Waving the baton

"That’s the Cherniavsky trio."

Khushroo N. Suntook is giving us a tour of his office. It’s been a full workday for the 81-year-old chairman of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai, followed by a long chat with us, and now he has a concert to attend. But aside from a slight hoarsening of his voice, he shows no sign of fatigue or dimming interest.

I stare at the sepia-coloured photograph. I hadn’t heard of the early 20th century trio from Russia, nor do I recognize most of the classical music luminaries on the walls of his office in the NCPA building in Nariman Point (save for tenor Plácido Domingo, standing next to Suntook in a framed picture, both men grinning). Suntook mentions other names: violist Yuri Bashmet, tenor Giovanni Martinelli. He points to a portrait of a striking-looking woman; “Maria Callas,” he says—a name I do know, one of the great divas of 20th century opera. I ask Suntook if he ever saw her perform. “In 1956, during the Mozart bicentenary in Vienna. I met her after the show. She asked me, ‘You listen to music in India?’” he chuckles, shaking his head.

Thanks to Suntook, classical fans in Mumbai have been able to watch quality music performed on a regular basis over the last decade. While still vice-chairman of the NCPA, he founded the Symphony Orchestra of India (SoI). The idea for this germinated with a concert by a Kazakh orchestra which he attended in London in 2004. Suntook was floored by the playing, especially that of violinist Marat Bisengaliev. Backstage, he urged Bisengaliev to bring his orchestra to India. They came down twice, performing first in suits and dresses, and the next time in Indian clothes.

In 2006, Suntook convinced Bisengaliev to start a full-time orchestra in Mumbai comprising Indian musicians and his existing players. The violinist agreed, though he insisted he wouldn’t accept any local players who didn’t meet his standards. “My God, the auditions were a pain,” Suntook says. “He just wouldn’t pass anybody. Finally, we ended up with six or eight.” Today, that number has increased to 16 full-time Indian members, and another five-six seasonal recruits. Still, there’s a long way to go before Indians can constitute the majority, or even a sizeable portion, of SoI. To this end, Suntook has tasked some of the members with travelling to different parts of the country and identifying talent (Assam has been a fruitful hunting ground). He’s also happy that the advanced tuition programme for youngsters that the NCPA has run since 2012 is starting to show results.

It makes sense that Suntook would be the one to start what is billed as India’s “first and only professional orchestra”. He grew up soaked in music in Mumbai, with a piano-playing mother and grandfather, and a classmate in future conductor Zubin Mehta. “I was surrounded by music at home,” he says. “My father was solicitor to lots of foreign companies, so many of them used to bring records.” He took classes with Olga Craen, a celebrated pianist from the 1930s to the 1950s in Mumbai. “I played it very badly, because it was in competition with my tennis, which I played at a good level.” I ask him what that level was. “Let’s say if there was an Indian eleven, I would have been in it,” he replies.

Tennis is one of Suntook’s great passions; he speaks about Ramanathan Krishnan, his favourites John McEnroe and Roger Federer, about organizing a tournament which was delayed due to the theft of Raja Dhanraj Girji’s spittoon. In a conversation littered with casual mentions of famous names, Suntook’s offhand recollection of Rod Laver is a high point. Asked if he ever saw the legendary Australian play, he replies, “I knocked with him at Queen’s Club. The ball used to come like lead.”

Growing up, every night, after dinner, there would be music in the Suntook household. “Parsis are fond of big romantic works—Tchaikovsky, Strauss,” he says. “Of course, God is Beethoven.” He began a record collection in his mid-teens. He remembers buying Aida, spread over 20 records, over six months in single instalments, each costing Rs7. “In those days collecting was tough. Today, you can see the same performance on YouTube for nothing.”

K.N. Suntook is particular about the way he listens to his own music. He has two music systems at his Mumbai home—one for recordings that require transparency and cleanliness, like chamber music; the other one for big orchestral sounds, like Wagner. He has two more systems in his house in Khandala. He cannot put a number on his personal record collection, but says that it must be at least a few thousand.

