CITY CITY, BANG BANG

The 7/11 Mumbai blasts form the backdrop for an uneven drama that’s redeemed by several powerful moments. Plus, a cheerfully trashy scare movie.

AUG 24, 2008 - PERHAPS THE ONLY WAY TO LOOK AT A FILM bookended by red roses – it begins with a wreath; it ends with a man extending a single bloom – is as a romance. And with its title reminiscent of a roadside Romeo’s call to his beloved, Nishikant Kamat’s Mumbai Meri Jaan is, first and foremost, a love story between a city and its inhabitants, with the 2006 train blasts proving to be the villain who threatens to tear the lovers apart. When you love someone, the reasons aren’t always logical, and they almost always have to do more with the heart than the head. And others – non-Mumbaikars, in this case – cannot begin to fathom the extent of this love, because being in love is one thing, and hearing about someone being in love quite another. That’s why, I feel, the good people of Mumbai will respond best to this fictional imagining of the days that followed 7/11. They will be the ones who will overlook its faults and open their hearts to it – while the rest of us, to whom this is just a movie, will not be able to be quite as forgiving.

Because for the rest of us, this love is not a given. It has to be communicated in a manner that’s affecting and convincing – and that’s something Kamat’s film doesn’t quite manage all the time. If we experience a lump in the throat as Rafi launches into Ae dil, mushkil, jeena yahaan, it’s because of our associations with the song, the singer, the movie, the era of filmmaking – but when a Mumbaikar hears this number, as it plays over the end credits, the effect is surely that of listening to a serenade. And how can we compete with that extent of emotion, which is possibly so overpowering that the fact that this song isn’t really an ode to the resilience of Mumbai, as it is implied here, is least relevant? That it is about Mumbai (or Bombay, according to the song) is all that’s important. So too the terror of a series of bombings that crippled the train services, the lifeline of the city – how could those of us to whom this is an abstract, faraway horror begin to understand its implications and its resonances in a population to whom these trains are a concrete, everyday reality?

And therefore, Mumbai Meri Jaan is destined to play as two movies – a deeply moving drama (by default) to the people of Mumbai, and, for the others, a film that succeeds on several counts but is constrained by its incessant warm-fuzziness and its underlying implication that the solutions to the problems that face us are just a group hug away. (And, needless to say, had Kamat been able to pull it all off, we would all have seen the same movie.) This is a film where some truly great writing (in terms of dialogue and character) has been squandered on alarmingly simple-minded screenplay contrivances – or, perhaps, the right way to look at it would be that some alarmingly simple-minded screenplay contrivances have, thankfully, been bettered with truly great writing. What is it with films that deal with tragedies in Mumbai – like, well, Bombay – that they end with such blatantly positive messages of hope, leaving you with the feeling of watching someone attempt to cure AIDS with a bottle of cough syrup? Let’s hold hands and the world will be a better place – that seems to be the takeaway from Mumbai Meri Jaan as well.

The problem isn’t the message itself – and much as I loathe messages in movies, I realise that it isn’t always such a bad thing to come away with a few positive thoughts – but with the all-too-convenient manner in which these platitudes are put across, as if peace and harmony were merely a state of rosy health that could be attained with a timely injection of hope and goodwill. Sometimes, it isn’t the bad movies that frustrate you, but the good ones that do not go after the greatness that is so within reach. Mumbai Meri Jaan tracks the stories of five people affected by the blasts – the programmatically drawn characters played by Kay Kay Menon, Soha Ali Khan, Paresh Rawal, Irrfan Khan and Madhavan; each represents a microcosmic cross-section of the city – either directly, because they were in or near the trains, or indirectly, because, well, they belong to Mumbai, and this villainous act has sown seeds of doubt in their minds about the long-term viability of their relationship with the city they love. The film is about the ripples set off by a senseless tragedy – and had it simply dealt with how the victims cope, it could have been a moving little gem.

Unfortunately, Mumbai Meri Jaan wants to offer solutions – in the form of idealistic change-your-heart banalities, which undo a lot of the genuinely complex good work done earlier. The same wish-fulfillment scenarios might have succeeded in a simpler, simplistic film, but with something this oblique and ambitious, these instant fix-it suggestions appear laughably tacked on, as if the producer warned Kamat, “I gave you the funds to make the film you want. Now go make some adjustments so that it will also be the movie that the average moviegoer (or awards jury) would want.” Someone who sets off a bomb-scare panic in the city’s malls, with a series of prank calls, is shown the error of his ways when he sees one of the mall-goers clutch at his weak heart in the midst of a stampede to escape to safety. Someone who’s toying with thoughts of emigrating to the US is reminded of 9/11, of how tourists used to come to see the Twin Towers, whereas now they come to see Ground Zero. (All this, while the background is filled with meditative chants, as if the very secret of the scriptures were being demystified in order to steady the vacillations of this man in doubt.)

To see why these developments are so disappointing, you have to see how these developments came to be. The person who’s thinking of emigrating is a chance survivor of the blasts. But for a lucky accident, he might have ended up dead – and this hairline escape has severely unsettled him and instilled a deep sense of paranoia. Kamat gives us a beautiful scene in which this character’s pregnant wife berates him after he returns home, that he couldn’t be bothered to make a single call and inform her that he was okay. And he’s still in a daze, as if thoughts of his wife and his unborn child and his parents who live with him can wait – and all he can think of, for the moment, is how close he was to being reduced to a mass of mangled limbs, like some of the other passengers on his train. He becomes so paranoid about boarding trains that he begins to take taxis to work – and we get a haunting image of the taxi running parallel to the tracks, with him staring out of the window at the rattling death trap that’s hurtling past. He’s shifted his allegiance from one mode of transportation to another, and the way he feels, it appears that it’s just a small step before he switches allegiance from one country to another.

And when these unspoken half-thoughts coagulate into vulgar spoken dialogue – as in that speech about 9/11, which reminds him that No Country Is Entirely Safe – it’s a shock. And it’s equally shocking that the delicate textures of Mumbai Meri Jaan transform, without warning, into a finger-wagging Madhur Bhandarkar movie – the kind that pounds us with its insights that rich people and television companies are bad, bad, bad. Soha Ali Khan’s story suffers the most due to this change in tone. She plays a television reporter who heartlessly thrusts a mike in front of the faces of people who’ve just suffered a tragedy, and don’t you know, she’s soon reduced to a tragic figure herself, now facing a heartlessly thrust mike in front of her face. These childish retributory mechanisms come off as third-rate television drama, filled with “touches” like the auspicious redness of a wedding card being contrasted with the gloomy black of a silhouette of a woman who’s lost her fiancé. Mumbai Meri Jaan is at its worst when it addresses the plight of those directly affected by the blasts, the ones at the epicentre.

And it’s at its best while tackling the characters who are only feeling the aftershocks. Irrfan Khan gets a marvellous story arc that’s borderline irresponsible – but the reason it works so well, at least till it’s time for him to realise The Error Of His Ways, is the realisation that tragedies of this magnitude do not always result in reactions of hushed, respectful mourning. There are going to be those who exploit these unsettling times for their own little kicks. The portions with Paresh Rawal (who plays a cop on the verge of retirement) and Vijay Maurya (who’s a newbie on the force) are also wonderful. The scene that made the film, for me, is the one where these policemen stumble upon Kay Kay, who’s drunk and whose anger towards a community has made him target a poor old Muslim who’s wheeling a cycle at night. Kay Kay asks him what he’s carrying, and when the older man replies that it’s just pav, he snatches a bun and bites into it and asks sarcastically if it won’t explode once inside his stomach, “Pet mein jaayega to phatega to nahin?”

And when the cops arrive at the scene and warn Kay Kay that he’s out of line, he insults them and runs away. Maurya gives chase, gives up, and turns, in frustration, to Irrfan, who’s been a silent spectator all along. And for no reason, he is commanded to perform sit-ups, like an errant student in a classroom in a village. With this, Kamat shows us the cycle of violence, of revenge – of wanting to get even with the one who’s readily at hand, if not the one who’s really responsible. And this idea is movingly brought full circle when, later on, Rawal instructs Kay Kay on a variation of the Gandhi-ism that an eye for an eye only ends up in a world gone blind. It’s moments like these when Mumbai Meri Jaan stands still and shines, content to be a movie rather than a moral science lesson. And despite the potential for touchy-feeliness in this speech, Rawal puts it across so beautifully, your eyes tear up at his innocent conviction. There are a lot of strong performances here – from Maurya, Madhavan, Kay Kay, Irrfan – but this is a Rawal showcase all the way through. Just watch him tear into a series of extraordinarily crafted speeches – about the time he nabbed a big shot who was carrying cocaine and had to let him go; about the time, as a child, he stole a teacher’s spectacles; about his remorse at not having a single major accomplishment in all his years of service – and you’ll sense the hunger of a performer who’s been too long denied. For all the explosions in the film – literal and otherwise – the sound you come away remembering is the satisfied burp of an actor who’s finally had his fill.

NOTHING, JUST NOTHING, ESCAPES Ram Gopal Varma’s malevolent gaze in the black magic thriller Phoonk. Soft toys, calendar art, religious icons, felled branches by the roadside – just about everything on screen is transformed into a shamanistic fetish object, intended to spook the daylights out of a gleefully complicit audience. Part B-movie, part boo-movie, Phoonk is the silliest thing Varma has attempted in years – never mind all his grandstanding about how this is actually a debate on Science versus Superstition – but that very sleaziness is, strangely, the film’s strength. Scary movies usually lull you into a state of deceptive calm and then let loose their jack-in-the-box shocks, but with Varma’s signature style in the forefront – all that jarring background music, all that snaking camerawork – there’s not a moment of quiet, and your nerves are jangly from start to finish.

