Whose '68? 'Medium Cool' and the limitations of 'The Trial of the Chicago 7'

Trust Aaron Sorkin to bring Strunk & White to a riot. William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), defense lawyer for the Chicago 7, the motley group of anti-war protestors accused of starting a riot on the occasion of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, has just been given a tape by the prosecution. On it is student leader Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), one of the seven, seemingly inciting the crowd, shouting: “If blood must flow, let it flow all over the city.” We flash back and forth between Tom’s recollection of the events of the night and a mock-interrogation by the lawyer. After a heated exchange, Kunstler asks, “Who started the riot, Tom?” Instead of replying, the young man says, “Our.”

This is an old Sorkin trick, having a character say something cryptic in the middle of an intense scene (like Mark Zuckerberg muttering “It’s raining” in The Social Network). Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), another of the accused, is the only one who understands what’s going on. Tom, he says, has a tendency to imply possessive pronouns—he’d meant to say “If our blood must flow”, not the cops’ blood. This has several effects at once. Tom is immediately absolved in the group’s eyes. It posits Abbie and Tom as Men of Grammar—which in a Sorkin film is everything. And because Abbie speaks up for him, Tom argues that he should take the stand in his place.

How neatly it all fits together. Tom is a good citizen, not a riot-instigator, and Abbie can testify in court, as he did in the actual trial. Yet, as I watched and marveled at the intricacy of Sorkin’s construction, something gnawed at me. I later realized it was the sheer professionalism of the scene. The timing, the impeccability of the writing, the way it ties everything up, prizes elocution over effect—it felt so smooth as to almost be a con. I'd felt similarly about Steve Jobs (2015), but at least there the airtight precision of Sorkin's writing was in line with the subject, whereas here it’s an uneasy fit with the messiness of '68.

With its syncopated dialogue and winsome cast, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is undeniably pleasurable. Sorkin isn’t a visually arresting film-maker; one gets the impression he’s writing even when he’s directing. He’s at his best deflating powerful people and institutions, and at his most saccharine when praising them. “I think our institutions of democracy are a wonderful thing that right now are populated by some terrible people,” Hoffman says in his testimony. Sorkin is an incurable romantic pretending to be a cynic—even his anarchists love democracy. The ending is an embarrassingly triumphal set-piece, with Tom reading aloud the names of everyone killed since the war began, strings swelling, almost everyone in court (including the buttoned-down prosecutor) applauding while the defendants stand with fists raised.

It’s been suggested that The Trial of the Chicago 7 is uncannily of this moment. Without dismissing such claims, I’d hazard that audiences in the 1970s, '80s, '90s and 2000s would have found it equally timely. There’s scarcely been a time in the last half century when people, especially those of a liberal bent, have not felt like civil rights are being impinged, free thinkers are being silenced and the government has something to hide. When asked if he was hoping for a confrontation with the police, Abbie Hoffman (in a beautiful line reading by Cohen) tells the prosecutor, “Give me a moment, would you, friend? I’ve never been on trial for my thoughts before.” Sorkin fades to black, as if any answer would be unable to match something so profound.

Another view of the events of ’68 can be found in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), a film as chaotic and charged as the time it's set in. Wexler, a cinematographer, was already famous for shooting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (he’d go on to shoot One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Days of Heaven). He’d also directed non-fiction—something which would inform the unique hybrid nature of Medium Cool. The film is part verité documentary, part fictional narrative built around John Cassellis (Robert Forster), a reporter and cameraman with a local news channel in Chicago, a cool, calculating figure without much of a moral compass.

Medium Cool began shooting at the end of July 1968, and continued through the tumultuous months that followed. Wexler didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing ("I knew there would be demonstrations and that the police would suppress them," he told Time Out Chicago in 2013). One of the scenes in the film is a jokey riot simulation conducted by the National Guard, in which half the troops are dressed like hippies and the other half quell the protest. Wexler was there when the real protests broke out, incorporating them into his story, actor Verna Bloom making her way through the smoke and the chaos in a bright yellow dress.

There’s a memorable breaking of the fourth wall. A tear gas cannister lands in front of the camera and a voice says, “Look out, Haskell, it’s real.” It was real, though Wexler admitted the line was added later.

The Black Panthers figure in Sorkin’s film—their co-founder, Bobby Seale Yahya (Abdul-Mateen II), is on trial too—but they lack the edge they possess in Medium Cool. There’s an extended sequence where John tries to barge his way into a black household to do a human-interest story and gets threatened and called out. This is followed by a couple of Panthers addressing John’s camera (and the viewer). “Why you always got to wait till someone gets killed?” one of them asks. The next scene is white women at a shooting gallery.

