Review: Frost/Nixon

Click here to read the review of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon.

Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Click here to read the review of David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Review: Milk

Click here to read a review of Gus Van Sant's Milk.

Review: The Reader

Click here to read the review of Stephen Daldry's The Reader.

An Oscar decade

Yes yes, I'm obsessing over the Oscars...but if not now then when right?

Click here to reach this gallery.

Killing Margaret Atwood's work

Perhaps one of the most reductive, not to mention badly written, and absolutely un-researched pieces I have read about a writer. The victim this time is Margaret Atwood. Sadly it was carried out by The Hindu Literary Supplement. Click here to read.

Down Oscar lane...

I came across a unique collection of Academy Award ceremonies showcased by Google, sourced from Life. Click here to have a look.

Why Slumdog can irk an Indian

Click here to read the article.

The Bachchan-Boyle-blog saga; or the Slumdog story

Danny Boyle’s little film, Slumdog Millionaire has made it big. With four Golden Globe wins including major ones like Best Film and Best Director have made it an Oscar favourite. As was expected, a film like this would have encouraged yawns from the Indian masses and at best would have received critical nods and intellectual appraisal at film festivals. But then Rahman went and won a Golden Globe and we went a tad berserk that an Indian received an international award, and dreams for India’s first actual Oscar (Satyajit Ray’s was an honorary one, and Aamir was always a non-starter) have resurfaced at an embarrassing level. For some reason the Oscars appear sacrosanct to us, the superior awards to the lowly, Third-World, manipulations evident at the Filmfare etc. Since we have taken to worshipping Aamir Khan, his word against popular awards is the word of god and his weird preference for ‘untainted’ Oscars makes them holy.

But Aamir aside, Slumdog is unique in the reception it has received more than a fortnight before its release. Agreed that it is the most pirated films of all time, but I do wonder if the all-knowing, opinionated public has really watched the film, or is the public just judging it for the inevitable indignation that is considered politically correct behaviour from any Third-World citizen. I am most curious to find out if Amitabh Bachchan, the most “disgusted” of the lot has actually seen the film.

What Bachchan said: “If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It’s just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition.”

Bachchan acknowledges that the film is based on a book by an Indian but doesn’t quite realize that that contradicts his statement. Even if one is to agree with him about the Orientalist view of Danny Boyle or any white man for that matter, this is a unique case as the meat for the film comes from an Indian.

The cast of Slumdog was vehement in its defense of the film. Actor Irrfan Khan said, “The film is based on (a work of) fiction and it takes a cue from what Vikas Swarup narrates in his book Q&A. It is not that Swarup wrote the book in the backdrop of Mumbai's posh south Mumbai locality and Boyle deliberately set his film against the background of the city's slum in order to run down India's economic progress…Anyway, why get jittery about India's poverty and try to hide it? Because, the fact is, we are a poor country and poverty is there for all to see. Is there any harm if it is highlighted in a film for the sake of realism?”

No one quite expected the kind of backlash Bachchan’s statement invoked, the sharpest of them all coming from a blogger with The Guardian in UK. Nirpal Dhariwal said, “Bachchan is no doubt riled, as many other Bollwood no-talents will be, about the fact that the best film to be made about India in recent times has been made by a white man, Danny Boyle. Bachchan gave one of the worst English-language performances in cinematic history with his embarrassingly stupid portrayal of an ageing thespian in The Last Lear. Having failed miserably at cultivating a western audience, it must hurt him to be so monumentally upstaged by white folk on his home turf.
The bitter truth is, Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by westerners. The talent exists in India for such movies: much of it, like the brilliant actor Irrfan Khan, contributed to this film. But Bollywood producers, fixated with making flimsy films about the lives of the middle class, will never throw their weight behind such projects. Like Bachchan, they are too blind to what India really is to deal with it. Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India's "murky underbelly" as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world's poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema.
Bachchan's blinkered comments prove how hopelessly blind he and most of Bollywood are to the reality of India and how wholly incapable they are of making films that can address it. Instead, they produce worthless trash like Jaane Tu, Rock On!! and Love Story 2050, full of affluent young Indians desperately, and mostly idiotically, trying to look cool and modern.”

Meanwhile, the media quoted Boyle saying he respects the view of Bachchan. Though no actual quotes of Boyle saying this are available, perhaps him not defending the film was construed as such.

