Review: Joji

If Fahadh Faasil is the best actor in the country—and any case to the contrary would have to be exceedingly strong—it’s because he repeatedly puts himself in situations which encourage such arguments. Sure, he has abilities, but almost as important is his choice of material. Good parts find good actors only if they want to be found, and Faasil, more than perhaps anyone else, gives the impression of wanting to explore his craft rather than expand his empire. And though he’s done fine work for several directors, Dileesh Pothan in Maheshinte Prathikaaram and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum has been especially successful in unlocking Faasil’s gift for subtle histrionics.

The two have reunited for Joji, which sets Macbeth in a small Kerala town in the present day. Though the source is acknowledged in the opening credits, we quickly realise this isn’t a literal adaptation. For one, Faasil’s Joji—the film’s Macbeth—is the son, not the lieutenant, of the brutish patriarch Kuttappan (Sunny PN). The Banquo figure is his elder brother, Jomon (Baburaj), and Bincy (Unnimaya Prasad)—Lady Macbeth—is not his wife but his brother Jaison’s. Syam Pushkaran, who’s written Pothan’s earlier films as well as Kumbalangi Nights, goes easy on the witches, moving woods and hands that won’t wash clean of blood—elements featured prominently in the great Hindi adaptation of the play, Maqbool.

In Shakespeare’s play, we’re impressed by Macbeth before we even meet him; he’s described as ‘brave’, ‘noble’, ‘valiant cousin, worthy gentleman’. It’s a very Pushkaran/Pothan touch to make their Macbeth entirely unworthy. Though Kuttappan’s bullying of his sons is shocking, Joji is a difficult one to sympathise with, given his own bullying tendencies (towards the one person weaker than him, Jomon’s son, Popy) and his unpleasantness. His one gift is for low cunning —again, not a Macbeth trait—which he puts to use when Kuttappan has a sudden stroke. Faasil plays him with a kind of slouching alertness and a child’s idea of anger; after a physical altercation with his father, he shuts the door and punches the air wildly, a brilliant bit of physical comedy.

Kuttappan’s stroke isn’t what kills him—in this regard the film doesn’t deviate from the play. “My Father never did any harm to me/ Even if he hurts me/ I would happily accept it and sing hallelujah,” the gathered sing at his funeral. Pushkaran also took aim at patriarchy in Kumbalangi Nights; here he adds religion, in the form of a pompous local priest, to his targets. In a state cinema teeming with strong visual artists, Pothan is one of the most incisive, able to infuse everyday activities like a morning jog with unease and portent. Cinematographer Shyju Khalid makes the most of a handful of settings and players; particularly striking are the bird’s-eye-view shots.

All of this is tied together by one of the best background scores in recent memory in an Indian film. Justin Varghese’s mix of plaintive melodies and prodding, insinuating pieces recalls the work of Jo Yeong-wook, Park Chan-wook’s longtime collaborator. The main theme is a wintry violin piece that returns at various points in the film; during the opening credits, it leads into a spiraling Bernard Herrmann-esque arrangement. As Joji drives home at night, thinking his father has a fortnight to live, the unseemly glee he cannot show on his face is instead reflected in the playful arrangement. As the film progresses and Joji descends further into crime, the music becomes unhinged as well—sepulchral plinks, pizzicato strings, skittering percussion.

A significant—and avoidable—drawback is Rajeev Ramachandran’s English subtitling, which ranges from functional to appalling. Leave aside conveying the subtleties of the screenplay, there are errors of spelling and grammar that one wouldn’t expect in a fansub (‘anniversery’, ‘gartitude’, ‘there is an info’).

Joji might be the first memorable Indian film to be visibly set in the covid era. Characters wear masks in public, though these, as in real life, rarely cover their noses. Doctors in PPE kits identify themselves by their nicknames to their colleagues. Caregivers try to figure out how to access OTPs sent to the patient's mobile. Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned, the diseased, uncertain spirit of the times permeates the film. “We will take care of you,” Joji says to his wheelchair-ridden father, his assurance a veiled threat. “That’s what you want, right?” And a moment that’s equal parts 17th century drama and 21st century pandemic: Bincy telling her brother-in-law, who’ll spend the rest of the film lying his face off: “Put on a mask and come.”

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.

