From Kampala, with love

That Mira Nair has, over the course of 37 years and 10 feature films, largely avoided repeating herself is both remarkable and not remarked upon enough. Few directors today can claim to have worked in as many varied settings and styles. The Rourkela-born Nair has made hyper-realistic street films and lavish costume dramas, ensemble pieces and techno-thrillers. Her stories have taken place in 16th century India and post-9/11 Pakistan, in the American Deep South, Kolkata, New York, Havana and Delhi.

Those who’ve kept up with Nair over the years would have noted her penchant for celebrating her home cities on film. Kolkata, where she spent summers as a child, became one of the settings for The Namesake. New Delhi, where she went to college, got one of its defining films in Monsoon Wedding (2001). New York, where she currently spends half her year, was one of the settings for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). And Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where she spends the other six months, was seen at the start of Mississippi Masala (1991). Now, Nair has made her first full film in Kampala: Queen Of Katwe, the story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.

“If we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will,” Nair says, over the phone from Kampala. It isn’t surprising that Nair would speak of this story in personal terms. She has lived in Kampala for 27 years now, ever since she went to research Mississippi Masala and fell in love with academic Mahmood Mamdani there. In 2004, she founded Maisha Film Labs, a non-profit organization that provides scholarships, produces films and imparts skills. During our conversation, she repeatedly referred to the locations in the film in terms of their distance from her Kampala home.

Though Mutesi grew up in the slums of Katwe, just 15 minutes away from where Nair lives, the director hadn’t gotten wind of her exploits. It was a phone call from Disney executive Tendo Nagenda which brought Mutesi on to her radar in early 2013. Two weeks later, she met Mutesi—then on a tour of the US—in New York City. She was struck, she said, by the 17-year-old’s modesty and shyness. In Kampala, she met Mutesi’s mother, Harriet, who took her around the city in a van and showed her six houses they’d previously lived in and been forced to leave. They visited each other’s homes; Nair planted seeds in Harriet’s garden. “It’s only because I’ve seen your garden that I can ask you to plant mine,” Harriet told her.

Nair’s films are packed with strivers, underdogs and outsiders—Salaam Bombay!’s Chaipau, Monsoon Wedding’s Dubey, Amelia Earhart in Amelia—but Mutesi is a special case. As Tim Crothers wrote in a 2011 profile of her for ESPN The Magazine: “To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe.” After her father died of AIDS when she was 4, Mutesi and her two brothers were raised by Harriet. Finding adequate food was a daily struggle; Mutesi would sell corn to help her mother out. One day, nine-year-old Mutesi followed her brother Brian to the local Sports Outreach Institute. She’d never played that game with the black and white pieces—all she knew was that they gave you porridge if you attended.

This is how Robert Katende entered Mutesi’s life. In a 2014 short film co-directed by Nair called A Fork, A Spoon And A Knight, we learn how Katende started the chess programme after he noticed children standing on the sidelines of the football games he coached. Katende taught Mutesi to play and, crucially, realized that the girl showed an unusual aptitude for the game. Soon, the 10-year-old was beating boarding-school children. In 2007, aged 11, she won the Uganda Women’s Junior Championship. She won it again the following year, and the year after that. In 2012, she became the first woman to win the open category of the National Junior Chess Championship. She repeated her triumph in 2013. She has been part of the Ugandan women’s team at the last three Chess Olympiads in Siberia, Turkey and Norway.

In 2012, the ESPN profile was expanded into a book, The Queen Of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path To Becoming A Chess Champion, by Crothers. This was adapted for the screen by William Wheeler, who’d worked with Nair on The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Meanwhile, Nair’s short film on Katende became a “calling card of sorts”, an introduction to the film’s themes and one of its primary characters. Disney green-lit the film—very quickly, Nair says.

It probably helped that the people Nair had in mind to play Harriet and Robert—David Oyelowo (Selma) and Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years A Slave)—were both Oscar-nominated actors. Nyong’o and Nair knew each other well; the actor had done a stint at Maisha, and had been Nair’s assistant during the filming of The Namesake. Nair says she sent both of them the script within hours of it being completed. Madina Nalwanga, a dancer by training, was cast as Mutesi; like the character she plays, she too is from the slums of Kampala, and sold corn as a child.