Suntook’s initiation into the world of business happened by accident. He trained as a lawyer, like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. At the time, his father was a “custodian of enemy property” on behalf of the government of India (properties that belonged to the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, etc., were vested after the war in a legal custodian). One of these companies was Bisleri, which at the time made anti-malarial drugs. One Dr Cesari Rossi of Bisleri decided that India needed bottled water, and convinced Suntook senior to allow his son to help set up the company.

Suntook managed a licence—his tennis matches at the Cricket Club of India came handy—and started the venture (he was then in his mid-20s), establishing a factory in Thane. Voltas was engaged as a distributor. “We used to carry crates to Irani restaurants,” he laughs. Were people willing to shell out a rupee for bottled water in the 1950s? “I thought it would be a long time before India could drink water from the tap,” he says. “I knew it would be a grand success.” Bisleri was launched in India in 1965. Unfortunately, circumstances compelled Suntook to sell his shares in the company. He turned to another tennis partner, biscuit baron Narottam Chauhan. And in 1967, Bisleri was sold to Parle, which was run by Chauhan and his brothers.

Soon after this, Suntook joined the Tatas, with whom he would work in various capacities for the next 30-odd years. The first place he worked at was Lakmé (“I wanted the smallest company”). “I was with Mrs (Simone) Tata,” he says. “The turnout was peanuts then. We turned it into quite a big company.” While at Lakmé, he helped set up pharmaceutical and lyophilization plants, established Tata Pharma, and began exporting cosmetics and medical equipment to Russia. He also served as director on the boards of Tata Oil Mills, Tata Finance, Tata McGraw Hill, Tata Investment Corp., Tata Services and National Peroxide Ltd, and as a president at the Council of Fair Business Practices.

It was after he retired in 2000, at the age of 65, that Suntook was invited to lunch by NCPA chairman Jamshed Bhabha and asked to help out at the institute. “There was no arguing with him,” Suntook recalls. “He said, ‘You realize, my dear boy, that your salary will be one rupee a year?’ I said, ‘Of course.’” He joined as vice-chairman. After Bhabha’s death in 2007, he became the chairman a year later.

In Suntook’s initial years at the NCPA, he had to battle low occupancy and cash flow problems. The centre was “limping along”, he says, on “donations, a small membership fee, extremely low salaries and income from rentals”. Bhabha sold his paintings, which included Husains and Gaitondes, to keep the place afloat. This situation has been remedied to an extent by the sale of Bhabha’s home, which was in legal limbo for years. Today, the annual operating budget is a little more than Rs30 crore. Apart from regular theatre, dance and music performances and film screenings, the NCPA has also hosted a couple of large-scale productions in the last couple of years, including La Bohème Revisited and a stage version of Mughal-e-Azam (which will have its first Delhi show on 8 September). Suntook is looking at a “big bang festival” across disciplines sometime in the near future.

Suntook hasn’t yet decided when he will retire. He would like to see the running of the NCPA professionalized, though he knows they can’t pay the kind of salaries that would attract top-flight executives. He believes the institution needs to concentrate first and foremost on fund-raising. “All of us with some influence will go sooner or later. It is hugely necessary to encourage people to give us legacies. I’ve just heard from a very wealthy friend of mine that he would like to donate all his paintings to us. If we have wealth in that form, I wouldn’t like to sell it, unless we’re on our last legs.”

As he’s saying this, I have a vision of a teenage Suntook counting his annas and buying another precious instalment of Aida. It’s a kind twist of fate that the SoI continues to be guided by someone who’s had a lifetime’s practice balancing finances and a passion for music.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Indu Sarkar: Review

Madhur Bhandarkar’s new film, set during The Emergency of 1975-77, is called Indu Sarkar – a mocking reference, one would assume, to Indira Gandhi’s government of the time. This is the intention, of course, but Indu Sarkar is also the name of the film’s protagonist. Naming your lead Indu and her husband Sarkar just so you can have a mildly clever title for your film – evidence, if any were needed, of how far Indians will go to land a pun.