Sea of love: Time and My Octopus Teacher

PG Wodehouse famously said there were two ways to write a novel, as “a sort of musical comedy without music” or “going deep down into life and not caring a damn”. If one were to adapt this to documentary cinema, the two strains might be: films that show us wonders and films that reveal something about the human condition. Flaherty, Riefenstahl, Reggio, Attenborough would fit in the former category; Varda, Wiseman, Marker, Rosi in the latter; Herzog in both. Of the five films nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars (26 April), Garrett Bradley’s Time goes deep into life and James Reed and Pippa Ehrlich’s My Octopus Teacher shows us wonders.

Bradley approached Sibil Fox Richardson in 2016. Sibil and her husband, Robert, had gone to prison in Louisiana for attempting to rob a bank after the family fell on hard times. Sibil served three-and-a-half years; Robert was sentenced to 60 years, and stayed in prison for nearly two decades while she campaigned for his release and brought up their six children. Bradley had intended to make a short film on her, but when Sibil handed over home videos she had shot, with close to 100 hours of footage chronicling their journey, she decided to make a feature instead.

Time (on Amazon Prime) lasts 81 minutes and spans 18 years. It begins with home video footage—Sibil and Robert’s young children goofing about, being driven to school, playing in the heat of summer and in the snow. A 20-something Sibil addresses Robert in one of her recordings: “Do you know how hard I am going to be smiling when you come back?” There’s a cut and on screen is a much older Sibil, with a streak of grey in her hair. In that instant, without saying anything or indicating the timelines, Bradley establishes a small lifetime of thwarted hopes.

Both the videos and the scenes shot by cinematographers Zac Manuel, Justin Zweifach and Nisa East are in black and white, and even though the former is scratchy and the latter pristine, transitions from one to the other are often breathtaking. Cinema is at its most profound when it reckons with the passage of time. Seeing Sibil’s boys on their first day of kindergarten, then as young men with careers and dreams, underscores the social cost of the prison system, one which Sibil forcefully argues is inhumane and slanted against African-Americans. In tracking the 18-year wait for Robert’s release, Bradley shows how prison doesn’t end at the jail complex. Sibil speaks several times of her belief that slavery gave way to the modern penal system (this film is perfectly paired with Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, which explores similar themes). Time also lends intimacy and a human face to a subject most often covered in terms of numbers and laws and from the point of view of the incarcerated.

Towards the end of the film, just before the verdict, we see scenes from the home videos but in reverse. It’s a lovely instinctive bit of film trickery, almost as old as cinema itself. Having reached a moment of truth, time pauses, retreats, before moving forward again. “Time is what you make of it,” Sibil’s son Freedom says. “Time is unbiased. Time is lost. Time flies.” Bradley’s achievement is creating a work that speaks to all these statements.

My Octopus Teacher is also an intimate journey through, and past, pain. But unlike Time, its aim is not to explain our human world but to show us worlds unseen. The primary photographer and narrator is a South African naturalist named Craig Foster, who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus he comes across while diving in a kelp forest in the ocean. He meets the octopus every day over the course of a year, photographing the stunning underwater environment and the development of their relationship.

Foster tells us at the start of the film that he was burnt out and not communicating with his family at the time he took to diving. Though he returns to his troubled state at various points in the film, there isn’t much detail provided as to the kinds of problems he was facing or how his bond with the octopus helped him deal with those. But as long as the film is below water—which is a lot—it’s mesmerising.

My Octopus Teacher is a great primer on marine behaviour—everything from mating rituals to hunting and evading predators is captured in vivid detail. Foster can’t help but project human values on to the octopus. He feels “incredible pride for this animal that has been through impossible odds to get to this place”. The depth of emotion he feels is surreal at times—you could take lines from this and place them in a romantic film. “I fell in love with her but also with that amazing wildness she represented,” Foster says. And at another point: “All I could do at the time is just think of her.” The music, a mixture of overly sensitive strings and piano, perpetuates this mood.

Foster used to dive without oxygen or a wetsuit, so as to keep as little a barrier as possible between his environment and him. Even with this limitation, the footage he gathers is incredible. Riotously colourful and strange, the creatures he photographs live up to his claim that the marine world is “much more extreme than our maddest science fiction”. There are spectacular setpieces, like the attack on the octopus by a shark, with Foster tracking it from the moment of imminent threat to the eventual escape. Another scene shows the octopus as predator, hunting crab and lobster. The most cinematic moment, perhaps, is a scene where the octopus darts at a school of fish with no real intent to catch them. Foster guesses this is her playing.