One of the biggest challenges for Nair was figuring out how to make chess—one of the most static of sports—into something visually compelling. She and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt devised different visual approaches for the various matches Mutesi plays. Katende, who was present for the duration of the shoot, designed the games, after which Nair and Bobbitt worked out how to shoot each individual one. In scenes with multiple games taking place simultaneously, this became all the more complicated. “The call sheet would have actual chess moves on it,” Nair says. Later, she and editor Barry Alexander Brown “cut the games emotionally, like a drama”.

After the somewhat underwhelming Amelia (2009) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Queen Of Katwe appears to return Nair to her roots. Salaam Bombay! (1988), her first feature, emerged from her fascination with the vérité tradition. She shot the 1988 film in 55 days in the brothels and slums of Bombay, with a cast and crew full of non-professionals and first-timers. Queen Of Katwe may have the backing of a big American studio, but it too was shot on location, in slums and crowded streets, with locals filling in many of the smaller parts (Nair estimated that out of the 100-odd Ugandans in the film, 80 had never faced the camera before).

If films about chess are a rarity on world cinema screens, so are films about Africa. African stories rarely make their way to screens outside the continent, and the ones that do are usually directed by foreigners. Queen Of Katwe could be seen as a corrective: an insider’s view of a specific corner of Africa, made by an adopted daughter who believes she’s “become Ugandan now”.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Pink: Review

The most memorable image in Pink is that of Deepak (Amitabh Bachchan) walking from his Delhi home to a nearby park, wearing a gas mask and breathing heavily. As Darth Vader imitations go, it’s a commendable 6/10. Yet, as a repeated detail, it’s also empty, an impressive-looking trick that signifies nothing. This is the only bit of compulsive behaviour—if that’s what this is—that Deepak displays. There are brief mentions of mental health problems, but wandering around Delhi with a gas mask is hardly an indication of an unstable mind.

This isn’t the only story strand that Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink introduces and then forgets about. Minal (Taapsee Pannu) is abducted and sexually assaulted by men who want to teach her a lesson for injuring their friend and speaking to the police. Whether the film needed this incident at all is debatable, but once it happens, one would expect it to be at least a minor part of the ensuing narrative. This, however, doesn’t happen. I wouldn’t want to suggest that rape—like Deepak’s mental health, or his dying wife—is being used as colourful detail, but it certainly feels that way.

This is unfortunate, because Pink is earnestly, vocally in the corner of its female characters. The film begins with Minal and her roommates, Falak (Kirti Kulhari) and Andrea (Andrea Tariang), in a cab, panicked and desperate to reach home. In another cab, Rajveer (Angad Bedi) holds a bloodied cloth over his eye while his friends assure him that they won’t let “those women” get away with it. We find out that it was Minal who’d hit Rajveer with a bottle after he wouldn’t stop touching her. It also transpires that he’s the nephew of a powerful politician—a cliché, really, given he’s the bad guy in a Delhi-set Hindi film.

Rajveer’s friends stalk and threaten the women, who live in a rented South Delhi flat and don’t have anyone to turn to. After Minal’s abduction and assault, they register a case with the police, upon which Rajveer files counter charges, including attempt to murder. It’s at this point that Deepak, who’s been glowering and acting weird on the edges of the narrative, is revealed to be an attorney. He agrees to take on Minal’s case, though why her roommates, even in their desperate state, would think that a retired lawyer with mental health issues would be a good bet is less than clear.

After the pregnant pauses, careful framing and unbearably tasteful background music—all of which suggest a Bengali film that happens to be unfolding in Delhi—of the first half, it’s a relief when Pink morphs into a charged courtroom drama. It’s not that the proceedings aren’t gimmicky; Deepak begins his arguments with single-word phrases like “superwoman” and “no”, and his attacking his own client on the stand is so transparent a strategy that the makers put it in the trailer. But at least the film begins to execute what seems to have been its plan from the start: to have Bachchan lecture viewers on how the dice is always loaded against women in India. There’s a bit of moral greyness introduced towards the end, but on the whole, Pink has all the righteousness and simplicity of a PSA.

