Ludo: Review

A gangster lies in a hospital bed, neck in a brace, both arms and one leg in casts. On the adjoining bed lies a man who’s under arrest for the murder of a builder, actually committed by the gangster. Outside the window is the long yellow neck of a crane. It’s being operated by a Mithun-impersonating waiter who’s been asked by the love of his life, who’s married to the murder suspect, to effect a jail break.

No one in Hindi cinema today makes films like Anurag Basu. Even when the results are unwieldy—as is the case with Ludo—it's the sort of vibrant mess that’s unique to him. Post-Barfi (2012), it’s become possible to identify a Basu film from just a few frames, a distinction he shares with Sanjay Leela Bhansali. In Ludo, as in Barfi and Jagga Jasoos (2017), he creates a visual and sonic world that’s almost cartoon-like, dressed up with primary colours and bright sounds, in which he sends characters in search of family or some vital connection.

After an unnecessary framing device, the first of the film’s intersecting stories is introduced with an overhead shot of a floor like a chessboard and a green door kicked in by contract killer Sattu (Pankaj Tripathi), who shoots a man in a bathtub. Ventriloquist Akash (Aditya Roy Kapoor) finds out there's a video of himself and Shruti (Sanya Malhotra), a one-time casual partner, having sex that has surfaced online; when he discovers she’s getting married in a few days, he goes to warn her. Rahul (Rohit Saraf) is a put-on store employee and Sheeja (Pearle Maaney) an equally harried nurse who get mixed up with Sattu. Dhaba-owner Aalu (Rajkummar Rao) is approached by Pinky (Fatima Sana Sheikh), his one true love, and the wife of the man arrested for the murder that Sattu commits, for help. There’s also Bittu (Abhishek Bachchan), an ex-con just out of prison, who bonds with a young girl who fakes her kidnapping to get her parents’ attention.

It’s a lot—and this is before the stories start to intersect. Ludo is two-and-half hours long, yet with so many characters it still manages to feel hurried. Some of the narrative joins are clever but more often it feels like Basu is simply throwing his odd couples together to see what happens. There’s nothing like the elegant structure of Pulp Fiction (1994), the granddaddy of the hyperlink film, or the merciless loop of Amores Perros (2000). But Ludo is similarly ambitious, jumping not just between stories but also across time frames, going forward, then back, making detours and sideways hops.

I was reminded of one hyperlink film in particular—Thiagarajan Kumararaja's Super Deluxe. That 2019 Tamil film had four or five seedy intersecting narratives, and an eye for eccentricity and colour codes (the palette for Basu’s film is provided by the red, green, blue and yellow pieces on a Ludo board). If Super Deluxe and other gritty Tamil comedies like Jigarthanda (2014) are a source of inspiration, the inclusion of Pistah, a supercharged track from the 2013 Tamil-Malayalam bilingual film Neram, might be a nod in that direction. There are nods in other directions as well: the father of a kidnapping victim getting instructions on a moving train is reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963). And Shruti saying “I know where I’m going” is a possible tribute to the 1945 Powell-Pressburger film of that name, which also has a young woman who must choose between a wealthy suitor and an exciting but broke companion.

Some of the sub-narratives work better than others. The Bittu track is blatantly sentimental, the scowling thug gently steering the chatty young girl out of trouble. The Rahul-Sheeja bits derive excitement from their collisions with the other plots. Rao is funny as the hopeless romantic who can’t say no to the woman who’s not only married but has a child, but it’s difficult to get a read on Pinky, who spends the whole film in tears or close to it. In a film full of men coming to the rescue of women, Sattu’s relationship with a no-nonsense nurse (Shalini Vatsa) is a welcome reversal, with the gangster made a little more human by her kindness.

The only pairing that really sparkles is Akash and Shruti. Their first scene is wonderful—she thinks he’s taken the video and is there to blackmail her; even as she starts hitting him, he can’t stop laughing. Malhotra somehow makes her status-obsessed, honest-to-a-fault character winsome. Shruti is blithely blunt, telling Akash “You’re really not photogenic at all” when they first meet (she means he looks better in person). Even better is her frank assessment of his prospects: “The problem isn’t that you aren’t rich. It’s that you will never be rich.” Akash accepts all this with a rueful smile—he loves her but, unlike most Hindi film heroes, he doesn’t want to burden her with that.

The whimsicality that’s become such a big part of Basu’s filmmaking since Barfi pervades every scene here. This might not have been a problem had the musical jokes and whacky frames been woven around something substantial. But Ludo is all filling, no pastry. It’s not clear that Basu has an exit plan, or even wants these stories to end. And so we get two quasi-Mexican standoffs, the cinephile director’s way out of screenplay trouble. In Barfi and Jagga Jasoos, there was a central quest; here there’s a maze. Despite the many incidental pleasures on offer, Ludo gets lost in itself.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge on 12 November 2020.