My Octopus Teacher is a visually breathtaking nature documentary with a personal hook, a film that audiences found organically and loved when it premiered on Netflix in 2020. It’s only because of the Oscar nomination that one would think of comparing it with Bradley's film. Time, which won the US Documentary Directing Prize at Sundance in 2020 and landed on several best-of-year lists, is a dense, ambitious work. In terms of sophistication of technique and narrative, it is far ahead of Reed and Ehrlich’s film. Yet it’s also true that My Octopus Teacher provides the kind of cinematic rush that Time cannot. The Oscars will force a choice between the two, but both are worth seeking out as very different examples of intensely personal non-fiction.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Review: Nomadland

Nomadland starts with a couple of shots as spare and elegiac as anything Roger Deakins might dream up. We see Fern (Frances McDormand) leaving her home of many years in the cold light of the early morning, packing her belongings into her van. She says goodbye to a friend and sets off. The houses, their clothes, the landscape, everything is blue and grey. Just when it all seems so poetic, director Chloé Zhao shows Fern doing her business in a frozen open field. And then we see the title, white letters occupying minimal space on a black screen. These opening three minutes offer a clue to the nature of this film, which situates its human figures against flat, empty landscapes, and which shows the rough beauty of the open road without hiding its drudgeries.

Much of the discourse around Nomadland, which is nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Actress, has focused on the inequalities of the gig economy—a rather literal read of what’s decidedly not an “issue” film. Fern, who’s in her 60s, leaves the town of Empire, Nevada, after the gypsum factory where she and her late husband worked is shut down and the workforce laid off. Later, we see her working in an Amazon store, at a burger joint, in an amusement park cleaning bathrooms. All the while, she lives in her RV, moving from town to town, meeting up with other “nomads”. It’s not an easy life—there’s a scene that makes clear you have to defecate in a bucket if you live in a van—but for Fern, who can’t get by on benefits, it’s a way to stay independent and employed without being tied down.

Initially, my thoughts went to Ken Loach films like I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019), tales of ordinary people caught in the crush of capitalist progress. Yet, as Nomadland progressed, it became clear that Fern and others like her saw themselves not as victims of the system but as rebels against it. When the daughter of a friend bumps into Fern and expresses concern, Fern corrects her, saying, “I’m not homeless—I’m houseless.” Most of the nomads in the film are elderly, living alone, suffering some kind of loss; their fellow itinerants are the closest thing they have to family.

Late in the film, Fern makes two trips into society. The first is out of desperation: her RV breaks down, and she has to visit her sister to ask for a loan. Fern is seen as an eccentric by her brother-in-law and his friends; her sister alone understands that Fern just isn’t made for a polite suburban life (“It’s always what’s out there that’s more interesting”, she says, a diagnosis Fern can’t deny). She also visits David, a fellow-nomad who has a crush on her, staying with his family for a while. But she’s ill at ease in these settings, the strain of company weighing on her like loneliness might weigh on someone else.

There’s an American strain of outdoors living that stretches from Thoreau to Into The Wild’s Chris McCandless. Fern—who doesn’t shrink from human company so much as civilisation— belongs to this tradition. She’s a tough soul, clipped of speech, stubborn but kind. Her friends Linda May and Swankie are actual van-dwellers, as is Bob Wells, who organises the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, a meeting place for people who, in the film’s parlance, adopt the lifestyle. It’s a measure of McDormand’s brilliant ordinariness, after more than 35 years of acting, that Zhao can surround her with real-life persons and she doesn’t stick out.

Nomadland is being spoken of as an Oscar favourite—an unlikely one, given its tendency towards quiet and understatement. There’s a muted glow to Joshua James Richards’ cinematography and Ludovico Einaudi’s score, and Zhao’s editing and direction is unobtrusive (a few ripples come from intuitive Malick-style cutting). From time to time, I felt the film passes over from naturalistic to drab—you can only go so far with flat, plainspoken dialogue. But its commitment to mundanity also means that the small joys its characters experience are magnified: Fern hopping in a canyon; a young wanderer exchanging a dinosaur bone lighter for a sonnet; Swankie murmuring “Oh, I see something neat” as she stares at a spectacular sunset.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge. 

The patient revelations of Gianfranco Rosi

MUBI’s presentation of Notturno (2020) segues into a short conversation, a welcome addition to their recent exclusive releases. On a split screen, Alejandro González Iñárritu starts to ask the director, Gianfranco Rosi, a question along the lines of “What was your vision?” Three minutes later, he’s still asking it. It feels like an unintended tribute to someone whose films don’t come with clear narrative pathways or guiding lights. Iñárritu is one of the great directors of his age, but the effort of pinning down Rosi seems to briefly overwhelm him.