Pannu, in her first worthwhile role in a Hindi film (most of her work has been in Telugu and Tamil cinema), manages to suggest someone who’s been drained of everything but a small sliver of resistance. Her unwavering determination is the moral centre of the film, even though it was Bachchan’s bluster that the audience I saw the film with responded to. Pink has its heart in the right place, but there’s very little joy to be derived from its sermons. In Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, James Stewart comes out of retirement to defend a man whose wife has been raped. It’s one of the least sanctimonious, most absorbing courtroom films ever. I don’t know if Bachchan’s Deepak Sehgal is a tribute to Stewart’s Paul Biegler, but Pink could have done with a dose of Preminger complexity.

Baar Baar Dekho: Review

If there’s one thing Hindi films have become increasingly adept at in the past few years, it’s the use of musical montage to collapse time and convey information. Baar Baar Dekho opens with two babies being born: a girl in England, a boy in India. Then, accompanied by the low-key singing voices of Jasleen Royal and Prateek Kuhad, we’re given a whistle-stop tour of Jai and Diya’s childhood and adolescence. We see them become friends, comfort each other, fall in love. By the time the song is over, they’re grown up and in a relationship.

It’s no coincidence that Baar Baar Dekho begins this way. The idea that life is made up of a few key moments—as opposed to a multitude of largely mundane ones—is at the heart of Nitya Mehra’s film. When Diya (Katrina Kaif) proposes marriage, Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) agrees but is soon overwhelmed by the build-up to the wedding. He tells Diya he needs to concentrate on his academic career, breaks off the engagement and drinks himself to sleep.

When he wakes up, he’s somehow been transported 10 days into the future, with no memory of the intervening time. He’s married, on his honeymoon in Thailand with Diya. The next morning, it’s a jump of two years. They’ve moved to England; he’s a mathematics professor at Cambridge, and the two of them are having a baby. Their marriage also seems to be cracking apart. The next jump takes him 16 years ahead. His son picks him up, takes him to court. Jai assumes the boy is getting married but eventually realizes that he and Diya are there to finalize their divorce.

Like Adam Sandler in Click—a film Baar Baar Dekho bears some resemblance to— Jai attempts to alter his destiny by changing his behaviour: making more time for his kids, being a more attentive husband. Whether or not you find the film resonant might depend on whether you buy the idea that a life’s course can be altered by a dramatic change in attitude on one important day, or whether it’s the accumulation of years of hurt or joy that ultimately decides our trajectories. Personally, I found the film’s admonitions of Jai rather simplistic—especially the repeated suggestion that being a gifted mathematician (he’s solved Fermat’s last theorem!) and a good family man are somehow incompatible.

In her first film as director, Mehra moves everything along briskly but is unable to add her own visual touch to the impossibly bright and beautiful Dharma house style (the other producer is Excel Entertainment). She collaborated with comic Anuvab Pal—who may have had a hand in some of the more outlandish gags, like the weird throat-clearing doctor or the grain of rice inscribed with the Hanuman Chalisa—and Sri Rao on the screenplay, which builds to an emotional crescendo that’s pat but satisfying. Anvita Dutt’s dialogue-writing is another matter, mostly fortune-cookie trite (“The answer to the future lies in the past”) and sometimes, just plain silly (“I’m not useless. I’m Jai Verma”).

It’s only taken 13 years but Kaif has finally delivered something resembling a credible performance. She’s still an impossibly studied actor, unable to relax or save a bad line (“Maine tumhare dreams ko hamesha support kiya hai”) the way Kangana Ranaut or Alia Bhatt might. Yet, her feeling for Diya—who keeps putting her dreams on hold until she no longer can—is so palpable that it’s touching. Malhotra—so striking that there are multiple scenes with students gazing moony-eyed at him—doesn’t quite have the comic chops to enliven Jai’s disorientation. With that soulful, lost expression as his default mode, he does just enough; Kaif goes a little deeper.