Laxmii: Review

Like everyone else, I’ve missed films on the big screen. What I haven’t missed are big-screen films, the ones with major stars and minor intellects. Raghava Lawrence's Laxmii is a reminder of the sort of plodding, patronizing, garish Hindi film that would release wide every fortnight in pre-covid times. Akshay Kumar is Bollywood’s most consistent hitmaker but this might be his sternest test—without the ritual of theatre viewing, will the audience choose to remain captive to unrelenting silliness for over two-and-a-half hours?

This remake of Lawrence's Tamil-language Kanchana begins in Daman, with a spirit freed and a girl dragged out of her house and down the road by a malevolent force, but the true horror comes a few scenes later, in a brightly lit apartment, as Asif (Kumar) tries to explain to his nephew why his wife’s parents won’t talk to them. “Her father didn’t like me being Muslim,” he says. “He’s still stuck on the whole Hindu-Muslim thing?” the child asks. “Yes, he’s still stuck on the whole Hindu-Muslim thing,” Asif replies. I’d forgotten how much heavy weather Indian screenwriters could make of scenarios that have been in circulation since the 1930s (the writers here are Lawrence, Farhad Samji, Sparsh Khetarpal and Tasha Bhambra).

The impetus for that little lecture—not the last in the film—is a phone call from Rashmi’s (Kiara Advani) mother, asking her to come home after three years. So Asif, Rashmi and nephew, whom they’re bringing up, head to Daman. Along with painful meet-the-parents comedy, a spectral presence starts haunting Rashmi’s mother (Ayesha Raza Mishra), father (Rajesh Sharma), sister-law (Ashwini Kalsekar, occasionally funny) and brother (Manu Rishi Chadha). Finally, it settles on Asif, entering him via lemongrass tea (of the two Hindi films this year to feature the beverage, Thappad is certainly the better horror movie).

Though we already know Asif is possessed—he’s shown dribbling from the mouth, teeth streaked with mud, shouting “I won’t let them go”—the first sign of the specific form this will take comes in a sari shop. He asks the attendant to hand over a sari, then another, and another. His movements and voice turn coy, effeminate. He gets up and sashays to a mirror, where he tries on the sari as his extended family look on, horrified. He snaps out of it after he’s slapped, and storms out. That night and the next day, he’s overtaken by similar possessions—wearing bangles, applying turmeric to his hands and face. He also has an out-of-body experience where he murders a man in a warehouse, because why not?

Woman-Asif is violent and superhumanly strong but the low comedy—childish name-calling, people going cross-eyed with terror—diminishes any latent threat. After flinging her husband across the room, Asif tells the sister-in-law: “Tera pati hai na, halkat, tedha hai par tera hai (this idiot husband, he’s twisted but he’s yours).” How I've missed you, silver wit of Farhad Samji.

There’s also the underwhelming central idea of a straight, macho actor playing an exaggerated version of a transgender person primarily for laughs. Asif, it turns out, has been possessed by the ghost of Laxmi, a trans woman killed by corrupt builders. Laxmi is shown as a bruiser—capable of inflicting as much damage as Asif can when he's possessed by her—but also an inspirational figure and a mentor. Actor Sharad Kelkar gives the character some dignity in this flashback, at odds with Kumar’s turn, which is grotesque and intended to be so (some might remember Kumar camped it up as a gay man in Dishoom).

Having a huge contingent of trans persons perform a wild, religion-themed dance (there's a bunch of Hindu iconography in the film) before Asif-as-Laxmi stabs, slices, dices and burns her way to revenge is one way to do representation. But it’s scarcely worse than the last scene, where Asif and Rashmi sum up the film’s Good Intentions. “There wasn’t much difference between Laxmi and me,” he says. “I used to eradicate the fear of ghosts from people’s hearts and Laxmi removed the ghost of inequality from society.” “Absolutely right,” she replies. “We have created divisions by classifying people as male, female, transgender—but when it comes down to emotions, we’re all the same.”

I’d like to tell you there’s a pretty frame or two, some nice camerawork, a scene with a novel idea. But the only evidence of good taste in 140 minutes is the straight lift of John Carpenter’s tinkling theme from Halloween. The funniest moment comes when the real Laxmi gives an emotional speech on stage. As soon as she finishes, a man in the audience jumps up and shouts “Superb!” What’s a nice adjective like you doing in a film like this?

This piece was published on 10 November 2020.