In the days that followed, Big B, as Bachchan is popularly referred to, has backtracked, (who wouldn’t in the face of unprecedented criticism that you are just not used to) and has once again used his most popular tactic till date – an amused criticism of the media. He has gone on about how headlines are picked and how it is morally incorrect and what have you. How he managed to convince people (and by that I mean Danny Boyle) that a headline like Big B rubbishes Slumdog, is not appropriate for his statement about the movie disgusting nationalists and patriots is anyone’s guess. Bachchan has also written an official letter to The Guardian saying that attacks on his person by reporters and bloggers of this paper display the “most extraordinary level of misreporting.”

Thoughts on Revolutionary Road

There is no dearth of films on the darkness of suburban life in America. In fact we get at least one every year. As far as content goes, Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road is nothing new.

A young couple move to the suburbs after their first pregnancy, looking for a stable background for the life that is to come and for themselves. Few years and two children down the line, it hits them that they aren’t happy with their lives, and the stableness they once desired. The wife suggests moving to Paris – a long unfulfilled dream of her husband’s, where he can take some time off while she provides for the family. After some initial hesitation, the husband is on board. The couple, excited for the first time in years, make plans, announcements and dreams. As luck would have it, the husband’s meaningless job suddenly becomes more lucrative, forcing him to rethink, he does, and thus begins the crashing of dreams and a family.

The hollow emptiness that surrounds the lives of Frank (Leonardo Dicaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) has been staple fodder in Hollywood for years. Think back to American Beauty, Donnie Darko or even the other Kate Winslet starrer Little Children. The emptiness eats people on the one hand, and gradually, the monstrous City—which stands in stark comparison to the suburbs—looks more colourful and more alive.

It is therefore not the story that makes Revolutionary Road special, but the characters who may live the lives of stock suburban figures in cinema, but embody greater detail in the way they’ve been built. As he narrates his one lasting memory of his father’s company, Frank says that the one thing he wanted was to not become like him, and here he is, working for the same company. The sense of superiority that was there in him when he sub-consciously distanced himself from his father’s way of life, stayed with him and we see glimpses of it in his very demeanor. He feels superior to his co-workers, to his neighbours and of course to his wife.

April on the other hand is no longer sure that they are in fact superior to the lot that lives falsely content lives in the suburbs. She is doing the dishes, looking after her children and exchanging gardening tips like any other woman. Her failed attempt at acting has only proven that she can no longer boast of being above the rest. Instead, it gives the riff-raff of her neighbourhood a chance to judge her. She reminds Frank of the man he used to be, who she thought was ‘the most exciting man (she had) ever met’, and wants to see that energy in him again. The confidence that was explicit in her body language in the snapshots of her pre-marital life has waned and she wants the edge back. In the guise of giving her husband the time to be the intellectual he has aspired to be, she is looking to gain control.

Frank laughs at the lowly, backward notion of his friend Shep when he expresses shock and contempt at the thought of April supporting him while he sits back, but it is ultimately the idea of control that becomes the deciding factor. Questioning Frank’s manhood is the recurring motif throughout the film – which leads him to try and prove it in the most traditional way – violence. The thought of earning more, going beyond the man his father was, one who can stand proud in front of his children because he has given them the perfect life is a temptation he can’t avoid.

The other recurring figure of suburbia is a mentally disturbed character. Michael Shannon plays John Givings the institutionalised son of their neighbour and land-lady. As is expected, he is the only person who ‘truly understands’ what they mean when they say they want to escape the hollow emptiness. They are happy to see he approves, as if it is a true indicator of his genius and the greatness of their plan. However, when he speaks the truth once again and questions Frank’s manhood, he is a crazed lunatic who should be shut up in an asylum where him and his views belong. In the suburbs, the mad are the sane.

The film does give in to hysteria every now and again becoming at points a little too shrill, but when it is contrasted with lasting silence—and Mendes does that at strategic points and with the control of a master—the silence becomes loaded with anticipation, frustration and hope, all at the same time.