Indu (Kirti Kulhari), like the rest of India, has chosen Sarkar (in her case, Navin Sarkar, an ambitious mid-level government servant), and is now regretting it. It’s not that the restrictions of the Emergency affect her personally – Navin is a favourite of a minister who’s close to “Chief” (a stand-in for Sanjay Gandhi) – but she’s empathetic to the suffering of those around her, unlike Sarkar and sarkar. She gets caught in the chaos of the forced clearance of the slums near Turkman Gate in Delhi by the authorities; that episode ends with her bringing back two stranded children to her house (Navin, not one for subtlety, asks if her own orphan status has something to do with her bringing destitute kids in).

The film shows us how the official machinery, mostly acting on the orders of Sanjay Gandhi, carried out mass sterilization, razed neighbourhoods, suppressed the media and persecuted its opponents. None of this is untrue, and yet it’s still difficult to take Indu Sarkar seriously. Though the villain in the film is clearly the Congress Party of that era (which is why this film is releasing now, with the BJP in power and one of its vocal supporters heading the Central Board of Film Certification), the language used in the film reflects current biases – “anti-nationals”, “Naxalites” and “activists” are used as if they mean roughly the same thing. And though it’s a shade better than his last, the laughable Calendar Girls, it’s still a Bhandarkar film. It hardly matters that he’s swapped salacious expose for historical statement: the sledgehammer obviousness, the inability to show something without explaining it (walking through flaming debris, one character tells another: “They were going to remove poverty, but here they’re just moving the poor”) is intact.

It’s not like we’re left with much choice in the matter (what kind of monster hates a stuttering orphan patriot?), but Kulhari’s portrayal of Indu is quite affecting; her character’s journey from shrinking housewife to anti-Emergency activist is schematic but believable. The only other performance of note – I wouldn’t go so far as to call it good – is Neil Nitin Mukesh’s Sanjay Gandhi impression. There are some nice touches from cinematographer Keiko Nakahara – a frenetic dash from a press conference, a walk-and-talk with Indu and resistance leader Nanaji (Anupam Kher). But it’s difficult to keep from wondering, even as the film unfolds, what a less sensationalist director might have done with similar material. If the current political climate is to give rise to more films about the Emergency – and we could do with several, just as we could films about other tumultuous periods in our history – one would hope they’re better art.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Lipstick Under My Burkha: Review

About halfway through Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha comes a scene that’s as casually beautiful as anything Hindi cinema has offered this year. Fifty-five-year-old Usha (Ratna Pathak Shah) has come to mall to buy a swimsuit—a terrifying leap outside the safety of her normal existence. But there’s another first that must be negotiated before that: the escalator. As she stares at it with a look of dread, a series of little girls, each holding the next one’s hand, step on to the moving stairs. The last one takes Usha’s hand and she’s borne up, recovering sufficiently to allow herself a shy smile.

You could read all sorts of things into this moment, or nothing at all. This makes it a rarity in Lipstick, a film that’s sure about what it’s saying, and which says it clearly and loudly at every turn. Female desire, in all its forms, is the fulcrum around which the film’s four stories turn: college-goer Rehana (Plabita Borthakur) wants to wear jeans and sing Zeppelin and jam with drummer Dhruv (Shashank Arora); Leela (Aahana Kumra) is engaged to a man she barely knows and in heated love with another; Shireen (Konkona Sensharma) is trying to get her brutish husband to be a little nicer to her; and Usha is balancing being the unofficial matriarch to the apartment complex in which all these characters live with lusting after a much younger man and reading steamy paperbacks.