Medium Cool is unmistakably a product of its time, with its agitprop directness, sexual openness and New Wave sensibility (you can see a poster of Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, in John’s room). It’s fragmentary and jumpy, as verité by nature is, not a polished work but one that gives the impression of having been made up on the fly. Yet, as a portrait of that tumultuous time, it embraces all the contradictions and rough edges that Sorkin’s film smoothens out to tell a more universal story.

Both Sorkin and Wexler’s films end with that famous rallying cry of Chicago ’68: "The whole world is watching". In The Trial of Chicago 7, it’s almost an afterthought, a single chant after the applause and the music is over and we’ve been told where the main characters ended up. At this point it doesn’t mean anything—the urgency of revolution has been diluted by five minutes of triumph. Medium Cool’s ending, on the other hand, is anything but victorious. There's a car crash, swift and unheroic, like the one in Easy Rider that same year. The camera pulls back from the accident, swivels and settles on… Wexler behind a camera. As we slowly zoom in, Wexler's gaze turned on his own movie and on us, the soundtrack juxtaposes "The whole world is watching" with a voice on the radio describing the mayhem at the protest site. In a film that gazes both outward and inward, it's an ending that defies any easy interpretation.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 27 October 2020.

Rebecca: Review

Last night I dreamt I saw Rebecca again. Only this Maxim de Winter had no moustache, and smiled, and didn’t seem to despise his new bride. What a let down. But Manderley was beautiful as ever, and the second Mrs de Winter still a bundle of nerves. All in all, it was the same, except in colour, and worse.

Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca exists; we know not why. A Working Title production, it’s being distributed by Netflix, presumably to cater to Armie Hammer fans who can’t get enough of the actor in sun-kissed continental settings. It’s based on the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier; more importantly, it’s made in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation. Wheatley makes a few tweaks—notably, a revelation that was there in the novel but which the Hollywood Production Code wouldn’t allow. Even so, this is a timid revisiting of Rebecca, neither convincingly sexy nor Gothic, as much stuck in the past as its widower protagonist.

Rebecca isn’t god-tier Hitchcock but had he made it in colour there's little chance he would have introduced his hero in an ill-fitting mustard suit. Not that the soon-to-be second Mrs de Winter (Lily James) cares—she’s so fluttery and unsure of herself she wouldn’t notice if Maxim (Hammer) was in shorts. Despite this, I prefer the Monte Carlo courtship here to the Hitchcock one. Hammer might be less de Wintry than fans of the book would like, but given the troubles his wife will soon face, it’s difficult to begrudge her an enthusiastic suitor in place of Laurence Olivier’s hilariously sour Maxim.

It’s when the happy couple come home to the seaside estate of Manderley that the film’s limitations become apparent. At every step where a reinvention is possible, Wheatley opts for a retread. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers is as cold with her new mistress and obsessed with her old one, the late, wild Rebecca, as she was in the Hitchcock film. Even Kristin Scott Thomas, as adept as any actor at icy severity, can't really improve on Judith Anderson’s performance, only replicate it. A more self-possessed Mrs de Winter might have been interesting as well, but James invests her character with jello-like fortitude, twitching and gulping and blinking her way through scenes.

Above all, it’s the same Rebecca, still whipping the horse until it bleeds, still taunting her husband with her affairs. The film still turns on whether Maxim killed her (not that it really matters). There’s a glimpse of a willful, magnetic woman in Danvers’ tribute: “She lived her life as she pleased, my Rebecca. No wonder a man had to kill her.” Yet, the film mostly serves up the Rebecca of 1938 and 1940: a scarlet ghost who got her just deserts. There’s little made of ‘my Rebecca’ as well—the suggestion of sexual longing between Danvers and Rebecca was laid out far more explicitly by Hitchcock, who had the housekeeper rattle her new mistress by showing her Rebecca’s underwear and recalling how she’d talk to her while she undressed.

When Wheatley does take a chance, he doesn’t go far enough. There’s a dream sequence with Mrs de Winter swallowed by creepers in the hallway that’s over quickly and too cleanly. More elaborate is the costume ball, where she’s first humiliated by her husband for wearing a gown similar to one Rebecca did, and then seemingly loses her grip on reality. The party turns into a Argento-ish nightmare, with revellers surrounding her chanting ‘Rebecca, Rebecca’—a phantom fragment of a sillier, livelier adaptation.

As the bounder Jack Favell, Sam Riley is so at ease in his villainy that he makes Maxim’s moodiness even less attractive. Between Hammer’s effortful brooding and James’ tremulousness, this is a sympathetic but uninspiring lead pair. After they’ve barely outmaneuvered him, Favell asks the couple, “I bet you think you’ve won, don’t you?”. Neither of them looks at all convinced they have.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge on 24 October 2020.