This alone would fulfill the expectations of a lot of people – but because we hold Varma to a higher standard, let’s recall the far classier Bhoot, of which I wrote at the time, “And there’s so much quietness, the sudden rainfall sounds like gunfire and the buzz of the calling bell makes your heart stop.” The understated elegance of that film is nowhere in sight here. Phoonk appears deliberately calculated to percolate down to every single member of the audience – the promotional line could well have been: “Look, Ram Gopal Varma can make a movie that will draw large numbers to the theatres” – and it doesn’t trust us to put two and two together. There’s a ton of drearily clumsy exposition built around Rajeev’s (Sudeep) scientific temperament. He refuses to accept that the trials that befall his daughter (Ahsaas Channa) could be a function of the occult – and it’s hard to believe that this is what Varma was referring to when he said his film was going to trigger debates among supporters and scoffers.

The other problem with Phoonk is that it doesn’t possess an iota of mystery. (There could be spoilers ahead.) From the minute we see Ashwini Kalsekar (who pitches her performance at such a decibel, it can be heard from the moon) with her black-crescent forehead markings and her inebriated witch’s cackle, we know she’s somehow responsible for the child’s plight. Having referenced The Exorcist in the image of a relic being unearthed during an excavation, I kept hoping that Varma would also channel that film’s stomach-churning atmosphere of domestic dread – of what could happen when someone you love is suffering from something beyond your control. But we don’t share Rajeev’s abject helplessness, because we know that his daughter’s condition isn’t due so much to a nameless horror as a shamelessly hammy actress. But as the film progresses, you see that, had Kalsekar been reined in, she’d have been a misfit – for everything around her is equally over the top. And with that in mind, it’s easier to buy into the realisation that Phoonk was never going to add up to anything more than a couple of hours of trashy scares.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without

BOLLYWOOD FOR HOLLYWOODIANS

AUG 24, 2008 - IF YOU LOVE FILMS – good films, great films, even bad films that you’d never admit to liking but find it difficult, nonetheless, to give the channel-flip to – one of the toughest tasks you’ll find is making lists. People ask you all the time, variations on essentially what boots your C-drive: Which are your [desi, foreign, desert island, insert appropriate qualifier] films? And not too long ago, I was presented with a unique spin on this question, from someone – let’s call her S – who wrote in, “There’s a film-related podcast that I listen to regularly. Apart from reviewing a couple of new releases on the show, they also have a segment where they watch a series of five films based on a central theme. Having gotten to know the hosts over the years, I’ve frequently requested them to do a Bollywood marathon and now they’re looking to me to suggest the films that they should be watching for the marathon.”

“I do have a few films in mind. However, I’d really like to hear some recommendations from you,” she concluded, adding that the aim was to suggest a set that would give them an idea of “what a good Bollywood film is like while also spanning multiple directors and time periods in Indian cinema.” I wrote back that I wasn’t quite clear about the theme that was being proposed.

For instance, you could consider NRI-targeted Bollywood films, and that would easily yield a set of five movies from the Johar-Chopra stable. Or you could go with hillside-escapist-romances and pick five films from the Shammi Kapoor factory. And S replied with clarifications. “The podcast hosts are two American guys who have watched a sum total of zero Bollywood films. They’ve watched the Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha stuff, but nothing that really came out of Bollywood. What they seem to be interested in doing is watching a set of 5-6 films that will serve as a nice introduction to good Bollywood cinema. I realise that this is a ridiculously broad theme but seeing as how these could potentially be the only Bollywood films they ever end up watching, breadth of scope may not be such a bad thing perhaps?”

S continued, “I think what I would like to do is to suggest films that do follow a sufficient number of Bollywood conventions, such that at least a majority of them are more or less mainstream in nature, and yet make sure that they appeal to someone who doesn’t have the benefit of being familiar with Bollywood and therefore having context. Most of my cinephile friends here think of Bollywood as meaningless melodramatic song and dance. I was hoping to introduce a set of films that demonstrate some substance and genuine talent underlying the melodramatic song and dance.” The task, therefore, was to pull up a list keeping in mind that the people who’d be watching this set of films would be non-Indians, whose exposure to Indian cinema (let alone Bollywood) is probably restricted to Ray.

I guess that ruled out Namak Haram – a film I bring up not because it rests at the top of my top-ten list or some such thing, but simply on occasion of having watched it around the time this correspondence was being carried out. This is a film from the days Hindi cinema wasn’t afraid to show us life at the other side of the tracks, where a house would casually have dung patties left to dry on the outside walls. It’s from a time long after Hollywood had entered our filmmaking consciousness – this was, after all, a retooling of Becket – and, in that sense, the conflicts and the themes wouldn’t be difficult, for a foreigner, to get. But with those dung patties and those bhang sessions, the film was also uniquely Indian in ways that might not travel across cultures.

In general, I feel, that era of cinema is something only those who lived through (or grew up in) those times can really appreciate. They were our films – those strange hybrids of songs and declamatory drama and curious acting styles and corny comedy. Only we could understand them, and, in all probability, only we could tolerate them (at least, without consigning them to the category of camp, in which case, everything becomes great).

Another film I watched during the time was Aandhi – again, a very Bollywood film in the sense that you (or, at least, I) don’t usually watch it for its primary purpose, which is the drama. (It’s a tad too overtly symbolic for my taste. When we meet the leads, he’s bent over doing gardening work, while she’s in a helicopter – ergo he’s a simple son-of-the-soil, while she’s the kind of political high-flier whose party’s symbol is… a bird). What I find rewarding in Gulzar’s films is his way with words, as when Sanjeev Kumar keeps telling Suchitra Sen, “Ismail bhai,” and when she looks up, vexed, she finds he has a camera in his hand and is actually asking her to smile.

And this aspect of the film, alone, wouldn’t be useful in recommending it, would it? Just as there’s no guarantee that we completely understand all aspects of subtitled foreign films, how can we expect, say, the following exchange to travel across? Husband and wife are deciding what to name their daughter. He suggests Manorama. She disagrees violently because she doesn’t want to be reminded of the overweight actress. (“Moti ki yaad aayegi.”) And then he says the name could be abbreviated to Man, when she counters that it’s too short. He replies that they could call it out twice: Man Man. And she feels that that would be like hearing a bell being rung somewhere. This entire conversation, even if subtitled – how could it be interesting to someone not attuned to the cadences of the spoken language?

And then there are the cadences of the sung language. Even inveterate adorers of Gulzar may find themselves rolling their eyes at the picturisation of Is mod se jaate hain – if only because the hero and the heroine mouth those lyrics. As a background track, it would have been perfectly appropriate (and the lyrics, by themselves, are magnificent), but when two people wrap their lips around these elaborate constructions, you can’t help but wonder, “What frighteningly intellectual lovers they must be!”

But, again, there’s so much more to the song when viewed in its context – in the sense that it occurs just after Suchitra Sen has learnt that her estranged husband, Sanjeev Kumar, is the manager of the hotel she’s staying in, and just before she lands up at his doorstep. So the mod, the metaphorical path, that the song is talking about is, now, the physical route that takes her from where she is, at that moment, to where he is – lyrically, and even musically (Lata Mangeshkar embellishes mod with so many quicksilver microtonal flourishes that this simple path morphs into a treacherously winding mountain road; it isn’t going to be easy, her going to him. Tum tak to pahunchti hai… that’s what it means, and literally, in this case.) When we ourselves – unless we choose to parse the situation and place it under a magnifying glass – are likely to miss these shadings that make even lesser Bollywood movies so worthwhile, how could we expect them to go down easily in another culture?

And therefore, I decided to be a coward and play safe. This was what I told S: “Begin with Dil Chahta Hai (because it’s a very Western Bollywood film), then move to Lakshya (which still has Farhan Akhtar’s sensibilities, but with a greater sense of Bollywood drama), then go to Chak De India (again, a very Western sports flick, but with Indian sensibilities), then move to Saawariya (melodrama and songs, but also Bollywood aesthetics; plus the Blu-Ray presentation is said to be astounding), and end with Main Hoon Na (even if they don’t get the references, the buoyant, infectious silliness should cross over, and maybe they’d get a sense of what the other Bollywood, the real Bollywood, is like).”

S wrote back that her list was identical, except that it had a Vishal Bhardwaj film instead of Lakshya (simply because she wanted to avoid two movies by the same director). And it struck me that I should have, of course, worked in an Omkara or a Maqbool. But then, that’s the other thing about making lists. Films that you know and love keep slipping from your mind all the time, and so the lists you make are actually from the films that, at that time, are swimming inside your head. And if that means, for some scary reason, your brain has chosen to retain Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic and Rama Rama Kya Hai Dramaa, you’re doomed. Did I tell you I’m not a fan of making lists?

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

WAR IN PEACE

AUG 23, 2008 - EVEN ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE BEING SUBJECTIVE, and uplift usually triumphing over unhappiness as the favoured film-going takeaway, Gabriele Salvatores’ Mediterraneo is an unusually lightweight winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (It won in 1991 – over heavyweights like Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern and Sven Nykvist’s The Ox.) An overview of the plot certainly presents possibilities. A band of Italian soldiers is stranded on a Greek island during the madness of World War II, and when they lose their means of transportation and communication – which is to say, when they are cut off from “civilisation” (ironic quotes fully intentional) – they slowly realise that they’ve lucked into those most precious of wartime commodities: peace and idyll.

But the problem, for a while, is that nothing happens – at least, nothing that stays with you. Scenes evaporate from your mind even before your eyes have finished absorbing them – and the question that arises, therefore, is this: Is Salvatores a middlebrow hack who knows one thing and one thing only, which is to orchestrate a mood of pastoral banality (set amidst tranquil surroundings) that functions as nothing more than cinematic balm, soothing frayed nerves at the end of a frazzled workday? Or is it intentional, this pleasing nothingness? Is this lack of event actually a carefully constructed counterpoint to the world outside, which is boiling over with headline-ready happenings? These are the times you feel like a fraud for attempting to appraise an art form that can, on occasion, prove frustratingly vague about its true intentions.

