When you can’t say @#%*

In October, writer-director Kanu Behl appeared in a sketch video by comedy collective The Viral Fever. Censor Qtiyapa shows Behl bringing his first film to a “Pre-censor Board”, where directors such as Hansal Mehta and Vasan Bala tell him that all this cussing and extramarital sex just won’t fly. We love your film, they say. Just clean it up.

Like all good satire, Censor Qtiyapa cuts close to the bone. A couple of months before the sketch released, Behl went before the actual censor board with Titli. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and travelled the festival circuit from Chicago to Hamburg. Behl, however, knew that this would mean little to the Central Board of Film Certification and was prepared for the eventuality of cuts and an A-certificate.

The first interaction, with the CBFC’s examining committee, started off well. “They told us, we really like the film, it’s one of the best we’ve seen of late,” Behl says. The committee told Behl that they wouldn’t recommend any cuts—a significant victory, for Titli is disturbingly violent in parts—but that he would have to take out “all the language”. The makers were aghast—that would come to some 70 cuts. They decided to appeal to the next stage of the CBFC: the revising committee. That discussion was along similar lines—the committee members loved the film, but there were guidelines to follow. Finally, a compromise was reached. Three scenes with an inordinate number of expletives were identified; Behl offered to remove the expletives from one altogether and reduce the cussing in the other two “by 50%”. He could keep the rest.

Just when Titli seemed to have got through fairly unscathed, it came up against the immovable object that is Pahlaj Nihalani. A producer of commercial melodramas in the 1980s and 1990s, Nihalani took over as CBFC chairperson in January 2015, after his predecessor, Leela Samson, and nine board members quit, citing “interference, coercion and corruption”. Summoning the film-makers to his office, he told them that the decision of the revising committee was invalid, that there was no such thing as reducing invective by 50%. (In an ideal world, one would agree.) He offered them two alternatives: Submit the film to the revising committee again or incorporate the committee’s suggestions for the three scenes and remove all the other expletives. With a release date looming, the film-makers had to agree to the latter.

Behl wasn’t the only writer who faced this sort of humiliation last year. These last 14 months have seen an unprecedented amount of censorship, much of which has centred on the language used in films. In a scenario where an unofficial war has been declared on words, consider the plight of those responsible for these words. What does it mean to have exclamations, sentences, entire scenes you’ve written ripped out by a committee that’s following guidelines dating back to when 'saala' was an unpardonable insult? Are screenwriters today starting to second-guess themselves whenever they put anything mildly offensive on paper? Are they becoming, like in that TVF sketch, their own pre-censor board?

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In June of 1930, Donald Bradman, then 21 and playing for the first time at Lord’s, made 254. This innings would go down in cricket history for its utter chance-less mastery of an attack. Bradman himself regarded it as his finest knock. “Practically without exception every ball went where it was intended to go,” he wrote in Farewell To Cricket, “even the one from which I was dismissed”.

Once in a while, when the planets align and the literary gods look down benevolently, writers get to feel the same way: Every word goes where it is intended to. Good writers are compulsive rewriters, modifying, embellishing, agonizing over their choice of punctuation, syntax and tone. But once they’ve finished fiddling and are satisfied with the results, they like all the words—not just the ones that make them look smart or funny, but the little half-thoughts and interjections and grunts that are, in their heads at least, the bedrock of their characters’ personalities.

For screenwriters—who, quite often, must protect their vision from producers, financiers, directors and the demands of the market—the idea of a hard-won final draft is even more important. “From a writer’s point of view, it’s a deliberate act of putting certain thoughts, certain philosophies, certain points of view on paper,” says Juhi Chaturvedi, the screenwriter of Vicky Donor and Piku. “It’s not random, ki galti se likh diya toh kaat do.” I heard the same thing from writer after writer—that pretty much everything on the page is there for a reason. Which is why it hurts when they are told, as they so often are by the CBFC, that they cannot use the words.

Chaturvedi has a reputation as a writer who can say what needs saying without raising the hackles of the CBFC. In May, Piku sailed through the censors untouched, even the scene where Amitabh Bachchan declares that his daughter is not a virgin (the same word was almost deleted from 2014’s Finding Fanny, another film starring Deepika Padukone). A few years earlier, Vicky Donor became the first Indian film—the first mainstream film, at any rate—about sperm to open in theatres across the country. Today, Chaturvedi says, she isn’t sure whether a film about a remarkably fertile sperm donor could even be made, let alone passed.

Though its name was changed from the Central Board of Film Censors in 1983, the CBFC has never really thought of itself as a ratings body. Relying on the exhaustive and often vague guidelines of The Cinematograph Act of 1952, the board has always been keen to cut, mute, reduce and blur, even when it has rated the film as “A”. Certain topics have always been, and continue to be, verboten: religion, caste, nudity, excessive violence and anything that might irritate the government in power. As a result, there’s never a time that someone or the other isn’t feuding with the CBFC. But all things considered, language seemed to be one area where things were loosening up.