Hansal Mehta on 'Scam 1992'

If you consider Hansal Mehta's first feature film to be Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar (2000) and not the unreleased Jayate (1997), then this year marks two decades for the director in Hindi cinema. Since Shahid (2012), which won Mehta a National Award for Best Director, he's had a run of critically acclaimed features—CityLights (2014), Aligarh (2015), Simran (2017), Omerta (2017)—four of them with actor Rajkummar Rao.

Mehta's latest release is the 10-part series Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, which premiered on SonyLiv earlier this month. A lively, granular look at the rise and fall of stockbroker Harshad Mehta, it's his first foray into the OTT space as director (he was creative producer on 2017's Bose: Dead/Alive, starring Rao). He also has a film coming up next month, Chhalaang, a comedy with Rao and his Shahid co-star Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as warring schoolteachers. Mehta spoke to Lounge from his home near Lonavala about the warm reception Scam 1992 has received, casting the relatively unknown Pratik Gandhi in the lead, and how Harshad is yet another of his outsider protagonists. Edited excerpts:

Do you have an idea of the viewership numbers for 'Scam 1992'?

We have some numbers but there isn't any particular reliable source for OTT. There are third party numbers but all have different parameters to judge how much it has been viewed. There's something called COTT ratings that say 116 million people have viewed it.

I was asking Sony how they measure it. Their benchmark usually is the increase in subscriptions for the platform. Subscriptions seem to have spiked a lot. There's an approximate number of one crore-plus people who watched the first episode (which is free) in a period of six days.

Given the subject matter and treatment, were you surprised to hear that?

After 20 odd years, making the sort of films I do, any kind of success is a surprise. But we had been watching these episodes over the past few months. To me one of the tests was that I wasn't tired of watching them, even though we've been working on it for three years.

I never felt any fatigue. There was something about the subject, about the script, that you felt you were on to something. It's a feeling I got when I was making Shahid.

How different was it directing in this format?

The number of days I had was a quarter of what you'd take to direct a 10-hour feature. There was pressure to complete early, but because I was so used to making low-budget and independent films, the pressure did not get to me. And the actors we had, they would energise you. I had my son, Jai, as co-director, he was a huge support. We work well together, a lot of technical things I would delegate to him.

In casting the part of Harshad, with whom many viewers would have prior associations, how useful is it to cast an actor with no associations, like Gandhi?

I always feel it is ideal to have an actor who can reinvent with every character. I had seen Pratik's Gujarati films and when I met him, there was this sparkle in his eyes, a lot of energy but also this stillness. There's a Zen thing about Pratik, he's very secure about his ability to transform himself for a character. There were some ideas from my producers but that was before he came in. I did not even look at other choices.

OTT puts greater challenges on you, and you have to choose accordingly. The last script was 550 pages. So to have an actor who has the gumption to read that and build his own arc through it is very important.

As he gets more confident and rich, you see this change in his walk, a little more panache. When he's poorer, while the walk is confident, it's a little more wannabe. As he ages, he's slightly bent. Those changes, a good actor can do that.

The actors in supporting parts were fantastic. I particularly liked the smarmy bankers.

This is Mukesh Chhabra at his best—slightly odd casting. You have Shadaab Khan, Nikhil Dwivedi; you have KK Raina, whom we're seeing after a long time. Anant Mahadevan was so good—there was an intelligence about him, you sort of felt he was the governor.

'Scam 1992' uses many of the actual names of institutions and individuals in Harshad's journey. Indian films and series usually shy away from this.

There was a lot of discussion between me and my team and Sony. It was a complicated process that went through various sets of lawyers. Some names, of course, have been changed, sometimes we composited two or three characters.

When you make something based on real-life characters, that does happen. I've been through it once: on Shahid, UTV's lawyer came with some 75 points in the film, saying all of these will expose you to legal risk.

Another thing the show doesn't shy away from is the finance talk. Were there concerns that the viewer wouldn't keep up?

We had decided that if we're making a show about a financial scam we had to be respectful of the audience's intelligence. I think that's one of the things that has worked for the show. I've always been a fan of boardroom dramas, whether it is Wall Street or The Big Short. I'd seen this film Margin Call, which is underrated but so engrossing, phenomenal cast. I must have seen it five or six times. I wanted Scam to be immersive like that.

So many friends told me after watching, 'I tried to look up SGLs and BRs.' Now everyone I know is aware of SGLs and BRs. When we started we did not know what they meant. We had to ask people. We found it was very simple—and we kept it there. I think partly the show has been successful because we have not treated the audience like idiots. I am not a commerce person. If I can understand, my audience will too.

In the last couple of episodes, when the show's sympathies tip somewhat towards Harshad, Bhushan (Chirag Vohra) is a good counterbalance, showing how Mehta can be unsparing even with those closest to him.

My writer Saurav (Dey) sent me an email I'd written to the entire team around a year and a half back, when there was a block in the script and everyone was arguing about which direction we were going. I said, I see these characters as something out of a Shakespeare play. They have their failings, yet they have their humanity.