But at least an interpretative intention can be gleaned from the sequences that revolve around Vassilissa (Vanna Barba), the local beauty who’s introduced to us as she demands to see Sgt. Nicola Lo Russo (Diego Abatantuono). When the soldier named Farina (Giuseppe Cederna) walks into the sergeant’s chambers with this unusual request, Lo Russo, who’s just had himself a shave and whose attentions are now focused entirely on defining the contours of his beard, can’t bring himself to care. “If she wants to talk, show her in. If not, she can stay outside.” Farina begins to leave, but then, scratching his brow, he reveals that she is beautiful. The extra information has the desired effect. Lo Russo fluffs up his collar in anticipation. Vassilissa walks in.

And in pidgin Italian, this Greek goddess makes it known that she’s looking for work. When Lo Russo asks her about the kind of work she does, she replies that she’s a puta. Perhaps unsure that the word means the same in her language as it does in his, Lo Russo looks uncomfortably at his soldiers and mumbles, “Puta is Greek for…?” One of them replies, in no uncertain terms, “A whore.” Lo Russo lifts an arm as if to reprimand this soldier for his tactlessness, but Vassilissa nods that that is indeed her profession. “You’re interested?” she demands, and Lo Russo – after a glance in the direction of his salivating subordinates – imbues his response with equal parts authority and ardour. “I have to glance at the regulations… but we’re very… we’d be interested.”

The next scene, Lo Russo is surrounded by his soldiers as he reads out from the fornication schedule he’s prepared. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Off on Thursday. Friday, Saturday, double shifts. Sunday: day off. Understood?” A subordinate demands, “Why not alternate days?” Lo Russo replies, “Because this is what I decided. The order is based on age and rank. So, I’m first.” Accordingly, a little later, he is seen exiting Vassilissa’s home with a satisfied song on his lips. “Speak to me of love, Marie. All my life, it’s you. Your lovely eyes are shining. Like two stars, they twinkle. Tell me it’s not a dream…” And, suddenly, he switches to his speaking voice to brag, “I destroyed her.”

They’re completely cut off from the war that rages in the world outside, and yet Lo Russo can’t help talking of Vassilissa in the manner of an all-conquering hero, as if the blitzkrieg of his sexual prowess has reduced her to rubble. But worse is to come when Farina sleeps with Vassilissa. He decides that she’s the love of his life, and that she’s his and his alone. And, with the zeal of a patriot safeguarding his homeland, he arms himself with a rifle and fires at his compatriots when they attempt to reason with him that he cannot seize totalitarian control of Vassilissa, that she’s a democratic entity – for everyone. But Farina won’t listen. Trapped on this island, he may be unable to stave off enemies encroaching on his country, but he’ll be damned if he lets his friends cross the borders of Vassilissa’s house. And the director, who doesn’t seem such a hack anymore, appears to have said his piece: that the allure of war is undeniable, even in peace.

Copyright ©2008 The New Indian Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

HEROINE ADDICT

Ranbir Kapoor pursues three women in a romance with surprising flashes of depth. Plus, a watered-down remake of a watered-down comedy.

AUG 17, 2008 - WE’VE GOTTEN SO USED TO laying the ills that plague our cinema at the doorstep of Karan Johar and Yash Raj films that we often overlook a simple reality – that their highly imperfect creations have, of late, been quietly reshaping the boundaries of what constitutes “mainstream.” I still remember how startled I was when Preity Zinta planted that fat slap on Shah Rukh Khan’s unresisting cheek in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Big male stars aren’t supposed to take slights to their manhood so meekly, even if they’ve selfishly trampled all over the lives of the ones they love, the ones they’ve pledged their commitments to. And now, in Siddharth Anand’s new film for Yash Raj, Ranbir Kapoor (who plays Raj) undergoes a mortifying series of humiliations. He’s reduced, at one point, to a tuxedoed waiter at a chic soiree, a holder of umbrellas, a fetcher of coffee and dry cleaning, a carrier of shopping bags, and a cleaner of swimming pools. And he bears these trials willingly because he agrees with the assessment of the person who’s assigned him these jobs, that he’s “the worst kind of human being.”

Bachna Ae Haseeno wasn’t supposed to be all this – was it? With that ladies-beware title, with the high-voltage brass of RD Burman’s nostalgic hit blaring across the promos, with Vishal-Shekhar’s addictive score (with the irresistibly funky Ahista ahista), and with the cast of three pretty girls (Bipasha Basu, Deepika Padukone, Minissha Lamba) swooning over one pretty boy, we got the impression that this was going to be a lollapalooza of a date movie, Teen Deviyaan retooled for the teen generation – nothing less, and certainly nothing more. But here’s Raj repenting his life’s decisions – which caused one of these girls to become trapped in the kind of loveless marriage where she’d rather reorganise the kitchen shelves than open herself up to a loving husband, while another ex has made sure she’ll never get hurt again by evolving into a scary diva-bitch. A hero in penance mode is supposed to suffer for grand follies – like Rajesh Khanna in Dushman, who mowed down the breadwinner of a family. But the leading man of a romantic trifle making mistakes, owning up to these mistakes and facing the consequences (or even understanding that there could be consequences) – that’s not done, is it?

That’s the kind of less-than-ideal love story that Ranbir Kapoor has, once again, chosen to star in. (Well, it’s either that – or he just signed up because big names like Bhansali and Chopra were involved, and lucked into yet another interesting project.) The essence of Bachna Ae Haseeno isn’t new. The theme of a man revisiting his past loves was already seen in Broken Flowers and Cheran’s Tamil film, Autograph, and the conceit of a boy having to earn a girl’s hand – prove worthy of her, and, indeed, of love itself – found some sort of shape in Maine Pyar Kiya. (There, Salman Khan had to divest himself of his family fortune, his gilt; here, Ranbir has to divest himself of guilt.) And the way this story is spun doesn’t bear close scrutiny, what with the overarching motto of grand entertainment straining against the dark tone of individual scenes. (The climax, in particular, has a pat rom-com cutesiness that feels forced and frustratingly underdeveloped.) But as with Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, there’s so much good writing here, and so many nicely drawn characters, that the overall film is a pleasant surprise – one that shows that a big glitzy commercial entertainer needn’t be entirely devoid of heart and soul.

Aditya Chopra puzzles me. Just a few months ago, he threw our way a soulless piece of plastic trash called Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic – and here too, there’s so much shameless self-referencing that the effect is almost parodic. (There are nods to plot points from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, the music from Dhoom and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, the Main aur meri tanhayi sequence from Silsila, and even the flashing mirror bit from Bobby; the latter is, presumably, a bit of self-referencing from Ranbir Kapoor’s side.) It appears that Chopra wants to keep pushing our faces into the glories (such as they are) from his past – like how Karan Johar reuses bits and pieces of his films all the time – and yet, he’s willing to greenlight a Chak De India or a Bachna Ae Haseeno, which features a character so complex and so riddled with insecurities that she forgives Raj not so much for his sake as hers, so that she can move on. Just who is this man, really?

The women in Bachna Ae Haseeno are a treat to watch – and not just for the obvious reasons. (Deepika Padukone, especially, is such a radiant mix of innocence and sultriness, you can see why Ranbir Kapoor looks at her and sighs, “Khuda jaane… main mit gaya.” Hers is the kind of Madonna-whore screen presence that can fell grown men to their knees. With those looks, who needs “acting”?) One of these girls is so independent, she’s practically a “guy” (in Hindi movie terms) – and yet, she sulks that she has the right to change her mind without warning because she is, after all, a woman. Another one is the very personification of “hell hath no fury…” She’s not one to easily forgive past transgressions, and in that way, she’s very “Western” (again, in Hindi movie terms) – and yet, there’s still that little Indian girl in her, who feels that her unconventional choices (like living in with a boyfriend) might have hurt her salability in the marriage market. Understandably, the heroines, here, walk away with the film – particularly Bipasha Basu, who’s rarely cast in parts she’s suited for (did you believe her in latter portions of Corporate?) but is so right in this instance that you feel she may be playing herself.

The male supporting characters don’t do too badly for themselves either. When the father of one of the heroines faces Raj – his daughter had gone missing, and Raj helped her find her way back to her parents – his hesitation suggests that as grateful as he is to this young man, did it have to be a young man, especially when overnight travel was involved? It’s humour, with heart. And Kunal Kapoor, who plays the husband of one of Raj’s loves, has a moving scene where he sees Raj leave his wife in tears and fishes around in his pockets for a handkerchief. There, in that flash, you catch a glimpse of the innate decency of this man. But surprisingly, the one male character that could have used some building is Raj himself. For a story that’s all about a rake’s progress, Raj simply doesn’t come across as that much of a rake. The character is certainly an improvement from the days of Aap Ki Kasam, where Rajesh Khanna played a college student (yeah!) who took offence at the mere fact that a petulant Mumtaz accused him of teasing her – because, you know, he’s the hero and such heinous acts are usually the handiwork of villains like Ranjeet (who, in fact, did the actual teasing in this case).