Sully: Review

A theme Clint Eastwood has returned to time and again over the course of his career is heroism, whether through his roles as outlaws and lawmen who cling to an idea of frontier justice, or through films which dissect what it means to be heroic. Sully might appear to be another exploration of conflicted heroism in the vein of Unforgiven and Flags of Our Fathers. Yet, this film doth protest too much. The more Chesley Sullenberger shrugs off praise, the more Eastwood seems to want to shower him with it.

In 2009, Sullenberger, a commercial pilot with US Airways, landed a plane with two malfunctioning engines on the Hudson River in New York City. By all accounts, it was an enormously skilful bit of flying, backed up by a whole lot of luck and the timely response of the authorities, who reached the passengers before the cold or the water claimed any lives. Eastwood does an efficient, tense rendering of the flight, malfunction and landing, but once the passengers are out on the water and we’re being taken through every detail of the rescue, there’s a sense that the film has run out of ideas.

The film uses as a framing device an official investigation into the circumstances of the crash. Sully (Tom Hanks) and his co-pilot Aaron Eckhart as Jeff Skiles are brought before a committee headed by a man so needling and lacking in worshipfulness that it’s all too clear where this is headed. Even then, Eastwood can’t resist having someone tell Sully every five minutes or so that he’s a true hero. The director of Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby—films in which minor gestures carried tremendous weight—appears to have lost confidence in his audience. The shot of a man in a high-rise watching the plane fly dangerously low over New York brings to mind the 9/11 attacks, but the effect is ruined when Sully is later told that there hasn’t been much to cheer about in the city, especially where planes are involved.

The problem with Sully is that nothing apart from the incident at its centre is particularly interesting: not the good captain’s financial problems, or the flashback to another tricky landing he made, or the committee hearings. By the time we’re shown the entire flight and landing for the second time—and for no good reason—it’s clear that Eastwood is so enamored of his subject that he assumes the audience is as well. Hanks does all he can, but there are few nuances in the writing for him to explore. He’s trying to play a human being, while Eastwood is attempting to film a legend.

Island City: Review

One of the great themes of the modern Mumbai-set indie is loneliness. It runs through films as disparate as Dhobi Ghat, That Girl In Yellow Boots and The Lunchbox, driving the narrative, forcing characters to take emotional risks. The adage that you’re never more alone than when you’re in a crowd finds its purest expression in Mumbai, where it’s almost impossible to not be in a crowd. The architecture reinforces the idea of a diminished self. Island City begins with two contrasting images of high-rises: a gleaming corporate tower and a plain residential building. The implication is simple and crushing: Every day, at work and at home, you’re one lonely window among hundreds, gazing out at a city that’s too busy to care.

Another consistent theme in Mumbai-centric cinema is the dehumanizing effect of big-city life. Ever since Majrooh Sultanpuri wrote “Milta hai yahan sab kuchh, ek milta nahin dil, insaan ka nahin kahin naam-o-nishaan” in C.I.D. in 1956, Hindi film viewers have repeatedly been warned about the soullessness that accompanies progress in Mumbai, even as they’ve been simultaneously sold on its glamour and energy. Updating Sultanpuri’s “buildings, trams, motorcars and mills” for the digital age, Island City gives us a vision of Mumbai in which human feeling has been reduced to meaningless tag lines and computer code.

In Ruchika Oberoi’s film, it’s as if the machines have taken over but everyone is yet to realize that. People take orders from disembodied voices, consult fortune-telling robots, treat TV melodramas as more real than real life. In the first of the film’s three stories, Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak) is a dedicated white-collar employee in a company whose motto—orderliness, organization, obedience—is at odds with the message its human resource team is trying to convey (fun, frolic, festivity). “You people are not having enough fun,” his boss yells. “Why!?” No wonder, then, that Suyash treats his selection for a company-sponsored outing at a mall as just another task to be completed.