The fight between Harshad and Bhushan, that scene was shot almost in real time. I told them, don't rehearse, we'll see what happens. Think of it as an expensive rehearsal; anyway, we're not shooting on film anymore. I told my director of photography, Pratham (Mehta), just follow them, follow whatever you hear. I'd kept the whole day for the scene. It was done in two takes.

We shot it some 10 days into the shoot; there were some 70 days left. The actors had read the entire script, worked out their arcs, in order to reach that point.

You've mostly made films on outsiders—Ram Saran Pandey, the couple in 'CityLights', Professor Siras, and now Harshad.

I've always lived in Bombay. The class divide is very obvious—either you're born into money and inherit a certain amount of strength or you come from outside. The class divide between Harshad and the affluent bankers is apparent. Even the RBI governor treats him with a lot of contempt. Whereas the managers of Polo Steel treat him with a little more respect, because they are also self-made men, so there is more of a connection. My characters always enter a world they're not seen as belonging to.

Did 'Chhalaang' originate with you?

No. Chhalaang let's say is a new kind of Luv Ranjan film which is directed by me.

It's a surprising collaboration.

I wanted to surprise myself too. When Luv called and narrated this, I enjoyed the idea. And Raj (Rajkummar Rao) was already in the film. That was one of the factors—I had faith that Raj has signed the right thing.

I wanted to make something a little lighthearted. Raj and I have worked on five very intense characters. Playing Omar Sheikh (in Omerta) took a toll on him also. We felt we needed to lighten up.

It's set in Haryana, where Raj is from. It's got Satish Kaushik, whom you've seen in Scam. Baljinder Kaur, who played Raj's mother in Shahid, is in it; Zeeshan, who was the brother in Shahid, is playing his nemesis. There's Saurabh Shukla, who was in Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar. So it was also all of us coming together to have some fun.

Is the scene with the scooter malfunctioning a tribute to 'Chashme Buddoor'?

No, the Chashme Buddoor tribute happened in Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar. There was a red scooter that belonged to Saurabh Shukla which would never start.

That scene with Raj's scooter was sort of improvised, because the scooter actually didn't start. Raj is that sort of an actor—if the scooter doesn't work, he will continue. And I never say cut. A lot of things you see in my scenes are after technically you would have said cut.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge on 22 October 2020. 

Fleet Foxes' Shore, Kurt Vile's Speed Sound Lonely KV: Album review

On 22 September, Fleet Foxes dropped their new album, Shore, on YouTube. Along with it came an hour-long film directed by Kersti Jan Werdal, which had the album’s 15 tracks set to long, often static shots of the outdoors: the ocean, fields, mountains, streams, animals, birds, and the odd human. The release was timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox—a very Fleet Foxes gesture, at once folky and arty, organic and somewhat precious.

If the opener, Wading In Waist-High Water, sounds like typical tasteful unplugged Foxes, it’s the second track, Sunblind, which suggests their sound might be headed in a slightly different direction this time. Pecknold sounds his familiar self on this warm tribute to singers departed, recent deaths like David Berman as well as influences like Elliott Smith. But the stabbing of the piano leading into the chorus is new, and the chorus itself is as close as they've come to structured pop songwriting.

Shore is the fourth album by Fleet Foxes. The first two were near-perfect batches of artisanal folk: jangling guitars, ethereal harmonies and Pecknold’s searching voice. They added a choir and strings on their ambitious third album, Crack-Up (2016), a deepening and darkening of their sound. It’s a beautiful, stormy record but, with its baroque touches and esoteric song titles (Third of May/Ōdaigahara, – Naiads, Cassadies), not outside the realm of affectation.

Perhaps Pecknold decided there wasn’t much further to explore in that direction. On Shore, he strips the Foxes’ sound down to something winsome and bright. He recorded the album himself, with the help of guest musicians like Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Raphael Rossen and Christopher Bear. None of the Foxes’ other members feature on it; as Pecknold explained in a note, the studio albums are “predominantly my work and vision”. It’s surprising to hear pronounced drums on track after track—conventional percussion has never been a Fleet Foxes staple. But it’s a positive move, the sort of opening up a well-regarded band can afford to make on its fourth album (in the late 1980s, R.E.M followed three superb, moody records with the exuberant Life's Rich Pageant).

The song lengths are back under control too—no rolling eight-minute epics—and the titles aren’t tongue-twisters. It’s the old Foxes sound, but streamlined and accessible. Whatever experimentation is there is subtle. Quiet Air has a modal breakdown at the end; Going-to-the-Sun Road has lovely elegiac horns. Young Man's Game takes advantage of the steady beat to include driving harmonies that one might not have got on an earlier album. Pecknold is in fine, relaxed form, making even the mainstream balladry of Can I Believe You memorable, stretching the ‘you’ over three or four syllables, his voice ringing high and clear like Rick Danko in It Makes No Difference.