Joan Baez turns 68

Click here to go to Joan Baez - A journey in music

Death of an actor…

One of the best publicity campaigns in the history of Indian cinema was designed for Ghajini. The anticipation for this film was like none other. Internet movie portals had a glorious December with page-views increasing ten folds each time they mentioned the word Ghajini. It was as if there was something magical about the word, that made people leave anything they were doing and lap up gossip, information, sneak peeks, pictures and trailers of the film. Brand partners of the film – Van Heusen, Tata Sky and Samsung too got a piece of the pie and pushed their products through their star – the one, the only Aamir Khan. His newly worked out look, the eight-pack that defeated Shah Rukh’s measly six-pack was the headliner at dinner-table conversations. The two girls of the film were royally ignored and no one minded that. The director was ignored and no one minded that either. After all, how many directors are there who are willing to tell the same, stolen, stale story twice. While we were busy giving ourselves embarrassed sighs over the dominance of remakes of Hollywood films, we didn’t see a more sinister trend coming up –remake of a remake of a remake. Plato and his Republic died all over again.

A R Murugadoss made the first attempt at copying Christoper Nolan’s Memento in 2005 with the Tamil Ghajini starring Surya Sivakumar, Asin and Pradeep Rawat. The version we see today has the same cast with the exception of Aamir Khan who has replaced Surya Shivakumar and Jiah Khan who has replaced Nayantara.

The story is of a man whose fiancé was killed and he was given a massive blow on the head that lead to short term memory loss. He plans to kill the killer, which is not an ordinary task given his 15-minute memory span. He makes notes and takes photos of things and people to remind himself of his agenda.

It’s a unique storyline, but the kind whose novelty wears off after the first time (which was Memento). The Aamir Khan starrer, being the third, has nothing new to offer and is therefore little more than a miserable copy. A film like this, which has a weak storyline does the predictable – and tries over the top methods of populating itself. Unnecessary and graphic violence was the means by which Murugadoss chose to overcome this lack. His characters were weak and poorly defined, take Ghajini for instance, played by Pradeep Rawat - an actor who hails from the South was forced to adopt a Harayanvi accent, something that he was ill at ease with and something that did not gel with his appearance at all, especially given that he slipped out of it every now and again (I wouldn’t call that perfection, would you?). He was clearly a man of influence, even publicly, but what exactly his profession was, was undefined. He attended college functions as the chief guest but also made regular appearances to kill people – personally.

The real disappointment is however, Aamir’s character – Sanjay Singhania. Unfortunately, the director and the writers haven’t quite figured out for themselves the stand they want to take about short term memory loss. His 15 minute memory span expands and compresses as per need of the moment. He can be in an act and not remember why but also reach from one end of Mumbai to the next without any memory loss problems. Continuity and logic have taken the toll badly in this film. There is an interesting moment in the film when we see the renewed shock of Kalpana’s (Asin) death for Sanjay when he takes his shirt off and reads the message. But Aamir Khan gets so busy showing off his body and admiring it himself that few would be fooled into believing he is reading devastating messages. His disorder is mixed up with bouts of madness (for people like him it seems it’s the same thing) as he lives in a state of animal rage. And by animal, I mean real, growling, jumping, snarling type of animal. He goes from making sounds and gestures like dogs, tigers and even King Kong for that matter. Sadly, this is the man who gave us the most incredible portrayal a character ever saw – in Rangeela. Even he, who is widely projected as a perfectionist, never bothered to understand the logistics of short term memory loss and follow at least something consistently. The renewed shock of a man over the murder of his fiancée can be a challenging role, especially if the aim is to prevent it from being run-of-the-mill and repetitive. Instead Aamir chose to snarl to show blind rage. Not novel, not perfect.

Meanwhile, Asin who made a bold statement saying she too is a perfectionist like Aamir, made a forced attempt at a bubbly personality. In her defense, she may have done it well the first time around and lost steam by the second. Anyone who needs to reinstate her ‘jadu ki chhadi’ status repeatedly is surely not confident of her charm and ‘magic’ reaching out to people.

Jiah Khan meanwhile was so badly cast that little else can be said about her. Her weird accent coming and going, her static expression and poor dialogue delivery did not help this crumbling film.

The people may go to the theatres out of sheer curiosity, but that just means the PR people behind this film were brilliant, not the film itself.

Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Few would believe that the hyper Woody Allen has it in him to make a film like Vicky Cristina Barcelona. His films so far have been witty, fast-paced and likeable, especially when he isn’t in them because he can play but one character – himself. Vicky Cristina Barcelona however looks like it’s made by a wholly different person. One whose soul agenda is not to convey his great wit and intelligence to his audience.

The story is about two women, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) who travel to Barcelona for a vacation. There they meet the sexually aggressive Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). Cristina in her forced post-Modern outlook is immediately attracted to his predatory skills, while the overly balanced Vicky is more than cynical about him and ‘method’. His suave, European demeanour wins them over and they accompany him to his birthplace, also in Spain. This leads to a number of friendships, relationships, loves and betrayals, and that’s what the film is about.