Oberoi, who also wrote the film, captures the inane emptiness of corporate-speak—those voluntary salary cuts and employee-motivation schemes. This kind of darkly comic, satirical tone isn’t seen much in Hindi cinema; it hews closer to the plausible science fiction of TV shows like Black Mirror or films like Her and Ex Machina. Still, it’s only in the third—and least satisfying—segment, about a desperately unhappy woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) who begins to receive letters from a secret admirer, that something resembling sci-fi is attempted. The denouement is a bit too clever, though, and it doesn’t work as well as the shock of the first story’s climax, which makes emotional, if not logical, sense.

The middle segment is close to perfection. It begins with a doctor telling Sarita Joshi (Amruta Subhash) that her husband is in a coma. She doesn’t seem too upset, and we learn in a series of flashbacks that the husband was a horrible person, berating her and her mother and their two children. With him out of the house, they’re actually getting to enjoy life. They buy a new TV and become addicted to a kitschy melodrama called "Purushottam" (that this show could as easily be a parody of Indian prime-time TV 10 years ago as today’s programming is a dispiriting thought). Things take a delightfully dark turn when the show’s paragon of a protagonist goes into a coma, and the Joshis end up more concerned about his fate than that of their own husband and father.

There are inspired touches throughout the film, like when Sarita’s mother, sprinkling holy water around the house, sees the comatose body on screen and showers a few drops on the TV, or Suyash’s employers and an altogether more sinister organization having the same motto. Oberoi’s scenario-writing is so good that one wishes her ear for dialogue was as sparkling; there are too many clichés (“Kitni baar kaha hai ki apni akal mat lagao”; “Honi ko kaun taal sakta hai?”) floating around, even for a satire. Also, apart from Pathak, Subhash and Ashwin Mushran, the performances are somewhat heavy-handed and lacking in wit. But what Island City achieves is far more important than where it trips up. As a tonally tricky, slyly subversive mood piece, it finds itself in a very small group of Hindi films. It’s also an intriguing new entry in the long tradition of films that explore the spiritual heartache of living in Mumbai.

This review appeared in Mint.

Goodbye, Gene Wilder

There’s a scene in Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little’s Bart watches the Waco Kid, played by Gene Wilder, drink from the bottle. “A man drink like that and he don’t eat, he is going to die,” Bart says. Wilder looks at Bart with his blues eyes, half-sighs and asks, “When?” This is a Mel Brooks film, so a wisecrack is right around the corner (“Well, my name is Jim, but most people call me... Jim”), but it’s impossible not to be struck by the absolute pathos Wilder lends this one word.

Wilder died last Sunday in his home in Stamford, Connecticut, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was one of the great comic actors, capable of inspired hysteria and uncanny poise. From his first onscreen appearance as one half of a couple taken hostage in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he seemed to be less in a hurry than other comic actors to get to the punchline. Of particular beauty was his voice, which would range up and down and sideways while his features, more often than not, remained impassive.

He had an electric start to his career: The brief role in Bonnie and Clyde was followed by his first starring role, as Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967). He was exquisitely funny as the sheep-loving doctor in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), and very sensible casting as the titular chocolatier in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). He made two more films with Brooks: Blazing Saddles (1974) and the brilliant Young Frankenstein (1974) (which he co-wrote). He acted with Richard Pryor—Brooks’ original choice for Bart in Blazing Saddles—in 1976’s Silver Streak; the pair would go on to star in three more films.

From the late ‘70s onwards, the roles weren’t as memorable, though Wilder still found ways to be funny and empathetic. I have vivid recollections, from the early days of Indian cable TV, of Wilder spoofing Rudolph Valentino in The World’s Greatest Lover (1977). After 1991, he quit the movies, preferring to act on TV, write and paint.