One of the artists Pecknold mentions on Sunblind is country-folk legend John Prine, who died in April. Prine recorded a cover of his 1979 song How Lucky with Kurt Vile at the end of last year. Over a fingerpicked guitar figure, Vile and Prine trade verses, then sing one together. The track, and a cover of Pine’s Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, feature along with three other songs on Vile’s new EP, Speed Sound Lonely KV, which was released on 2 October.

Vile is a prolific singer-songwriter, with eight full-length albums and 18 EPs since 2003. His mix of indie fingerpicking and dreamy electric psychedelia has changed very little since his breakthrough, 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo. No other major artist today, with the exception of Canadian power pop savants The New Pornographers, has so stubbornly stuck to such a simple and well-defined sound over time. The new EP veers towards country—it was recorded in Nashville—but is still recognizably Vile, full of his tricky guitar riffs and lackadaisical, philosophical writing (“I ain’t lying/just being a little exotic”, he sings on Dandelions).

Change carries risk, of course, but in this age of reinvention, with a listening public vying to be on the cusp of the new, it’s also a surefire way to indie cred. Fleet Foxes deserve credit for tweaking their sound and producing an excellent album that’s true to their ethos. And Kurt Vile should be recognized as the modern master of not fixing what ain’t broke.

This piece was published on 20 October 2020.

Jatin-Lalit, the sound of the '90s

 It’s a balmy October evening in Mumbai. Lalit Pandit is on the phone; he’s singing ho gaya hai tujhko toh pyaar sajna.

I had mentioned how the differing tempos in the verse and chorus make it sound like two separate songs. “There were two different songs we combined to make one song,” he confirms. “Na jaane mere…it’s slightly fast. The energy and rhythm of the two pieces is Indian-Western. The ho gaya hai dholak break is amazing. Laakh kar le tu inkaar sajna, dildaar sajna, hai yeh pyaar sajna.” On the last “pyaar”, his voice does the upward lilt made famous by Lata Mangeshkar, who sang this and three other classics on the Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge soundtrack.

Aditya Chopra’s film celebrates 25 years on 20 October. It was, at the time of its release in 1995, one of the biggest commercial successes in Hindi cinema, setting off a trend of outwardly youthful, secretly conservative romances to woo the NRI community. It’s still watched and referenced today, so much a shorthand for Bollywood romance that Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) used it as a framework for its gay love story. Central to the film’s appeal is the music, composed by Lalit and his brother Jatin: seven songs, each of them intimately familiar to most Indians alive today.

When the duo was first called in by Yash and Aditya Chopra, they didn’t know the name of the film or who was in it. They presented some of the tunes they had at the time, including early versions of Mehandi Laga Ke Rakhna and Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye—enough to get them the job. Later, after a detailed narration, veteran lyricist Anand Bakshi told them, “This picture will be great, give it your all.” “The biggest thing was that Lataji was going to do the songs. Millions of fans crazy about her, and you get a chance to make her sing…” says Lalit, his voice trailing off as if he still can’t believe it.

They worked on the film for four and a half months. Ruk Jaa O Dil Deewane was created in the image of Rishi Kapoor stage songs like Bachna Ae Haseeno. Mehandi Laga Ke Rakhna, originally intended for Khiladi (1992), then for a Firoz Nadiadwala film, found its rightful home. “Of course, we were the captains, but our collaborators were exceptional,” Lalit says. “Humein phoolon jaise upar utha diya (they lifted us up like flowers).”

Jatin-Lalit’s music was the bedrock of Hindi film in the 1990s. Theirs was an inviting sound: clean, uncluttered, with an emphasis on melody. Not for them the distinctive dolour of Vishal Bhardwaj or the aggressive rhythms of A.R. Rahman. Akshay Manwani, author of Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet and Music, Masti, Modernity: The Cinema Of Nasir Husain, says the duo brought “melody and a certain propriety” back to film music. “The Hindi film song had really hit its lowest in the 1980s,” he says on email. “Jatin-Lalit emerged in this backdrop. I wouldn’t say they were exceptional or ingenious or anywhere near as brilliant like Rahman, but they brought an element of decency back to the film song, which is their single largest contribution to Hindi cinema.”

As a child of the '90s my primary allegiance was to Rahman, but I consumed more Jatin-Lalit than any other composer. Emanating from movie screens and cassette players and countdown shows on TV, their music seemed to reach out a hand. I had my favourites, of course: Tu Mere Saath Saath from Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992), as seductive a vision of social mobility as anything in Rangeela; Jaana Suno from Khamoshi (1996), which transforms Paul Anka’s laborious Bring The Wine into a soaring ballad; Main Koi Aisa Geet Gaoon from Yes Boss (1997), with that wild violin break; Zindagi Maut Na Ban Jaaye from Sarfarosh (1999), a qawwali-style number movingly rendered by Sonu Nigam and Roop Kumar Rathod.