Notturno, Rosi’s sixth feature, is particularly disorienting. Shot for three years in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan and Lebanon and premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, it moves from one country to another without so much as an intertitle. The entire Middle East becomes one large conflict, a frayed map of sorrow where time has erased boundaries. It’s a bold choice, though a contentious one. By removing the specificity of the conflicts, which range from attacks by Western “peacekeepers” to atrocities by ISIS, Rosi is asking us to react to human suffering without context. Yet, Westerners seeing the Middle East as a monolithic whole is the source of a lot of the region’s problems.

Rosi doesn’t use voice-over, and on-screen text is usually limited to the start of his films. His refusal to point the viewer in a certain direction, though, is at odds with the control he himself exerts over the narrative. Even when he stretches a scene, it’s done for a reason, like the mysterious static shot of a horse standing in a city street at night, staring at the camera, in Notturno. He shoots his own films, working with a tiny crew. His images, impeccably framed and fiercely beautiful, aren’t what most viewers would associate with “documentary” (“Tarkovsky on hormones,” as Iñárritu put it). Notturno is full of these: lovers sharing a shisha, unperturbed by sounds of gunfire from the city below; an all-women militia huddled around a kettle for warmth; a tree bent over by buffeting winds, watched by a boy who’s weathering his own storm.

In the years since the Varanasi-set Boatman (1993), Rosi has become a leading voice in non-fiction film. He’s one of the only documentary makers to have won the top prize at the Venice and Berlin film festivals. He found his particular style—immersive, composed, character-driven—with Below Sea Level (2008), about flatland squatters in California. El Sicario, Room 164 (2010) followed, an interview with a masked hitman recounting his crimes; an outlier in his filmography. He broke out with his next film, Sacro GRA, which won at Venice in 2013, and followed that with Fire At Sea, winner at Berlinale in 2016.

Sacro GRA is named for the ring road that circles Rome. The film, his first feature in his native Italy, took him two years to shoot. He found his subjects in the people who live just off this road, and who work on it: a gallery of eccentrics that includes a man who rents out his palatial villa for shoots and a botanist consumed with saving palm trees from weevils. Rosi doesn’t prettify their rough existence, showing instead how it’s leavened by humour and moments of joy, whether it’s eating a melon or plotting perfect revenge against insects.

Rosi’s next film, Fire At Sea, was also shot in Italy—on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. It is, I feel, the strongest of all his films, tying together his character work and image-making with a narrative focus absent in his other work. The film contrasts the life of Samuele, a 12-year-old boy, with those of the refugees from Africa who routinely wash up or are rescued by the authorities. Interspersed with Samuele’s days spent practising his slingshot, visiting the ophthalmologist, bossing his friend, and chatting with his father and grandmother are scenes of the refugees packed in boats, lined up and searched, huddled in masses at immigration centres.

There is no direct connection between the boy and the refugees, except perhaps the doctor who treats Samuele for a minor ailment and the immigrants for life-threatening ones. The juxtaposition works precisely because of its impreciseness—a boy whose biggest worry is his lazy eye could never be compared to someone who has just travelled thousands of miles in a rickety boat, except that they happen to be in the same geographical space. In one scene, the radio station gives news of a new boatful, with several dead, then switches to news of an upcoming interruption in power supply. But Rosi isn’t pushing us to feel derision for the relatively privileged: Rather, he regards the precocious Samuele (a better protagonist than any actor could have been) with the same interest as the young refugee who looks straight down the lens of the camera, like the horse in Notturno.

There are other recurring motifs across these films. Dogs wander in and out of the frame. There are men in boats of all sizes and purposes. The golden cellophane-like sheets the refugees drape in Fire At Sea are also in Sacro GRA, offered to a protesting patient in an ambulance. There are moving scenes with elderly people: the grieving mothers in Notturno, the talkative old man and his patient daughter glimpsed from the window in Sacro GRA, the kindly grandmother in Fire At Sea. Rosi’s films usually come in under the two-hour mark. Yet they feel endlessly expansive, a wealth of experiences and emotions distilled, without judgement or explanation.

This piece appeares in Mint Lounge. 