The downside to making a film with intersecting but nonetheless separate storylines is that it’s difficult not to compare them to each other, to re-edit one’s own film even as the one in front of you unfolds. Though each of the stories represents a markedly different situation, the Rehana and Shireen strands are restrictive in ways that the other two aren’t. In showing how these two characters must deal with the inflexibility of society, Shrivastava (who’s also the screenwriter) opts for an inflexibility of characterization that stifles the stories. In both cases the oppressors—nightmare conservative parents in Rehana’s case, a despicable husband for Shireen —are so unvaryingly unpleasant and narrow-minded that there’s a feeling of watching a game whose outcome is pre-decided.

The other two stories, however, are wonderfully constructed and executed. Leela’s moral quandary is complicated by the fact that both her options are flawed but not without merit: boyfriend Arshad (Vikrant Massey) is tempestuous and clearly unreliable, yet has undeniable charm; fiancée Manoj (Vaibbhav Tatwawdi) is thoughtful and sweet but also hopelessly square (when he shows Leela his home, there’s a lovely shot of a group of senior citizens silently watching TV, a vision of her future which sends her right back into Arshad’s arms). Leela herself is a fascinating character, prone to making potentially life-altering decisions on the spur of the moment. This results in one of the film’s most whistle-worthy scenes, when, after vacillating between passion and stability, she goes with stability and supplies the passion herself.

All the protagonists in Lipstick place themselves in varying degrees of risk, but none has quite as much to lose as Usha. A widow, a hard-nosed businesswoman and the neighbourhood bua-ji, she can’t help but read soft-core romance novels at night. When she comes across a doltish swim instructor (Jagat Singh Solanki), she buys a bathing costume and starts taking classes with him. Soon, she’s calling him anonymously at night for phone sex. It’s unlikely this particular scenario—a woman in her mid-50s lusting after a young stud—has ever been attempted in this fashion in Hindi cinema. And it might have seemed too cruel or silly here had it not been for Ratna Pathak Shah. In her quiet way, Pathak has become one of the most reliable character actors in India today. Her Usha—hesitant yet impelled by desire—is a baring of the soul that’s as fearless as it is heart-breaking. It also makes for a great contrast with the brassiness of Kumra, who supplies the film’s other standout performance.

Lipstick isn’t much for obscuring its message; the audience is kept abreast of the action at nearly every step. Purely filmic solutions—like the sound of a drill or a train to convey mental agitation—are few, and sometimes the dialogue is so direct it grates (Shireen’s boss at the department store asks her: “Do you only intend to keep having children or do you want to be a sales trainer?”). The setting, Bhopal, is shorn of local colour until it could be any middle-class neighbourhood in any first- or second-tier Indian city. Perhaps this is deliberate—using a place that isn’t Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata as a sort of representative space free of audience associations. Still, it feels like a missed opportunity. Lipstick is at its best when it’s being specific. Early in the film, it’s hinted that Leela’s mother has an unusual profession. I won’t spoil the revelation, but it’s the sort of detail that adds virtually nothing to the plot but nevertheless remains lodged in one’s mind.

This review appeared in Mint.

World War II, as it happened

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) doesn’t have combat scenes but it is in many ways a war film. It begins with a US soldier, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), returning home from World War II. In a veterans’ hospital, a doctor asks him about headaches and a crying spell. Freddie dismisses this at first, but then admits these might have been brought on by “nostalgia”. It’s a strange word to encounter in this context, unless you’re aware that the medical term for various PTSD symptoms was, for centuries, nostalgia.

These scenes in The Master were inspired by a 1946 documentary called Let There Be Light. It was directed by John Huston, one of five American film-makers tapped by the US government to help with the war effort at the start of the 1940s. Just how illustrious a bunch this was becomes clear when you consider that Huston, director of The Maltese Falcon, was the least well-known of the five. John Ford was already considered the greatest director of Westerns ever. George Stevens was the first to pair Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, in Woman Of The Year. William Wyler had directed Dodsworth; Frank Capra had won Oscars for It Happened One Night and Mr Smith Goes To Washington.

How these five directors went about creating Allied propaganda is told in the three-part documentary Five Came Back. The series, based on a 2015 book of the same name by Mark Harris (who has also written the script for the show), is available on Netflix, as are all the films made by the five. Taken together, they offer fascinating insight into an initiative that used everything from scratchy newsreels to Hollywood spectacle to inspire the troops and reassure the public.

No doubt anticipating an audience that wouldn’t know Stagecoach from Jezebel, the show assembles five recent directors to talk about the original quintet. And so we get the dizzyingly starry line-up of Steven Spielberg on Wyler, Francis Ford Coppola on Huston, Guillermo Del Toro on Capra, Paul Greengrass on Ford and Lawrence Kasdan on Stevens (Meryl Streep does the narration). Even if you’re somewhat familiar with Allied wartime films, the details revealed are fascinating: how, for instance, Ford smuggled out his film in tobacco cans so that he could cut it the way he wanted instead of the army tampering with his vision, or how Wyler went deaf in one ear filming Thunderbolt.

Laurent Bouzereau directs the three 50-minute episodes in roughly chronological fashion, switching between the different film-makers’ stories. He does an efficient job, though it must be said that Five Came Back lacks the depth and ambition of recent extended documentaries. It’s a pity this material wasn’t developed beyond two-and-a-half-hours: we barely scratch the surface of what the Axis powers were doing in their propaganda. The only discussion of American propaganda through cartoons is Private Snafu; it would have been fascinating to learn more about the wealth of wartime—often racist—animation that came out of the US.

Watching Five Came Back, it’s difficult not to think of later films that carry their markings. In the second episode, it’s revealed that the lifelike combat scenes in The Battle Of San Pietro were faked by Huston. Was Clint Eastwood aware of this when he made Flags Of Our Fathers, a section of which is about the falsification of the Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph? Coppola mentions Huston’s ingenuity in getting his soldiers to look directly at the camera—something no “actor” would do; a little later, we’re shown a clip from Apocalypse Now, with Coppola playing a director and shouting, “Don’t look in the camera”. When Spielberg discusses a scene in Wyler’s Memphis Belle in which a pilot ejects out of a B-52, the image that jumps forth is that of Frank Powers trying to escape his plane in Bridge Of Spies.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is in theatres this weekend, and it should be fascinating to see what this trickiest of modern directors does with the most straightforward of genres. Ever since All Quiet On The Western Front, ambitious directors of all stripes—from Terrence Malick to Kathryn Bigelow—have looked to shape, energize and subvert the combat narrative. Five Came Back takes us back to the beginning, when a small group of directors created the DNA of the modern combat film.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Jagga Jasoos: Review

There’s a moment, some 10 minutes into Jagga Jasoos, which will probably represent a way into the film for some, and a departure point for others. Anurag Basu’s film, his first after 2012’s Barfi!, begins with a botched arms drop in Purulia, West Bengal, in 1995. We see the incident first, then the reports on TV, during which something strange happens. As Pritam’s music swells in the background, newscasters and studio guests start to sing their lines instead of speaking them.

If viewers laugh at this spot of invention, and not with it, the film could be in trouble. In this moment Basu is signalling two things to his audience: that Jagga Jasoos will be fairy-tale whimsical, and that it’s a wall-to-wall musical. The first isn’t too much of an issue: when you have 34-year-old Ranbir Kapoor playing a schoolkid and Katrina Kaif as a successful investigative journalist, what’s a little more suspension of disbelief? The second barrier could prove trickier. Dialogue and music intruding on each other’s space is the Hollywood conception of a musical. We’re used to song and dance in our films, but only as self-contained packages. We may move like some combination of James Brown and Fred Astaire, but we don’t sing dialogue.

In Basu’s film, almost everything is sung. Jagga (Kapoor), an orphan who lives in a hospital in Ukhrul, Manipur, has a debilitating stutter. At the suggestion of a kindly gent (the terrific Saswata Chatterjee)—whom we saw in the opening arms drop—he attempts to sing his thoughts, and finds he can do so without faltering. This is an idea that’s been explored in films from Rocket Science to The King’s Speech, though I haven’t seen it used as all-consumingly as it is here. Nearly all of Jagga’s spoken lines from this point on are rapped or sung; more often than not, those replying to him end up singing too.

Though the musical conceit is new, the palette is familiar. The surfeit of charm, the piling up of eccentric detail, the manicured beauty of every frame—all of this seems like a continuation of the Barfi! aesthetic developed by Basu, cinematographer Ravi Varman, editors Akiv Ali and Ajay Sharma, and designers Rajat and Parijat Poddar. Not that outside influences aren’t easy to spot. “Wes Anderson-like” as shorthand for studied whimsy has long passed the point of overuse, but the parallels between Jagga—a gifted schoolboy who’s serious like a grownup—and Rushmore’s Max are impossible to ignore. There’s the obvious reference to Tintin in Jagga’s talent for detection, and in the tuft of hair sticking out the side of his head. There’s also a dash of Indiana Jones in the film’s make-it-up-as-you-go-along plot, which is ostensibly about Jagga and his journalist friend, Shruti (Kaif), investigating an international arms cartel.

Most Hindi films feed us our dramatic vegetables with the tacit understanding that dessert is soon to follow. Jagga Jasoos, though, has no use for a balanced diet: it’s all dessert, all the time. Like a less frenetic Michel Gondry film, the screen is constantly coming alive with little bits of invention. Many of these details serve no dramatic purpose—you can almost picture Basu saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a Russian dance troupe swaying to "Kalinka" on a train moving through the African countryside?” and his producers mopping their foreheads. This is a film with giraffes, leopards, elephants and ostriches; a clock-tower scene out of Vertigo; a biplane (because biplanes are cool); a fictional region in Africa called Shundi, which is likely a reference to the magical kingdom in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Baagha Byne.

Is everything weaved together successful? Not quite. The political references are largely toothless and perfunctory, except for one song about farmer suicides and people dying in riots, which is so extreme a mismatch with the material that it took my breath away. The singing stratagem occasionally gets in its own way, with dramatic scenes rendered silly by characters breaking into song. There’s also the baffling decision to cast, opposite Bollywood’s nimblest male star, the slow-reacting, risk-averse Kaif. Still, when it’s firing, Jagga Jasoos taps into the sort of rhythm that propels scenes from within—whether it’s a simple gag, like a police officer trying to figure out which of his six phones is ringing, or a setpiece, as when Jagga and Shruti, running from a gunman, find themselves on stage and improvise a little dance. Kishore Kumar did something similar in the Woh Ek Nigah Kya Mili sequence in 1962’s Half Ticket. It’s nice to know that, these many years later, Hindi cinema hasn’t lost the ability to be sublimely ridiculous when it wants.

This review appeared in Mint.

Mom: Review

In its response to the issue of women’s safety, Indian cinema lately has been a bit of superego and a whole bunch of id. Pink was a critical breakdown of the problem, and was rare for holding out the promise of justice actually being served. Few other films have been that optimistic. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen no less than three features—the latest being Ravi Udyawar’s Mom—in which a lone woman is forced into a car by a group of men. None of these films present any response to injustice except for nihilism and revenge. Playing on the public’s deep-rooted mistrust of the law and order and justice system in this country, particularly when it comes to women’s safety, and a media climate that’s more strident by the day, our films are placing a pretend gun in our hands and saying, if you had the chance, would you?

Film has always been an outlet for viewers to be more potent than they are in real life, where they’re bound by laws and systems. Mom devotes almost half its running time to show how ineffective it believes these systems are, before it allows its titular character to start bypassing them (the ease with which she does so is another indictment of their ineffectiveness). Unlike Pink, which showed the failure of the system but ultimately voted for its relevance, Mom goes the way of Maatr, a revenge thriller with a shared theme from earlier this year.

The mom in Udyawar’s film is actually “ma’am”—at least that’s what Arya insists on calling her step-mother, and her teacher at school, Devki (Sridevi). In the opening scene, Arya is sent a lewd message by a classmate. Devki takes the phone from the offending student, Mohit, and calmly drops it from the window. Though Arya is as embarrassed as Mohit, this incident is one of the triggers for the film’s horrific central event. In a series of distressingly well-choreographed scenes, Arya is abducted by Mohit, his cousin and two others from a party, and bundled into a car. She’s raped, beaten and left in a ditch.

It’s only when Arya’s assailants are identified, arrested and, after a fast-tracked trial, declared innocent that Mom reveals its true face. What was till now a wrenching family drama morphs into a revenge thriller, with Devki tracking down the four men and finding creative ways to make them suffer. She’s helped in this by a private detective named Dayashankar, played by a semi-unrecognizable Nawazuddin Siddiqui, sporting a high hairline and prominent front teeth. The pivot to genre film is signalled via an exchange between the two just before intermission. “God isn’t everywhere,” Devki tells the Bholenath-invoking private eye. “That’s why he made mothers,” Dayashankar replies.

Like Kahaani’s Vidya, a modern-day Durga, Devki is both mother and avenging god. This is made clear not only through choice of character name—Devaki is the mother of Krishna, and therefore not far from a god herself—but also when Dayashankar and her meet in a gallery in front of an abstract painting of a particularly grisly episode from the Mahabharata. Though Dayashankar can’t see it, Devki knows exactly what it is: Draupadi bathing her hair in the blood of Dushasana, her violator. Mythology doesn’t get much pulpier, or provide a better basis for the revenge narrative.

If you believe that rapists should be castrated or given the death penalty—not necessarily by the state—you’re the choir Mom is preaching to. If you aren’t, you’ll have a lot to wrestle with, not least the law’s approval of Devki’s actions. Either way, this is a taut thriller, with Udyawar showing a flair with for economical unbroken shots (the hard-edged cinematography is by Anay Goswamy). Sridevi delivers an appropriately strained performance, and Sajal Ali is harrowing as Arya. Akshaye Khanna is memorably (though probably not intentionally) weird as a police inspector with a faraway look on his face, while Siddiqui starts off as comic relief before creating, as only he can, a startlingly vivid character in just a handful of scenes.

Mom is a strange brew: audience-appeasing thriller, relationship drama and social commentary all rolled into one. To Udyawar’s credit, he manages to make it look cohesive, even as he struggles to contend with the moral quagmire of revenge and opts instead for the escape of pulp.

This review appeared in Mint.

The classroom in French cinema

In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard, then a critic, and a year away from launching one of the most significant film careers ever, wrote a polemic for the French magazine Arts. Addressing the film-makers whom he and his cohorts at Cahiers Du Cinéma had sarcastically dubbed the “tradition of quality”, he wrote: “We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent; in other words, things as they are.”

Godard’s phrasing of this complaint is revealing. He isn’t disappointed in the old guard, or angry at them. He can’t forgive them for what they’ve done to his cinema. And he wasn’t the only one at Cahiers taking such matters to heart. In 1954, in an essay titled “A Certain Tendency Of The French Cinema”, François Truffaut attacked “le cinéma de papa (daddy’s cinema)”. “Aurenche and Bost are essentially literary men,” he wrote, “and I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by underestimating it” (italics mine).

That article brought Truffaut welcome notoriety a few years before his debut film, The 400 Blows, played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 and alerted the world to the French New Wave. It was also notable for a phrase he uses in it: “la politique des Auteurs”—essentially, a policy of treating directors with a distinctive visual style as auteurs, or authors, and regarding them as superior to directors who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) put their stamp on source material. The Auteur Theory, as it came to be known, became one of the central theses of modern cinema.

No one takes cinema quite as seriously as the French. Certainly, this is reflected in critical thinking about film, which is dominated by ideas birthed in France. Auteurism—which grew out of the critical work of André Bazin, Truffaut’s mentor, in the 1940s—might be the most influential concept to emerge from the country, but consider the other French terms that have crept into the global lexicon. Film noir, that most American genre, was a term coined in France when post-war critics started noticing a predominance of downbeat, shadowy films from the US and called them noir (black). Montage, which came from the French monter (to mount or assemble), is the worldwide term for a rapid succession of images; a fundamental editing theory is the Soviet system of montage. Even mise-en-scène—basically, everything in front of the camera—occasionally escapes the confines of academic film writing to confuse lay readers.

That the French have been, and remain, central to the critical discourse surrounding cinema is not surprising. To use a highly reductive analogy: If American films are about people doing things, French films are about the discussion of ideas. If you look at their films carefully, you can see where this argumentativeness comes from. I don’t know any other cinema, especially in recent years, that’s had as many charged scenes set in classrooms as the French.

It was Laurent Cantet’s The Class which placed this idea in my head. In 2008, the year when Cantet’s film won the Palme d’Or, I had started to move my world cinema intake beyond the Bergmans and Fellinis. The Class thrilled me in ways that I wouldn’t have expected a gritty-looking film about a man teaching a group of inner-city children to do. The back-and-forth between the professor and his students was unpredictably electric—a discussion about Anne Frank, for instance, ends up as a snapshot of modern-day, multicultural France in all its complexity.

From that point on, I started noticing classroom scenes in all sorts of French films. Sometimes these were central to the narrative—as in The Class, or Nicolas Philibert’s excellent documentary, Être Et Avoir, which unfolds over a year in a rural preschool—or used ironically, or as a premonition. In Jeune & Jolie, the grave central character, who will soon start working as an escort, recites Rimbaud: “No one’s serious at seventeen”. Blue Is The Warmest Colour, about the sexual awakening of a young student, has a reading of Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie De Marianne (which is echoed in the French title of the film, La Vie d’Adèle). “I am a woman, and I tell my story,” a student says aloud. “Among the young men I attracted was one I myself noticed. My gaze fell upon him in particular. I didn’t realize the pleasure I procured.” Replace “him” with “her” and it’s almost a prediction of Adele’s first glimpse of her soon-to-be lover Emma.

It isn’t just that classrooms are featured in these films, it’s the argumentativeness of the people in them that’s indicative of a culture that thrives on debate and deconstruction. This could range from the philosophical arguments in Things To Come to the bruising scene in Divines, in which the motormouth protagonist, Dounia, demolishes her teacher’s self-control. Though classrooms may figure prominently in French films, they aren’t treated as a hallowed space. It’s worth remembering that one of the foundation texts of French cinema, Jean Vigo’s Zéro De Conduite, was a celebration of student anarchy—as was the equally influential film it inspired, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.

I happened to be in France last month. Speaking to a dentist who worked in Paris, I mentioned how fascinating it was to see ideas debated by students in film after film. He replied that it wasn’t surprising—that structuring a cogent argument and debating it, often without any urgency to arrive at a solution, was something the French placed a premium on.

A cinema that’s about ideas, and a country that takes seriously the idea of cinema (and not just movie-going)—the evidence is everywhere. In Paris, I visited the Cinémathèque, home to 40,000 films, 500,000 photographs and 30,000 film-related documents, and the Librairie du Cinéma du Panthéon, a film-themed book store whose owner casually informed me that there were 15-20 repertory theatres in the vicinity (there isn’t a single dedicated repertory in Mumbai).

On Deauville beach in Normandy, I came across signs commemorating the legendary Jean-Pierre Melville and Anna Karina, both of whom had shot films there. Walking past the mk2 theatre in Paris, I noticed their dream line-up of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and I Am Not Your Negro. My favourite sighting, though, was in Châtelet, Paris. From high up on a wall, Richie Tenenbaum gazed down upon college-goers blowing off steam on a Friday night. Even the film graffiti there has good taste.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge as part of a series on world cinema.