One could say that Wilder never achieved as much as he seemed to promise. Yet, another way of looking at his career is that he had one of the hottest extended streaks in the history of film comedy. Between 1967 and 1974, he acted in five films that’ll go down as major or minor classics, and others that were merely very good. He may have faded from the public memory somewhat, but his death will hopefully rekindle memories of Willy Wonka and the Waco Kid, Dr Frankenstein and Leo Bloom.

This piece appeared in Mint.

A Flying Jatt: Review

A Flying Jatt gives viewers a modern-day superhero in the mould of Sikh warriors. It’s a neat idea, but I couldn’t help feeling like the makers had missed out on a few ready possibilities. Superman ruined the kachera for all future crime-fighters, but where’s the Jatt’s magic kirpan? Tiger Shroff’s kesh are already magical, but imagine the comic potential in a special superhero kanga. It’s an indication of the film’s increasingly bizarre decision-making that they would take the least cinematic of the five articles of faith—the kada—and fashion an explosive moment around it.

Still, credit must be given where credit is due: director Remo D’Souza and screenwriter Tushar Hiranandani manage to situate their hero in a believable (if outrightly comic) local context, something that previous Hindi films in this genre have generally failed to do. Aman (Shroff) is a martial arts instructor who wakes up one morning after being pummelled in a dream by a large bald man to find that he has acquired superpowers. There are some delightful touches once his family realizes he can do just about anything physically imaginable. His mother lovingly fashions a suit for him on her sewing machine; later on, Aman (who assumes the moniker of “Flying Jatt”) is told to pick up lauki on his flight back home.

To begin a superhero film with a plaintive song about the environment may seem like an unusual choice, but pollution isn’t just a major theme in A Flying Jatt, it’s literally the villain. The bald brawler who appears in Aman’s nightmare is buried under toxic waste. In comic book tradition, what doesn’t kill you makes you a supervillain; in this case, one who grows stronger with every sniff of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke (for once, that painful “smoking kills” warning seemed justified). Raka (former wrestler Nathan Jones) is resurrected and employed by crooked businessman Malhotra (Kay Kay Menon)—who’s been trying to acquire the land owned by Aman’s family—to kill the Jatt.

All this might suggest that D’Souza and Hiranandani have created a fairly original superhero. Nothing could be further from the truth. The most obvious powers of Flying Jatt—enhanced strength, speed and flight—are the same as Superman’s. He can hear the voices of faraway people in distress, again like Superman, but also like Daredevil. The climactic fight between Raka and Flying Jatt is very likely inspired by the battle in Superman IV. Raka levitates like Magneto and, though he looks more like an evil Sabu, he shares a name with the villain in the Chacha Chaudhary comic series. And the scene in which our hero seemingly stops time during a tense stand-off and zips around rearranging things is a shameless lift from the Quicksilver scenes in the two most recent X-Men movies.

Thievery is par for the course in big-budget Indian action films, but A Flying Jatt commits a bigger offence: It runs out of ideas and—rather fittingly for an environmentally conscious film—begins to recycle. The first half of the film is silly but quite watchable, with Shroff happy to play both clown and masked saviour. After the interval, though, the repetitions begin. We’ve already seen Aman’s brother, Rohit (Gaurav Pandey), put on the suit and pretend to be the Jatt; it’s funny the first time, but then we’re given the same routine again, and again. It’s established early on, then reiterated, that Aman’s love, Kirti, is a bit of a character, which is perfect for Jacqueline Fernandez, whose ability to play anything more than bits of characters has always been in doubt. We understand that Raka feeds on fumes; those pollution montages that look like the world’s worst grunge video are entirely unnecessary.

Amrita Singh is funny as Aman’s mother; her utter Punjabi-ness throws into sharp relief how un-Punjabi Shroff is. Still, I doubt authenticity will matter much to Shroff fans, who will likely be thrilled to see all his regular tricks—martial arts, dancing, slapstick—incorporated in the superhero narrative. A Flying Jatt is derivative, sloppily structured and, especially in its later stages, tacky beyond belief. That it might also be the best Indian superhero film ever (barring Mr India, if that qualifies) is an indication of how low the bar is set.

This review appeared in Mint.