Review: Zack Snyder's Justice League

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is four hours long and divided into six "chapters". While “The Age of Heroes” and “Something Darker” capture something of the director’s approach, the full Snyder effect can be found in the song titles for Tom Holkenborg’s soundtrack. "No Paradise, No Fall", "The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries of Stony Sleep", "World Ending Fire", "That Terrible Strength" and “Urgrund” all point to a cinema that’s violent, mythic and cataclysmic. These qualities are contained in the music as well—Wagnerian strings, electronic groans, Middle Eastern wails whenever the Amazons are on screen, and the pounding drums Holkenborg used in his Fury Road score.

The journey of Justice League to the small screen has also been protracted, contentious and, for a while, seemingly based in myth. In 2017, Snyder had completed a fraught production, with studio confidence in him low after the stupefying Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Tragically, while he was in post-production, his daughter died by suicide, and he left the project. Joss Whedon, director of the first two Avengers films, was hired to complete it. Largely reshot by Whedon, the 2017 theatrical version was close to unwatchable, but after Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad (2016), everyone just shrugged at another noisy, chaotic DC film. Everyone, that is, except a growing group of fans who insisted there was a “Snyder cut” that the studio had under lock and key.

One of the last nods in the end credits is to “All the fans that made this film possible”. It’s well-deserved, even if the Snyder supporters were, on their best day, insufferable. Yet, their persistent campaigning, which ranged from buying ad space to trending #ReleaseTheSnyderCut on Twitter, meant that when the filmmaker confirmed, in 2019, that such a cut did exist, the pressure was suddenly on the studio. Incredibly, in 2020, Warner, the same studio that lost faith in Snyder, gave him the green light to assemble what he’d originally shot. The film is now streaming on HBO Max—testament to the lengths studios will go to appease fan bases, especially toxic ones.

Superman’s death in Batman v Superman released a power surge from three “mother boxes”, hidden in the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, on Themyscira by the Amazons, and, rather anti-climatically, by a scientist in a cupboard in a Metropolis apartment. Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) set out to find the remaining members of a team to combat Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), the scowly metallic being who’s assembling the boxes so his master, Darkseid, can become ruler of the universe or something. Steppenwolf’s excursions, and the recruitment of Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa), Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) and Victor Stone (Ray Fisher)—Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg—proceed at a pace that's at once leisurely and terribly busy. Snyder goes from crescendo to crescendo, shooting everything from intergalactic battles to Arthur walking off a pier with the same crazy bombast.

The film was shot in the squarish 4:3 format, apparently so it would play better in IMAX. Personally, I can’t complain about watching Justice League at home, where I can control the volume, and where the darkness of the colour palette doesn’t seem quite so dark. Still, after years of competent but bland Marvel films, there is a certain primal thrill in Snyder’s dark, violent action scenes, like the “golden age of heroes” battle where the Atlanteans, the Guardians and the Amazons fight alongside Zeus and Ares (looking remarkably like Snyder’s heroes from 300) to defeat Darkseid—shorter than the other setpieces, but colossally, nakedly grand. Even the momentary visions are wild: as a voiceover discusses monetary systems, a giant bull and bear clash.

What Justice League lacks is the kind of narrative intelligence that can turn its roiling surface and scale into something meaningful (beyond comic mythology). Compared to the falling van in Inception, a visual tying up various plot lines, the mother box descending in slo-mo is just another neat effect in a film saturated with them. Chris Terrio’s screenplay has all the comic book mumbo-jumbo one has come to expect from superhero films (“The anti-life equation, the key to controlling all life and all will throughout the multiverse…”), but can’t offer anything smarter than “Fuck the world” or “Let’s go find this son of a bitch” when it’s time for a one-liner.

Justice League ends with a confusing epilogue: seeds of films unmade, involving at least one character who’s been recast; bait, perhaps, to fans who’ll demand that Snyder be entrusted with future DC projects. If Justice League is his last, though, it’s not a bad resting place. The tragedy that befell Snyder has endowed his film with a resonance that it might not have otherwise possessed. Mortality and grief are major themes: Bruce’s dead parents are a constant in any Batman film, but here there’s also Victor and Arthur’s late mothers, Martha Kent’s dead superhero son, and Barry’s incarcerated father. Victor is reassembled as a robot after a horrific accident; Superman too is brought back from the dead. In a lovely scene, Barry uses his super-speed to save Iris (Kiersey Clemons), who’s about to die in a car accident. Most directors would have played this as action comedy. But here it’s sweet, almost gentle. There’s something quite touching about Snyder, through Barry, being able to save this one girl, on a film where he lost so much.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.