This process began in 1996, when Bandit Queen landed on Indian screens with its Molotov cocktail of an opening line: “Main hoon Phoolan Devi, behenchod.” It continued through such disparate films as Hyderabad Blues, Omkara, Ishqiya, Delhi Belly, Paan Singh Tomar and Gangs of Wasseypur. By 2014, it looked like film writers might soon be able to take language for granted and start pushing other kinds of boundaries. Then, in January 2015, Samson resigned, Nihalani took over and immediately began with his mission of washing Indian cinema’s mouth out with soap.

From the start, Nihalani made no bones about the kind of moral approach he would like to see in Indian films. Asked by The Hindu whether he thought people might accuse him of being conservative, the then newly appointed CBFC chairperson said: “I don’t mind being called that if I have to serve the nation. You have to take care of the new generation, on whom the future of the country depends.”

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“I can see it has started affecting me. It has started affecting people around me—the directors I’m working with, producers, my writer friends. You still fight and stuff, but in your head, whenever you’re writing something, you think, yeh toh kabhi pass nahi hoga. And then you think, do I want to go down this road?”

I’m sitting in Sudip Sharma’s study, listening to him wonder aloud whether the CBFC’s actions over the past year are driving writers to self-censorship. In a sense, Sharma is perfectly placed to talk about the current state of affairs. NH10, a film he wrote about a Gurgaon couple stalked by a group of homicidal Jats, was one of the first to bear the brunt of the new board’s stricter rules regarding language. Sharma described meeting the examining and revising committees as a “fascinating process, provided it isn’t your film”. “A lot of bargaining takes place,” he says. “You actually find yourself saying things like, ‘Okay, if you’re removing the slap, leave saali.’”

NH10 was eventually released with 14 cuts, a list of which one can find on the CBFC website. It wasn’t just the spoken word the board had a problem with. A key scene has Anushka Sharma staring at the word 'randi' scribbled on the wall of a bathroom stall. Sudip Sharma and director Navdeep Singh were initially asked to blur the word. They protested, arguing that the scene was integral to the film’s structure (there’s an echo, with 'raand saali' appearing on another wall towards the end). They were eventually allowed to “reduce the visual by 50%”—apparently, a glimpse won’t engender the same moral corruption that a longer look might.

Why does Nihalani end up getting blamed for a decision like this? One reason could be his visibility; more than previous chairpersons, he is regularly in the news, defending the board’s verdicts. It could also be because, according to several people I spoke to, he’s made himself an essential part of the certification process. While his predecessors tended to avoid involving themselves on a regular basis, only intervening when the film in question was especially controversial, Nihalani is, by all reports, more than happy to be in the thick of things. In May, board member Nandini Sardesai told The Telegraph that the chairperson was clearing the big releases himself instead of allowing the board to do so. Several people, writers and otherwise, told me that while the members of the revising and examining committees were usually sympathetic and open to discussing cuts, the chairperson just wasn’t someone you could reason with. One person recalled how, during a meeting, Nihalani told him: “What do you new film-makers think of yourselves? I’ll tell you how films are supposed to be made. Just wait and see what kind of films will be made in the next two years.” (Despite multiple attempts to reach Nihalani by text, email and phone, we received no response.)

The CBFC guidelines are vague enough for a chairperson to impose his or her own value system on the decision-making process, if so desired. Nihalani has made it clear in interviews that he isn’t comfortable with the idea of on-screen cussing (“Normal civilized people don’t abuse the way we see in films”); violence (“The violence can always be suggested without bringing it on screen”); nudity (“People are paying money to watch [Sunny Leone]. How can there be tolerance for all this?”); and anything remotely connected to homosexuality—which has manifested in particularly indefensible ways. Early on in his tenure, the word 'lesbian' was muted in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. More recently, in an unprecedented move, the board slapped the trailer of Aligarh with an “A” certificate, which meant it could only be played before other A-rated films. When asked about this, Nihalani said that the subject of homosexuality wasn’t for children or teenagers.

Amazingly, this wasn’t even the strangest CBFC decision concerning Aligarh. In a couple of scenes, the central character, a gay professor, is shown yawning and dozing off in court. According to the film’s writer, Apurva Asrani, they were told to shorten these scenes as they constituted, in the eyes of the CBFC, contempt of court. “It’s not even a ‘tareekh pe tareekh’ scene, where the character is challenging the court,” Asrani says. “He’s sleeping because he’s just been harangued and he’s lost his house.”

