Gehraiyaan: Review

There’s a subplot in Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan that involves ex-advertising man Karan (Dhairya Karwa) struggling to finish his first novel. As with most writers, even good-intentioned enquiries about his progress drive him up the wall. Yet his girlfriend, Alisha (Deepika Padukone), keeps asking whether he’s almost done, and pushes him to let her read a draft. Neither strikes me as something a person in a long-term relationship with a writer would do—unless that relationship is on the rocks, which theirs is. It’s significant, then, that the first big betrayal is not by Alisha but by Karan, who gives a draft to her cousin Tia (Ananya Panday) for feedback.

By this time, Alisha is in the midst of a flirtation with Tia’s fiancé, Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), founder of a real estate firm. They meet on vacation in Alibaug, sailing there from Mumbai in Zain’s yacht (it’s to impress his clients, he explains, betraying the naivete of the very rich who think supplying context about their toys will make them seem more relatable). There, while Tia and Karan—old friends from college—unwind boisterously, their partners find themselves drawn, instantly, helplessly, to each other. 

Back in Mumbai, the two circle each other for a while, then crash into an affair, the artfully slurred vocals on ‘Doobey’ providing the soundtrack for the start of their tryst. Chaturvedi and Padukone are physically well-matched, lithe, tanned and comfortable in their bodies. Once they start spending time together, they realize they both have family trauma in their past. She’s estranged from her father, whom she holds responsible for her mother’s death by suicide when she was young; his father was a violent alcoholic. We can see why they’d gravitate toward each other, and why they’ve fallen out of love with sad sack Karan and chirpy, bland Tia. 

There aren't a whole lot of Hindi films on infidelity (a famous one is Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna; he’s producer here), and nearly all are about how cheating will make you miserable. Gehraiyaan is almost instantly miserable, yet it gets right the small acts of deception that support a larger one. Early on, even before they’ve begun the affair, Alisha mutes her texts so her partner won’t notice her phone buzzing. Both lie to Tia about a conversation they had. Soon, the deceptions scale up. He funds her yoga app. Karan proposes marriage. 

There’s a lifestyle influencer quality that sticks to the film, with its yoga, its beautifully plated meals, and its guileless rich-person speak (“I specifically asked for Burrata cheese because I know you love it but then they gave me goat’s cheese yaa. I was so fucking… are these your pills?”). They address each other as ‘yaar’ a lot, like the couple in Little Things. Alisha is the ‘struggler’ of the quartet because she knows where the garbage is thrown and couldn’t go to college in the US because her family fell on hard times. Cinematographer Kaushal Shah films everything with a beautiful manicured moodiness, all glinting blues and greys. The frames have the tastefulness of a fashion magazine spread—everything in its right place, but somehow airless. 

Batra and Nitesh Bhatia’s cutting is neat and incisive, but this is still a two-and-a-half-hour film. Much of the running time is spent in suspended artful unhappiness, before the film kicks into a higher gear. This surge comes a few beats too late—Alisha and Zain aren’t that interesting a couple to spend so much time with, and Karan and Tia aren’t interesting at all (by contrast, there wasn’t a character in Batra’s last film, Kapoor & Sons, that wasn’t fascinating). I enjoyed the slew of revelations in the final third, and a memorable nasty trick played on the audience. But it did feel like a mood piece had had an existential crisis and turned into a high-stakes drama. 

Padukone demonstrates again how, if nothing else, she’s one of the great criers in Hindi film history. Tia finding nothing more illuminating to say than “acchi hai” (it’s nice) after reading Karan’s draft seems to encapsulate the sweet nothingness of her character. Chaturvedi looks increasingly harried, but not much more. Rajat Kapoor supplies a necessary nastiness; they ought to have unleashed him earlier. There are moments that bruise, but Gehraiyaan can’t shake the impression of being Scenes From an Affair for the swish Instagram set. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

All That Breathes: Review

Shaunak Sen has a knack for finding poets in unusual places. In Cities Of Sleep (2015) , it’s the owner of a homeless shelter that doubles as a movie parlour, who says things like “We ingest the night”. In All That Breathes (2022), it’s two brothers in unlovely east Delhi, who tend to injured kites. “Cheelon ko gosht khilane se sawab milta hai,” one of them explains. “Woh aapki dikkatein kha jaati hain (You will be rewarded if you feed kites. They eat away your problems).”