How Sean Connery escaped Bond

James Bond wasn’t the first movie series, but it was arguably the first modern movie franchise. Similarly, though Sean Connery wasn’t the first actor to play a character over a number of films, he could be considered the first real franchise star—and, by extension, the first star to try and escape one. The Scottish actor, who died on 31 October at 90, will be remembered first and foremost for playing Ian Fleming’s secret agent in seven films over 21 years. Yet, his attempts to dodge the 007 persona, almost from the start of the series, are just as intriguing.

The first Bond film, Dr No, came out in 1962. Its massive success meant that four more films with Connery in the lead were shot and released in the next five years: From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967). In between the second and third film, Connery made Marnie with Alfred Hitchcock. He plays Mark Rutland, a coldly charismatic owner of a publishing company who becomes fascinated with Tippi Hedren’s Marnie, a compulsive thief with a host of psychological issues. It’s possible Hitchcock wanted to use a bit of Connery’s developing Bond persona: he’s mostly in sharp suits, is watchful and witty, and powerfully attractive (Marnie has no interest in men until she meets him). But Mark’s efforts to diagnose and cure Marnie’s seeming frigidity (after they marry, he rapes her) place him in another category: that of the controlling Hitchcock male, a type played by Cary Grant in Notorious (1946) and Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo (1958). It was Connery’s first challenge to audiences.

Today, it’s not enough for actors to play larger-than-life heroes for lots of money—they have to pretend it’s meaningful. Connery didn’t feel that obligation. In 1965, he told interviewer Oriana Fallaci that while he wasn’t ashamed of the Bond movies, he would “get angry when they ask me if I’d like to be James Bond, if I’m like James Bond, if they should call me Connery or Bond, when they plague me with idiocies of that kind”. By 1967, five years and as many films since 007’s birth in cinema, he wanted out. “I had become completely identified with it, and it became very wearying and very boring,” he said. He wanted to do other kinds of films—to show he wasn’t just someone who “fell into this tuxedo and started mixing vodka martinis”. So he walked out, and George Lazenby took over.

People often forget that, aside from two returns to Bond in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and Never Say Never Again (1983), Connery was 007 for just five years, an almost Beatles-like packing of colossal cultural influence into a short span of time. But what of the remaining 35 odd years of his career? After the half-decade of Bond, he spent a good deal of energy getting as far away from the character as possible. One early attempt was Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires (1970), set in Pennsylvania in the 1870s. Connery plays the leader of a militant Irish worker’s group that’s disrupting work in the coal mines. In a moustache and cap, his face streaked with black, he’s a low-key presence opposite Richard Harris’ charismatic Pinkerton detective who’s been sent to infiltrate the group. Connery seems to welcome playing a man of weight and conscience—the feeling he puts into the line “I have no coolness in me at all” is tremendous.

It was with Sidney Lumet's The Offence (1972) that Connery seemed to violently exorcise the ghost of Bond. The film, which returned Connery to Britain, was his third with Lumet after The Hill (1965) and The Anderson Tapes (1971). He plays a brusque detective-sergeant named Johnson, who’s haunted by visions of grisly crimes he’s investigated. The rape of a schoolgirl pushes him over the edge, and he beats the lone suspect (an unforgettable Ian Bannen) to death in custody. As Johnson is questioned, we see, in flashback, the events leading up to the death.

The Offence is based on a play by its screenwriter, John Hopkins, which shows in the long, grueling scenes between Johnson and his wife, the detective superintendent, and the suspect. It’s an unremittingly bleak film, and Connery’s performance is unflinching in its darkness. When he discovers the frightened girl in the woods, Johnson gets on top of her and holds her down—though his intention is to calm her, it’s impossible not to think of this when he breaks down later and admits to having violent fantasies of rape and murder himself.

Then there’s the argument with his wife, in which he grabs her roughly, berates and, at one point, seems ready to assault her. As uncomfortable a scene as it is to watch, it’s even tougher if you know of Connery’s own attitude towards domestic violence. He said in a 1965 interview that he wasn't against slapping women, though he wouldn’t do it with a closed fist. Asked in 1987 by Barbara Walters if he regretted that statement, he said no. His first wife, Diane Cilento, claimed in her autobiography that he beat her during their 11-year marriage. This brutishness was usually passed off as roguishness or virility in most of his films, but it stayed raw and ugly in The Offence, and in Marnie, where he tells Hedren’s character, “I'm fighting a powerful impulse to beat the hell out of you”.

In the 1970s, Connery oscillated between the mainstream—part of the starry ensembles in Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and A Bridge Too Far (1977), clowning with Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), opposite Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian (1976)—and the esoteric (1972's Zardoz, in which he wore, at different times, a red loincloth and a wedding dress). Then he faded for a spell, only to resurface with a sharp white beard and an air of hard-won wisdom as the 14th century Franciscan friar detective in The Name of the Rose (1986). His reward was two scene-stealing parts, in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), as one of the agents hunting Al Capone, and as Indy Sr. in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). My generation knew him as a wisecracking tough guy in films like The Rock (1996) and Entrapment (1999), before The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) exasperated him enough to call curtains on his career.