For sheer strangeness, though, this is surpassed by a recent decision by the examining committee to deny a certificate to a Gujarati film called Jivan Sathi. The reason, according to a letter from the committee to the producers, is: “The end of the film shows bigamy, which is not as per Hindu Marriage Act.” Even if this were a reason to deny a film a certificate, it shows the board’s double standards. Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon, in which the popular TV comedian Kapil Sharma plays a man with three wives and a girlfriend, was cleared for release in September.

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Whether this particular censor regime is resulting in large-scale self-censoring by writers is difficult to gauge. One might have to wait a little longer, for films written in the Nihalani era, in order to see whether themes and modes of expression have altered significantly. The writers I spoke to all felt differently about whether their own writing was being affected. Sharma was one of the few who openly admitted to fallout; after his experience on NH10, he went back to a script he had written when, as he put it, the mind was free and without fear, and made changes to it, “taming it a bit, scaling it back”. Asrani, on the other hand, said that what he had faced with Aligarh made him even more determined not to compromise. Behl confirmed increasing signs of self-censorship in the film community and said that while his first concern was to “let the film flower fully and be what it wants to be, there are more fears now, because you know what can or will happen. I try and not think about it. But it does play on your mind.”

Often, it isn’t so much about being driven to self-censorship as working in an atmosphere of vague, constant unease. Screenwriter and comedian Varun Grover says that he often feels the censors are over his shoulder, watching him as he writes. At the same time, he also feels that the censorship situation in India—pre- and post-Nihalani—often forces him to come up with writing solutions that are better than the more explosive ones he might have otherwise gone for. He gives the example of a memorable line from Masaan, in which an inspector tells Richa Chadha her life is over. “I might have written tumhari zindagi toh jhaant ho gayi hai, but it wouldn’t have been passed. So I came up with tumhari zindagi toh condom ho gayi hai, which is a better line.”

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Chaturvedi talks about the disappointment that the current board does not seem to take milieu or context into account before muting language. “In certain environments, you can’t have sophisticated, well-spoken people,” she says. “Go to Assi Ghat in Benaras; you’ll see that everyone there abuses—men, women.” A week after this conversation, I found myself in the office of Chandraprakash Dwivedi, a CBFC board member who, coincidentally, happens to have directed an as-yet-unreleased Varanasi-set film called Mohalla Assi. Dwivedi, best known as the director of the National Award-winning 2003 film Pinjar and for his role as Chanakya in the 1990s TV series of the same name, joined the CBFC at the same time as Nihalani. It was his March 2015 letter to the chairperson that, when leaked, was the first indication that there were members of the board who weren’t comfortable with the list of expletives (including 'bastard', 'rakhail' and “double meaning any kind of words”) that Nihalani wanted banned from all films.

It’s unlikely Mohalla Assi would be passed by the very board Dwivedi is a member of. Though there’s only a patched-together trailer online—one which Dwivedi disavows—the footage seems to confirm Chaturvedi’s observation that one could go down to the ghats and come back with one’s dictionary of abuses radically expanded. Though he reserved comment on the film, Dwivedi says he and “other like-minded members” had raised the issue of context as far as strong language was concerned in the second board meeting. “Per se, we are not against abusive language,” he told me. “It cannot be a blanket ban.”

In Dwivedi’s estimation, one of the biggest problems with the CBFC is that an inordinate amount of power ends up concentrated at the top. “The guidelines are framed in such a manner that it leaves a lot of scope for the chairperson to exercise his rights,” he says. “But that also makes the entire process futile, because the decision is not by majority. There are nine members (in the revising committee), and if one member disagrees, it is referred to the chairperson. Now, it is the chairperson’s interpretation, his wisdom, to say yes or no.”

There is, as Dwivedi points out, and as Nihalani tried to while being lambasted by Arnab Goswami on Times Now (“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” the anchor crowed at one point), an option for film-makers unhappy with the CBFC’s decisions. They can approach the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal, a statutory body set up under a retired judge. Films submitted to the tribunal when they had not been cleared by the censors range from MSG: Messenger Of God to Park Street, a film on a rape that took place in a Kolkata neighbourhood in 2012. Increasingly, this is becoming a go-to option for directors and producers with little faith in the CBFC. Recently, the producers of Vikram Bhatt’s Love Games went to the FCAT after the CBFC ordered them to make 18 cuts. The film was cleared. There are also unconfirmed reports that the Ekta Kapoor production Great Grand Masti is likely to go straight from the examining committee to the tribunal.

Even the writers I spoke to seem to regard the FCAT as a more viable option than the CBFC grind. Behl says he would probably take his next film straight to them. “We had considered going with Titli, but the release had already been pushed, so we decided against it,” he says. Grover agrees, saying that taking a film to the tribunal makes it seem like more of a “serious case”. Of course, there’s always the chance that the FCAT will deny the film a certificate, as it did with Porkalathil Oru Poo, a film about the rape and murder of a journalist by the Sri Lankan army, or The Textures Of Loss, a documentary on the impact of violence on ordinary Kashmiris. The only option then left is to go to court—a risk few producers or directors are willing to take.