They came from an illustrious musical lineage, the Mewati gharana. Their uncle, Pandit Jasraj, was one of the revered classical singers of the 20th century. The siblings were trained by their father, Pandit Pratap Narayan. Jatin, nine years older than Lalit, went into films first with their elder brother, Mandheer. They worked without much success for 15 years. Mandheer bowed out and Jatin-Lalit teamed up. Success came almost immediately, with their first film, Yaara Dildara (1991), yielding the disco-lite hit Bin Tere Sanam. The track was actually a repurposing of Le Ja Mera Dil, from their album Rhythmic Love (1989). Dil Kehta Hai, from the same album, would later become Chaand Taare in Yes Boss.

By the time Bin Tere Sanam became a hit, Jatin-Lalit were working on Mansoor Khan’s Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992). Unlike Yaara Dildara, this Aamir Khan-starrer was a hit, and so was the soundtrack, especially the piano duet Pehla Nasha. “Udit Narayan practised the song for almost one and a half months, every day,” Lalit says. “Sadhana (Sargam) would come in, so would Udit, we would finish the day’s work and rehearse with them.” Like all Nasir Husain productions, the sound was Western pop-influenced. The verses in Yahaan Ke Hum Sikandar are similar in metre and melody to The Who’s Pinball Wizard, and Naam Hai Mera Fonseca is a remake of Chuck Berry’s rockabilly classic Johnny B Goode.

It was on Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman that an era-defining partnership was formed. There are few things more quintessentially ’90s than Jatin-Lalit songs for a Shah Rukh Khan film. They collaborated on Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Yes Boss, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Mohabbatein (2000), Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and Chalte Chalte (2003)—memorable soundtracks all, as well as some of the most successful Hindi films ever. The reason they meshed so well with Khan’s image is because they were the right composers for that era. The slick romantic drama had a resurgence in the ’90s, which suited their clean, bright style better than the naked emotionalism of Nadeem-Shravan, a more traditional sound which ruled the early part of the decade. “We had a clarity of sound that you couldn’t hear in anyone else,” Lalit says. And it’s true that in a Jatin-Lalit song, everything—voices, horns, strings—is in balance.

Jatin-Lalit’s most famous works are the Shah Rukh romances but they composed for other actors and genres too. Their filmography includes Vaastav (gangster film), Khiladi and Ghulam (action), Sangharsh (psychological thriller). The cop film Sarfarosh yielded the popular Jagjit Singh ghazal Hoshwaalon Ko Khabar. Ghulam (1998) had the monster hit Aati Kya Khandala, delivered in tapori fashion by Aamir Khan. And there was Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s musical drama Khamoshi, their most rounded work, which alternates typical Jatin-Lalit melodies like Aaj Main Upar with uptempo rhythm-driven pieces like Huiya Ho and Gaate Thhe Pehle Akele.

Lalit counts Bhansali as one of three directors he worked with who really understood how to use music (the other two are Aditya Chopra and Aziz Mirza). “I could make out that even though it was his first film, he was asking for something different,” Lalit says. “He would tell us, I will take money out of the film if needed, but I want my music.”

I ask Lalit if he ever felt competitive with his contemporaries. His reply is immediate: “I always felt, and now I feel ever more so, that our music was far beyond anyone at that time.”

As beloved as Jatin-Lalit’s music is, many would likely disagree with this statement. One could make a case for elevating the duo above Nadeem-Shravan, Anu Malik or Vishal Bhardwaj, but in terms of creativity and seismic impact, this simply wouldn’t hold for Rahman. To make an inexact comparison, they were Rahul Dravid to Rahman’s Sachin Tendulkar: technically sound, dependable, great at what they did but not once-in-a-generation talents. It’s telling that they never won a Filmfare or National Award for best music director as a duo (Lalit and Sajid-Wajid won the Filmfare in 2011 for Dabangg), despite averaging more than one hit album a year from 1991-2001.

After 2001’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Jatin-Lalit started fading. More than Rahman’s dominance, it was perhaps the rise of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy as dependable (and more sonically adventurous) hit-makers that rendered the duo superfluous. Fanaa (2006) was their last hit album, after which they split up. They have worked separately since. In an industry where the great composers have careers spanning three or four decades, 10 years seems like a relatively short time. But those 10 years belonged to Jatin-Lalit.

This piece was published on 18 October 2020.

'Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story': Review

In the bull market that is Indian streaming TV, Scam 1992 arrives to scratch a specific itch: a show with a journalistic bent. The gold standard is David Simon’s expansive productions, not just The Wire but also Show Me A Hero and The Deuce. These shows vary tonally and in subject matter, but their basic impulse is towards longform storytelling. The same can be said for Hansal Mehta’s series (streaming on SonyLIV), which tracks the rise and fall of Harshad Mehta, for a while India’s most famous stockbroker, then its most notorious scamster.