In Marnie, when Mark calls his to-be wife a “little method actress of a liar”, it’s an in-joke by Hitchcock, who didn’t think much of actors asking what their motivation was. It’s unlikely Connery did either. No matter the part, his approach was always forthright. Even while straining, he seemed at ease. And occasionally, when he was shaken, he was stirring.

This piece was published on 3 November 2020.

Manganiyar dreams in 'Pearl of the Desert'

Pushpendra Singh’s approach to documentary might have infusions of fictional storytelling, but there are some things you can’t plan. Manganiyar elder and poet Nijre Khan is rhythmically reciting to an audience of young children about their heritage when his flow is broken by a gust of desert wind that finds its way into the hut, covering both speaker and listener with dust. It’s a small miracle bottled, nature adding its own commentary to a scene.

Maru ro Moti (Pearl of the Desert, 2019), which is playing online at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (29 October-4 November), originated during the production of Lajwanti (2014), Singh’s first feature as director. He was talking with Anwar Khan of the Manganiyars—a desert community in Rajasthan known for their musical traditions—who asked if he’d make a film on them. Singh didn’t want to cover the same ground that he’d seen in documentaries on the community, which has become famous in recent decades through touring and exuberant stage shows. He asked Khan if there was something he could focus on. The musician told him about bhanat, a harvest ritual. “I was reading this Rajasthani dictionary and found that bhanat also referred to education,” Singh said. Already impressed by Manganiyar youngsters, who'd surround him and sing when there was a break in shooting, he latched onto the idea of a film from the perspective of a young musician.

When the director accompanied Anwar to his village of Barna, he became fascinated by the Manganiyar oral tradition of teaching. There, Singh came across Anwar’s nephew, Moti, a talented young singer. Moti’s journey—his musical education, lessons from his uncle and Nijre Khan, and his first steps towards a performing career—became the story of the film. It took five years to make, Singh returning periodically to Barna to shoot. In this time he also directed a second feature, Ashwatthama (2017); his fourth, Laila Aur Satt Geet, released this year.

In several scenes, Singh had Moti and others re-enact events. He then blended these with more traditional documentary footage captured without rehearsal. “I’m more interested in the truth than reality,” he told me, saying he wanted to give the impression of staging, and giving the example of one of the great early documentaries, Nanook of the North (1922), which was later found to have been largely staged by director Robert Flaherty. It wasn’t always the rehearsed option that made the final cut, though. There’s a spectacular acapella performance by Moti as he sits on a camel cart, leaving home on his first trip abroad. Singh shot it twice, at first capturing the audio with a basic camera recorder, and later giving Moti a proper mic. But he ended up using the raw first version.

The Manganiyar are Muslim, but their patrons are mostly upper caste Hindus, which has resulted in a syncretic art and way of life for the community. They might almost be mistaken for a Hindu tribe in the film—they use Hindu legends in their art and speech, a group prays at a temple—but there are also songs in praise of Allah, and of course everyone is named Khan. Their lower social standing is alluded to: Singh says many upper-caste patrons consider them on par with Dalits, the power imbalance clear in one scene where Manganiyar musicians sit on the ground and serenade their listeners, who are on an elevated surface. In another scene, Anwar and a few men talk about discrimination, though caste isn’t mentioned explicitly.

Singh’s approach to the material isn’t ethnographic; his aim was to make something that was both a documentary and a musical. There are stunning scenes with Moti in the desert, his voice echoing through the deserted landscape, and of bhanat work songs, the call-and-response vocals a primal link with tribes in other parts of the world (“They have this idea of projection,” Singh said, “of singing in open spaces”). Even with their recent fame outside their home state, there is a sense of the difficulty of sustaining livelihood and maintaining tradition. A man complains about the difficulty of continuing their way of teaching, upon which Singh mercilessly cuts to a group of children singing the hit film song Main Tenu Samjhawan.

At one point, Moti is warned by an elder, “Our heritage is poetry, couplets, traditional songs. You can sustain yourself with them. Do not fall into the trap of the hotels”. Yet there’s also a clear-sightedness about where the boy’s efforts should be focused. Anwar Khan, dropping the boy to his village after his first foreign tour, asks him about his plans. When Moti defers to him, he says, “You won't get anywhere if you leave music.” Moti’s answer is immediate. “I will never abandon music. I'll die without it."

This piece was published in Mint Lounge on 30 October 2020.

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.