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Right now, almost everyone has their hopes pinned on a committee appointed by the government to review and recommend changes in the functioning of the CBFC. The presence of Shyam Benegal at the helm has raised expectations; the director has made it clear that he is no advocate of censorship. The committee even asked the public to send in recommendations—more than 6,600 mails were received through a website called Save Our Cinema. Yet, many forget that in 2013, a similar committee was set up under retired Delhi high court judge Mukul Mudgal. The report, which is available online, recommended, among other things, a more nuanced film classification system and clearer guidelines as to the appointment of regional officers and “advisory panel” members (who form the bulk of the examining and revising committees). As is often the case with expert panels constituted in this country, none of its recommendations were implemented.

In the end, all everyone’s asking for is a little respect: writers and directors from the committees that decide their fate; board members who find their decisions undermined by a single nay vote; possibly even the chairman, struggling to maintain the sort of moral absolutism that young film-makers today just don’t relate to. A little predictability would be nice as well: In the past few months, Spectre had its kissing scenes shortened, while The Danish Girl was released with frontal nudity. The sooner all concerned know exactly what they can’t do, the sooner they can go about trying to do exactly that.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Between the grooves

Early on in the pilot of Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter’s new series Vinyl, the camera pans up on Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), founder of American Century, a New York City record label in the late 1970s, and we hear his voice on the soundtrack. “I had a golden ear, a silver tongue and a pair of brass balls,” he boasts. How predictable, I thought. A voice-over out of Goodfellas/Casino/The Wolf Of Wall Street, imagined by the man who had made these films and scripted by someone who could spit out hard-boiled dialogue in his sleep. Vinyl, I decided, would be two masters on autopilot, and I wanted nothing of it.

That feeling passed—somewhat at least. After the 2-hour Scorsese-helmed pilot, I’ve watched episodes 2, 3 and 4 of Vinyl (created by Scorsese, Winter, Mick Jagger and writer Rich Cohen) and found myself drawn in by its messiness and its theatricality, its attention to detail and, above all, its willingness to cut, copy and print the legend. The pilot ends with a New York Dolls gig at the Mercer Arts Center in Manhattan that’s so wild, it literally brings the roof down. In reality, the Dolls did play at the Mercer, and the building did collapse, just not on the same day. Such details are brushed aside by the image of Richie, bloodied and dusty, walking unsteadily away from the rubble with Chuck Berry’s "Rock ‘N’ Roll Music" playing in his head.

Vinyl’s pilot—which seemed to me, on first viewing, like The Wolf Of Wall Street would have been if it had been set in the music business—sends a bunch of plot-lines scurrying in different directions. First, there are the repercussions of Richie’s decision not to sell his label, which is floundering financially, to the German company Polygram. There’s his relationship with his wife, Devon (Olivia Wilde), a former Andy Warhol muse, now a stifled housewife; with his employees, in particular his sad-sack head of promotions Zak Yankovich (Ray Romano); and with Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), a blues singer he built up and then let down. There’s also the matter of his beating a DJ to death and disposing of the body. Following episodes have deepened some of these stories—especially Lester’s—but on the whole, there is little that isn’t reminiscent of half-a-dozen Scorsese movies or any number of prestige TV shows with anti-hero white male protagonists.

Vinyl may be derivative and predictable, but it’s also a trip. Everyone’s shouting and having sex and doing drugs, there’s always some great song or the other playing, and all the directors seem to be having a great time doing their best Scorsese imitation. Like Boardwalk Empire, Scorsese’s last collaboration with Winter, Vinyl is simultaneously expansive and meticulous in its recreation of a very particular world. Most of the action takes place in the late 1970s, a period of extraordinary flux for the music industry, with manicured pop, classic rock, funk and soul all fighting for radio time just as punk was rearing its head and the first experiments in hip hop were taking place. This is reflected in the show’s stunningly varied, virtually never-ending soundtrack, which comes at the viewer in three avatars: as background tracks commenting on the action, as songs performed by characters and in dream sequences that allow the show to pay tribute to everyone from Howlin’ Wolf to Jerry Lee Lewis.

Some of the references are only likely to make sense to music fans of a certain vintage. Will viewers recognize the blinding light the camera keeps staring into during a bar performance of Otis Redding’s "Mr Pitiful" as a tribute to D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop? How many are likely to care about the intricacies of payola, or the uneasy alliance that once existed between Jewish producers, Italian mobsters and black singers? It would seem that this number is not as much as HBO might have expected. The pilot logged a low 764,000 viewers—disappointing for a show with names such as Scorsese, Winter, Jagger, Cannavale, Romano, Wilde and Juno Temple. Despite the lack of chatter surrounding Vinyl, HBO has renewed the show for a second season. Yet, even as it moves into its fifth week, there are few signs that the public at large cares about Richie or Devon or Alice Cooper and his python. In India, where the best place to gauge whether a foreign show is making any impression is on Twitter, there has barely been a mention.