Raj is someone who, refreshingly, talks dirty and wants women without the pesky commitment issues. (Even his definition of “forever” is endearingly warped: “Hamesha wala ‘hamesha’ nahin,” he clarifies. “Thodi der wali ‘hamesha’.”) But the director pulls his punches when it comes to depicting this aspect of his hero – because, I guess, this isn’t an ultra-realistic art film and we still need to like the guy. Raj’s contrition, therefore, doesn’t carry the weight that it should. He doesn’t seem to have fallen enough in our eyes in order to warrant this penance – and considering this is the crux of the film, it comes across as a huge failing. Then again, this is something I noted only in retrospect. After a somewhat shaky start, Bachna Ae Haseeno rolls onward with such well-oiled poise, its charms are hard to resist. I wish the same could be said of Ranbir, though. He’s an affable enough screen presence, but he works just too damn hard to please us, especially in the lighter scenes. (I was reminded of the kind of taut-muscled performance Hrithik Roshan used to give in the early days.) But it doesn’t really matter because he’s playing someone quite unusual – a hero who’s, mostly, a foil for his magnificent heroines. In other words, he, too, is doing his bit to quietly reshape the boundaries of what constitutes “mainstream.”

IF OUR FILMMAKERS ARE GOING TO INSIST on looking westwards for inspiration, I wish they’d insist on being inspired by the running times as well. Even at a little over an hour-and-a-half, Bruce Almighty seemed way too long – some thirty minutes of genius slapstick tossed into a vat of icky, inspirational goo – and at a good hour more, Rumy Jaffery’s God Tussi Great Ho appears interminable. Salman Khan (playing Arun) steps in for Jim Carrey as the self-centred, whiny loser who blames God (Amitabh Bachchan) for all the injustices in his life – the girl of his dreams (Priyanka Chopra) looks at him as just a friend, and a rival at work (Sohail Khan) quickly becomes a mortal foe – and when the latter grants him His powers, he realises omnipotence isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

The original film may not quite have delivered on its promise of full-frontal blasphemy, but it did feature a few razor-sharp lines – like the sarcastic retort Bruce tosses off when the man in the white suit claims he’s God: “Thank you for the Grand Canyon, and good luck with the Apocalypse” – and it had some sweetly anarchic fun with Christian imagery (as when Bruce wreaks vengeance with the help of a Biblical plague of insects). I hoped Jaffery would do something similar with our own legends, many of which are ripe for a punch line, if not biting parody. But God Tussi Great Ho has no teeth. Salman is hilarious in a blink-and-miss gag where he’s a TV-station weatherman and Anupam Kher scores some laughs as Arun’s cantankerous father – but these funny bits are buried under a tedious love triangle, and almost nothing significant is made of Arun’s higher powers. It’s all expended on inanities like sending a villain flying through the air with a mere look. You don’t need to be God to be able to do that – you just need to be Rajinikanth.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without

HIT HAPPENS

AUG 17, 2008 - FILM CRITICS AND THE BOX OFFICE have traditionally maintained a very cordial distance from one another – thanks largely to the law of inverse proportions that states that if a critic likes something, the box office typically responds with the kiss of death – but this column, this week, deserves to be devoted to numbers. For one, we have been subjected to non-stop reports of the earth having been shattered, in several parts of the country, by the collections of Singh is Kinng. According to the site boxofficeindia.com (which tracks, well, box collections in India), “Singh Is Kinng re-writes box office history by collecting over 8 crore nett on its opening day in India. The box office tornado that is Singh is Kinng is likely to fetch around 28 crore nett over the weekend destroying the 22 crore record of Om Shanti Om and Race… Singh is Kinng will surpass the 32 crore distributor share of the biggest grosser of 2008 Race in 9-10 days while the 26 crore distributor share of the biggest hit of 2008 Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na will be crossed in 6-7 days. It is the fastest money spinner ever.”

Secondly, there’s the juggernaut that is The Dark Knight, lodged comfortably at number one (at the North American box office) in its fourth consecutive weekend, with a 24-day total of $441.5 million. It is already third on the list of all-time domestic blockbusters, behind only Titanic (which grossed $600.8 million during a single theatrical run) and Star Wars (which made $461 million over multiple releases). There is, of course, some perspective needed to all this oohing and aahing – the fact, say, that ticket prices were much lower when those earlier films blasted through the record charts. But then you could argue that today’s records are more impressive, in a way, because they are created in an age of entertainment overload. Even with the easy distractions of cable television and DVDs being out in three months and so on, if large numbers swarm to the theatres to snap up tickets at the steep multiplex rates (or the not-inconsiderable single-screen prices), doesn’t it mean something?

Talk to old-timers in Chennai and they’ll go misty eyed about how MK Thyagaraja Bhagavathar’s Haridas ran for three years at a single theatre. And over there, the figures adjusted for inflation show that Gone with the Wind – at $1.4 billion, in North America alone – is still the all-time box-office champ. But what else did people, those days, do for an instant entertainment fix but watch movies? And hence the question: which records are more, let’s say, valid? Those – or the ones created by Sivaji and Singh is Kinng and The Dark Knight, which have managed to displace droves of moviegoers from their couches or their consoles or whatever else? And, on a related note, what do these records mean? As much as I loathed Singh is Kinng, its unprecedented success does seem hugely significant – at least in terms of what it’s going to mean to an industry beleaguered by a number of flops. But that’s just the business end of things, and cinema being (at least in theory) the intersection of commerce and art, what does the success of Singh is Kinng imply in terms of art? Several more lamely scripted comedies rolling off the assembly line – and that’s the scary part.

The motorist’s dictum of objects in the rear view mirror appearing closer than they are is easily translated to the moviegoer, in the sense that long-ago movies flashing through the mind’s eye appear better than they are – and it’s not difficult to make a list of older films that did not really deserve to become hits (if indeed, deserve has anything to do with it). But think of the top three Hindi films of all time (Sholay, Mughal-e-Azam and Mother India) or the top three Hollywood films of all time (Gone with the Wind, Star Wars and The Sound of Music). Doesn’t it seem that, back then, the films that grew legendary for breaking records – not just the hits, but the mega-super-duper-whatever blockbusters, the kind that united all strata of the public in a collective moviegoing rapture – had something to them? Aren’t they films that have lasted well beyond their sell-by dates? Aren’t they so beloved that the outrage that surrounded Ram Gopal Varma’s remake of Sholay suggested that the filmmaker had waltzed into a temple wearing chappals and proceeded to slaughter a cow in the vicinity of the sanctum sanctorum, and didn’t the colourised version of the chaste Mughal-e-Azam power past the siren calls of a barely clad Antara Mali in Naach a few Diwalis ago?

Speaking of the latter, you can get tangled up in knots about what, exactly, goes towards making up a blockbuster. Sholay you can understand, as also Mother India – but I never cease to be amazed at the kind of hysteria that Mughal-e-Azam set off when it was released. Even with those beautiful songs, even with those big stars, it’s still filled with all that talking – in heavy, high-flown poetry. It’s exquisite stuff, those dialogues – but to imagine that such a film could work on such a scale is, even today, incredible. You can believe that select sections in select cities – the so-called “classes” – would have been drawn in by its formidable charms, but does the degree to which the film worked indicate that the masses, too, were more “cultured” then? And have the ensuing years witnessed a gradual erosion that ineffable substance we snobbishly refer to as taste? Because the masses, today, appear to be flocking to Dhoom 2 and Singh is Kinng – and somehow, I don’t see that audiences, thirty years hence, are going to bat an eyelid when a hubristic filmmaker makes known his intentions of a frame-by-frame remake.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

AUG 16, 2008 - AS PEDRO ALMODÓVAR’S BAD EDUCATION OPENS, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) is in the middle of a writer’s block – or, as he calls it, a “creative crisis.” He’s a filmmaker without an idea for a film, and so he’s scouring the tabloids for inspiration. A typically sensational story catches his attention. “The current spell of icy weather has claimed its first victim,” he begins to read. “A motorcyclist froze to death on Highway 4 and drove for a further 90 km after he was dead.” He looks up at Martín (Juan Fernández), his production director, his audience of one. Martín has his back to us and we cannot see his reaction to this morbid anecdote, but the outline of a couple of fingers resting against the partial profile of a chin suggests that he’s understandably riveted.

Goded continues. “Two patrolmen flagged him down, and as he didn’t react, they pursued him. They drove alongside and rebuked him for his attitude. As he didn’t move they realised something was wrong.” Martín says it’s incredible. Goded’s eyes are shining, and, in true filmmaker fashion, he’s already cottoned on to the visual possibilities. “It’s a wonderful image,” he remarks. “A dead young man drives his motorcycle across the icy plain, escorted by two patrolmen.” Martín attempts to temper this enthusiasm with a dash of inquisitive reasoning. “Where was he going in that icy dawn?” he wonders. But Goded has an answer ready, a born storyteller’s romantic extrapolation of the situation. “To see someone who couldn’t wait until the morning.”

The deliberate outlandishness of this story could make you wonder if there’s something autobiographical going on here. After all, the final title card did announce, “Guión y Dirección: Pedro Almodóvar,” and this writing-directing credit did dissolve to a poster of a film that announced, “Guión y Dirección: Enrique Goded.” The two directors – inside and outside the film – do appear to share more than just their job descriptions. (And Goded even rhymes with Godard.) They’re both drawn towards melancholic, melodramatic, romantic, outré narratives. They’re both openly homosexual. Almodóvar’s first films were shorts that were shown, according to Wikipedia, in “Madrid’s night circuit,” while a character in Bad Education informs us, through a letter, that Goded debuted with an underground film.

This theory of doppelgängers on either side of the camera is given a shot in the arm by another tabloid story that Goded zeroes in on, later in the film. That one is, improbably, even more bizarre. “A woman threw herself into a pool of hungry crocodiles in a zoo that was crowded with visitors at the time. When the first crocodile attacked, the woman hugged it, according to the witness. The crocodiles devoured the body of the woman, who never complained, in a few minutes.” Once again, Martín chimes in with his reaction. “What a horrible death!” And once again, Goded neatly cuts out this portion of the paper to file away, possibly for use during another attack of creative crisis.