Cities Of Sleep was a remarkable debut. A documentary about the night shelters of Delhi, it was minutely observed, empathetic but not cloying, able to see the people who populate and run the shelters as complex beings capable of grift and fabrication. It was also a smart treatise on the city and the cut-rate philosophers it engenders. All That Breathes, Sen’s second feature, playing this week at the Sundance Film Festival, builds on the strengths of his debut, while taking in more of the world.

Brothers Nadeem and Saud repair kites. In the basement of their Wazirabad home, they take injured raptors out of cardboard boxes one by one and diagnose, bind wings, give medicine, feed and house them until they are well enough to be set free. It’s a modest setup: just the two siblings and an earnest young man named Salik. Nadeem’s wife pitches in sometimes, when he’s too tired from his day job and Saud is busy. This is not a rich household—the meat grinder and the generator need replacing, and the equipment and storage facilities are bare-bones. Their application for much-needed foreign funding is rejected at one point; only towards the end is it approved.

In almost every frame, we are offered evidence of just how polluted a city Delhi has become. The first shot—unbroken over three-and-a-half minutes—tracks slowly across a garbage dump. The family discusses the day’s AQI over meals—a depressingly familiar routine for residents of the Capital. When water floods their home in the monsoon, it’s topped with snowy drifts of chemical foam. The city is fit for neither man nor bird, yet both have found a way to survive. The Ghazipur garbage hill has become a source of food for kites (one man compares them to microbiomes), and they use cigarette butts in their nests as pest repellents.

Had All That Breathes just been a nature doc, it would still have been an urgent document of its times. But Sen extends the idea of toxicity, on the ground and in the air, to human relations. Halfway into the film, protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) start appearing on the periphery of the action. Later, there are phone conversations in which the brothers and Salik promise that they are safe—the 2020 Delhi riots have begun. Like most Muslim families on the outskirts of Delhi, they are vulnerable. Saud says matter-of-factly that there has been violence just 2km from their home.

There’s a beautiful scene where the brothers are offering a prayer at their mother’s grave. A bird calls. Without moving, Nadeem says, “Spotted.” They continue to pray in silence. He had heard a spotted owlet. Their mother would have approved; it was she who instilled in them a fascination for all living creatures—not just humans and pets but “all that breathes”. Here is photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson’s ‘little human detail’: a moment that reveals everything. It’s why we understand Nadeem’s response when his wife asks him to join a sit-in against the CAA with her, saying “It’s important”. “It is,” Nadeem says. “So is my work.”

Time and again, Sen, working with camerapersons Ben Bernhard, Riju Das and Saumyananda Sahi, zooms in to show something—a turtle in a garbage heap, a frog in the grass— that has adapted to living in a human environment. The intricacy is often breathtaking, like the changes of focus that shows us a spider’s web, then a guard and two dogs in the background, then reveals a lizard, and another, in the foreground, all in the same shot. A wall of buildings is reflected in a puddle, around which circle a multitude of kites. In another shot, the camera dwells on a piece of plastic waste in shallow water. We see insects skitter across it and trees reflected. Then, an aeroplane flies across the surface—a small miracle.

A director with an eye for eccentricities will always be rewarded by the universe—I laughed out loud when Salik casually pulls a baby squirrel out of his shirt pocket, no explanation given. It’s testament to the patience and immersion of Sen’s approach that he is around and ready when moments like this present themselves. At times, All That Breathes reminded me of the Italian documentarist Gianfranco Rosi, whose scenes are also beautifully filmed and seem to rise from the material unforced and unbidden.

I have encountered more striking images in Sen’s two features than in all the Hindi fiction films of the last five or six years. But chances are you haven’t seen Cities Of Sleep, and you may not see All That Breathes either. I caught the former at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2015; till this day, it’s neither streaming in India nor on physical media. I hope All That Breathes gets a better deal, but I'm not hopeful. Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya'sThe Cinema Travellers, a revelatory Indian documentary from 2016, which won the L’Œil d’or special mention at the Cannes Film Festival, is still unavailable here. Two of the most acclaimed Indian films from last year were documentaries—Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire and Payal Kapadia’s A Night Of Knowing Nothing, winner of the L’Œil d’or award for Best Documentary at Cannes. Almost no one here has seen either. It’s high time the makers and promoters of Indian documentaries ask themselves why their work is accessible to arthouse festival attendees abroad but not to the audiences who would best understand them.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