The series has a 10-episode first season, so we might only see a couple of plot threads resolved this year (hopefully, one of them will be the DJ murder, which felt like a misstep from the moment it happened). I hope the series finds its groove, and its audience; whatever its faults, it’s one of the most unabashedly entertaining drama series in a while. And when it digs deep, it finds a moment or two of magic. One of these arrives during a flashback, with Lester recording a doo-wop number as Little Jimmy Little. We start the scene at the engineers’ console, with both backing track and voice audible. But then we’re inside the studio, inside the singers’ headphones, and all we hear is the shoop-be-doops of the backing vocalists and Lester’s rich voice ringing out. It’s the sort of intimate, spine-tingling moment you would expect from a show called Vinyl.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.

Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921): Review

Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) may be a family drama, but it’s paced like a thriller. The viewer is taken briskly from line to line, and scene to scene. Despite its 140-minute running time, the storytelling is surprisingly economical; while one could argue about certain plot strands being there at all, there’s hardly a scene that feels superfluous or unnecessary to the narrative as it exists.

This commitment to pace is evident from the start. The film begins with Amarjeet Kapoor having a heart attack in his Coonoor home as his son, Harsh (Rajat Kapoor), and daughter-in-law, Sunita (Ratna Pathak Shah), argue in the other room. Ten minutes later, his grandsons, Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra) and Rahul (Fawad Khan), are shown to have flown in from New Jersey and London. Almost immediately, the family starts to bicker and small and big secrets start tumbling out. Harsh and Sunita—both of whom seem difficult to get along with—are having trouble keeping their marriage afloat. Arjun, who has been bouncing between careers, feels belittled by his parents and envies his older brother, a published novelist. Rahul, meanwhile, is feeling the pressure of being the perpetual peacemaker in the family.

Into this stormy mix, the film throws two sunny, uncomplicated personalities. The first is Amarjeet, played by Rishi Kapoor, who is made up to look like he’s 90. Dadu, as he’s called by everyone, only wants to smoke a little weed, watch a little porn and get a nice family portrait clicked (as with Amitabh Bachchan in Piku, this film manages to smuggle in progressive attitudes towards sex and drugs through the ramblings of a cantankerous old man). There’s also Tia (Alia Bhatt), another visitor with roots in Coonoor, whom Arjun meets at a party and immediately likes. She, however, is attracted to Rahul, unaware that he’s Arjun’s brother.

In most films, this triangle would have taken centre stage, but Shakun Batra, the director, is more interested in how the Kapoor family is cracking wide open. And boy, does it crack. Smaller arguments keep flaring up until finally, the sheer weight of grievances and resentments accumulated comes crashing down on the Kapoors. Even as the characters lose control, the film never relinquishes it. Editor Shivkumar Panicker’s cross-cutting is often effective, especially when it’s working in tandem with the fleet, cutting script, by Batra and Ayesha DeVitre. Unlike with other recent dysfunctional family films such as Finding Fanny and Dil Dhadakne Do, I didn’t care for just some of the characters, I felt for all of them. They are monumentally messed up, but it’s the messiness of real life, with a little Dharma gloss (and an irritating score) on top.

Even as it gently teases Khan’s ever-increasing hold over female fans in this country, the film also gives him his first good role in Hindi movies. His low-key charisma works for his character and makes a nice contrast with the more method-y approach of Malhotra, who, after Brothers, is playing the unappreciated son for the second time in 12 months. Pathak Shah and Rajat perform like the old pros they are. Rishi’s face doesn’t move under all that make-up, but his voice is alive with mischief. Yet, what Bhatt does with a role that could have been boilerplate Manic Pixie was, for me, the most pleasurable part of the film. Of all the stars in Bollywood today, she has the lightest touch. The way she holds certain words, repeats others, converts half-frowns into half-smiles—these are clues to her character that she’s casually tossing out like breadcrumbs. This trail was the most interesting thing in lesser films such as 2 States and Shaandaar; in Kapoor & Sons, it’s a brilliant grace note.

Jai Gangaajal: Review

Viewed from afar, Prakash Jha’s Jai Gangaajal is yet another entry in the morally-upright-Bihar-cop-against-the-system subgenre. Abha Mathur (Priyanka Chopra) is appointed SP of Bankipur, a district in Bihar. Her mission is to keep a lid on the law and order situation there, which puts her on a collision course with crooked local MLA Bablu Pandey (Manav Kaul), who has the local police under his thumb and big business in his pocket. So far, so Shool (or Gangaajal, to which this is a sequel in spirit), but Jai Gangaajal—when it can tear itself away from crowd-pleasing theatrics—tells its story with a welcome amount of detail.