Again, there seems to be something more to this, something more than just the fact that a freakish happening caught the attention of a storyteller in search of a story. A little later, Goded finds his plot and is in the middle of auditioning the actor (Gael García Bernal) who will play the protagonist of his film, titled The Visit, when he comments, “The audition worked for several months, long enough for me to throw myself into the shooting of The Visit, like the woman who threw herself to the crocodiles and hugged them as they ate her.” Suddenly, now, that incident with the woman and the reptiles that devoured her appears to function as a metaphor for the all-consuming process of filmmaking itself, a process only too well known to both Almodóvar and Goded.

But by then, enough of the serpentine plot has uncoiled before us. We’ve seen a movie-within-this-movie about a long-ago event, which also features a flashback (so that we’re now twice removed from the present day). We’ve also seen a character’s brother pretending to be that character (that is, he’s posing as his brother), while enacting the same part (that of the brother) in The Visit – the film that’s being shot within the film that is Bad Education, and which mirrors (in tone and in terms of the cast) the actors and the settings we saw in the earlier movie-within-the-movie. Throw into this dizzying mix pederast priests and boy-boy love and a transsexual heroin addict – and you wonder if the reason Almodóvar wove in those earlier stories (about the dead man on a bike, about the woman and the crocodiles) was simply to prefigure the fact that Goded’s life would soon be filled with more bizarre twists than anything the tabloids could dream up. You wonder, in other words, if Almodóvar is merely pointing out that truth is stranger than lurid fiction.

Copyright ©2008 The New Indian Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

FACTORY TALK

Ram Gopal Varma opens up about being a certain kind of director, about why Contract didn’t work, and about why the upcoming Phoonk is more than just a horror film.

AUG 15, 2008 - ABOUT FIVE MINUTES AFTER SITTING DOWN across Ram Gopal Varma, I’m beginning to realise he’s hijacked the interview. There’s a sheet of questions in my hand – a list that I frequently look at, in the desperate hope of launching a counterattack to this blatant act of terrorism. But he keeps talking, and I keep listening. (Let’s face it: would you look Varma in the eye and ask, “Excuse me, but there are some things that I need to ask. Would you mind letting go while I try to do that?”) And as he talks, it’s almost as if he’s amassed a clutch of interesting things to talk about, and he’s got to check items off that list before the close of day – a theory that is confirmed later, when I see he’s gone over those same anecdotes during most other interviews he’s given that afternoon. It’s either that – or the fact that every single interviewer has put to him questions of unvarying insipidity, and, with these choice quotes, Varma is doing the best he can to keep himself entertained.

Even so, it’s an entertaining experience. The arrogance that you detect in Varma the filmmaker isn’t, as you’d expect, there in Varma the person. At least that afternoon in Chennai, he’s a delightful conversationalist, with a healthy amount of perspective on his work and a hearty sense of humour. I’m barely a couple of words into my first question, when he cuts me off and observes that my review of his Sarkar Raj was interesting, but I “completely missed the point.” Defensive hackles rising, I begin to argue that a review is just a point of view and so forth, but he cuts me off because he gets it. What interests him, he smiles, is to note people’s reactions to his films. But, I venture, he doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who cares about what others think. He agrees, and clarifies that even if he doesn’t bother, it’s interesting to “study” the way people react – as if filmmaking, to him, is nothing but an expensive laboratory with the nation’s audiences scraped into a petri dish. And I can’t help but wonder…

Is that why you make films – because it “interests” you to see how others will react?

My belief is that any filmmaker makes films for two reasons. One, he makes the film for himself – that is, he’d like to see a film like this. Second, he would like to imitate a successful film. “If Jaane Tu… worked, let me make a film like Jaane Tu…” So you’re trying to copy, but your ego doesn’t permit you to say you’re copying that film, so you would say, “The audiences like this kind of film.” Otherwise, your only choice is… [the first one]. Because I can make a film for me. I can’t make a film for you. Because I don’t know you, I don’t know your sensibilities. And if I cannot know that about one person, how can I group a whole mass and label them an “audience” just for my convenience?

So you’re basically talking about someone who makes a movie as a personal statement versus someone who makes a movie as a business venture.

Yeah, I would say that. But it’s a business venture not only in terms of making money, but also in terms of fame. Someone would want to make a movie to be paid more than, say, David Dhawan or Anees Bazmee – because if Anees Bazmee is the benchmark for commercial success today, he may want to be bigger than that. Still, I don’t think people really come into the industry to make money. Today, actors come to Mumbai to become Shah Rukh Khan. They don’t come there to become Naseeruddin Shah. And that’s because of the glamour, the fame quotient – to be looked up to, to be adored. That’s not really the passion for acting, and neither is it the greed for money. It’s the same thing with filmmakers. They want to be called the most famous or the most successful director. That becomes more important than why you want to make the film.

But then how do you explain the careers of people like Vidhu Vinod Chopra, or even yourself? You have your fame, your money – so why do you keep making movies?

I can’t speak for Vinod Chopra, but I make films because of a desire to make films. Ultimately, the filmmaker is a storyteller. I can have a conversation with you or I can write an article or I can make a film. The difference is, with cinema, you can use the various aspects of the medium and enhance the effect. More than telling you about a scene from Phoonk, for example, which is a horror film, I can use the various tools at my disposal and enhance the effect of what I want to impress you with. My passion is to make you feel that – rather than what you think of it, or how much money you will give it for gratifying you. I don’t think of those two aspects.

But you are working in a very expensive medium.

I’m not denying that. I’m talking about my motivation. I’m not saying that it’s right. But having said that, how can I guarantee that you would like it? Suppose I want to scare you, what could happen? (a) It scares you. (b) It doesn’t. So why would I deliberately do something thinking that you will like it? What I tried to do, you may not like – but that is an aftereffect. It’s not the primary reason. It’s not that I don’t care whether you like it or not. I’m not saying that. There’s no way of knowing whether you’ll like it or not. That’s what I’m saying.

Even then, when a filmmaker has been on the scene for as long as you have, aren’t there certain patterns that he learns to discern – whether this will work, or this won’t, and so on? Doesn’t he begin to “know” the audience after a while?

In fact, I think the reverse is true. The more you are around, the more disconnected you become – because you get corrupted with the industry’s thinking. They tend to think of the audience in terms of groups – “youth” films, “family” films… Also, when you are looking at cinema, in a theatre, with people around you, it’s a very different way of looking at it. At that time, your exposure level, your knowledge is very different. But when you become a director, you tend to lose that way of looking at films. Today, I can’t watch a film anymore, because I don’t watch a film to be entertained. I see a film to judge it. I am constantly looking at camera angles, sound, this, that – which is not the way audiences look at the film. So the film that everybody loves, say something like Taare Zameen Par – this is just an example – the point is, if in the first five minutes I disagree with the way the scenes are being captured, I will miss out on the content of the film, which might be the main reason the film clicks. So I think that the more you understand cinema, the more you become disassociated from the audience.

In that case, how do you explain the careers of people like Prakash Mehra or Manmohan Desai – apart from the fact that they worked in an era where more people went to the theatres because there were no TVs and VCRs?

See, their intention of making a film was different. Now, where did the word “formula film” come from? Formula films are like thali meals, you know? You get your curry, your dal, your rice, your chapatis – you have a good time, but also, your expectation isn’t going to be very high. You know exactly what you’re going to get there. So they kept on serving good helpings of that, with varying degrees and ranges, but, more or less, the soul was the same. And that’s why the word “formula” came about – because it can’t fail. Like the Coke formula, which is sent to various outlets – it will still be the same. But when you try to make a film that breaks convention – when I made my first film, the prevailing trend at the time were Balakrishna’s and Chiranjeevi’s films, so Shiva was a complete change – you have no way of knowing if it will work.

I didn’t know that then – and even now, I don’t have any idea why it worked. But it was liked. Whether it was liked for the reasons I made the film, or whether they saw something else in it – even that, I do not know. Even with a movie like Satya, I’m not sure that its commercial success has anything to do with what the critics liked it for. There were people who said they loved it because it was the first time they heard the word “chutiya” in the theatre. Reactions are as wide-ranging as that. Now, the critics gave four stars to Satya and they gave four stars to Maqbool, but Maqbool didn’t work anywhere as well as Satya. That’s what I’m saying. Each person likes or dislikes a film for unique reasons – and you can’t generalise them.

Do you think that the audience has become more fragmented today and it was more homogenous earlier?

I would think they were always fragmented. There are more choices today, and because of the Information Age, people are more aware of what is available, plus the freedom of communication is so strong that… When Doordarshan was the only option, I used to watch everything. I used to watch the Nirma ad. I used to watch the Surf ad. But the moment I’m given 50 channels and a remote control, I’m not going to watch TV with the same mindset anymore. The same thing applies to films too. I think very fast, and I can follow a very fast-paced film. But someone else may process things slowly and may want the film to linger on its scenes. Now who do you take as a benchmark for the guy sitting in the theatre? That’s why I feel when you make a film the way you want, there will hopefully be enough people out there wanting to watch it.

To give an example, Dhoom 2 is the biggest hit of last year. It collected some twenty crores in the Mumbai circuit alone. At an average of a hundred rupees a ticket, twenty lakh people saw the film. Now, this is the kind of film that has a repeat audience, so if you halve that figure, ten lakh people saw Dhoom 2. If ten lakh people out of a population of six crores can make the year’s biggest hit, what are the other five crore and ninety lakh people doing? Do they watch films or not? Another interesting question is: are the same people watching Welcome and Taare Zameen Par? There’s no way of knowing, which is why predictions are so often wrong. So the point is, you want to make a film and, secondly, you want people to like it. But which people? I can’t have a conversation like this with, say, my driver. And my driver is also a part of the audience, just like you and me. So do I take you as my mean audience, or do I take my driver?