Book review: Vesper Flights

It’s hard to avoid words like ‘luminous’ when describing Helen MacDonald’s writing. There’s a soft glow that emanates from it, akin to the work of E.B. White, who also wrote beautifully about insects, animals and birds. Her sentences breathe and pulse like the living things she describes. An oncoming migraine is “a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes is like shorting fairy lights”, an unborn falcon is “something that had not yet known light or air, but would soon take in the revealed coil and furl of a west-coast breeze and cloud of a hillside in one easy glide”.

In her last book, H is for Hawk (2014), Macdonald wrote about the death of her father and how she coped with it by training a goshawk. It was nature writing of the highest order, but also something more: a distillation of grief so pure it transcended the gloom. Her latest, Vesper Flights, is a collection of 41 essays, some of which have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Statesman and other publications. They're mostly short pieces—four or five pages on an average—and deal with nature in one way or another. But they also intersect with Macdonald’s life (several essays begin with her travelling, or already at her destination) and with the world at large.

By dint of when these pieces were written, Vesper Flights is a window into a Brexit-ing England and a world consumed by the refugee crisis. “I’m fascinated by the relationship between natural history and national history,” Macdonald writes—and the history she describes is often unfolding around her. In "Swan Upping", she ponders how heritage traditions might be appropriated by nationalists in post-Brexit England, even as these “skilful interactions with things that are not us” gradually win her over. The geese she observes in a Hungarian village in "The Human Flock" makes her think of the razor wire put up a hundred miles south by Serbia to keep out Syrian refugees. In "The Student’s Tale", she meets a refugee, an epidemiologist from an unnamed country; in "Murmurations", a lost passport leads to a meditation on wartime Britain. "Cherry Stones" starts with a paragraph about immigrants who’ve come to England because of food shortages in their countries of origin—before revealing the immigrants as hawfinches.

Most stunningly, in "Symptomatic", after describing with painful eloquence over a few pages the effect of migraines, Macdonald moves on to climate change (a frequent topic through the book). The turnover is so smooth that I was well into the paragraph before my brain could fully register the subject matter had changed. “For many years, a great fatalism would overtake me when I felt the first twinges of an oncoming migraine,” she writes. She relates this to denial of the climate crisis, saying: “Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action. It makes us give up agency, feel that all we can do is suffer and wait for the end.”

A science historian and naturalist, Macdonald has a knack for describing natural phenomena in precise, colorful ways. A drinker moth caterpillar inches forth “like a cautiously mobile moustache”. Hawfinches, “with coppery eyes set in an ink-black bib and mask”, remind her of “an exquisitely dressed pugilist”. One black-throated blue warbler is “so neat and spry he looks like a folded pocket handkerchief”. “Wood pigeons feast on the black fruits of ivy, clambering awkwardly on thin twigs and later depositing bright purple droppings under their roosts,” she writes in "Berries". “As winter progresses, some berries ferment and become alcoholic, and it’s not uncommon to see faintly disoriented birds wandering around beneath affected shrubs.”

Macdonald’s late father makes a couple of cameo appearances in the book, including a hilarious starring role in "Goats". Stu from H is to Hawk is paid tribute to in Eulogy, but the melancholy of that book has been replaced by wisdom and wonder. MacDonald’s writing doesn’t suffer from being in bite-sized pieces—I like that it allows her to range over a variety of subjects. “I am far from an industrious soul,” she writes, “except in my capacity, perhaps, to pay close attention to things.” In the days after reading this, I found myself noticing bird calls and spiderwebs in the backyard. Vesper Flights will reward your close attention.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Review: Bombay Begums

For the second time in two months, a Netflix title from India is hobbled by a voiceover in English. The White Tiger’s narration was stilted and ornate, but for sheer teeth-grating qualities it can’t match the one by 13-year-old Shai (Aadhya Anand) in Bombay Begums. When Terence Malick had the teenage Linda narrate Days of Heaven (1978), the writing and delivery were deliberately flat. Shai, however, enunciates in a Bandra-via-American-TV accent, and everything she says sounds like the beginning of an op-ed.