This is hardly surprising. Jha has been making movies about Bihar for decades and he can shade in his small-town environments and characters in a way that most Bollywood directors aren’t able to. Amid all the kidnappings, murders and land grabs that one expects from a Bihar crime film, there are intriguing little touches that stand out, like the way people say “suicide” when they mean death by hanging (this might be the first film which has someone talk about “murder by suicide”).

Jha sets his film (which he’s also written) in an environment that’s overwhelmingly male. Mathur is repeatedly called “Madam Sir”, or sometimes just “Sir”, by her juniors. One’s masculinity coming under question is treated as the worst thing that could befall someone. When Mathur beats up her first criminal in public, an officer tells her, “Aaj aap humein mard bana diye hain.” Mathur resorts to a similar jibe, telling Pandey that a “namard” like him cannot stain the uniform. Several times, the word “napunsak” (impotent) is uttered. Even the (apparently) trans henchman, played by Murli Sharma, is named Munna Mardaani.

Local colour will only get you so far, and Jha is canny enough to know that the audience is there to see Chopra hand out beatings and sermons, sometimes all at once. Most of Jai GangaaJal’s 150-minute running time is taken up by hissing villains and virtuous poor folk and a morally upright protagonist whose private (or inner) life we’re rarely privy to. This kind of film-making seems more and more outdated in an era when few venerate the police and even mainstream cinema allows for some amount of moral ambiguity. Though Jha tries to address this by casting himself as a corrupt circle officer, he nevertheless gives himself a long redemption arc that's considerably more interesting than Chopra's by-the-book heroism. Yet, by the end, nearly all the cops are good, and all the politicians bad.

Chopra plays the tough but sensible Mathur with adequate determination, but the film presents her more as an ideal than a living, breathing character (contrast this to how Shool used its protagonist’s personal life to illuminate his behaviour). This inability to introduce nuance into the storytelling is the film’s undoing. This is a film that’s nominally against mob justice, but nevertheless includes a scene in which a small child is allowed to commit a dragged-out murder while a crowd of people cheer him on. Jha’s cinema has always been about broad strokes for simple folk, and Jai Gangaajal is no exception.

This review appeared in Mint.

Zubaan: Review

If there’s one scene that best captures the mix of hipster pretension and soap-opera melodrama that is Zubaan, it’s probably the musical number that arrives three-quarters of the way in. "Kori Pukaar" is sung by Amira (Sarah-Jane Dias) from a stage that has—as we’ve been warned earlier—“a whole Japanese minimalist thing happening”. It’s a power ballad, without a hint of a beat, yet the French dance duo Les Twins are there alongside her, writhing and swivelling like the number is more MC Hammer than Maria Callas. Drama enough, one would think, but towards the end, a battered, bandaged Dilsher (Vicky Kaushal) emerges to sing the last stanza. The scene ends with them kissing as fake snow falls and onlookers applaud.

Up till this point, Zubaan has concerned itself with a young Sikh boy from Gurdaspur with a beautiful singing voice who grows up to be the stuttering, ambitious Dilsher. There’s a fleeting moment early on, when a helmeted Dilsher is destroying a rival’s knee in a gym, when I felt the cold, confident spirit of Tom Ripley descend on the film. Like the protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, not only does Dilsher want to live a rich man’s life so badly that he’ll commit crimes for it, he changes his identity in order to infiltrate a wealthy household. But Zubaan isn’t willing to follow these dark urges to their logical conclusion, and it’s just a matter of time before Dilsher does what every Hindi film hero who loses his way is made to: return to his roots.

The household that Dilsher attaches himself to is headed by Gurcharan Sikand (Manish Chaudhari), a business tycoon originally from Gurdaspur, which is where Dilsher had met him years ago. We’re shown, via flashback, how he watched Dilsher get picked on by a bunch of boys and didn’t intervene, later telling him that the incident would teach him to rely only on himself. For some reason, it becomes Dilsher’s great ambition to find Sikand in Delhi, work with him and emulate him in every way he can. He does this with some degree of success, gaining Sikand’s trust, taking over responsibilities formerly entrusted to his sulky son, Surya (Raaghav Chanana), even moving into the magnate’s house.

As Surya’s jealousy mounts, Dilsher finds himself drawn to Amira, a vaguely defined singer-dancer-free-spirit. Her purpose in the film seems to be to remind Dilsher of his true calling—music, for he doesn’t stammer when he sings—as well as to supply intermittent blasts of hipster chic, whether it be a rave party in what looks like a lit-up baoli or a white-desert wake with bhaang and sky lanterns held in the memory of her dead brother. Their scenes together have all the heat of a flickering scented candle; there’s more passion, if not much more sense, to be found in the Punjabi-inflected exchanges between Sikand his wife (a nicely campy Meghna Malik) and Dilsher.