And that’s why you say you make films for yourself…

The fact is that I understood that it’s impossible to group the audience into one whole. And because of this, you either decide that you want to copy a successful film, like Jaane Tu… When I made my first film, if I’d made something like a Balakrishna film, it might have also become a superhit, perhaps a bigger hit than Shiva. How should I know? Or, you choose the second option and you make films for yourself. And I decided that I want to make the films that I want to see. That’s just my decision. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. Now, coming to what you were saying, yes, film is an expensive medium. Apart from the costs, various actors and technicians are putting their trust – along with their time and effort – in your vision. And they all have some expectations. You have a responsibility towards them, not to let them down. But take the time I made Daud. It had everything going for it – the success of Rangeela, Urmila’s image, Sanjay Dutt after Khalnayak, AR Rahman after Rangeela. Nothing should have gone wrong, and yet it went wrong. And when I started Satya, people said nobody wanted to see bearded, sweaty faces. But that film worked.

So, in retrospect, my decisions may have been wrong, but at the time I took these decisions, they were right. Whether it was Rangeela or Satya or Daud, when I made the decision to make these films, I was serious. It is possible, en route, that I would have missed the target. Because at a human level, I could have been sidetracked, or I could have lost sight of my final purpose. But again, what is the benchmark for a flop or a hit? For example, Sarkar Raj cost 20 crores, and it was sold to one wholesale distributor at 41. He then sells it to another bunch, making a 15-20% profit. Those guys will make another 15-20% by selling it to sub-distributors and fixed hires. So the street value of Sarkar Raj, by the time it hits theatres, would be in the range of 65 crores. So even if it collects 60, it will be called a flop. Now, I made it for 20, and so even if it collects 25, it’s a hit. And the bottom line, for me as a director, is how many people saw the film.

Let’s assume 60 lakh people saw it. Does it mean anything, maybe that 59 lakh people hated it? I don’t know that. So the collections do not necessarily mean that people liked the film. So if film is an idea, film business is about taking that idea to the maximum number of people as effectively and as widely as possible. Along the way, different people have different agenda and motivations, all for their own purposes, and the only true, pure result is on a one-to-one basis. Did you like the film or not? That’s the only concern of the consumer. The producer has invested money. The distributor has invested money. With Sarkar Raj, the wholesale distributor made a lot of money. So in that sense, it’s a superhit. But on the street, if a distributor paid an MG amount of five lakhs, and he only made four lakhs, it’s a flop for him. That’s an informed decision he’s taken, based on his expectations from the local territory or the promos or X or Y factors. Now, that, as a director, I will never be able to control.

But why do you find so many contrasting figures? In the US, for instance, box office reporting is such a streamlined system.

I don’t really deal with the business end. But I think, earlier, there was a lot of cash business, and slowly, with the corporates, all that is getting cleaned up. The multiplexes are very streamlined, while the single screens and the small-town theatres are not. And unless there’s accountability from top to bottom, it’s difficult. But I think we’re getting there.

You just said that you define the success of a film by whether it achieved the aims that you wanted it to achieve. Let’s take Contract. What made you say you wanted to see this vigilante movie? What made you persist with it and put it out in a market that’s no longer responsive to such films?

I’ve answered this question already. You either make what you want to make, or you make whatever kind of movie is working.

But I’m talking about gangster films, in general, not doing well of late…

I don’t agree with that. I’ll agree with you if you say you don’t like Contract as a film. But I don’t believe the genre has anything to do with it. No genre will ever fail. It’s the film that fails. It’s a question of how interesting you make it and how you pitch it. Maybe they didn’t like what they saw in the promos, or they didn’t like the actors or what they heard about it. There could be so many reasons for people not going to a film. It’s not a question of genre. A horror film and a romantic comedy and a family film can work on the same day.

With Phoonk, you’re coming out with your first horror film after Bhoot. Has it shaped up according to your expectations, according to the way you saw it in your head?

It’s a big fallacy that a director can know if the film has come up to his expectations. From the time it was started, whatever concept of the film was there inside your head, it’s rarely there by the time you’ve finished. By the time you’ve broken it down into scenes and done location shooting and editing and so on, you have no idea – because you’re looking more into the details of the technical aspects. You may have begun the film to make people laugh or cry or scared or whatever, but by the time you finish, you won’t be able to feel it. At best, you can try to analyse the reaction of someone who’s seeing it for the first time, and see if you’ve reached your goal. But you, on a personal level, cannot do this. Because in each decision you’ve taken, there’s so much thinking you’ve done about the shot or the performance or the line, you take it for granted that all the information you’re using is in the audience’s head. But it might not be there, and they will look at it in a completely different way. So regarding whether the film has come up to my satisfaction, no film can ever do that.

The second point is what I think of it. Bhoot had the scare element of making you jump in your seat, and then you laughed because you were caught unawares. And then you waited for the next scare to come. But with Phoonk, the subject matter is very serious. What I mean by “serious” is that it could make you question your faith. It ‘s a debate between a believer and a non-believer and a person who’s on the wall – but it’s not a drawing-room discussion. At the centre is a girl with something happening to her. (Picks up pen) Let’s say this pen rises in the air like this. You can say it’s a miracle, or you can call it a trick, or you could say you’re just imagining it. But you have to take a decision soon, or your loved one will die. Now you’re desperate to find a solution and you may find yourself asking some guy who’s supposed to know about all this – as you’re a non-believer. But if this guy’s explanation about this trick is not satisfactory, and he’s not giving you a solution, how do you decide? Phoonk is like that. The interesting part for me is that it’s beyond a horror film, beyond the “scary” genre. It is very scary, because of the backdrop itself, but the more interesting part – which I think is novel in such a film – is that I’m hoping it will create a debate among both believers and non-believers.

Is this an extension of your own feelings about such things – because you’ve often said you’re a non-believer?

Yes. I think the protagonist is, more or less, playing me. But then, every protagonist has some bits of me. “Mujhe jo sahi lagta hai, main wohi karta hoon” from Sarkar is me. “Main jagah se nahin, dimaag se kaam karta hoon” from Contract is also me. I said that when I lost my office. And most importantly, “Faisle nahin, nateeje galat hote hain” – that’s me too.

You come across as more interested in the darker side of things, and when I think of you doing a romance, I think of something like Naach. The love story of that scarily independent woman – that’s how I’d think Ram Gopal Varma’s idea of a romance would be. What made you do frothy films like Rangeela and Mast?

Not really. I’ve done light films in Telugu. There’s no doubt I have an affinity for dark films, because that’s the kind of cinema I enjoy – but I’m basically, by nature, a very funny person. I’ve done films in almost every genre. My first film was about student politics. Raat is a horror film. Kshanam Kshanam is a caper. Kaun is a psychological thriller. But because of the hard-hitting nature of the underworld films and the horror films, because of the intensity, I think they tend to be remembered more easily. Anyway, what happened with Rangeela is that I had a friend called Ramesh in college. He was actually a street goonda, not a student. Those days it was like Shiva – a lot of hobnobbing between students and goondas. He was in love with this girl, but he’d never go up to her. We used to encourage him to go and speak to her. He always used to wear these dirty chappals, and one day, he wore brand new Nike shoes. We all laughed and he was hurt. Then this girl started seeing this guy – very good-looking, very rich, the only guy who had a car in those days – so we chamchas of Ramesh would goad him to go and beat that guy up. And in a choked voice, he turned to me and said, “She deserves someone better than me.”

That was the birth of Rangeela. I wanted to capture his emotion, and the Nike shoes he wore became the scene where Aamir Khan dresses up. So each film of mine has one basic thought behind it. Ramesh’s line, for me, was the soul of Rangeela. But from the time he said it to the making of the film, it must have been a ten-year journey. Now, when I saw how Mani Ratnam had shot the songs in Roja, I was blown away – and for the first time, I had a desire to do songs. Then, in The Sound of Music, I was very impressed with the character of the Countess, the way they resisted the temptation of making her the vamp – that became the basis for Jackie Shroff’s character. And I was watching Singin’ in the Rain, when I noticed my mother – who’s very conservative and who used to hate watching the Sarkailo khatiya kind of songs – didn’t mind this film, which actually had more exposure, girls baring their legs and all that. I realised that it was because these girls take pride in flaunting their body. It was there in their expressions – whereas in Sarkailo khatiya, which was done only for commercial reasons, you can see the hardness in Karisma’s face. So I told Urmila to take pride in being beautiful – and that’s what comes across in Rangeela. The bodies of all women are the same, but the way they feel about it is what the audience will take home.

So a lot of thoughts were grouped into Rangeela, but still the basic point is Ramesh’s line. The Countess, the woman’s pride in her beautiful body, the songs – all that became the atmosphere. And the humour element, which was so different in the film, I took from watching a lot of Hollywood musicals at the time. And the conversations that Munna and Pakia used to have were the kind of conversations that we used to have. And I’ve seen that, any time, if my first thought behind why I wanted to make the film happened to be right, the film happened to be right. And if that thought was wrong, the film went wrong. With Company, I was sitting with this guy called Manish Kadawala, who knew the Dawood Ibrahim gang. We got talking, and he told me, “So many people died in the fight between Dawood and Chhota Rajan. They are bent on killing each other. But even today, if Dawood Ibrahim calls, if Chhota Rajan is smoking a cigarette, he’ll keep it aside. He has that much respect for his mentor. They hate each other because they love each other.” And that line – “They hate each other because they love each other” –became the basis for Company. The rest of the film has nothing to do with Dawood Ibrahim or Chhota Rajan. It’s all my office politics, in the Factory. Because jealousy and one-upmanship and wanting to be better than the other – all this is part of any company. Now the point I’m trying to make is that with Contract, I was trying to make a Rambo kind of film in a realistic setting. That line, that idea, by itself, was wrong. And therefore the film went wrong.

