coach, Hans-Dieter ‘Hansi’ Flick, has taken that haven’t paid off since he took over mid-season from Niko Kovač. This one did too, with Coman scoring the game’s lone goal, taking Bayern to a sixth Champions League title. In doing so, they repeated the treble of 2013—Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal, Champions League—and set a new tournament record: the first side to win without dropping a point.

The talk before the game was all about how PSG’s star attackers Neymar and Kylian Mbappé could take advantage of the high defensive line Bayern had maintained through the championship. Wisely, Bayern didn’t have as aggressive a line. In a goalless but lively first half, PSG had the better chances. Bayern captain Manuel Neuer made two saves in succession, first getting a hand to Neymar’s shot on goal, then recovering and throwing his leg out to block his cross. Jerome Boateng went down in the 23rd minute and was replaced by Niklas Süle, who’d spent most of the season on the sidelines with an ACL injury. Ángel Di María skied one over the bar.

Bayern kept their composure, and found their rhythm going into the break. Coman went down in the PSG box in the 45th minute—the referee didn’t ask for VAR. Their best chances were a Robert Lewandowski shot that hit the post in the 18th minute and another stopped at point-blank range by Keylor Navas in the 31st minute.

After the break, the mood changed. Bayern started to dominate the midfield, swarming and hurrying PSG. Neymar went down once, then twice, resulting in a brief scuffle and yellow cards for Serge Gnabry and Leandro Paredes. Coman, meanwhile, was creating havoc with his darting runs and feints down the left. A goal seemed likely and it came in the 59th minute: a smart Thomas Müller back pass, a lovely curling ball by Joshua Kimmich, and a calm header by Coman—against his former club—into the far corner of the goal.

From then on, the game always seemed to be just beyond PSG’s grasp. They had a chance 10 minutes after Bayern’s goal, Neuer executing a sliding block to snuff out Marquinhos. Neither Neymar nor Mbappé looked threatening—the latter’s night was summed up when he was denied, at point blank range, by Neuer in the 90th minute, though it would have been offside anyway. PSG playmaker Marco Verratti, not at full fitness, was brought on, but inspiration was lacking.

Bayern seemed to realise this wouldn’t be the kind of game they’d played all tournament, chancy and high-scoring. Instead, they parked themselves in PSG’s half, denied them the ball, and ran at them incessantly. Coman, his job done, was replaced by Perišić, Gnabry by Philippe Coutinho, in the 68th minute. Fresh legs gegenpress best.

The yellow cards came thick and fast on both sides. What everyone had thought would be a goal fest was instead a game of inches, short on finesse, high on crunching bodies. The Bayern defence held firm, with Kimmich at right-back closing Mbappé down, and Süle, David Alaba and Leon Goretzka stifling Neymar (the PSG defence had a solid game too, keeping the German side that had rampaged through the tournament quiet). Thiago Alcantara, in what may have been his last game for Bayern, was memorable—a perennially calm presence in midfield, instrumental in his side’s buildups, with that touch of class in his little turns and pivots.

PSG coach Thomas Tuchel made substitution after substitution. With five minutes of extra time, the benches turned cheerleaders, a masked Javi Martínez and Benjamin Pavard willing their teammates to hang on. They did so without much difficulty. The whistle blew and the Bayern players were in a happy heap. Alaba consoled Neymar. Lykke Li’s I Follow Rivers played, then the more Germanic Zimmer theme. Hansi Flick finally smiled.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 24 August 2020.

Sadak 2: Review

Nine minutes into Sadak 2 comes a scene that’s disconcerting on multiple levels. Ravi (Sanjay Dutt), the troubled taxi driver from Sadak (1991), is now grey and desperately unhappy. His wife, Pooja, is dead, and he’s given up on life himself, tying a noose to the fan and trying unsuccessfully to hang himself. If the death of Sushant Singh Rajput makes the sight of a near-hanging in a film difficult to watch, Dutt's recent announcement that he's taking a break for medical treatment (it was rumoured, though not confirmed, that he has cancer) renders it even more distressing.

The cross-currents don’t stop there. The first time Ravi lays eyes on Aryaa (Alia Bhatt), he looks like he’s seen a ghost. Perhaps this is the film's way of acknowledging the strangeness of the situation, for Alia is the half-sister of Pooja Bhatt, who starred opposite Dutt in Sadak almost 30 years ago. Mahesh Bhatt, father of Alia and Pooja, directed both films. Both he and Alia have been targeted in the vicious—and seemingly never-ending—smear campaign that began shortly after Rajput’s death. And now they’re out with a film that’s full of people talking about ending their lives.

Ravi’s second suicide attempt is interrupted when Aryaa knocks on his door one night (that Hum Tere Bin Kahin is playing as he prepares to asphyxiate himself in the garage is a clear sign that Bhatt doesn’t mind weaponizing our memories of the 1991 film). It turns out that before her death, Pooja had taken a booking from Aarya for their taxi service. Though Ravi just wants to get on with his efforts to join his late wife, Aryaa manages to convince the old man to drive her to Kailash in the mountains. She’s on the run; her industrialist father (Jisshu Sengupta) is under the influence of an evil godman, Gyaan Prakash (Makarand Deshpande), who she suspects killed her mother with the help of her aunt (Priyanka Bose), who's now her stepmother.

Ravi and Aryaa pick up her boyfriend, Vishal (Aditya Roy Kapur), fresh out of jail and carrying a pet owl in a cage. We get their backstory in a mercifully short flashback: Aryaa is an anti-godman activist, Vishal a reformed troll. Further flashbacks reveal their ties to Gyaan Prakash, and Aryaa’s twisted family history. As Ravi takes it upon himself to protect the kids, Sadak 2 strays far from the film it might have been—a genuine look at loss and hurt—and turns increasingly violent and ludicrous.

Mahesh Bhatt was one of the leading directors of the 1980s and early '90s, making bruising dramas with big stars and hit soundtracks. But it’s been 21 years since he directed a film, and it feels like his head is stuck in the past. There’s an action scene in Sadak 2 with a strong whiff of the '90s, involving a one-armed Gulshan Grover and Vishal's owl attacking on command. Gyaan Prakash is a throwback to the kind of campy villains who populated Hindi cinema for decades (Deshpande gender-ambiguous look is likely a nod to Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s antagonist in in Sadak, trans woman Maharani). The first time a clip of Dutt and Pooja Bhatt from Sadak flashes onscreen, it’s a jolt to the heart; by the seventh or eighth such usage, it looks like a trick repeated for lack of better ideas.

The sadness in Dutt’s eyes now seems engraved on his entire face, but the film squanders what little pathos there might have been by making him play action hero. Bhatt does what she can with a script that would almost certainly have landed on the rejected pile had it not been handed to her, one assumes, over family dinner. No script is beneath Kapur, though perhaps the line about his “khoobsurat aur masoom chehra (beautiful and innocent face)" is beneath the director of Arth and Saaraansh. By the time an unarmed, unaccompanied Ravi is laying waste to a private militia while chanting Ram naam satya hai, I could almost hear the film say, as Vishal’s friend does when he betrays them, “Sorry yaar guys".

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 20 August 2020.