When Harshad (Pratik Gandhi) first steps onto the floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange, he’s frozen in delight, even though everyone around him is frantically buying and selling. He’s found a home—and yet, his place isn’t among the shouters. He wants to be the one who makes them shout. Because he has no wealthy backers, he establishes contacts in trade unions to keep track of management decisions, and uses that to bet on stocks (in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, still the best film in this genre, Bud Fox also got a leg up by providing insider information). Soon, Harshad is on the rise, calling the shots in the stock market, then in the money market. But his instinct is always to game the system, and eventually the system turns on him.

Scam 1992 is linear, detailed and dogged. It isn’t shy about peppering its conversations with finance talk and market jargon, but co-directors Hansal Mehta and Jai Mehta and writers Sumit Purohit, Saurav Dey, Vaibhav Vishal and Karan Vyas find inventive ways to dress up the exposition. I was encouraged by a detail in the show's first scene. A nervous whistleblower (Sharib Hashmi) arrives at the Mumbai Times of India office looking for an editor. The first person he comes across, under a large cutout of the Common Man, is cartoonist R.K. Laxman (happily, the show uses actual names, from Reserve Bank of India governor S. Venkitaramanan to prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao). They have a short exchange and Laxman deposits him in the editor’s office.

There were any number of ways that man could have ended up in the office but I can’t think of a neater solution than this. Similarly, a scene with three of Mehta’s detractors discussing the market takes place in a dance bar, not unlike Sean Parker in The Social Network yelling over the noise of a club to Mark Zuckerberg. Other scenes are constructed around cricket and golf games, over dessert in a restaurant. It’s not quite The Big Short subbing in Anthony Bourdain and Margot Robbie to explain financial impropriety, but it’s definitely a dose of sugar where none would have been fatal.

The ordering and drinking of tea is a recurring motif. Harshad first talks of insider trading over chai outside the stock exchange. Later, when he wants to show how financially sound he is, he gives instructions to all the local tea-shops to bill him for his fellow brokers’ expenses. In the State Bank of India office, as the '92 scam threatens to break (he’s taken ₹500 crore of their money), he's offered tea by the office boy without the boss saying anything—testament to his stature. He pronounces the tea bitter; later, when he returns their money, he says it's sweet. Tea also figures prominently in the meetings of Sucheta Dalal (Shreya Dhanwanthary), the reporter who breaks the story, with her sources.

Gandhi's sunny performance suggest how Mehta’s charisma could have overridden the ethical concerns his investors and creditors had, while Dhanwanthary’s Dalal is a closer approximation of a doughty journalist than anything Hindi film has managed in recent years. But it’s the supporting performances that really sing (credit to Mukesh Chhabra's pinpoint casting as well). There’s an excellent rogue’s gallery: Satish Kaushik as a foul-mouthed seth, his three minions like a Greek chorus, Nikhil Dwivedi and Shadaab Khan as smooth, smarmy bankers. Rajat Kapoor seems to enjoy himself playing a blunt instrument of a CBI investigator (“Surprise!” he shouts cheerfully when Harshad opens the door to a raid). Anant Mahadevan is wonderfully dry as the RBI governor, and Chirag Vohra, as Mehta’s long-time associate, is a tremendous study in moral weakness.

At 10 episodes of 50 minutes each, there’s enough time for the show to stretch out and introduce incidental characters and subplots. My favourite passage involves a SBI employee named Sitaraman (Jamini Pathak), who’s given Mehta the 500 crore and left for his son’s mundan in Palani, Tamil Nadu. Once the story breaks that Mehta is using bank funds to play the market, the SBI head sends employees to personally bring Sitaraman back. In a shorter series, this semi-comic interlude wouldn’t be possible—it’s not even necessary here. There are dozens of scenes like this, which give the impression of a whole complex world, not just whatever’s going on with Mehta.

Towards the end, there’s an attempt to say, look, Harshad might have been wrong but so was everyone else. Yet, for most of its running time, the series manages to balance its admiration for him with a clear-eyed view of the devastation he caused. Some of the most incisive acting on Gandhi’s part is the look of utter incomprehension when Harshad tries and fails to bluster his way through his problems in the later episodes. It’s rather poignant that he’s the last to realize he’s not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge on 13 October 2020.

Sudhir Mishra and Nawazuddin Siddiqui on 'Serious Men'

Between Sudhir Mishra and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, there's been plenty of memorable Mumbai-centric cinema made. The director has given us the searing Dharavi and the underrated gangster film Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin. And Siddiqui has played Mumbaikars of all stripes, from politician Bal Thackeray and serial killer Raman Raghav to the gentle strivers of Bombay Talkies and Photograph.