With these ideas, is it possible to stay “pure” and true to yourself, or do other voices begin to influence you and corrupt your thinking?

It’s not possible, after a point, to retain your purity. And besides, you will yourself forget the feel that was there when you first had the idea. I had a story for a film. Anybody I told this story to was amazed, and the way I narrated the story, they didn’t even realise it was Sholay, till I told them. Then why did I make Sholay the way I made it? It’s because the day “Kitne aadmi the” became “Kitne,” and Holi became Diwali and so on, the people around were so mesmerised that they created an atmosphere – not intentionally – and I started thinking along the lines of audiovisual bites. It was no longer a film. I didn’t think whether the audience should hate Babban or if they should empathise with Thakur…

But isn’t that also how you make films, by concentrating on key moments, key aspects?

I’m not very sure that’s my intention. It’s not so much about the technical aspect of it. I’m a person who gets bored quite fast. I want to excite myself. So depending on what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it, my mind will create a visual which will highlight it, at least for me. Some of them get it, while others think I’m needlessly exhibiting dramatic angles. I saw an incredible visual the other day, at Versova beach, at about 6:30 in the evening, just as it was turning dark. There were ten or twelve couples, holding each other and standing in almost the same pose. It looked very ghostly. I just couldn’t understand how it happened – till I figured out that night is falling and it’s time for them to part , so they are holding on to that one last moment, all of them. So the night falling is the trigger for them to feel that emotion at that time. It’s one of the most romantic images I’ve ever seen. Now the mistake I do is this. I’ve explained this visual to you for five minutes – but if I hadn’t, you’ll think it’s so artificial. That’s what even I thought at first. In fact, it was very bizarre for me. The moment I understood it, it completely changed my perspective. I do that a lot. I think the more you sit with the film in your head, the more you take it for granted that it’s come out exactly like that on celluloid. That’s where the disconnect possibly lies with me and the audience.

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THE CREATIVE ART OF COMPROMISE

After Lagaan, Taare Zameen Par and, now, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Aamir Khan has become synonymous with cleverly compromised creativity.

AUGUST 2008 - ON THE FACE OF IT, OUR MAINSTREAM CINEMA spans a spectrum of stories. Love stories. Revenge stories. Stories about friendship and sacrifice and betrayal and honour and tradition. But the story that plays out behind the scenes has pretty much stayed the same: about the filmmaker as Faust, and the almighty box-office as Mephistopheles. With very few exceptions (that actually prove the rule), the crux of this plot is the selling of the soul.

You want to change the world with your film, but you also want to survive in order to make your next film – so you make your peace with the kind of arrangement that’s the bedrock of any kind of marriage, especially the one between art and commerce. You learn to compromise. And that that isn’t necessarily a bad word is what Aamir Khan is apparently on a mission to prove – as actor, and especially as producer.

This isn’t the first time a superstar has channelled his energies into something other than the creation of the next superhit. Kamal Hassan has been doing that for a while now – but with a singular difference, alternating between the unusual stories that he wants to tell (Hey Ram, Anbe Sivam) and the easy entertainment that his audiences want to see (the comedies like Tenali and Panchatantiram), making his monies off the latter and pumping those finances into the former. But Aamir, somehow, has managed to ensure that the unusual stories that he wants to tell are the entertainment that his audiences want to see.

And this he has achieved primarily by making better use of the multiplex revolution than practically anybody else (something that has to be factored into the consideration of Kamal Hassan’s cinema, for Tamil Nadu is still dominated by single screens). Aamir has fashioned these multiplexes into little hotbeds of compromised creativity – compromised, because his films aren’t perfect, but creative all the same, because even these imperfections are loftier in intent than the blemishes that mar other films.

Not for Aamir the silky seductions of an easily tucked in item number, the safety net of a comedy track, or the decadent eye candy of big stars trussed up in painstakingly styled finery and deposited in the kind of mouthwateringly touristy locations that no Yash Raj production can do without. These are compromises of desperation, of selling the soul for silver, whereas Aamir’s compromises serve a higher purpose – to ensure, for instance, wider acceptance of Hindi cinema’s sole instance of a story propelled by a bucktoothed, dyslexic protagonist.

Taare Zameen Par had a truly great first half, one that ended intriguingly with the director-producer-actor in a clown suit – and during intermission, you couldn’t help but anticipate what came afterwards. Unfortunately, what came afterwards did not touch the heights of the earlier portions. The compromise, the pact with the devil manning the box-office, was that the second half became sentimental. This isn’t a problem in itself, but considering that the first half was a remarkably understated, day-in-the-life chronicle of a dyslexic child, the change in tone was tough to take – because where the film was, earlier, grittily individual, it now became generously crowd-pleasing.

But how those crowds responded – the way they never did for the uncompromised vision of, say, Sparsh (one of the finest Hindi films about disability). The compromises of Taare Zameen Par were ones you could at least respect if not respond to, for they were compromises with a measure of creativity; they did not violate the integrity of the premise with, for instance, an item number or a comedy track. And because of these compromises, the film broke out of the “nice little film that nobody saw” niche and became a nationwide phenomenon, making a topical buzzword of dyslexia and a fifteen-minute star of Darsheel Safary.

This is impossible to imagine without Aamir Khan in the driver’s seat, without the goodwill he commands within the industry and with his fans, and without the notion he’s gradually instilled in his audiences that his name is a guarantee of quality mainstream entertainment. He appears to truly believe in the films he makes, and he uses his clout as a huge star to make everyone else believe in them too. And this is surely why Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (produced by Aamir, starring his nephew Imran Khan) is on its way to becoming one of the year’s biggest hits.

Left to its own devices – in other words, had Aamir not tirelessly spearheaded the publicity for the film and stamped his name on it – Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut might have been dismissed as just another love story with newcomers. But with Aamir behind it, it quickly became the must-see feel-good romance of the season. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the film turned out to be quite engrossing – witty and wise about the ways of the heart, with casting choices bordering on genius. But then the audiences already knew all that, without seeing a single frame. After all, the producer’s name was Aamir Khan.

What’s remarkable about Aamir’s stint as producer is that every film he’s bankrolled so far has become an event. Lagaan was a huge hit that went to the Oscars. Taare Zameen Par was a huge hit that went on to redefine what a mainstream audience would flock in droves to see. And now, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is a huge hit that… Well, we’ll have to see what the lasting legacy of this trifling romance is going to be, but the way it’s caught on like wildfire, it’s, at the very least, the film that gave Imran Khan the kind of launch few films have given their leading men.

The impact of these films has been such that it’s easy to forget that Aamir Khan has taken to producing only very recently. But he appears to have a bloodhound’s scent for what people want and what will work at the box-office. He knows that, as long as his name is attached to a project, the audiences will line up for anything – even a four-hour film about cricket, or the story of a dyslexic child populated mostly by non-stars.

And that’s why there’s a greedy little part of me that wishes Taare Zameen Par had become all that it could have been – that it had not turned cute and gooey, that it had delivered on its early promise of the tough little trajectory that its protagonist would have to take to triumph over his disability. And the same part of me wishes that Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na had been better, more attuned to the locutions of the English-speaking (and English-thinking) set that the group of friends in the film primarily is.

But if Taare Zameen Par had stayed a bitter little pill, stubbornly resisting the gradual glazing of sugar, and had Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na remained an upscale Dil Chahta Hai for the just-graduated set, the reach of the films would have been curtailed – and the producer knows this. And hence the compromises. He is, after all, the canniest of businessmen, the returns on investment of whose ventures would leave leading industrialists salivating.

But, at the same time, Aamir Khan is also an artist, and at least in the films he puts his producing cap on for, he appears genuinely interested in more than just making money, and in shepherding mainstream cinema to new grazing grounds – for if that weren’t the case, he could merely divert his funds to the likes of Fanaa, which made pots of cash while doing nothing to his reputation as a stickler perfectionist. For the one question on our lips as we exited that Yash Raj production was: Just what modes of black magic were employed on Aamir Khan to make him consent to this script?

Instead, the films with his imprimatur – namely, the films that he’s not simply acting in – take on a life beyond their run at the box office (though, admittedly, it’s too soon to say that about Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na). They go on to define the zeitgeist, redefine the contours of commercial cinema, and because few others follow in these footsteps, taking these risks, Aamir Khan’s films take root as definitive pop-culture signposts.

Because for all the compromise, there’s still the creativity. Because for all the watering down of Taare Zameen Par, there’s still the highly atypical soundtrack by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, which is the closest that Hindi film music has come to channelling the indulgent, rock-fuelled angst of Pink Floyd. Because if the heroine of Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (played by Genelia D’Souza) is a lame construct full of I-love-my-best-friend clichés, there’s still Meghna (played by Manjari), who’s easily one of the most complex female characters written for a mainstream cinema culture that’s rarely interested in women, let alone a woman who isn’t the heroine.

The character of Meghna was written by Abbas Tyrewala, sure, just as Taare Zameen Par was Amole Gupte’s brainchild – but it’s not difficult to imagine the reception these films would have received had they been backed by another producer (and if, at all, they’d been backed by any other producer). Looking back, Lagaan seems to have revitalised Aamir Khan, whose famed script sense, whose famed audience connect was nowhere in evidence in Mann and Mela, the films he made just earlier.

But practically everything Aamir has touched after beating the British at their own game in those four hours – Dil Chahta Hai, Rang De Basanti – has gone towards cementing his position as someone who’s as attuned to artistry as the audience, at least as much as is possible within the commercial format. He’s discovered a startling middle path between selling his soul and still somehow saving it, and, in the process, he’s made a fine art of compromised creativity.