Zubaan is the first film by Mozez Singh; it opened the Busan International Film Festival last year and won the Rising Director Asia Star award there. The trailer bills it as “The musical journey of the year”, and though Ashutosh Phatak’s grab-bag soundtrack of Punjabi folk, dance-pop and rock has its moments, it’s hardly path-breaking. The only thing the film cannot dim is the promise shown by Vicky Kaushal. Even in this, his first film (he shot for it before Masaan), he’s a likeable, transparent performer, his face consistently betraying whatever emotions his character is experiencing. I’m sure the audience would have willingly followed him into darker territory. But the film doesn’t seem to believe that and is left, like its protagonist, fumbling for eloquence.

This review appeared in Mint.

Maestro vs maestro

When was the last time you were able to sing a film’s score out loud? Not just recognize a piece of music, but actually go “Da dum da dum da da” from memory? The most recent one I could manage was Pirates Of The Caribbean. I can recognize the themes from Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and Inception, but I can’t really sing them. As for some of the more complex, path-breaking scores in recent times—Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ work with David Fincher, Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood—forget about it.

It’s difficult to find a John Williams score that doesn’t lend itself to humming, singing or air-conducting. Take the opening fanfare from Star Wars, very likely the most famous piece of film music of all time. Or the martial theme from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Or the ominous two-note sting from Jaws, a close second to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho shower music in the scary film music canon. Or the gently sweeping orchestral movements in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park. There’s something about a Williams score that lifts the heart, quickens the pulse, makes one feel weightless and wonderstruck.

Later this month, Williams is one of the contenders for the Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s his 50th nomination—he’s second only to Walt Disney as far as Oscar nods are concerned. His near-omniscience at the Academy Awards underscores the extent to which Williams is, for people all over the world, the sound of Hollywood. It helps that his music is so uncomplicated. More often than not, his compositions use simple brass or string arrangements, with a little timpani sprinkled over. It also helps that he’s composed most of his music for the films of Steven Spielberg, another accessible yet supremely masterful artist.

In a video essay titled The Spielberg Face, Kevin B. Lee points to the director’s repeated use of actors standing “eyes open, staring in wordless wonder”. It’s in these moments of wordless wonder that Williams takes over from Spielberg. Their partnership, which began in 1974 with The Sugarland Express, is now 26 films old—27 with the forthcoming BFG. It is difficult to imagine one’s work without that of the other—the flight to Neverland in Hook minus that theme that soars along with it; the child-like refrain of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind without those stunned, upturned faces. Williams has done great work with other directors—seven Star Wars films, the first three Harry Potters—but he’s tied to, and matched perfectly with, Spielberg.

If there’s anyone who might challenge Williams for the title of greatest living film composer, it’s the other octogenarian nominated for an Oscar this year. Ennio Morricone has been composing for the cinema since the turn of the 1960s. He began, like Williams, as an arranger, eventually graduating to composition and film scores. The breakthrough came when he teamed up with his fellow Italian Sergio Leone on A Fistful Of Dollars (1964). This was the first Spaghetti Western (essentially, Westerns made in Italy with Hollywood stars), and Morricone’s wild sound became synonymous with the genre. By the time The Good, The Bad And The Ugly arrived in 1966, Morricone’s cavernous soundtracks, filled out with echoey guitars, chanting and animal shrieks, were being recognized and imitated the world over.

Morricone’s scores for Westerns are so unique that he’s been primarily associated with the genre over the years. This must be a source of considerable irritation to him, for Westerns only comprise around a tenth of his output. In his 50-year-plus career, he has lent his compositional talents to everything from giallos to arthouse cinema. People who speak of that fabled “Leone sound” are usually referring to his Westerns, for what manner of sound could possibly encompass the soundtracks of The Battle Of Algiers; Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom; Cinema Paradiso; and Duck, You Sucker? While Williams spent his life largely wedded to one film-maker, Morricone worked with everyone from Tinto Brass to Terrence Malick, resulting in a much wider-ranging soundscape than many give him credit for.

Morricone has been nominated this year for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Though Tarantino had used his pieces in earlier films, the two had never collaborated on an entire soundtrack before. After 2012’s Django Unchained, Morricone said he wouldn’t want to work with Tarantino as he “places music in his films without coherence” (he later said that he had only been partially quoted). In any event, Tarantino, a massive fan of both Leone and Morricone, managed to convince the 86-year-old to score his film. It was Morricone’s first Western since Buddy Goes West, in 1981, and it won him his third Golden Globe (after The Legend Of 1900 and The Mission) last month.