Barely has the series begun than we hear: “Some women secretly aspire to be queen, but society has taught them they can’t dare aspire for such big things.” Eight minutes later, obligatory Bombay plug: “How far can you go to survive in this city of dreams?” Of her stepmother, Rani (Pooja Bhatt), Shai says, “Her closet, of course, is not just full of saris but zillions of secrets”. A little later: “Do queens always have to have big bosoms?” Mercy. And this is just the first episode.

Rani—Hindi for ‘queen’—is the CEO of Royal Bank of India (the show isn't exactly subtle with imperial metaphors). Her MD has moved on to another bank, and Rani chooses Fatima (Shahana Goswami) over senior partner Deepak (Manish Chaudhari) to fill the position. Fatima refuses at first; she and her husband, Arijay (Vivek Gomber), who also works at Royal Bank, have just found out they’re having a baby. But then there’s a miscarriage and Fatima, whose marriage is visibly fraying, takes up the offer, while continuing to visit Deepak, her mentor, for advice. Meanwhile, Rani’s stepson, driving while drunk, runs into a young boy at night. The mother of the victim, dancer Laxmi (Amruta Subhash), immediately blackmails Rani, who is forced to make her the first beneficiary of a scheme for women entrepreneurs, a project headed by eager young employee Ayesha (Plabita Borthakur).

Bombay Begums is recognizable as an Alankrita Shrivastava joint. After Amazon’s Made in Heaven (2019- ), this is the second series she’s co-written and directed, and the first she’s created (Bornila Chatterjee and Iti Agarwal have two screenplay credits each, and Chatterjee directed three episodes). Her films Lipstick Under My Burkha (2017) and Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitaare (2020) are uniquely candid about matters of female sexuality and autonomy, which is true of Bombay Begums as well. Few other filmmakers would risk having their series lead say, in reference to a planned surrogacy, “It’s just a womb”. Nor would many execute as matter-of-factly the sequence where Ayesha kisses, for the first time, a girl she’s been crushing on, then abruptly leaves, goes home and makes out with the boy she’s rooming with, the scenes linked by shots of the shorter person in each case standing on their toes to kiss.

Of the many cross-currents of conflict—the power struggle at the bank, Fatima and Arijay fighting, Shai rebelling—one expands and takes over the narrative. One night, after an office party, Ayesha asks Deepak if he can drop her home. She’s asked for a transfer to his department, and might be nursing a tiny crush on him. In the car, he forces himself on her, and, over her protests, sexually assaults her. When the matter is brought before Fatima and Rani, they follow procedure but are less than encouraging. Ayesha is asked at different points if she wants to withdraw her complaint, whether she imagined it, and to think of the abuser’s family. We’re shown—perhaps for the first time—a detailed picture of post-#MeToo life in corporate India, with the language of abuse now commonplace, the system still rising up to protect the powerful, and whisper networks instrumental in breaking the silence.

This particular storyline, directed and performed with detail and empathy, makes the strongest case for Bombay Begums. But what is timely and important need not be good art. This isn’t a visually arresting show. The boardroom scenes feel anything but organic. Despite Shrivastava’s feel for the messiness of desire, it can sometimes seem like one taboo scenario after another—teens doing coke! Rani’s husband masturbating while wrapped in his dead wife’s clothes! And the relatively short run of six episodes might have hurried the ending: the way Ayesha’s complaint is resolved, with sudden changes of heart, feels wishful, especially coming from a director who’s been anything but in the past. Yet, the biggest drawback remains the writing, which is often blunt but rarely memorable. Whenever the characters speak in Hindi, it instantly hits harder. There’s no better line in the series than Laxmi saying, “Marzi ke bina sex mein apan ka PhD hai (I have a PhD in sex without consent).”

Shrivastava has shown in her Hindi films she can write colourful, candid dialogue. Bombay Begums squanders this to a large extent. The reason, one has to assume, is that Netflix believes their big Indian titles are likelier to be successful abroad if they’re partly in English. Everyone was up in arms about the English writing and accents on A Suitable Boy last year but since then we’ve had to endure the voice coach contests of The White Tiger, The Girl On the Train and now Bombay Begums—all on Netflix in India.

Laxmi is a bit of a caricature, but Subhash—a character actor who ought to be getting leads—is funny and charismatic. Bhatt finds real soul in Rani in the later episodes, and there’s a minor turn with great charm: Imaad Shah as Ayesha’s helpful friend. With a second season clearly hoped for, Bombay Begums might have an opportunity to take its acrid corporate politicking and fractured relationships and make them wittier and more resonant. A good first step would be canning the voiceover.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.