Copyright ©2008 Man’s World. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

SARDAR RAJ

Akshay Kumar’s new film wants to crown him box office emperor. What it doesn’t want is to be any good.

AUG 10, 2008 - THE CHARACTER THAT SONU SOOD PLAYS in Anees Bazmee’s Singh is Kinng is named Lucky, but perhaps Akshay Kumar (who plays Happy Singh) should have been the beneficiary of that felicitous moniker. The numerous ways that Happy gets lucky – except, of course, that way, he being a good Indian boy and all – make it appear that he was born under a shooting star, and grew up in a nursery littered with horseshoes and four-leafed clovers, with a giant Buddha by the bedside whose belly was flattened by constant rubbing. When Happy lands up in Australia – he’s come there looking for Lucky, who’s a don who needs to be carted back to India, back to their village – he has nowhere to go, no one to turn to, and a flower lady (Kirron Kher) just happens to stumble upon him. Not only is she Indian, she’s a Punjabi too – as well as the mother of Sonia (Katrina Kaif), whom Happy had fallen in love with in Egypt, where he just happened to end up when he inadvertently swapped flight tickets with a stranger, who just happened to be Puneet (Ranvir Shorey), Sonia’s boyfriend.

Incredulous coincidences have always been a staple of the cinema, even the ones we revere as classics, and – warning: wildly inappropriate comparison ahead – I was reminded, suddenly, of Casablanca. (I know. I know.) Now there’s something that’s widely considered an all-time great, and yet, its plot is kicked into motion by the happenstance – at least, it seems that way for a while – of Ingrid Bergman finding herself, one evening, in Humphrey Bogart’s nightclub. They were lovers long ago and they lost touch, and now, after all these years, she conveniently winds up in his proximity. We’re beginning to roll our eyes, when Bogart remarks, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” The reason that line is remembered today isn’t simply that it’s been crafted just so – it practically roils in rhyme – but because, with it, Bogart essentially dissipates our misgivings about the situation. He himself finds it ridiculous, and he’s drawing our attention to it – and therefore, we’re stranded without weapons. That’s what good writing can do – disarm our scepticism, or, to use a phrase more widely prevalent today, make us suspend our disbelief.

But who cares about good writing anymore, especially in a moviegoing culture where brain-dead films are considered the same as brain-dead filmmaking? In other words, not requiring the audience to apply themselves while watching a film has become a license for not applying yourself while making the film – when the reality is what they say about dying being comparatively easy. The best brain-dead comedy requires a lot more thought and work – besides actors who know the precise second to slip on that banana peel – than, say, a straight-up drama, where a reasonably involving storyline is capable of covering up a multitude of sins both behind and in front of the camera. Then again, the point of Singh is Kinng isn’t so much comedy as the coronation of Akshay Kumar as box office kinng. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch the sequence where Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan and Aamir Khan are reduced to mere sidekicks. The scene, actually, involves a few goons carrying out a kidnapping while wearing masks of these superstars, but isn’t the subtext unmistakable? And with that kind of overarching agendum, who’s got the time to be bothered about trivialities like writing?

Akshay Kumar continues to work on – or, perhaps, hammer in – the earthy self-effacing simpleton persona that’s worked so well for him of late. I’ll give him this much – it’s an extremely clever strategy to distinguish himself from every other hero (except maybe Sunny Deol). “You guys are welcome to the multiplex audiences,” the actor appears to be announcing in film after film, “and I’ll lord over the rest of the country, through the single screens.” (He seems to have leafed through the rulebooks of the big heroes of Tamil and Telugu cinema.) But in Singh is Kinng, he’s barely got a part to play. He’s there from beginning to end, but you don’t get the sense of joy in the performance that was there in, say, Tashan (which, for all its faults, at least gave him a nicely detailed character). Happy has a scene where he serves aloo parathas for breakfast, and when Puneet winces, he vows that, henceforth, the “Angrezon-wala breakfast” will be served, which, according to him, consists of doodh and chiwda. (Get it? He’s such a wholesome son-of-the-soil, he can’t even say “cornflakes.” Take that, you Kellogg’s-slurping PVR/INOX frequenters.)

But what are we to make of this scene? Who is it serving – Happy Singh, the character, or Akshay Kumar, the actor? Because if it were about the character, wouldn’t someone this clueless about modern urban life find himself at sea in Australia? Wouldn’t his adventures mirror those of the earthy self-effacing simpleton Bihari that Madhavan played in Ramji Londonwaley? Oh, but I’m sorry – thinking isn’t allowed in films such as this one. (I keep forgetting that. Damn!) And thus the Singh is Kinng juggernaut rolls on, throwing at us a shaky love triangle, several intolerable moments of four-hanky sentiment, a gratuitous love-conquers-all message (“Nafrat ko sirf pyaar se hi mitaya jaa sakta hai”), and even a dance item by Javed Jaffrey. (Why? Who knows? Maybe the actor felt it was time to remind audiences that he still has the loose limbs from his Bol baby bol days.) It’s all one sloppy mess of comedy and action and drama – with two exquisite high points. One is Manoj Pahwa’s hilarious throwaway dig about Shah Rukh Khan, and the other is a blessedly politically incorrect sight gag involving a patient in a wheelchair. Or maybe they’re not all that great, and maybe they just appear to be high points because, unlike the rest of Singh is Kinng, they at least leave you with the illusion of being entertained.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without

DUTT’S ENTERTAINMENT

AUG 10, 2008 - THE FUSTY CLICHÉ ABOUT LIFE IMITATING ART and art imitating life sprang to gruesome life on the evening of October 9, 1964, when Abrar Alvi went to Ark Royal, Guru Dutt’s flat on Peddar Road, to flesh out the final scene of Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi, in which the heroine dies a “sad, lonely, disappointed death.” Each one of those qualifiers would, in a matter of hours, apply to the demise of Dutt himself – who had, that day, committed himself to a series of agitated phone calls to his estranged wife, Geeta Dutt.

Alvi remembers, “She had refused to send across their baby daughter so that he could spend time with her, and with each call his anger mounted. At last, he had delivered an ultimatum… or so he seemed to suggest. ‘Send the child or you will see my dead body…’ You know, the kind of things one says when one is angry and one’s tongue gets a bit out of control.” Alvi finished his scene close to midnight and sat down for a late dinner. Dutt was monosyllabic throughout the meal, and finally said he’d like to retire. Alvi concludes, “I never saw Guru Dutt alive again.”

It is bit of a masterstroke that Sathya Saran opens Ten Years with Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s Journey with this death scene, for the author instantly establishes what the rest of her book emphasises in no uncertain terms – that Alvi and Dutt were inseparable during their decade-long relationship, which began when they met on the sets of Baaz in 1953 and ended that fateful night of 1964. The highlights of the intervening years are recounted with great gusto by Alvi, and Saran does well to stand back and simply listen.

The thing about someone else’s story is that there’s no real way of arriving at the veracity of the chapters, at the truth of the characters, and the best recourse, sometimes, is to let this teller himself tell the story. Accordingly, large portions of Ten Years with Guru Dutt are chunks of Alvi’s reminiscences, with Saran alternating each stretch with some editorialising of her own. The effect is that of thumbing through the very entertaining transcript of a those-were-the-days interview, laden with nostalgic nuggets as much about a bygone age of living as a bygone era of filmmaking.

Given his moment, finally, under the sun – after decades of malicious speculation whether it was really he that directed Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam – Alvi seizes the opportunity like a Saharan wanderer prostrating before the first well that’s not a mirage. He emphasises that Guru Dutt was involved only with the song sequences. “We were shooting a difficult scene,” he says, “Rehman is in bed, paralysed, and I had shot it in a way that neither Y.G. Chavan, the editor, nor Guru Dutt could make sense of. There were shots of flying leaves interspersed.”

Chavan, perhaps, went and complained to Dutt, for Alvi soon received a summons. No sooner had Alvi entered Dutt’s office than Dutt started shouting, “Who do you think you are? Is it your film? It is my film.” Alvi waited till his producer calmed down and replied, “If Chavan had told me that you wanted an explanation of the way I have visualised and shot the scene, I would have stopped my work and come.” Alvi left the room, went back to his house and dashed off a petulant note to Dutt. “Do what you want with the movie. I want no credit – I have nothing to do with the film.” And Dutt wrote back, “You have directed the movie, the credit is yours, and the discredit, if any, is yours.”

Having peddled his most significant ware – “I still have that precious letter with me” – Alvi relaxes to regale us with how, for instance, Waheeda Rehman’s rise to the big leagues may not have been possible in the absence of a driver suffering from night blindness and a buffalo that was startled by the horn of a car. We learn, along the way, that not even Guru Dutt was free from being “influenced” by Hollywood (The Man with My Face is mentioned in the same breath as CID, which Dutt’s assistant Raj Khosla directed), though Alvi’s account makes it clear that it’s one thing to sniff out what’s interesting about a film and distill that essence into a brand new bottle and quite another to assemble a frame-to-frame copy.

Later, Alvi tells us how Guru Dutt’s visit to a kotha – in preparation for Pyaasa – led to one of the most unforgettable moments in the film; he was sickened by the sight of a heavily pregnant girl being forced to dance, and that repulsion forced its way into the song, Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahaan hai. It was SD Burman who tuned that immortal piece of verse, but not all his experiences with composing the film’s music were as elevated. Upon being commanded by Dutt to compose Sar jo tera chakraaye along the lines of a number from the film Harry Black and the Tiger, Dada Burman, Alvi recalls, came to him and wondered, “What is this that Guru is asking of me, public mujhe maarega.” A creator in nervous apprehension of being caught red-handed before a wrathful public – how endearingly quaint this notion appears today.

Copyright ©2008 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.