We hear a constant narratorial voice that actually tells us the story, sometimes giving us information in advance leading to heightened anticipation, and sometimes withholding just the right amount - for shock value. The beauty of this story lies in its simplicity, or rather apparent simplicity as is enforced by the narrator, who is, like all good narrators, matter-of-fact about the story he tells. That we hear the most wonderfully bizarre story in the most traditional way of story-telling is interesting. The voice of the narrator is perhaps the single strongest force that ensures the smooth flow of the story. There is an ease with which the story is told that makes even a threesome seem like a spiritual, uplifting idea.

The characters are well built and contribute to the strange ride this film is. My personal favourite is Cristina, who is a painful mix of progressive and a forced progressive. Her studied attempts at being impulsive are hilarious, yet, when the straightjacketed Doug (Vicky’s fiancée) criticizes her lack of respect for ‘normal values’ as pretentious, the joke is on him. Similarly, Vicky, who starts out as the most stable, reasoning character of the film, turns into an emotional mess after one escapade with Juan Antonio. A good combination of the two is Juan Antonio himself, who embodies both these opposing forces.

A late entrant, Mary Elena (Penelope Cruz) brings in madness and a raw sexual energy that changes the tone of the film. The constantly touch-and-go relationships that she enters into are Woody Allen’s unique touch and her actual impulsiveness makes her the most attractive character.

The actors have helped Allen a great deal in realizing this little film. Unfortunately, Scarlett Johansson is not drastically different in this Woody Allen film than any other though she fits the role well. Javier Bardem plays out a great balancing act between the stable and not-so-stable aspects of Juan Antonio’s character. It is however, Penelope Cruz who steals the show.

No one who sinks into the film (as most viewers will) can miss the lovely background score that suits the film well and compliments the story being told.

You can call the film meta-normative, you can say the relationships occupy an alternative space, you can pitch the romance of Spain against the lack thereof of America and see the subtleties of moralities in it, but for me, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is just telling a story. It’s a great story and it is told well. And that is enough.

Is J.K. Rowling the new Bard?

Click HERE to read a review of J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard

Review: Burn After Reading

Click here to read the review of Burn After Reading.

Review: Sorry Bhai

There were two good things about Onir's Sorry Bhai and these were Shabana Azmi and Boman Irani. Unfortunately, that was it.

I'm still puzzled about why this film was labelled 'unique', 'unusual' or any such favourable term. It is the most run-of-the-mill story of an engaged couple where the woman realises days before the wedding that she has in fact fallen out of love with her fiance and is now interested in his younger brother. There is the usual feat of parents around to object and to support and there is of course the happy ending.

The film, contrary to any claims of singularity, is a contrived coming together of cliches we had forgotten about. Be it the loving looks the actors give their Casablanca DVDs or the age-old repeat-the-name-three-times technique to demonstrate frustration. In a desperate attempt to appear 'modern', the middle-aged parents are happy to kiss in public, the young couple are happy to have sex before they get married and the best part of the film - suggestion of a live-in Sharman tells Chitrangada at one point, "Ma ne suggest kiya hai ki hum live in karein". It seems the film was trying to explore the undefined territory between the modern and the traditional by its incredibly drab plot and characters. That a young scientist can't play the fool after saying 'Maa kasam' is the point of this film. For me the struggle didn't come through, the silliness did.

Sorry Bhai has only suffered from Chitrangada Singh's mystical star status because the actress who played Gita in Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi was a whole different person— one who could act. Every sentence she uttered in this film, every emotion she adopted looked forced, and as a result the character is hardly built up in any real sense. Not that I expected much from him, but Sajay Suri was more wooden than usual. The other real disappointment however, was Sharman Joshi. The shift he demonstrated in a few moments in Rang De Basanti was lost in this one. He tried to get away with smiling through every scene in this film, whether he was happy, sad, angry or frustrated. There was no chemistry or urgency in any of the relationships with the exception of Shabana Azmi and Boman Irani who were more charming than they were in Honeymoon Travels. Sadly for the young actors, the ease between Azmi and Irani highlighted the complete lack among the other relationships in the film. It doesn't move in any way and leaves an utterly bland taste.