 

Visible worlds: 'Ways of Seeing' at 50

For a text so suspicious of tradition, Ways Of Seeing has long been canon itself. Given the ubiquity and influence of the book, it’s curious to think that there must still be a few people today who remember experiencing it as a bolt from the blue. Picture someone, somewhere in England, switching channels on 8 January 1972. By chance, they land on the image of a man with shaggy hair in a gallery, his back to the camera, cutting out a portion of Botticelli’s Venus And Mars with a pocket knife. “This is the first of four programmes in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about European paintings…” he says. “Tonight, it isn’t so much the paintings themselves I want to consider, but the way we now see them…”

Ways Of Seeing was originally a four-part series on the BBC, hosted by British art critic, theorist and novelist John Berger and directed by Michael Dibb. It was adapted that same year as a pictorial book that became—and still remains —standard reading for students of the arts. Few watch the series first—or at all. Yet it offers things that the book cannot, most of all Berger himself, passionate and weirdly sexy with his open-collar shirt, his expansive gestures and his glares at the camera (David Thomson, a film critic always alert to sexual charge, described him as “a spellbinder on the screen, with a slight lisp that could seem like whispered intimacy”).

In the first episode, Berger explains how photography fundamentally changed how we see art. The European tradition of painting used the convention of perspective, focused on the eye of a sole beholder. “Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world,” he says. “But the human eye can only be in one place at a time. It takes its visible world with it as it walks.” With the invention of the camera, paintings could be reproduced, could travel. Works of art—or sections of these works, like the Venus that Berger cut out of the Botticelli—now found their original meanings altered by what was around them (like a magazine spread) or what they are seen in relation to (someone switching channels). Having taken a knife to tradition at the start, Berger closes by quoting a stuffy academic book on Dutch painter Frans Hals, saying flatly, “This is mystification,” and inviting a group of children to interpret the paintings instead.

The second episode is the best-known portion of the series/book. It yielded the one bit of writing by Berger that lay readers, not just art students, are familiar with: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” We encounter the line at the beginning of the episode, where it’s preceded by “Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of”, a less electrifying line, excised in the print edition. “How she appears to others, and particularly how she appears to men, is of crucial importance, for it is normally thought of as the success of her life,” he says. In the book, he adds: “The ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.” Three years before film scholar Laura Mulvey coined the phrase “male gaze” in the context of cinema, Berger was arguing something similar in art.

Ways Of Seeing has a modesty about its own aims and a desire to push the viewer into engagement. “I hope you will consider what I arrange, but be sceptical of it,” Berger says at the end of the first episode. And he ends the last with: “What I’ve shown and said…must be judged against your own experience.” This refusal to present the show’s theories as gospel is an unusually democratic gesture by a critic. You can see the same openness in the second episode, when, after discussing the male surveyor and the female surveyed, Berger brings in a group of women to talk about the same ideas. He cedes the stage to them for half of the programme’s running time—a necessary passing of the mic.

In the third and fourth episodes, Berger argues that oil paintings (and the wealth, land and objects depicted therein) reflect the status of those who commission them, and that modern publicity and advertising have replaced the oil painting. “Publicity and oil painting…share many of the same ideals, all of them related to the principle that you are what you have,” he says. He overlays vapid, glossy magazine advertisements with choral music—thus testing our alertness to something he warns of in the first episode: the ability of music to transform the meaning of images. At one point, taking off from a juxtaposition of a magazine story about Bangladesh and a luxury ad next to it, he speaks with feeling about the plight of refugees. Berger’s sympathy for the working class, the refugee and the grass-roots rebel has marked all his writing; he donated half his winnings from his 1972 Booker Prize to the Black Panthers movement in England, to call attention to the Booker McConnell company’s association with West Indies plantations and slavery. 

“Those who write about art, or teach about it, often raise art above life, turning it into a kind of religion,” we are warned. Throughout Ways Of Seeing, and in his other work, Berger always gives the impression of trying to get through to the reader, even when the ideas he’s putting forth are complex. It’s the reason why I, even with a layman’s knowledge of art, find his writing so revelatory, why his sentences often seem like the best possible statement of that particular idea. The print adaptation of Ways Of Seeing is more staccato than his normal style, which is hardly surprising given that it’s an expanded TV script. It’s still the ideal introduction to Berger: visually alive, stimulating even at a remove of half a century. But watch the series first, and imagine how exciting it would have seemed in 1972.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

The Lost Daughter: Parent, trapped

Last year, 18 film-makers from around the globe contributed to a lockdown anthology called Homemade. One of the segments was directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It featured her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, playing a bereaved loner in the woods. Only 10 minutes long, it’s funny, weird and touchingly realised. I remember thinking when I watched it that Gyllenhaal—a cool and complex screen presence for almost two decades—seemed at home behind the camera.

Nothing, however, could have prepared me for The Lost Daughter. The film, which Gyllenhaal adapted from a 2006 Elena Ferrante novel of the same name, won Best Screenplay at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. It’s now on Netflix, part of a strange year-end blitz of cinema for grown-ups that included Jane Campion’s and Paolo Sorrentino’s new films.

Leda (Olivia Colman) is a college professor from Cambridge vacationing in Greece. She’s in her late 40s (though people tell her she looks younger), with a clipped British accent. Showing her the place where she’s staying, the homeowner asks if she’s a teacher. “I’m a professor,” she corrects him, with a look that says the distinction is important. We see her observing an American woman and a little girl on the beach, maybe a little too intently. And we see flashes of another woman, with a British accent, peeling an orange, a girl in her lap.

Leda strikes up a conversation with the American, Nina (Dakota Johnson). Then the daughter goes missing and everyone joins in the search. It’s Leda who finds the girl, disconsolate because her doll can’t be found. “I used to have a doll like that,” Leda tells Nina. “Mina, or mini-Mama, as my mother used to call her.” Two reveals follow. The doll has been stolen by Leda. And the woman with the British accent is her as a younger woman.

The Lost Daughter has the pacing and cut-up structure of a mystery—though one that withholds both answers and questions. Gyllenhaal does something we don’t see often, painting parenthood as draining and unrewarding. Leda’s daughters are loud, insistent—we feel her need to escape even before she does anything about it. Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Hélène Louvart, cannily, don’t create a visual difference between the two time-frames. Leda’s turbulent past haunts her brittle present, so it’s only right that they look the same.

Colman, her face registering five kinds of pain at any given moment, is astonishing—and so are Jessie Buckley, scarily unhappy as the younger Leda, the deft, sympathetic Johnson, Sarsgaard in a sly turn, Ed Harris, Paul Mescal. But The Lost Daughter is so much more than an acting showcase, the kind of film that’s created to support the kinds of performances that win Oscars. Gyllenhaal finds a unique tone—intimate, caustically funny, startlingly sensual. Her camera moves right in, so close to the body at times that we can’t tell what we are looking at for a few seconds. Louvart brings the same erotic charge she did to Beach Rats, the immediacy complemented by the shard-like narrative flow assembled by editor Affonso Gonçalves.

The language used is a succession of cuts and bruises. “I’m working,” Leda’s husband says, indicating that she control their children. “I’m suffocating,” she retorts. Nina, driven to distraction by her uncontrollable daughter, asks the older woman, “Is this going to pass?” Leda, not given to false assurances, replies: “You’re so young and none of this passes.”

Through my viewing of The Lost Daughter, something nagged at me, a feeling that I had seen something akin to this. And then it hit me: it was director Jean-Marc Vallée, who died at 58 on 25 December. Gyllenhaal’s film and Vallée’s two HBO series, Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects, are spiritual cousins. They are each derived from psychologically dense novels written by women and are built around complicated female characters, often recovering from or dealing with trauma brought on by family ties.

What reminded me most of Vallée, though, was the editing. Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects have the same intuitive cutting between past and present as The Lost Daughter. Time and again, Vallée would cut from the present to months in the future and then to something decades in the past, all in the space of a few seconds. It was something extraordinary in the TV landscape, a freeing-up along the lines of Terrence Malick’s intuitive edits and Pablo Larrain’s restless jumps in cinema. Vallée would have approved of how Buckley’s Leda is spliced into the waking hours and dreams of Colman’s Leda, a ghost of hard decisions past. He will be missed, but his methods have already seeped into modern American film.

“Children are a crushing responsibility.” It’s surprising to see a film so frank about the difficulties of parenthood. In one scene, Leda’s husband offers shelter to a hitchhiking couple. Leda is fascinated by how the couple made a life together while abandoning children from previous relationships. To her, they are the ones who escaped. Her daughter quotes W.H. Auden’s Crisis in Italian for the guests. The original verse, in English, reads: “Where do they come from?/ Those whom we so much dread/ As on our dearest location falls the chill/ Of their crooked wing.” Gyllenhaal’s film exists in the shade of such a wing.

 

Memorable moments in Indian cinema: 2021

Pulao in ‘Geeli Pucchi (from ‘Ajeeb Daastaans’)
Neeraj Ghaywan’s segment in Ajeeb Daastaans is one of the clearest illustrations of how food helps enforce and perpetuate caste-based discrimination. Bharti (Konkona Sensharma), a machine worker in a factory, and newly hired accountant Priya (Aditi Rao Hydari) are eating lunch in the canteen. Priya offers Bharti a bite of pulao from her spoon. Bharti, who rejected Priya’s offer of food once earlier in the film, shakes her head, then looks around a few times and takes the bite. Those quick glances contain a lifetime of wariness: Priya doesn’t know that the woman eating her food, from her cutlery, is Dalit, but the other workers do. Later in the film, once Bharti’s caste is revealed, she’s given tea in a steel tumbler while Priya’s mother and husband have theirs in China cups. Yet that moment in the canteen is also an intimate connection being forged, a way for Bharti – whose feelings for the new girl run deeper than friendship – to let Priya into her life. (Netflix)    

All the dead in ‘Sardar Udham’
At the heart of Sardar Udham is an excruciating recreation of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Stretching over half an hour, it is key to understanding Udham’s subsequent trajectory in life. One unforgettable image comes after the killing and the rescue work. The camera pulls out slowly to reveal a field strewn with the dead, bodies still being stretchered off. The cinematic parallel here is, of course, the famous first shot of Gone with the Wind. But for those watching it a few months after covid devastated Delhi, there was another, more immediate comparison: the late Danish Siddiqui’s searing photographs of cremation grounds and burning pyres, taken during the second wave. (Amazon Prime Video)

Hope in ‘Sherni’
Forest official Vidya (Vidya Balan) and college professor Hassan (Vijay Raaz) look down upon a gigantic quarry. “This used to dense forest here,” he says. “And now this copper mine.” The tiger they’re trying to save needs to get from one end of the chasm to the other. As they’re struck into silence by the enormity of the task, director Amit Masurkar offers a flicker of hope: in the centre of the frame, nestled in the flowers through which we see Hassan and Vidya, a solitary, industrious bee. (Amazon Prime Video) 

The fight with Dancing Rose in ‘Sarpatta Parambarai’
No character this year was as memorable as the boxer Dancing Rose in Pa Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai. In fight movie terms, Rose is the junior boss the hero must defeat before battling the final boss. But Rose, played by Shabeer Kallarakkal, is anything but a second villain, stealing every moment he’s on screen. His clowning in the ring – he dances, jumps up on the ropes, even does a backflip – has no bearing on his abilities as a boxer, something the protagonist Kabilan (Arya) realizes seconds into their fight. The two-round bout is a masterpiece of editing, sound and action revealing character. (Amazon Prime Video)

Personal turns political in ‘Karnan’
Composer Santhosh Narayan and director Mari Selvaraj demonstrate in Karnan, as they did in Pariyerum Perumal, a knack for uniquely structured political musical sequences. Initially, Thattan Thattan is a straightforward romantic number. But then the focus shifts from Karnand (Dhanush) and Draupadi (Rajisha Vijayan), and we hear folk singera Meenakshi Elayaraja. “Our ancestors lost the uplands,” she laments. “Our forefathers lost the farmlands. We became wasteland. We became labour.” There’s a return to romance, but not before Karnan is told “You must triumph, child” – a reminder that while love and all is fine, his people come first. (Amazon Prime Video) 

Walk: ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’
Towards the end of Jeo Baby’s film, Nimisha Sajayan’s unnamed protagonist finally snaps and walks out of her husband’s oppressive home. As she strides down the road purposefully, the camera tracks alongside. We see in the background women washing clothes, cooking, bathing their children, while the men read newspapers nearby. It’s a subtle reminder that while we’ve just witnessed one woman throwing off the shackles of patriarchy, that action carries with it its own privilege. (Amazon Prime Video)

Asking for thought in ‘Milestone’
Ghalib (Suvinder Vicky) is a trucker from Punjab. His wife, Etali, died by suicide, and he’s back in his ancestral village to try and make restitution to her father (Arun Aseng) and sister (Gaurika Bhatt). In front of the village council, he offers them one, then two lakhs. Both times, he’s rejected – but surprisingly, the sister clarifies it isn’t that the amount is too small. The council gives Ghalib 30 days to come up with something else. It’s a resonant idea: that the person who, in some small way, is responsible for the tragedy not try and buy out his obligations but actually put some thought into it and make amends through a personal gesture. (Netflix)

Fusion in ‘The Disciple’
Sharad (Arun Dev) is at a pivotal moment, when it’s finally dawning on him that he might not make it as a classical singer. Instead of carrying forward the name of his gharana, he’s reduced to teaching schoolkids. When one of them approaches him along with his mother and asks if he should join a fusion band, Sharad lets loose his frustrations. “Let him join,” he says in a mild voice. “But if he does, he needn’t come back here.” He carries on, laying out in increasingly harsh terms how the child had little chance of being a classical singer anyway. His anger is, of course, fed from a well of self-loathing. But it’s also, in a strange way, a kindness. Sharad knows better than anyone how difficult it is to make it in this world, especially if one isn’t the most talented. (Netflix)   

Arjun unlocked in ‘Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar’
For about 110 minutes in Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, Arjun Kapoor punches above his weight, yet gives little indication why Dibakar Banerji thought of him for the part of a crooked cop who goes on the run with the executive he’s supposed to kill. But he’s unlocked by something strange in the film’s final 10 minutes. To escape the cop who’s tracked him down to a town on the Nepal border, Pinky disguises himself as a woman, a chholiya wedding dancer accompanying the groom’s procession. Suddenly, tentativeness of character and actor are one, and when Pinky starts to move his hands and hips in time with the music, there’s a grace to him that I’ve never glimpsed in his acting before. (Amazon Prime Video)   

Octopus: ‘Nayattu’
Nayattu is the leanest film of the year. There isn’t a wasted frame, nothing to distract from the pessimism of Shahi Kabir’s screenplay about three cops are on the run after they inadvertently cause the death of a young Dalit man in a bike accident. The tone is set by an unusually grisly wedding song addressed to a ‘drunk octopus’: “He doesn’t give two hoots about her/he chops her up into pieces/until the knife’s sharpness wanes.” And a little later: “The knife glitters/and his wife grins in his dreams.” It’s an early warning that the arc of the universe bends towards chaos in Martin Prakkat’s film. (Netflix)

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

The Hand Of God: The making of Paolo Sorrentino

Before you watch Paolo Sorrentino’s new film—and you really should make time for it in the pell-mell of end-December releases—it might be useful to watch Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona. The 2019 documentary focuses on the Argentine football legend’s time in Italy, where he twice led Napoli to the Serie A title. Through TV footage, interviews and home videos, Kapadia paints a vivid picture of just how much Maradona meant to the people of Naples, how his presence in their team was treated as a divine visitation.

Many of the characters in The Hand Of God could have walked straight out of Diego Maradona. There’s the crowd watching his training session in respectful silence. There’s Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), who, given a hypothetical choice by his brother between having sex for the first time or having Maradona play for Napoli, chooses the latter. Above all, there’s Fabietto’s uncle Alfredo (Renato Carpentieri), who says he will kill himself if the rumoured transfer doesn’t go through, and gets tears in his eyes when Maradona scores the infamous 1986 goal against England that gives the film its name. “He has avenged the great Argentine people, oppressed by the ignoble imperialists in the Malvinas (Falkland Islands),” the old man says. “He’s a genius. It’s a political act.”

This isn’t the first time Maradona has turned up in a Sorrentino film. In Youth (2015), there was a memorable scene where actor Roly Serrano, playing Diego, repeatedly launched a tennis ball high into the air with his bare feet without letting it touch the ground. The Argentine was a side character in that film; here he’s a framing device for a defining summer in the life of Fabietto, a shy teen in a boisterous family: father Saverio (Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo), mother Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert) and sister Daniela, who, in a great running gag, spends the film in the bathroom. There are also assorted uncles and aunts—including the beautiful, disturbed Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), whose surreal visit to “The Little Monk” begins the film—a grandmother with a filthy tongue, and the mysterious baroness Betti Pedrazzi and downright strange Mario as neighbours.

This is the first time Sorrentino is working from autobiographical material—he grew up in Naples, was Maradona-crazy—and the change is subtle but palpable. His previous work in film and TV was consistently dazzling, but tended to keep the viewer at a remove. This time, you can feel him lean in. The film is less surreal than Sorrentino’s series The Young Pope and The New Pope, and less flashy than his films like Il Divo (2008) and The Great Beauty (2013). It has more in common with the shaggy This Must Be The Place (2011), which starred Sean Penn as an ageing rocker, or the autumnal Youth, with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as septuagenarians at a luxury retreat. But even these two films were arch and artful, whereas The Hand Of God has direct access to its characters’ emotions.

The first half of the film is sun-kissed, sensual and very funny, with loud family lunches and sailing trips. It’s only after a personal tragedy that it sobers up somewhat. Fabie starts taking his first tentative steps towards a career in film. Earlier, we watched him as he observed, awestruck, from a doorway, an offscreen Fellini choose actors from dozens of glamour shots strewn on the floor. Now he stalks a famous director, Capuano (Ciro Capano), whom he finally corners after the maestro thunders out of a play.

The conversation between the two seems to anticipate Sorrentino’s career. “I don’t like reality,” Fabietto says. “Reality is lousy. That’s why I want to make films.” He insists he has pain but Capuno isn’t buying it. “Forget pain and think about fun, that’s how you’ll make films,” he advises. “But you gotta have something to say.” The overriding impression of Sorrentino is someone who makes films that are fun, but pain is never absent—especially in The Hand Of God, with its exceptionally moving last moments, a boy bidding goodbye to his childhood.

In the New York Times, Sorrentino says he spent years “gathering memories” for the film before writing it quickly, taking “not longer than two weeks”. “I have to have 3,000 ideas, then skim down until I have the cream,” he told them. It’s useful to think of Sorrentino films as a collection of hundreds of ideas, for they aren’t plotted the way Hollywood films are, with well-defined character arcs. Sorrentino reserves all the tightness for his immaculate framing, letting his stories hang loose. The Hand Of God is filled with little ideas that aren’t particularly ”significant” but which stayed with me days after I watched the film. A nighttime scooter ride with a charismatic smuggler. A prissy-looking kid in glasses providing momentary distraction from grief. A man suspended from a wire, high above the town square. Mario respecting the sanctity of hopscotch. Maria scurrying to the balcony so she can whistle at Saverio and he can respond in kind: a married couple ritual for the ages. An old sheikh and his young model companion walking through a deserted piazza at night, as strange a vision as the giraffe in The Great Beauty.

At a time when personal style in cinema is being replaced by a group aesthetic, it’s reassuring to note that Sorrentino—even when charting new territory—can hardly direct a scene that’s not recognisable as his. The Hand Of God has all those beautiful push-ins and pull-outs of the camera so central to his style; his affection for music, nature, women, ribald jokes, eccentrics of all sorts hasn’t dimmed either. In a world of practical cinema, he’s one of the last remaining sensualists.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

83: Review

In films that go all out, there's usually a moment from which there's no coming back. In Kabir Khan's 83, there's about half a dozen of these. My favourite is the one that comes during Kapil Dev’s knock of 175 against Zimbabwe, an innings without which India would not have progressed beyond the group stage of the 1983 Cricket World Cup. Dev, warming up to the task, pulls the ball lustily. The ball flies into the stands and is caught by... Kapil Dev.

As people around me cheered, I just stared at the screen. I wanted to groan, but I also wanted to laugh at the audacity of brandishing the actual Kapil so blatantly in a movie about his greatest sporting moment. It is, of course, an unnecessary, incredibly silly, fourth-wall-demolishing move. But it also conveys such a naked need to please viewers, to give them everything—event, recreation, myth, parody—all at once that it feels like the entire 163 minutes boiled down into one overwrought gesture. 

Comedians warn against putting a hat on a hat, trying to hang an extra joke on one that's already working. 83 puts a hat on a hat on a hat, then wraps them in Ranveer Singh’s fur coat. Every scene comes with four layers of good cheer. Even when India is losing, someone’s always on hand with a wisecrack or a malapropism or encouragement for the future. If all else fails, there’s Pritam’s music to hit you over the head with.

This much we knew: Kabir Khan was never going to make a restrained film on India’s first World Cup win. 83 recalls his Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) not only in its sweetness and maximality but also its maddening simplicity. Baby Sachin turns up at the end and says “I’ll play for India one day.” Pakistani forces suspend shelling on the border so Indian jawaans can hear the radio commentary in peace. A communal riot is put on hold for the finals. Khan's optimism can sometimes make him seem naïve. 1983 didn’t solve India, as the events of 1984 showed. 

Only two people seem to have any sort of expectations for the Indian team: captain Kapil Dev (Ranveer Singh) and the team’s resourceful manager, PR Man Singh (Pankaj Tripathi). The other players are more practical. They know India isn’t a serious one-day team. It has only won one game in the two previous World Cups—against East Africa, which, as Kris Srikkanth (Jiiva) points out, isn’t even a real country. In seam-friendly England conditions, it has only one genuine pacer in Kapil. When the captain tells reporters in his halting English, “We here to win,” it’s met with patronising smiles.

Everyone knows what happened after: a surprising win over the mighty West Indies; order restored after two crushing losses; Kapil’s 175 against Zimbabwe, one of the greatest ODI innings ever; dispatching Australia and England on route to the finals, where the West Indies are again beaten. For each match, Khan and his co-writers, Vasan Bala, Sumit Arora and Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan, zoom in one or two key players: Yashpal Sharma (Jatin Sarna) in the opener against the West Indies, Roger Binny (Nishant Dahiya) in the must-win game against Australia. It’s a smart strategy—by the time the finals come around, you feel you know the entire team (except poor Sunil Valson, who even here is treated like a twelfth man). 

Those scarred by MS Dhoni (2016) will be relieved to know the on-field action in 83 is entirely convincing. This is doubly impressive because the cricket in this film doesn’t just have to look authentic, it has to be specifically right, from Viv Richards' aggressive gum-chewing down to the way certain catches were taken and runouts effected. There is, of course, some creative cutting and slo-mo to help the actors along. But it’s immensely satisfying to see moments like the magical Balwinder Singh Sandhu inswinger to dismiss Gordon Greenridge in the finals—foreshadowed by a ball that beats Sunil Gavaskar in the nets—executed with precision (Khan is so pleased he cuts to a still photograph of the actual dismissal).

Khan’s enthusiasm runs away with him at times. There’s the overly cute idea of introducing the West Indies pace quartet through the eyes of awestruck Indian players in the nets (I’m sure Indian cricketers hero-worshipped the Windies pacers, but to have them describe each one out aloud is a stretch). Dev mentions Tony Greg’s infamous ‘grovel’ quote and says it fired up the West Indies to win the World Cup; the sentiment is right but it really goaded them to win the 1976 series in England (they’d already won the World Cup in 1975). And the sharpness of portraiture on the field isn’t matched elsewhere. The Indian spectators—a young boy with a flag, two factory workers—are sentimental figures rather than fleshed-out characters, and Romi, Kapil’s wife, is an inconsequential cameo for co-producer Deepika Padukone. 

Singh builds Kapil Dev not from the bowling action down but from the accent out. It’s a canny decision, for Dev’s speaking voice has a measured, gentle quality that's at odds with his gung-ho playing style. Singh’s Kapil is a cajoler, a leader by example but also through encouragement and clever man-management. It’s an unexpectedly charming portrayal from an actor who’s a lot smarter than he lets on. He’s supported by a well-chosen, effective cast; I’d single out Jiiva, hilarious as Srikanth, and Nishant Dahiya as a soft-voiced Roger Binny.

Before the first game, Kapil is encouraged by Man Singh to give the team a pep talk on the bus. Reluctantly, he says a few words in his broken English. In the background, Hum Bane Tum Bane Ek Duje Ke Liye, with its refrain of “I don't know what you say”, is playing. It’s a smart juxtaposition, but Khan doesn’t want to rely just on those watching carefully. He wants the inattentive viewers, the ones there only to see Deepika, the ones heading to the loo. So after Kapil finishes his excruciating address, the players start singing “I don’t know what you say” to him. This is Hindi cinema. Everything is underlined. But what’s a little repetition in a film with all the giddiness and unsubtlety of a sugar rush?

 This piece was published in Mint Lounge.