The prospect of Morricone head-to-head with Williams on Oscar night is a delicious one, not just because the two hold so much of film history between them, but also because they represent two very different approaches to scoring for movies. One is the Hollywood composer par excellence, while the other has hewed his own stubborn path over the years. Williams is velvet, Morricone sandpaper. Coincidentally, both their nominated scores look back at older films. Morricone had as a starting point unused bits he had composed for John Carpenter’s 1982 Antarctic horror film The Thing, a possible clue to why The Hateful Eight sounds so brooding and demonic. As for Williams, who has a lifetime’s experience of working on sequels, his Force Awakens score blends the instantly recognizable musical themes from the earlier Star Wars films seamlessly with newly composed ones.

Of course, there’s a possibility neither of them will win. I wouldn’t expect Jóhann Jóhannsson’s effective but squally score for Sicario or Thomas Newman’s (who was probably praying Spielberg wouldn’t start making frantic calls to John Williams) work on Bridge Of Spies to deny the two veterans, but Carter Burwell’s bittersweet score for Carol is certainly Oscar-worthy. So if you ignore the popular 'narrative' that’s been building around this particular category, maybe it’s a three-way fight. But as far as modern film composition—in particular the kind you can sing aloud—is concerned, it’s Williams versus Morricone all the way.

This piece appeared in Mint in the run-up to the Oscars. Morricone won, and mentioned Williams in his speech.

Carol: Review

It’s no accident that the first scene in Carol is a conversation between two lovers that’s broken in on by a garrulous interrupter. For someone like Todd Haynes, who takes seriously his film history, this amounts to a statement of intent. If you’re making a film about a curtailed love affair, it takes some courage to begin with a steal from Brief Encounter. Many have tried to replicate, with limited success, the sad sweetness of the 1945 David Lean film about two strangers (one of whom is married) who fall in love. But Haynes has earned the right to appropriate it, for Carol is an excellent companion piece to Lean’s film, and a stellar entry in the limited canon of cinematic sighs.

The film is based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, which told the story—very controversial in 1952—of two lesbians, a glamorous socialite named Carol (Cate Blanchett), and Therese (Rooney Mara), a timid shopgirl. They meet on a snowy winter evening in the gifts section of a Manhattan department store. Therese advises Carol on an appropriate Christmas gift for her daughter; Carol tells her in passing she likes the Santa cap she’s wearing. It’s a charming, if mundane, first meeting, made significant only by the fact that Carol leaves her gloves behind.

Even as Therese wastes little time in mailing the gloves back to Carol and striking up a friendship with her, we’re given glimpses of their respective, unhappy lives. Carol’s marriage is in its death throes; the first clue that this might be due to her sexual orientation is provided by her husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), who bitterly remarks about her spending time with someone named Abby, who we later discover was her lover. Therese, too, is in a fracturing relationship; her fiancée, Richard (Jake Lacy), is headed to France, but she’s as uninterested in joining him there as she is in the advances of his friend, Dannie (John Magaro).

It’s a considerable feat to make a film about two women falling for each other without once mentioning the word “lesbian”. The closest we get to anything explicit being stated is when Harge attaches a “morality clause” to their divorce proceedings, or when Richard accuses Therese of having a crush on Carol. This restraint emphasizes further the desperate, self-censoring nature of gay life in 1950s America; in very literal terms, the love that dare not speak its name. If Edward Lachman’s camera—peering around corners, or through a succession of windows—makes it seem like we’re spying on these characters, that’s because some were being spied on, by their spouses, even by the government.

The film’s debt to Brief Encounter and the swooning 1950s films of Douglas Sirk notwithstanding, Carol reminded me even more of Wong Kar-Wai, especially the sumptuous melancholia of his 2000 film In the Mood for Love. Like Wong, Haynes piles up minute details to create an atmosphere of erotic intimacy: a hand carelessly resting on a shoulder, strands of Carol’s blonde hair seen in close-up, the dabbing of perfume. Lachman’s cinematography is key, but so is the production and art design, the costuming, and Carter Burwell’s elegant, wistful score; all of which amplify, rather than smother, the indelible lead performances. Mara, shaking off her shyness by degrees, is heartbreaking, though it’s Blanchett’s Carol—as knowing as Norma Desmond (Sunset Blvd. plays on TV briefly), as brittle and perfectly composed as fine china—who struck me as a singular creation. Few actors since Gena Rowlands can play an exposed nerve as well as Blanchett, and it’s something to see her start out the film coolly seductive and then begin to fray as the prospect of losing her daughter becomes very real.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that Carol isn’t in the running for a Best Picture Oscar. The soul of the film is in the little details—the side glances and nervously tapped cigarettes and jazz records playing in the background—rather than the broader, more easily understood movements of plot and character. If you’re watching Carol, watch it closely. Not a lot happens, but an entire world is revealed.

This review appeared in Mint.