The idea behind Sorry Bhai was never revolutionary but it could have been handled better. Half of their cinematography work was taken care of as a result of the beautiful locale, the other half was poorly shot. The overwhelming focus on the surroundings is a good give away of how poor the story is. The dialogues could have lifted this from an ordinary story to something a little more, but they only pulled the film back into a greater sense of the ridiculous.

Review: Oye Lucky Lucky Oye

To say that a new dawn is visible in Bollywood is a tad contrived, but somehow that is all I can think of when I think about Dibakar Banerjee, the director of Oye Lucky Lucky Oye. Banerjee’s earlier film, Khosla Ka Ghosla came at a time when small-budget films with relatively unknown or character actors like Parvin Dabbas, Ranvir Shorey and Boman Irani were still treading a tightrope between appreciation and rejection, and yet, the honesty of the film, its complete rootedness, pulled it through, and got Banerjee a National Award.

Oye Lucky... comes three years after Khosla... and it is visible that Banerjee is not sitting smug in the success of his last venture, but is out to deliver a story that is based on real events; it may be based once again in Delhi, it might once again be a combination of fact and fiction, but its originality puts it in a class by itself, and to compare it with Khosla... is actually an exercise in futility.

Oye Lucky... is the story of Lucky (Abhay Deol) a lower-middle class boy whose simple desires are thwarted by his father (Paresh Rawal), only giving rise to aspirations of a different, more affluent lifestyle. Surrounded as he is by bullies and thieves in the making, his desire pulls him towards petty crime and ultimately towards thievery of a much larger scale. He comes in contact with Gogi (Paresh Rawal), a singer with a backdoor business of supplying stolen goods to people. Lucky’s quick style earns him some demand in Gogi’s group, but his dreams are bigger; he isn’t made to serve anyone else, his only aim being profit and of course some fun. He meets the quiet Sonal (Neetu Chandra) through Dolly (Richa Chadda), Gogi’s dancer and begins a relationship with her. He goes on to meet Dr. Handa (Paresh Rawal) who, though initially fooled by his impressive lifestyle, soon puts two and two together and tries to swindle him.

The keen observation that builds this film is unprecedented. From the director to the production designer, we can see a complete and very controlled vision of Delhi. It is not overstated in its filth or affluence or gaudiness, instead the architecture of the houses with its small rooms but open verandahs, the easy access from one wall to the other, the iron doors of some houses are what are competently captured. Little details work wonders, like the red chillies set out on a newspaper in the sun, the clothes drying and of course the public walls with very Delhi ads and election messages. Characters use names on areas in west Delhi, but that is just an added bonus for Delhi audiences who can relate to Lucky’s joy at being able to take a girl from Amar Colony to Rajouri Garden.

A glimpse of the Delhi Police works as an oblique comment in the film. We are used to seeing their brutality, their corruption and an entire host of related things. Some of those things are there in Oye Lucky..., but they too are understated. It is the body language, the things around them, the appearance of police stations that is emphasized. The dark dingy rooms of the thana, inspectors in various stages of undress, the enmity yet a camaraderie between the police and the thief occupy this film, speaking to audience without shouting a message in our faces.

The actors are in sync with the director who has conveyed his pitch, soul and vision of the film to them perfectly. They depict every detail as if it comes most naturally. Abhay Deol is striking in his persona of Lucky. He takes on the anger and desires of the young Lucky and develops it just a notch as ‘he has grown up’. His romantic life serves as a good balance to his otherwise ambitious, somewhat aggressive outlook. It betrays hints of the young, awkward sardar that lives in the suave looking Lucky. The resentment with which he observes the rich around him is well-stated; he may be sitting in a coffee shop like the rich girls around him, but he can never occupy it with as much command as they do. And this is perhaps what draws Sonal to him. She is as accomplished as any of the girls in skirts, but she too resents their ease with clothes she can only aspire to wear. Hers is a touching character who is well aware of her 'sinful' surroundings - be it her sister and her occupation or Lucky and his. She tries in the most dignified way to disance herself from something that she is in close proximity with and that makes her all the more endearing.

Richa Chadda who plays Dolly was an apparent force in the film, one of the most visible comments made by the director. Her need for sympathy, attention and love are conveyed by the things that touch her. Rejection brings out a hardened side natural to anyone, and in particular an emotionally abused girl.

Archana Puran Singh was the comic strength of the film portraying the Delhi Punjabi aunty to the hilt. Mispronunciation, contrived relationship forging and an aspiration for what Delhi folk call ