Follywood?

THE MURKY NEXUS OF POLITICS AND PONZI SCHEMES
IN THE BENGALI FILM INDUSTRY

“WE ARE A  BIG HAPPY FAMILY!” declares Saiful Alam, after he has waved away my apologies for turning up at his office unannounced. “This place had nothing, just barren land,” he says, pointing through his window at Duki, a village of 200 households near the sal forests of Goaltore and Arabari in West Bengal’s tribal-dominated Paschim Medinipur district—where a third of the population lives below the poverty line. “We gave the people jobs. We put up water pumps. We send our ambulance for the sick. We feed the hungry,” he reels off, even before I can ask him a question.

The eager, middle-aged man could pass off as a missionary in this wilderness—buffeted by a war against Maoist insurgents that killed nearly 700 people from 2005 to 2012, according to conflict watchdog South Asia Terrorism Portal. Except Alam is the general manager of a film city—at 2,700 acres, “the world’s largest”—owned by the financial services-to-fly ash conglomerate Prayag Group.

Designed by Bollywood art director Nitish Roy—and with Shah Rukh Khan as its mascot—the film city’s first phase cost Rs 1,000 crore. Two more phases are on the drawing board, requiring another Rs 2,000 crore. (Fortune India could not independently verify those numbers.) Apart from Duki’s welfare, the money pays for 50 custom-designed sets, eight landscaped gardens and artificial water bodies, postproduction studios, a helipad, a dummy railway station with a train, luxury hotels, museums on Indian dynasties, life-sized models of famous Indian temples, and, for good measure, 110 miniatures of landmarks from across the world.

The opulence sticks out, and not just because of its immediate milieu. The economy of Bengal went all but bankrupt in 2012, the year when Khan unveiled the film city in a high-voltage function featuring a bevy of stars from Bollywood and Tollywood—the Bengali film industry, named after capital Kolkata’s Tollygunge studio neighbourhood. Stillborn projects saw investments crash to a 10-year low of Rs 312 crore, from over Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 15,000 crore in the previous two years.

The flight of capital has in fact been the biggest bugbear for chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who came to power in 2011 promising development after three decades of chronic deindustrialisation
under the Left Front. But since then, marquee developments across sectors—from the state’s
largest ever private investment by JSW Steel to an Infosys campus—have failed to take off.

Though the government claims a long list of “proposed investments”, there are widespread
reports that investors are spooked by Banerjee’s strictures against land acquisition, which famously forced Tata Motors out of the state in 2008. The dereliction of the state’s few existing bellwethers—notably, the recently shuttered Ambassador and Shalimar Paints factories—hasn’t helped. Add to that the debt—the Economic and Political Weekly puts it at 37.5% of the domestic product, twice the average of all Indian states—and it’s difficult to overstate the crisis.

But, as the film city’s sprawling grounds testify, things were very different in the movies. Data on the largely unorganised sector remains notoriously scant. But a report by consultancy firm Deloitte and advocacy body Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) says budgets of Tollywood’s biggest films topped Rs 6 crore in 2011, soaring nearly 300% over the previous year. Total investments touched Rs 150 crore—a 20% spike y-o-y. The industry produced 122 certified films—10% more than the previous year and nearly three times the number four years ago.

In 2012, Tollywood delivered its biggest ever hit, Shree Venkatesh Films’ (SVF) Awara—a remake of a Telugu action film—starring superstar Jeet, which reportedly grossed Rs 8.5 crore in theatrical collections. (SVF says it broke that record the very next year, when its adventure flick Chander Pahar, headlining reigning heartthrob and Paschim Medinipur lad Dev, grossed Rs 20 crore. With a budget of Rs 15 crore, it’s also Tollywood’s costliest film ever.) Bengali films also attracted plum satellite rights, opening up a new revenue stream, though those numbers are impossible to get. The windfall was played up all across the media—even nationally—as a miracle in the state’s industrial wasteland.

In business terms, Tollywood was still negligible compared to the south: Attarintiki Daredi, 2013’s biggest Telugu hit, for instance, alone cost Rs 55 crore and raked in Rs 187 crore. (Apart from the fact that remakes of Telugu movies are a staple here, the comparison with the Telugu industry [which also calls itself Tollywood] is pertinent, because both languages are spoken by about 8 crore people in India.) But given the gloom in other sectors, the industry’s real value went way beyond just numbers.

“Good-looking heroes and heroines, who spoke Bengali and romanced in posh locations in Turkey, Greece, or Italy, gave new dreams to the youth in Bengal’s villages,” says Himanshu Dhanuka, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer from National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, who runs Eskay Movies, a leading production house.Critics found the trend crude—Subhajit Chattopadhyay, who teaches film studies at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, says Tollywood reduced “the reality of the youth to malls and coffee shops”—but the embattled chief minister sensed the chance to fashion a brand-new image for the state.

During her land agitation days, Banerjee had developed a strong support base among Bengal’s traditional opinion-shapers: its artists and intellectuals. Her party, the Trinamool Congress, had three MPs from Tollywood in the previous Lok Sabha. Now, she started cultivating an unprecedented spate of heavyweight celebs, notably Dev—who won the 2014 Lok Sabha polls on a Trinamool ticket—and National Award-winning actor Mithun Chakraborty, whom Banerjee nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Several others were installed at assorted high offices: sheriff of Kolkata, working president of the Trinamool Youth Congress, members of the state women’s commission, even president of the State Council for Vocational Education and Training.

The plan wasn’t restricted to Tollywood: Even before Prayag signed him, Banerjee appointed megastar Khan the state’s brand ambassador, building on the popularity of his IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders. But while her proximity with stars generated intense commentary—a lot of it derisive, and involving predictable comparisons with South India’s cinema-politics nexus—a much wider gambit barely managed mention: She pitchforked cinema as Bengal’s flagship industry at the high table of economic diplomacy.

That happened in a May 2012 meeting in Kolkata with U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, where Banerjee threw her weight behind “cooperation between Hollywood, Bollywood, and Tollywood” to build showbiz infrastructure. Backing from Khan—who called the chief minister “sweet, loving, and feisty” in an e-mail to me—impressed Clinton, and she promised to seriously consider the proposal.

Buoyed by the signals, Banerjee declared in November that the entertainment industry was ready to shape a new era in West Bengal. The following month, in a symbolic coup, the government announced that Hollywood had expressed interest in partnering two upcoming, state-endorsed film cities.

That’s when reality caught up. Exhibit A: the world’s largest film city. Soon after its gala inauguration, its Facebook page and Twitter handle went dead. (Khan did not answer my question on the project). There’s no website, no contacts. Prayag’s corporate site lists a number, but no one responds.

I visit its office at Kolkata’s busy India Exchange Place, and find it locked from the inside. A few suspicious guards tell me to look up a hotel owned by the group on the outskirts. No, they don’t have a number. I find one online, but no one answers there either. That explains why I had to sneak up on Alam; I had no idea the man even existed.

And yet, none of the obscurity is an accident: Prayag is one of the companies named in Bengal’s multibillion-dollar chit fund scam, which broke with an RBI red alert soon after the chief minister’s “new era” speech, and exposed in its wake Tollywood’s sordid underbelly. Estimates sugggest chit funds produced a whopping 60% of the films in the industry’s go-go years. Others say they pumped in Rs 400 crore to Rs 500 crore. Everybody wanted a piece—till one day, as spectacularly as it had started, the party was over.

National Award-winning director Goutam Ghose, whose 2010 film Moner Manush was produced by one such company, Rose Valley, calls the boom a gigantic lie. “It was all media hype. Our revenue is a pittance. Theatres are closing down … things are actually a mess.”

CINEMA IN BENGAL dates back to the 1890s, coinciding with its beginnings in India. Ghose points out that in undivided India, Bengali culture, including cinema, extended to Allahabad, Banaras, even Lahore. “The primacy of Kolkata (then Calcutta) in the Raj meant even Hong Kong and Singapore were  considered its outposts.” But later political developments (shifting of the capital, Independence, and the birth of Bangladesh) changed it all.

Most histories of Bengali cinema concentrate on a golden era from the ’50s to the ’80s, when globally feted directors Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak, and legendary actor Uttam Kumar brought cinema to the centre of Bengali identity. But a shortage of sellable icons after them—with the exception of a lone star, Prosenjit, who kept the industry afloat with his prolific, albeit formulaic output—meant Tollywood became culturally and financially stultified.

Most films at this time could only muster shoestring budgets of about Rs 60 lakh. That helped producers stay in the black, but “production values were embarrassing—there weren’t even proper cameras”, says Mahendra Soni, co-founder of SVF.

“Lack of government support during the communist era also hurt the industry,” adds Shrikant Mohta, its other co-founder. “Only a certain kind of cinema shown at Nandan [a government-run cultural centre in Kolkata equated with the city’s famed intellectual elitism] was considered important. Those with any talent fled to Bollywood.”

Exhibitors—the invisible faces of the industry—were the hardest hit. “Theatres barely charged six or eight rupees for a ticket,” says Soni. “They were in such bad shape that women found them unsafe.” Hundreds of theatres shut or switched trades (see graphic); Dhanuka estimates only 300 to 400 screens remain, from nearly 1,500 not so long ago.

Maternal cousins Mohta and Soni—who stepped up from film distribution to production to gain creative ownership—saw opportunity in this chaos. Consensus has it that they triggered the turnaround with their 2002 hit Sathi (reported budget: Rs 1.50 crore, collections: Rs 6 crore), which introduced Jeet after a long drought of fresh faces.

“We took on one problem at a time,” says Soni. “First, we decided not to be stingy—you cannot shoot an adventure film in Alipore Zoo! We invested in digitisation, so that films could be simultaneously released across the state, and distributors and exhibitors wouldn’t lose money. We acquired theatres. We started a Tollywood music channel. We even chased the media to start covering Bengali films again,” en route to building a company with an “annual turnover of Rs 125 crore, growing 15% to 20% year on year”.

Jeet, whose own production house Grassroots Entertainment makes films in collaboration with Reliance Entertainment, says these efforts made Tollywood a viable investment destination. “Earlier, we couldn’t think of releasing a film at more than 30 or 35 centres. Today we see a 200-centre release, so producers can recover money much faster.

National multiplex chains, such as the Rs 1,543 crore Inox Group, played a vital role in the expansion by creating space for a new, urban genre. With that, CEO Alok Tandon says Tollywood became “a balanced market with equal contribution from across regions”.

Apart from Reliance, other national banners such as Mahindra’s Mumbai Mantra Media and Viacom 18 gravitated towards the rising industry, assisted by a slew of local moneybags—education groups (JIS), even kitchenware manufacturers (Bajoria Group). But the biggest cheer was reserved for Bengal’s mushrooming chit funds—perhaps the only other sector that was ‘booming’ in the state.

ESTIMATES OF THE PEAK SIZE of Bengal’s chit fund industry vary wildly, from Rs 10,000 crore to Rs 40,000 crore. The association of such funds with the film business isn’t unique to the state: Ramoji Rao—the founder of Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City, which Guinness still calls the world’s largest—started one, way back in the ’60s. But in hindsight, their unchecked growth in Tollywood—which rolled out the red carpet hastily—always had the makings of a disaster.

Their rise was riveting while it lasted. It helped that most of them, with all the paraphernalia of giant conglomerates, were run by Bengali entrepreneurs, challenging the dominance of Marwaris
who own virtually all big businesses in the state. (Soni, Mohta, and Dhanuka are Marwari too.) Several of them—including scam lynchpin Saradha Group—managed to build staggering connections in the film and media business, as well as a section of the ruling party, adding sheen to their brands. Rose Valley in particular emerged as a pillar of Tollywood, producing 20-odd films through a dedicated public limited company, including multiple National Award winners.

The crackdown after the scam—which has spread to Assam, Odisha, and Jharkhand—gutted dozens of projects, including several by first-time filmmakers. More worryingly, it brought back the spectre of ignominy. As I write this, the Enforcement Directorate is grilling noted actor-director Aparna Sen about her role as editor of a Saradha-owned magazine. A state minister and a Trinamool Rajya Sabha member who edited a couple of newspapers published by Saradha are also being questioned. A Mint report says the government did not act even as Prayag Film City encroached on government land, but Alam denies the allegation.

Arijit Dutta, part time actor, and director of Priya Entertainments, which owns one of Kolkata’s oldest theatres, concedes that most of the chit funds were “fooling around”. He doesn’t blame the industry for being reckless though. “We are not bothered about the source of money. We only want to make more films and generate more jobs.”

Soni says the reversal may not be such a bad thing. “The lure of quick bucks attracted fly-by-night operators who thought films were like gambling. That’s over now.”

BUT GOUTAM GHOSE FEARS the gold rush has set in motion a toxic cycle of greed and oneupmanship. “Our main market is the Bengali middle class. They simply cannot spend so much on movies,” he says. “And yet, hundreds are being churned out every year. Many producers tell me that they can’t even recover the cost of publicity, but feudal egos stop them from admitting it in public.” Industry reports confirm that only two movies—Chander Pahar and Mishawr Rawhosyo, both from SVF—out of about a hundred recovered money in 2013.

Hackneyed remakes of southern films—seen as the only counter to the lavish scale of Bollywood, which is well entrenched in Bengal—have copped much of the blame for the flop show, but Mohta says the real issue is talent. “Everyone thinks they can make movies, but there are only seven or eight good directors. At most they can make 20 movies a year. The other 80 are bound to be trash.”

SVF itself has been accused of pressuring theatres to block other producers, even tearing their posters, using their clout. But Soni laughs it off. “I think of films like the stock market. If the market grows, it helps everyone.”

Everybody I speak to points out that opening up Bangladesh is the only way to stop scrambling over the small market, “but we haven’t shown collective will at the political or industry level”, laments Ghose. That suits Bangladeshi pirates, who are the heaviest uploaders of Tollywood films on the Net—often “sponsored” by Dhaka-based companies.

Mohta and Soni say they have tried to release films in other states—even abroad, à la the southern industry—but those investments have bombed due to poor turnout, despite the two crore-strong Bengali diaspora. “They are still not willing to pay for anything other than Ray or Uttam Kumar.” Bengali films also regularly tour the festival circuit, but the focus is on prizes rather than monetisation. “We have now started selling films on iTunes and Google Play,” says Soni.

In the domestic market, the shrinking share of theatres has led to over-reliance on satellite rights, sold primarily to one channel—Jalsha Movies, owned by STAR. But this year, the channel has cut funding, straining already frayed nerves. “We have great friends in the industry,” Sumanta Bose, the channel’s senior vice president-marketing, tells me, “but the industry’s entire business model cannot depend on satellite.”

There are other things beyond the industry’s control. “Tollywood is not responsible for the state’s poor development,” asserts actor-director Shiboprosad Mukhopadhyay, who also produces his own films. “We depend on Kolkata for 80% of our business. Many talented people want to work here, but we can’t give them the right setup.”

Brand ambassador Khan remains hopeful. “Bengal is an extremely romantic place. Businesses which enhance that romance have a huge opportunity.” Jeet too is categorical it’s just a bad phase. “It’ll take one successful film to stop the noise.” That said, he presses the need for corporate investors, who will professionalise the industry. There’s been some VC and PE talk after the chit bust-up, but things are nascent yet.

THE STATE’S HOLLYWOOD-BACKED film cities haven’t flown. Repeated e-mails and phone calls to the office of the cultural affairs secretary, government of West Bengal, went unanswered. (The chief minister herself oversees the culture ministry.) Meanwhile, Tollywood continues to figure prominently in the chief minister’s master plan to woo investors. Dev and Mohta were part of her maiden foreign delegation last month to Singapore, which also included captains of Bengal industry such as Sanjiv Goenka, chairman, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, and Harsh Neotia, chairman, Ambuja Neotia Group.

The chief minister puts her affinity for the industry down to her belief that it is not inferior to, say, cement or steel. (Fittingly, the Bengali word shilpo stands for both “art” and “industry”.) But not everyone is convinced. “We are a very secular industry,” says Ghose. “Why divide ourselves along party lines?”

Actor-singer Babul Supriyo, who beat the Trinamool candidate from Asansol in the latest polls on a BJP ticket, suspects forced collusion. “These are all my friends, so scepticism is my natural reaction. Take Dev, who is at the peak of his career. Why join politics?” Dev didn’t respond to my interview request.

Others like Dola Mitra, author of the recent book Decoding Didi: Making Sense of Mamata Banerjee, feel Banerjee’s detractors are too harsh. “Her most likely motive for being close to celebrities is the need to be supremely culturally conscientious.”

Mohta confirms what I already know: Notwithstanding the struggling economy, “things have been the reverse for our industry. Didi never says no. In fact she just revamped Kolkata’s historic Technician Studio, which had collapsed during the communist regime. What can the government do beyond creating the right environment?”

But there are signs that Bengal’s culture of mixing politics with business has left the industry vulnerable. In 2012, producer Namit Bajoria (who owns the Kutchina kitchenware brand) was reportedly fined Rs 1.25 lakh by the Technicians’ Guild, a union of professionals, for not carrying enough local crew to Iceland, where his film Hanuman Dot Com was shot. Gaurav Pandey, its director, dubbed the union “a money-extracting machine” in an interview to The Times of India.

BACK IN DUKI, Alam says things are great. “Odiya and Bhojpuri folks are coming here too,” he tells me. “Ramoji is 18 years old. Give us just two.”

His confidence rings true, as his assistant gives me a guided tour of the railway station, the helipad, and the impressive gold-and-crimson colonnades of a China Town. But there are obvious signs of disrepair. “Money has dried up,” the assistant says. Then, just as we pass by a bunch of village boys bathing in a pool, his mobile rings. He says it’s Avik Bagchi, Prayag Group’s CEO, for me.

“How did you raise the Rs 1,000 crore for the first phase?” I ask the man who has been impossible
to reach thus far. “I will have to check my books,” he says. “And what about the next two phases?”
“We are looking at a number of options, including FDI,” Bagchi replies confidently. Nothing then of a September 2013 Sebi order which all but grounded his company. Can I have his number for future correspondence? No, but I can leave mine with Alam.

A week later, I get in touch with Alam one last time to ask whether it’s tough to make movies given his employer’s travails. “There’s no problem because we are an independent entity,” he assures me with characteristic sanguineness. “Dev is shooting here right now. Mithun Da’s next!”

(First published in Fortune India September 2014 issue; photos by Bandeep Singh.)

When an Oscar winner had to go on TV to stop angry people from breaking down theatres

I had interviewed soundman Resul Pookutty soon after he returned having won the Oscar for his work in Slumdog Millionaire. Who says filmy people are shallow?

“The industry may look at me as a soundwallah, but I am actually a very powerful man. I can do a complete analysis of a person just listening to the sounds they make. You’ve got to be very careful when I am around!”

Minutes before the interview, Resul Pookutty narrated his Oscar experience to me, how standing within sniffing distance of Kate Winslet and Steven Spielberg almost made him lose his wits! He sounded completely ordinary, like a friend who is happy to be back in the normal world after a bamboozling alien abduction. Then he started talking about his craft, and a most fascinating, angsty depth replaced the frivolity of that introductory banter.

What is it about sound that attracts you the most?

It started when I was a film student at FTII. Thanks to my physics background, sound appeared a natural choice, and that choice acquired greater significance when I began to understand the emotional power of sound, the fact that here’s a tool that can continuously manipulate audiences, and they don’t even realise it!

As a technician, sound also attracts me for its defining role in cinema as a medium. If you view cinema as a continuum of time and space, then the visuals that you see introduce you to the space element. That is very 2-dimensional, horizontal, you can see it, you can feel it. But sound is spherical, you cannot see it, you can only feel it. In that sense, sound becomes the time element in cinema. It takes you inside the space that the visuals hold up and helps you find emotional content in the scenes. Sound allows me to make something intangible very tangible.

But beyond the creative incentives, it is also a very responsible job. As a sound professional, it is up to me to understand and do justice to an actor’s performance in a given acoustic space. You know what difference a 50mm lens or an 80mm lens can make to an image, but do you know that the perception of an image can also fundamentally change based on whether I use a long-gun
microphone or a short-gun microphone to record the sound? Sound recording then transcends from being a technical job to a function of how well I can relate to and interpret the real intent of a scene. I am constantly listening for something and executing to arrive precisely at that.

At another, and larger, level, working as a sound technician for the past 15 years has also opened up my consciousness to the great Indian tradition of sound. Historically, we were probably the only people in the world for whom sound was everything. All our knowledge came from sound. The Vedas, for instance, were memorised and passed on from generation to generation orally. The verses were organised in a particular way so that they produced a particular kind of sound. We also found out early on that our bodies are the greatest musical instruments. So we started honing them to produce the swaptaswaras, which was our way of reaching Brahma…through the primordial sound Om.

This is a great inheritance, something that I am trying to understand and take forward through my work as a practitioner of sound techniques. It could be through something as banal as a chase sequence, but I feel privileged that I can at least borrow a little bit of our riches in whatever I do. That’s why I referred to my traditional roots in my Oscar acceptance speech too.

Since you mentioned the Oscars, I have often heard people say that the sound of Slumdog is very Indian, and that your win is actually the triumph of a distinctly Indian aesthetic. Do you agree?

I think Slumdog is rather European in its aesthetic, especially in its treatment of sound. Where it is very Indian is in its refusal to shy away from any kind of expression, no matter how high the pitch. The drama, the emotions, the music—everything is relentlessly in your face. That free-flowing sensibility is Indian. Danny Boyle later said that he wanted to dub the whole movie, just like we do with our films. Such kind of understanding of what works with Indians can only come if one has understood our sensibilities. Also, if you take language itself as a unit of sound, as a determinant of the colour and texture of sound, then Slumdog is obviously Indian.

I have often wondered why the Academy chose me for the award. In fact just before the Oscars, I met the legendary sound engineer Ben Burtt at the Cinema Audio Society Awards, and I told him how it appears so unreal to me when I remember how I started out in Mumbai 14 years back, lugging my heavy equipment from location to location like a porter. I feel that my victory is actually a reflection of the willingness of the global sound industry to welcome and acknowledge change. Otherwise what chance did the rough sound of Slumdog have over the sophisticated, epic canvases of movies like Wall-E and The Dark Knight?

When I was working on Slumdog, every day was a huge emotional strain. I often felt like I was failing as a professional. A microphone cannot exactly reproduce the same kind of sound perception that the human brain is capable of registering, and Slumdog is a deeply human movie. I struggled to create this humane perception. After a while, it occurred to me that I should let the movie evolve within the soundscape of Mumbai rather than mechanically recording it. I think the Oscar was a recognition of that idea rather than of any specific aesthetic. When I watch the movie today, I can still spot technically poor dialogue recording. So kudos to the Academy for disregarding all that and showing the discernment to reward the emotional investment that went into the movie.

Be that as it may, you have made sound glamorous. After you won the Oscar, many people have started reaching out for sounds in movies they never heard before. It’s like a whole new door of perception has been opened up for them. But for all the rejoicing and celebration, what is the scene at the grassroots? What is the real state of sound in India?

You know you have put me in a dangerous position by saying that I have made sound ‘glamorous’! No one has said that to me before, and that is just as well because sound in India is light years away from being glamorous. I will tell you the story of one of my most recent films. It was a Malayalam film that came to me right after the Oscars. I wanted to do something different with it, so I took the actors back on location and retook sound shot by shot. It worked wonders. For the first time in my career, I heard about a film being sold, about people flocking to theatres, because a soundman has done a particular sound job. I received massive applause as a technician, and it felt really good. And then things flipped.

One day I got a phone call that in villages and small towns in Kerala, people were breaking down cinema halls because they came to see my film and were let down by the ramshackle state of the sound systems. I had to actually go on TV to pacify the angry crowds.

I had actually seen this coming for a long time. In this multiplex era, while there is a policy governing everything in a theatre—from legroom to fire safety—there is absolutely no policy on technical aspects like sound or projection. It is appalling how trivially these elements are treated. I know only one thing: many people in India are still living off less than twenty rupees a day. In such a setting, if a villager goes to a theater dishing out forty rupees for a movie, the least we can do is to give them the best possible audio-visual experience. But we have absolutely no standards in this industry when it comes to technical finesse.

Let alone involving us technicians in research and development, even after I won the Oscar, no one from the academic fraternity came up to me even for a casual chat. We want to share our knowledge with students and the general community at large, but there is no impetus from anywhere. I feel very strongly agitated about this and have been fighting long over it.

After the fiasco with this particular film, I sent a bunch of letters people had written to me to the Cultural Affairs Ministry asking them for answers…

Do I sense a great deal of frustration hidden somewhere?

Unfortunately, yes. You see it’s simple really. Cinema is an audio-visual medium. As serious professionals, how can we even dream of reaching out to the intended recipients of our work if there are so many barriers in the way? No policies, no regulations, no support structure. We call ourselves an industry; we churn out five hundred movies every year spending a few hundred crores. But why do we need to spend so much on substandard fare? Why can’t we produce fewer movies that are technically perfect and invest in improving our infrastructure?

Forget about all that, we don’t even have anything to document our linguistic diversity. It’s a shame that for a country where dialects change every few kilometers, there is hardly any archival interest in this most basic manifestation of sound. I understand that we are a poor country and there are other priorities, but my suspicion is that the real problem lies in our complacency and lethargy.

That we as a society seem unable to appreciate something as elemental as sound, does it have anything to do with the fact that we are turning into a very loud, cacophonous nation?

But we have always been a loud nation! That’s been our identity, right from the days that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were performed out loudly…or think of the nautanki tradition for that matter…such performances were not ‘genteel’ affairs in any sense. Foreigners still think that the song-and-dance routine in our films is bizarre. But that’s what our ancestry and heritage is all about! We are a nation of performers, singers, dancers.

On an emotional plane, we have always liked expressing ourselves, no holds barred. However, while these performative excesses were and still are popular in the public cultural space, we are also a people who light a lamp at dusk and say a quiet prayer for
everyone’s souls, blocking off all the noise, trying to find order in chaos. That part of our Indianness hasn’t been affected by the cacophony of urban civilisation.

To an extent, technology is playing this ordering hand today. How does that combine with your philosophical approach to understanding our traditions?

Post Industrial Revolution, I think these are the most crucial times in human history. Technology has completely changed our lives, it has given us so many possibilities, so many options. But sometimes I feel that these are not really options, rather they are indecisions. Thanks to technology, we don’t need to make decisions any more. The computer has taken over that part of human intelligence.

A bigger challenge lies in how technology is fast making the faculty of memory redundant. So it’s scary that a whole generation is growing up with these incapabilities, thinking that if a satellite goes off the orbit tomorrow, we will be finished. It’s like living in a conceptual vacuum.

But the good part is, once we understand that there is a huge difference between information and knowledge, and that technology can give us all the information in the world but knowledge is something the human mind is best equipped to process, then technology becomes an exciting tool and not an inhibitor.

Has it ever happened that when you listened to your work later, you wanted to change everything? What  part of your work stays with you at the end of a long day in the studio?

It happens all the time. In fact if you gave me some money and time, I would remix Black from scratch! Thanks again to technology, we can indulge in such fantasies every now and then. Sometimes when we design a track in the studio and mix it around, it feels perfect. Then when we hear it the next day, that magic is gone. So we keep deleting things, removing things from the track, till we are left with that one sound that feels just right. It’s somewhat like how Bergman’s films feel exactly the way they do not so much because of what he chose to include in his frames but because of what he chose to leave out.

My perception of sound changes every day as I imbibe newer sounds for the same experiences, and cinema as a medium allows me to indulge in constant reinterpretation with every new film. That’s why I love my work—it allows me to take everything that the directors and actors have created, compose it all anew, and then do it as differently as I can in the next film. That’s what stays with me at the end of each day.

(First published in the now-defunct UTV World Movies magazine; photo courtesy Kunal Kampani)

Cry Baby and Resul Pookutty

Am I losing it? Why are films making me cry so much?

It was sporadic at first. A scene here, a dialogue there. Now, it’s like I cannot watch any kind of film without breaking out into loud sobs at the slightest provocation. This is not just strange but rather inconvenient as well, given that I mostly watch films while eating dinner.

But first a slight correction: it takes not just any provocation but a happy provocation to cause such outbursts. Sad scenes, people dying, poverty, failures, Fardeen Khan, these things don’t affect me. But whenever there is a moment of epic happiness, that’s it! Take today for instance. I was watching Chak De India while eating tandoori aloo and pulav. (I have been down with a most terrible fever and cold that makes me cough out scary looking phlegm for the past few days, so I was fully relishing my hot meal.) Suddenly, India went a goal down. Nothing happened (I only helped myself to another serving of aloo.) Then suddenly, with about 2 minutes remaining, India equalised. The audience in the stadium went berserk. There was a great deal of fist thumping. I sensed it coming.

In the tiebreaker, India messed up the first two-fifths. Nothing happened (I merely helped myself to some leftover daal). And then they scored three consecutive goals and saved three consecutively too. That did it for me. Just as Shahrukh Khan turned to cast this vague glance at the Tricolour, I started bawling (aloo still in mouth). Trust me, when you have a cold, it’s not a good state to be in.

PS: Quite separately from all this, I “heard” a film for the first time today. Each time the stick hit the ball, cut through air and hit the back of the net, the image became completely irrelevant for me, so rich was this experience. All thanks to Resul Pookutty, whom I had the good fortune of chatting with for almost three hours today. I am just sad that I didn’t do it before he won the Oscar, because now I feel like every other wannabe who wants to get a piece of him. The man is a delight. More about the meeting when the chat is published. Now I must go and cough.

PPS: Gymming is overrated.

Wasteland

Tanmoy Goswami loses his way in no man’s land.

 

“When the sniper reached the laneway on the street level, he felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed….He wondered did he know him. Perhaps he had been in his own company before the split in the army. He decided to risk going over to have a look at him…. A machine gun tore up the ground around him with a hail of bullets, but he escaped. He threw himself face downward beside the corpse. The machine gun stopped.

Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face.”

 

I first read Liam O’ Flaherty’s war story The Sniper in 1999 as part of my tenth board syllabus. I could swear the dead brother in the climax felt mine, such was the awe and shock of that last line which stayed with me for years. Events around the world only added to the macabre feeling. On 1 March 1999, days before my final exams, Rwandan Hutu rebels killed and dismembered eight foreign tourists in Uganda. On 24 March, while I was cramming up the history of the Irish civil war (1922-23) to prepare for ‘reference to context’ questions based on O’ Flaherty’s story, NATO started bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On 7 April, even as I was mourning the end of my favourite language and literature section of the exams, Serbian forces were sealing Kosovo’s border crossings to prevent ethnic Albanians from leaving the region. And on 26 July, when I was trying to convince reluctant parents that I mustn’t be forced to study science, India declared victory in the Kargil war because our army had supposedly killed more Pakistani soldiers than they had ours. In the middle of all this, some people were predicting the end of the world owing to some computer bug. I was struggling to make sense of things. The twentieth century was drawing to a close.

In the final reckoning, and in spite of the best efforts of the global media, it was war and not Y2K that claimed the twentieth century as its own. In the process, it picked up many adjectives, ‘absurd’, ‘insane’ and ‘needless’ being only few, but the truth is this: war was the only phenomenon that had stayed relevant right through those 100 years. Nothing had managed to unite human beings with greater finality than war, not man landing on moon; not the fall of the Empire; not the progress from vacuum tubes to microchips; not even global warming. It was war that had birthed the twentieth century, and only war had the right to lay it to rest.

So the war in erstwhile Yugoslavia and its aftermath (1992-99) came at just the right time, giving the century an apt laying-to-rest as it were. Decades after the world thought it had seen the end of ‘ethnical cleansing’ with the dismantling of the Concentration Camps, thousands of Bosnians (and later, Kosovar Albanians) were murdered in a systematic genocide. The UN, that delicate angel born out of monstrosity, was reduced to nothingness. And the once-formidable Yugoslav nation splintered into tiny pieces ill-equipped to do anything but maniacally wage war to assert their sovereignty, each piece a little no man’s land lobbed about along the trajectory of violence.

Right after the end of the century, Danis Tanovic chronicled a part of the spectacular madness of it all through No Man’s Land (2001), which won the 2002 Oscar for being the best foreign language film. If there were any doubts about war’s continued stranglehold over public imagination, that victory over four feel-good films from India, France, Norway and Argentina should have annulled them. By the time I watched the film five years later though, I was tiring of war. I had realised that war was a pretty good bet to stupefy anyone who had grown up in the twentieth century, a most unfortunate revelation because it immediately deflated the awe and shock of reading the O’ Flaherty story. I had also realised why ‘absurd’, ‘insane’ and ‘needless’ had gotten the better of ‘relevant’ as an adjective for much of what war came to be associated with.

That is not to say No Man’s Land is not a relevant or a well-made film. It is very relevant, if only as a document on the Bosnian crisis, and there is no denying the richness of its dark comedy. But in a world where war has become the ultimate metanarrative, the film’s little jokes and allusions appear staid, like a déjà vu which actively tells you it will show you nothing new.

Three soldiers––one Serbian and two Bosnian, one of them lying on a bouncing mine––are trapped in a trench between their lines, inventing charades for help that never comes. It is not too difficult to read the parallels with a certain pair of tramps waiting for Godot (Beckett’s existentialist outcry was published in 1952), or with the marooned American and Japanese soldiers forced to partner each other for survival in the World War II film Hell in the Pacific (made by John Boorman in 1968). There are other references straight out of a soldier’s diary: sample the scene where an anxious guide asks a bunch of lost soldiers to put out their cigarettes in order to stay invisible in the night fog. Remember Hector Hugh Munro and his alleged last words before being shot dead during World War I: “Put that bloody cigarette out!”? Or for those who have read it, even the sniper in O’ Flaherty’s story who gives in to the temptation of lighting a cigarette in the darkness of the parapet, only to be shot at from the opposite terrace? Then there’s UN bashing galore, a glimmer of friendship between two bitter adversaries, soldier banter around women and their photographs, media inanities over war and even a joke on another war (the one in Rwanda)––all of which together feel like a point stretched too far, even straight out of a JP Dutta canvas. Yes, war is evil, and yes, no one cares for the puny soldiers stuck in no man’s land, but is that really an education for someone who has studied a history textbook half-full of accounts of Nazism and Fascism? Or who used to have nightmares after reading Eliot’s Waste Land?

But perhaps I am being harsh on the film because I am generally done with all things war. Perhaps the point is exactly that war restricts expressive choices, stunts your ability to receive the ‘message’ and drowns you in fatigue. You set out to write about an acclaimed war film, and you end up rambling about the wars you remember from your lifetime. So you give up, and you wait for the next emblem of apocalypse, and you can only hope it rides on a different evil, one that can shock like the face of the first brother you killed.

Published in the UTV World Movies Magazine, December 09 issue, as a companion piece to the cover story on No Man’s Land.

Also Ran

Lola reminds Tanmoy Goswami of another common-man runner, who scampered through the business of life as if it were a box of chocolates.

The first time I sat down to watch Run Lola Run, I kept expecting to see Tom Hanks.

The name of the film had floated into my consciousness years back, most probably during one of those depraved post-dinner soirees in the college hostel when names like ‘Lola’ made unique sense. Just the title—invoking images of a running Lola customised to suit our individual fantasies—made us look for the CD in the neighbourhood video store. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t have it, although we did return with a few close matches featuring Bo Derek and Kimi Katkar.  I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because you simply did not get German movies in video rental stores ten years back, not even if they had names like that.

After I left college—and the hostel—my fantasies became more accessible. For starters, I now had my own laptop with my own superfast broadband. Suddenly, the world seemed to be exploding with all manners and forms of running women. Lola stayed on as a hazy, fond adolescent memory, like an obscene joke only your closest comrades are privy to, but she was still faceless.

It was at this time that films began to claim all my nights. After five years of reading English Literature, books had started to repel me, and cinema cashed in on this vacuum. Aided by IMDB, I drew up a list of 250 must-watch films, one per night, hoping to end what seemed like a lifetime’s cinematic starvation. A week after starting this regime, I encountered Forrest Gump for the first time.  He had been running for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 16 hours.

Forrest Gump won hands, or rather, feet down when it came to my generation’s runner heroes. Remember that running scenes in Bollywood films mostly involved a little street-hardened boy running away from the bad guys and ending up as a full-grown Amitabh Bachhan by the end of the credit sequence. Compared to this high-voltage saxophone-and-banjo routine, Forrest Gump’s sprint looked almost mundane—but he made you want to run with him, if only so you could also join him when he said “Now you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows.”

I owe not a little to Forrest Gump for helping me rush through those first 250 films in a little over three months. Soon, I was looking for more like him. Someone told me Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams aboard Chariots of Fire could come close, but it turned out they were too grandiose for me to relate to them. Then suddenly, serendipity struck through the unlikely route of the Bengaluru Goethe Institute, and Lola came running back into my life. She had only 20 minutes to reach the finish line.

That gap of 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, 15 hours and 40 minutes aside, there isn’t much separating Lola from Forrest Gump. Comparing the cinematic merit of the two films they inhabit would be as ridiculous as comparing Carl Lewis with PT Usha, because they ran—and won—very different races. One ran in the midst of the Vietnam War, the other merely across a nondescript German town. One ran to defy bullies and win rugby games among other reasons, the other with the singular aim of saving a life. But they both ran because that’s all they could do and not to establish any heroic agenda. If anything, Lola could do with a meeting with Forrest Gump. He would tell her how she must put her triumph aside and learn to run “for no particular reason”, and maybe years later she would be found telling her friends “…[f]rom that day on, if I was ever going somewhere, I was running!”

Published in the UTV World Movies Magazine, January 2010 issue, as a companion piece to the cover story on Run Lola Run.

Why Love Aaj Kal made me feel good about myself

I watched Love Aaj Kal with two deeply lovestruck souls today, and if that left any feeling of incompleteness in the experience, the Friendship Day SMS from one of those unknown numbers during the interval certainly made up for it. More than completing the cheese extravaganza all around though, the SMS made me think about why I – an opinionated and brutally frank friend of these two mushed out people – was watching Love Aaj Kal with them on this very day.

Chew on this. The young Sardar Veer Singh from the ’60s Delhi is sorrounded by a bunch of fawning friends, who are basically sponges without any independent personality. Yesmen all, they barely speak except to express approval or empathy for whatever their heroic buddy whips up. They always stay in the background, like a chorus incapable of disagreement or contrarian advice. At least one of them is always a buffoon, whose stupidity helps the hero feel good about himself. This is indeed a recurring trope in the “yaar/saheli”-infested world of Bollywood from the 60s through the late 90s.They are ciphers, a waste of screen space except for the relief provided by their motley clothes and make-up and their total lack of brains and/or beauty which helps project the hero/heroine in all their glory.

Now think about Love Aaj as opposed to Love Kal. Jai and Meera play out their destiny in a virtually friendless world, and only a handful of friends get screen space alongside the protagonists, but not before proving that they are real and not types. There’s one who thinks the idea of a break-up party is ridiculous, there’s another who starts flirting with the ‘liberated’ Jai the moment the break-up is officially announced, even as Meera encourages Jai to go ahead and try his luck. Love today is characterised by its aversion for  sheep-like friends who are agents of someone else’s will. Today’s surefooted heroes and heroines indeed have no patience for thoughtless loyalty, neither do they need to feed on someone’s inferiority to feel good about themselves. Friendship can in fact come in the way of love (think of Dil Chahta Hai), and though that temporarily dents things, it emerges stronger on its own and not using someone else’s romantic life like a spineless creeper.

Good for me, I say.

La Strada and Abhijan – The (Sexist) Road to Redemption

Behind every successful man, there is an awed woman.

The road is a great paradox. It promises the fixity of a destination, of an end goal sitting with smug certainty on the map, while its ego craves for an eternal journey, indefinitely deferring the end. A road that does not go anywhere is no good, and a road that takes you somewhere too soon is not memorable. How like the perennial dilemma of man! To charge bullishly onward, resisting the ‘emasculating’ charm of stability, or to know when it’s inevitable to stop, because finding a destination – no matter how ‘unromantic’ an act – will always be greater than the sum total of all journeys.

Fellini’s La Strada (The Road; 1954) and Ray’s Abhijan (The Expedition; 1962) are both classic explorations of this essentially male dilemma, and the paradox of the road fuels the auteur’s vision in both. Though Fellini and Ray are both champion neorealists in a general sense, these two films are not immediate or obvious parallels. The former, borrowing from Italy’s well established commedia dell’arte tradition, is consistent with Fellini’s broad directorial vision, whereas the latter was directed by Ray as an accident (apparently to the rescue of a friend not skilled enough to tackle the script) and broke away from the ‘box-office-unfriendly’ image that Ray had unfortunately created for himself. (Among other deviations from Ray’s contemporary image, it featured a longish fight sequence, which the director later admitted was underdone.) Ray is also very much a realist in the De Sica mould, examining man and his habitat with equal keenness, while Fellini’s lens remains firmly poised on the individual, using the social context as a fast-changing tableaux in the background. Still, La Strada (LS) and Abhijan (AJ) are two remarkably contiguous films and work surprisingly well as complements. They are both epics played out against the unsettling exteriority of a changing world order. Even grander, they have both earned the reputation of being great epics of the soul, offering two different possibilities of redemption, but more importantly showing that redemption is possible. But is this an inclusive vision, something that really merits the distinction of ‘soulful’ storytelling? I think not. Like the great exemplars of the classical epic tradition, Fellini and Ray’s narratives in fact converge on the
uber-male ego and not on the asexual construct of ‘soul’, reducing all other human presences to function as feedstock. The illusion of an egalitarian world order is an unobvious but certain casualty in the process.

On the surface, love is a powerful force in the two films, glorified by the cathartic climactic shots. In the much-celebrated concluding scene of LS, Zampano sheds his street-hardened façade and gives way to primordial anguish, driven apparently by a conscience that has finally registered the twin lashing of lost love and guilt. In the parallel scene in AJ, Narsingh chooses love and moral values over success and leaves the frame (the ‘corrupt space’ inhabited by the Sukhanrams of the world) in a burst of ecstasy. The respective emotional contents of the two scenes are converses of each other – the compulsive and fiercely masculine showman breaking down at an existential level with no one watching him at his most vulnerable moment, as opposed to the morally reconciled Rajput riding into the night having won the biggest battle of his life – but the two frames are unified by one common absence: that of the ostensibly all-important female agents of the two spectacular redemptions. Let’s see what a close-up reveals.

****

As it turns out, in LS, Gelsomina’s absence and obliteration are in fact necessary for Zampano’s salvation. In AJ, though Gulabi is in the Chrysler with Narsingh (and Rama) in the end, the camera focuses on another male lead Joseph while Narsingh shouts out his victory cry into the darkness. It is not a stretch to imagine that Ray keeping the camera away from Narsingh effectively puts Gulabi out of the action. If any further evidence were required, in an unmistakable piece of symbolism, Narsingh throws his coveted lighter – a pervasive icon of male bonding in the film – as a parting gift for Joseph. The camera zooms out off Zampano, it zooms in on Joseph’s face illuminated by the lighter, while the audience is left to reckon with the miracle of love. We better not forget though that this is absentee love – Gelsomina dead and irretrievable in Zampano’s life and Gulabi perhaps anticipating a (metaphorical) purdah as a part of Narsingh’s. What do endings like this convey about the power structures endorsed by these films? In my view, they establish the lineage of the films in the long tradition of classic sexist romantic storytelling, in which the triumph of love and the (implied) loss of female agency coincide more often than not.

****

To see whether this reading holds any water, let’s just invoke that eternal climactic phrase from immortal love stories: “…and they rode into the sunset/lived happily ever after”. While both partners exit the narrative space and cross the finish line together, the reins of the steed are always in the firm clasp of the charismatic lover. Ending a story with this image lends an unshakeable finality to the total control of the man actually doing the riding, as the gentle (and effeminate) redeeming power of love is rendered all too feeble before racy male bravado. Now compare this with Narsingh’s imagined transformation into the charismatic horse-whipping Rajput that he has always longed to be as he accelerates in his Chrysler to rescue Gulabi, and lo! We have a perfect match!

Love’s labour does not end there. In the very next frame, Gulabi asks her breathless lover “Kahaan jaiba?”/”Where are we going?”; “Ghar, Gulabi, ghar!”/”We are going home!” he responds, having finally tamed his fear of rest and stasis. Although ‘home’ is ostensibly the realm of love (as opposed to the road, which is the realm of conflicts and violence), the lovers’ homecoming has radically different connotations for the man and the woman. As long as they are both homeless wanderers, Narsingh and Gulabi are equal masters of screen space, he a corruptible loner, she a desperate seductress. Out there in the road, value judgments are unnecessary and survival is an animal art. It’s a space where Gulabi can both indulge in and rebuff Narsingh for sexual gratification without commitment. At ‘home’ though, it is difficult to imagine Gulabi not ceding at least a part of this self-certainty and authority. Did this loss of agency drive Narsingh’s first wife to leave home? Notice that the verb used in relation to this completely invisible woman is always “bhaagna”, she “fled”, conjuring a sense of freedom, the very antithesis of what Gulabi is coming home to. Gulabi will now fill in the vacuum left behind by this unseen but powerful force in Narsingh’s life, and in due course, she will turn invisible herself. Narsingh on the other hand has his “service” to start and will continue straddling both worlds, leaving Gulabi to play out the inevitable fusion of love and obscurity.

****

As noted before, the ending of LS is just the opposite of the fairytale climax of AJ. There is no convenient homecoming for Fellini’s hero, and the appearance of true contrition is also more pronounced in Zampano’s case. At first viewing, it is difficult to attribute his breakdown to anything but remorse. And that’s where we need to pause momentarily and question whether one desperate (and drunken) expression of guilt is really enough to negate all precedents of ruthless chauvinism in the film. Remember that Zampano (like Narsingh) too already carries the history of an ‘absent woman’ when he buys Gelsomina off her mother. This is Gelsomina’s sister, who probably died of the same neglect and hard-hearted rejection that claims her own life in the end. Zampano is a man clearly paranoid of losing his exaggerated masculinity, of lapsing into the kind of “weakness” that he suspects in some of his audience members while he creates a spectacle out of pain in his shows. Think of the scene in which he finally abandons Gelsomina in snow and solitude. It is not so much her insanity he flees from but his own demon that threatens him with the spectre of emasculation at the hands of love and perhaps a more domestic existence. Sure enough, it is easy to imagine that right after abandoning Gelsomina, he would purge his bike-cart of all her signs as well, given that she had converted it into a veritable home with her pots and pans and her general delicate presence. (Narsingh too imposes apartheid against women entering his coach, though he is willing to let go of his objections for a price.)

Zampano’s insecurity (strange how in this world love is equated with insecurity and apathy with strength!) is directly responsible for the tragedy of the two women in his life, and his cry of anguish in the end appears to me like a selfish appeal for absolution rather than the result of love blossoming, however belated. In the neorealist scheme, forgiveness is high virtue. This is precisely what makes it a double-edged sword, because it can be all too easily used to demand sympathy for characters that little deserve it. Martin Scorsese says that the magic of LS lies in its ability to extract compassion for even someone like Zampano. I agree. Left to himself, Zampano does not deserve compassion. It is the narrative framework that earns him this delicate emotion from the audience by forcing a suspension of more hostile reactions. Gelsomina poignantly sums up this undeserved tolerance when she decides to put up with him in spite of all his cruelty: “Who will live with you if I don’t?”

****

End note

When seen in combination, La Strada and Abhijan seem to be two films unmistakably in dialogue with each other, their exchange deeply sexist in tone and content. Both films subjugate love to the more virile and ruthless ideals of ambition and success. Sex without any sentimental trappings on the other hand is seen as the trophy for this ambition. The vagaries of the road in both films call for callous masters, and Zampano and Narsingh are just that. Zampano abuses the trust of the nuns who give her shelter, while Narsingh uses Neeli’s friendliness to score points with her brother Joseph. Both heroes are at odds with the world, and their personal tragedies end up getting centrestage at the cost of the collective fate of a woman forced to prostitution and two pushed to death. Blinded my machismo, the heroes constantly look out for ‘weaker’ opponents to vent their angst. Zampano takes out his frustrations on the Fool, while Rama bears the brunt of Narsingh’s futile rage. They are also both journeymen heroes, fiercely possessive of the one trade they are good at and which palliates their ego. Women are bought and sold, but they are better off in the road than at home: Gelsomina and her sisters starve at home, and though Zampano brutalises her, she is happy that she is at least seeing the world with him. Narsingh’s wife runs away from home, and later Neeli flees home with her lover. Men drink to drown their angry weariness, while women seek to placate them with their bodies, and then with their lives.

In the final analysis then, it amazes me to think that in the melee of so many tropes indicating a partial vision, the prevalent critical discourse chooses to highlight the films’ redemptive tracks and not the cost at which such redemption is bought. Fellini and Ray are both great humanists, and this sketch is not meant to hold them guilty for non-existent crimes. These are filmmakers who also gave us classics like Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria; 1957) and Teen Kanya (Three Daughters; 1961). If anything, this is just a bid to propose that precisely because they were such great chroniclers, they could not have remained insulated from the entrenched patriarchal realities of their times, not the least in these their most successful and popular works. Acknowledging this would be a greater tribute to their complex cinematic idiom than consigning the matter to critical oblivion.

Published article here: http://dearcinema.com/la-strada-and-abhijaan-the-sexist-road-to-redemption-124/

Khosla and Lucky take on the city – the Delhi of Dibakar Banerjee

 

City (ko) bajaao!

Woody Allen recently refused to lend himself to an ‘I love New York’ ad campaign. Observers say there is no love lost between the man and the city, which has been rather ‘unkind’ to him since the covers were blown off his scandalous relationship with an ex-partner’s daughter. That does not take away from the significance of the stand-off though, since the city is now faced with a disenchanted artist-merchant who does not feel any moral obligation to pay it everlasting obeisance, especially when it does not hesitate to drub him for his all-too-human lapses. This is a watershed moment in the traditional symbiotic equation between the city and art. A simplistic take on Allen’s latest uncharitable act would be to say that he refused to honour his end of the deal after using the city and its many lives as the amphitheatre in so many of his films. A more nuanced take would however suggest the arrival of a new utilitarian voice. The artist does not unconditionally belong to the city any more – rather, the city, its spaces, its wealth and its depravity, are for the artist to own and use. Humility is not a part of the deal, not a part that can be taken for granted anyway.

 In a way, Woody Allen will find his ideological match in Dibakar Banerjee. Remembered for Ghosla Ka Ghosla (KKG; 2006) till the release of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (OLLO; 2008), Banerjee has created a narrative pattern around Delhi that allows his characters to turn unapologetic owners of the spaces they inhabit, uprooting the notional ‘greater than’ sign that separates the city from its people.

Let’s briefly consider how the city brings this upon itself. In both KKG and OLLO, the city is an unforgiving, even dehumanising machina, overturning the very rules of civility that are meant to make it a liveable space. In both films, the city toys with the sanctimonious visible and invisible orders that are meant to preserve personal investments. Take KKG for instance. The usurpation of Khosla’s (Anupam Kher) plot and the land broker’s subsequent offer to him to repurchase his own plot is symptomatic of a city perversely fattening its inventory by feeding on those who think of themselves as its own. In OLLO’s very different universe, Lucky the thief’s (Abhay Deol) contribution to the city’s physical stock in the form of the restaurant he funds only deepens his isolation from the city, as his white-collared co-partner dramatically disowns him taking advantage of his disenfranchised existence. Thus, in both cases, the city first establishes rules of ownership and then allows a certain set of people to abuse them – by intimidating the middle-class sensibilities of Khosla in the first case and by applying the tenets of apartheid against Lucky in the second. It is a primitive world order where all wealth is up for grabs and must be subsumed within a hierarchical social order, not necessarily determined on the basis of class but might.

What is of interest to the cineaste is that the popularity of both the films is directly proportional to their adherence to a perceived ‘true’ Delhi dynamic. The cheer around KKG and OLLO is a celebration of their honest portrayal of a corrupt social matrix, proving that the audiences of the day are far more comfortable looking at a city as it really is – ruthless, with its own self-interested logic – rather than as an object of veneration. One can only imagine that the city justifies its behaviour by invoking Darwin. Little wonder then that the characters in such a world also quickly evolve to become deserving players in the Darwinian circus, and in both films they come up trumps by dismantling the same structures of ownership that the city erects and pulls down at its own whim. And they have the crowds behind them.

What is curious about physical ownership of wealth in cities is the role played by fences and boundaries in the process of wealth creation. As pointed out by the impressive directorial trinity of the documentary Corporation (www.thecorporation.com), as long as natural resources – like land or water, no matter how expansive – lie about unfenced, they are community property and therefore ‘worthless’. The moment someone puts up a wall or a fence around them, slicing out a piece and in effect delimiting their value, private wealth is born. The wall is, strictly speaking, inorganic – not a part of the wealth itself –  but the bigger the wall, the more imposing the owner’s stature. Who can forget the dwarfing effect of Khurana’s (Boman Irani) massive wall on Khosla and co and Bunty’s (Ranvir Shorey) subsequent plan to have the wall pulverised by pehelwans?! Similarly, an obsessive Lucky constantly jumping walls and fences to breach the fragile myth of security that the city weaves around its centres of wealth presents an enduring image. In such vignettes, the wall becomes the symbol of all that the city wants to preserve in its refulgent bowels, and challenging it betokens the underdog’s rebellion.

Both Khosla and Lucky are classic underdogs, but while Khosla’s is a battle that stops with reclaiming his property, Lucky’s marauds into the city’s coffers outgrow their initial motivation. The product of a depraved childhood (recollect the violent ‘let’s buy another scooter’ scene with an incensed Paresh Rawal as the young Lucky’s father) in a place notorious for show-offs (call to mind the schoolkids passing Lucky’s neighbourhood in a swanky car), Lucky’s initial foray into thievery is the result of ambition and the urge to make a statement. At this stage, he is busy stealing objects of moderate-to-high commercial value, a television here, a Merc there. However, after being spectacularly rebuffed by Handa (Paresh Rawal again, this time as the nefarious restaurant partner), stealing assumes a self-driven logic of its own that does not brook any care for sanity. He steals teddy bears, mannequins, greeting cards and even someone’s pet dog. Though this could be viewed as the sign of a commodity fetish – another of urban life’s flagship identities – Lucky is now propelled by an impish desire to confound the city’s conventional wisdom on the question of wealth. The thoroughly harassed cops give away how the outcast has in fact managed to confute all of the city’s pet theories on covetousness. As for the city itself, it is perhaps left to ponder upon this new anarchic intruder who revels in bullying its arrogant institutions and desecrating its chambers of riches and ho-hum alike, just to have some fun.

What about respect? Well it has to be mutual, doesn’t it?

Published review here: http://dearcinema.com/the-delhi-of-dibakar-banerjee/

Ten types I hate in a theatre

1. No, the first thing on the list is NOT the neighbour with the cell phone  ‘Knockin’ on heaven’s door’ at a particularly mellow moment in the film. The father of all irritants is the dork sitting behind you who takes the spirit of a ‘kickass’ film too literally and decides to relentlessly put the point across, through the metal and velvet of your backrest, straight into your rectal chakra

2. Those who think the ‘silent’ function on the cell phone is a quaint nuisance from 5000 B.C., like chastity belts

3. Those who think of the theatre as a day care centre and send their little angel to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ with someone whom the said angel obviously hates

4. Those who think of the theatre as a gigantic underground tunnel and have to fight their claustrophobia by breathing through the exit door

5. Those who bring their picnic baskets to the theatre and loudly regret not bringing Pammi along

6. Those who pay for the film on a pro-rated basis, enter only after the title sequence is over, and walk on about twenty pairs of toes to reach their seats right at the other end of the row

7. Those who come for a film because it’s too hot outside

8. Those who stare at you when you clap after a film

9. The ‘O bhaisaaaaa’b!!!!’ brotherhood

10. The really fat NRI mother and daughter who always buy the corner seats just to bully you

PS: List will be modified as and when

Sita sings the blues: the pirated Ramayana

Quick update: Dear Cinema reports that Sita sings the blues has won at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. Read the report here.

In a typically high-strung moment in the narrative of Sita sings the blues, Soorpanakha tells Ravana: “Hey brother, you must steal Sita. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her hands, they are like lotuses, her skin’s fair like the lotus blossom, her eyes are like lotuses, her breasts are like big, round, firm, juicy…lotuses!”

Now you can blame it all on the election season that I am reading too much into the poor demon’s figure of speech in the above extract. It must only be a wicked coincidence that arguably the most reviled female character in the Ramayana – at least in popular imagination – invokes the ‘lotus’ so many times to conjure a seductive aureole around inarguably the most sacred Indian woman of all time, real or fictitious. Nina Paley, the impish creator of Sita Sings the Blues, must only be making fun of Soorpanakha’s limited vocabulary through her parrot-like use of Hindu India’s most powerful icon to weave a covetous trap that will eventually prove to be the undoing of her very worthy, level-headed brother. The motif that I seem to have discerned in all this must really be balderdash…but what the heck, I am proud of it anyway! And I am sure I won’t be alone in my vanity, for Sita Sings the Blues is bound to create a retinue of proud devotees just like me, each exiting their media player proud of their own little trophy from the film’s virtually inexhaustible cabinet of possibilities. I say ‘media player’ because Sita Sings the Blues has not been released to theatre audiences, thanks to a ridiculous strife with Hollywood studios. (Check this out: http://blog.ninapaley.com/2008/08/26/music-industry-on-culture-killing-spree).

Sita Sings the Blues is a veritable circus of ideas. Not unlike the ones we all visited as kids, Nina’s circus too converges on the trapeze act, and the swing she chooses is the pendulous question of ownership over popular culture, particularly our stories and myths. Quite separate from the perils of culture falling into the wrong hands, there is a far more fundamental question that often escapes us: do we belong to our stories or do they belong to us? It is curious that communities with an organic heritage of epic storytelling often tend to be owned by their stories rather than owning them. Storytelling should be an unapologetically secular exercise, but the Ramayana has proved how perverse things can turn out to be if stories suddenly turn themselves into religious enema, sparing only the prostrate. Characters that need little more than their sheer complexity to grip us turn into moral booby traps, and before we realise it, a free cultural artefact turns into a sillyfaced monster ever hungry for obeisance. Paley’s Sita, performing Annette Hanshaw’s mid-20s’ lilts with obvious élan under the spotlight and finding time to steal a few wet kisses with her superman lover, even as the lover and his monkey army indulge in a gore fest, is a gigantic smack-on-the-buttocks for this monster, and one hopes it goes a long way in domesticating the conceited creature. This is a storyteller firmly claiming control over the story and having a lot of fun in the process. In her anarchic hands, characters which had built careers over a few centuries out of being solemn let their hair down and look mischievously free. Ravana appeases Shiva by playing the veena with his coiled innards and later tries to threaten Sita into acquiescence by unleashing his goofy demons at her. Hanuman jigs to Sita’s lovelorn rhapsody, offers her bananas as she bemoans her solitary life, and sets Lanka on fire with a facial expression that befits a labour of love. Rama casually kicks Sita into the agnipareeksha pier with an almost audible whistle – twice – and the narrator ascribes it to “peer pressure”. Lava and Kusha eulogise the righteous king by pointing out how he messed up Sita’s life for the sake of duty. These are characters proving their potential as performers and not drudging along as types for possibly the first time in the long history of Ramayana’s renditions, existing for the stage, for the screen, dramatic, unbound and grossly over the top at times, irreverent to their well-manured images, mad and chaotic as only a newly free tribe can be. An entire cast revelling in exaggeration and hyperbole, all thanks to a director who gives them a free run. Add to this a set of profane speculating sutradhars borrowed from the Indonesian Ramayana convention, constantly questioning and confounding the traditional understanding of the story – how could Sita have dropped her jewels en route Lanka after her kidnapping? Didn’t she leave Ayodhya as a sannyasin, without any jewellery in the first place?! – and it is clear that Paley’s Ramayana is indeed about an aesthetic based on the grand possibility of creative interrogation that needs to be preserved and reinforced, so that the epic can burn holes in the rigid moral/religious straitjacket assigned to it by custom. That it is an animation helps it establish its rampantly burlesque agenda. That it uses blues – the anathema of elitist expression – as the predominant form of expression gives it an anchor in popular culture and helps it steer home that agenda.

Like any free-spirited performance celebrating itself, Sita sings the blues lets its players continuously reinterpret themselves. This explains the existence of two simultaneous and visually distinct tracks in the narrative – one which uses conventional imagery and icons and more or less sticks to the traditional storyline, and the other that deploys bizarre caricatures to blow away the cover from that storyline. Impatience with staid interpretations is writ large even on the former track though, expressed mainly through the excessive disconnect between how the characters look and how they talk. It is hilarious, for instance, to hear a sombre and familiar-looking Ravana rebuking Soorpanakha in heavily accented English! The latter track is driven by figures like a rotund-bosomed, blues-crooning Sita and a suspiciously monkey-faced Rama. Just what such quirky juxtaposition does to the ‘image’ of the characters is aptly brought out when one of the sutradhars quips how Ravana looks exactly like Mogambo when he is angry – an audacious inversion that turns the tables on the ‘archetypal Indian villain’ rendered imposing by age and tradition, tethering him to a half-ludicrous twin from the 20^th century, shattering the very distance that elevated him in the first place. And the characters themselves clearly love every bit of their newfound cockiness, leading the way when it comes to enjoying the alternative script. In what is definitely the most entertaining ‘intermission’ ever, sages, demons and monkeys walk right out of the screen led by Rama, Sita and Hanuman and return only after securing their fix of cola and popcorn, as excited in anticipation of what the director has saved up for them in the second half as the audience itself!

The biggest beneficiary of the film’s performative excesses and rebellious self-definition is perhaps its subaltern politics. One could write loads about the concluding scene in which Narayani employs Vishnu’s services to have her feet pressed or the mad psychedelic sequence in which Sita hits out at the jury sitting in judgment over her purity. To this viewer however, the biggest winner is the Great (Indian) Story, with the auteur and the audience on either side of it, delightfully brought to bear by the film’s little subplot involving the marital disintegration of a software engineer couple, Dave and Nina. Dave abandons Nina for no good reason, leaving her lonely and frightened in a seedy apartment crawling with insects and nightmares. Their story is an obvious mirroring of the greatest breakup of all time – that between Rama and Sita – but the interplay between the two tales does not end there. After making peace with her loneliness and cleaning up her apartment, Nina goes to bed with the Ramayana in hand, and one can only imagine that she finds solace in Sita’s epiphany at the end of the story. This is indeed the most sacred function of storytelling – helping the reader/recipient make sense of life, palliating the aridity of one’s circumstances by connecting them with a much larger, even cosmic, context. Pitted against this, the liturgical virtues of the Ramayana become almost criminally superfluous, for the epic can do us far greater service from our bookshelves and bedsides than we can ever do it from our petty consecrated chambers of worship.

PS: As hinted at in the introductory paragraph, every viewer of the film can find themes in it to fill volumes with. The use of colours, music, 2D graphics and voiceovers in the film each merit independent reviews. Getting so many reviews shouldn’t be a problem though, since Sita sings the blues is freely available in pirateland as part of a ‘Creative Commons License’ arrangement.

Published review here: http://dearcinema.com/sita-sings-the-blues-the-pirated-ramayana/