Mishra and Siddiqui have collaborated for the first time on Serious Men, an adaptation of Manu Joseph's 2010 novel about Ayyan Mani, an ambitious Dalit man whose dreams of lifting himself out of poverty cause him to run a risky con involving his young son. The film will release on Netflix on 2 October. Over a video call, Mishra and Siddiqui spoke about how cities leave their mark on you and why the film is indicative of a new India.

Had you read the book prior to coming on board?

Sudhir Mishra: I did. I normally don't read books in order to make films but I really enjoyed it and it's quite brilliant in a lot of ways. I've been a big admirer of this tangential mind called Manu Joseph.

It's quite an accident that suddenly my writer and my co-producers said they'd like to take the rights and asked me if I'd make it. I read it again. Then I said yes, but it took us 8-10 months to transform this brilliant book to a film. We managed to take some of what we found interesting, and we always kept Manu aware of what we did. It's a whole different thing, the characters, the themes of the novel along with my mind, which has its own influences, and is a gentler mind.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui: I attempted to read it but didn't get beyond two pages. I'd have to sit with a dictionary. So I thought it was better I read the script. But I'd heard of Manu Joseph, and about this novel. It was a beautiful script. Sir (Mishra) gave me an idea of the film first. It was always my wish to work with him, for 20 years.

You tweeted about how you almost worked with him on 'Calcutta Mail'.

NS: Chhoote-chhoote reh gaya main Sir ko (he remained just out of reach then). (Laughs)

How did you decide which parts of the book to leave out?

SM: You can't transform a whole novel. Different things work in a book; mediums also choose their subjects. Often when you say the book is better than the film it is because the film is trying to mimic the novel. You can't shoot thoughts—you have to create something else.

We have removed a lot and kept it to Ayyan and his son and Acharya (director of the science institute where Ayyan is employed). Manu was there throughout the shoot; he loved the fact that we didn't mimic the book. Even V.S. Naipaul has said, once I give my book to a film I forget about it.

How did you end up casting Nawazuddin?

SM: Sometimes you're working and someone comes to mind. Luckily, Nawaz said yes. On certain projects, the right subject matter creates the right energy, passes to all the right people, they say yes, a good film happens. Sometimes, despite the problems, there is something in the basic nature of the film that almost summons the good energy.

The messiest production I've been in was Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. But every mistake improved the film. If you didn't get a location, the second location you got was better. If one actor didn't do the film, the next actor who came in was better.

What was your approach to Ayyan Mani?

NS: We had discussions before the shoot regarding the character. Using that and whatever instructions Sir would give, you get a feel that this is the correct path to take. You add your own interpretation but what the director has in mind is very important, because you're looking out for your character while he's looking at the whole film.

Do you see Ayyan as a typically Mumbai character?

NS: It isn't like that, there are people like this everywhere. But some cities do have a particular effect on the people living there. If I was in my village right now, I'd be the same person but some things would change. The city demands something. Your nature changes. Like right now, I'm at ease, but as soon as I come to Mumbai I'll be like, let's get this and that done.

You made 'Dharavi' in 1991, about a man trying to lift himself out of poverty in Mumbai, just like Ayyan is doing here. Do you think there's a greater chance of success now than there was then?

SM: I think so. I think there's an assertion. There's a major transformation, a new India. It may be emanating in ways that we don't like but these are all necessary eruptions in a society that's been constricted for too long. Ayyan Mani believes his son needs a leg up. Adjustments, jugaad, call it what you want. Mani knows things are not possible without this. I don't think he's wrong. It's the desperation of a man who wants to do well for his son.

That can exist only in modern India, the confidence that a lot of people now have. And a lot of other people don't like that confidence, whether it is an anger against English-speaking people or some other elite.

This aspect reminds me of 'Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahi', when the high-society folk brush up against the gangsters.

SM: There is a scene where the junior gangster is watching the upper-class people dance and tells his boss, yeh style, yeh izzat, apan ke naseeb mein nahi hai (we can never have this style, this respect). And Raman Bhai breaks the alcohol bottles, because he realizes he'll never get this kind of class or suaveness.

Does Ayyan Mani thinks he's doing the right thing?

NS: In their own mind, every man feels they're doing the right thing, even a gangster. I think after whatever Ayyan has seen with his father, his forefathers, he just wants to take a leap of a generation or two through his son. People who aren't privileged, they have to do a little jugaad. He won't do anything hardcore, he just has this wish.

What sort of look were you aiming for?

SM: We went to BDD chawl. I wanted to shoot in most of the actual locations, because you can't replace that, the constriction of that life. But I wanted to shoot it like an upper-class house. You live long enough in a chawl and you take it for granted. I tried to bring out the normalcy in the place.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge on 5 October 2020.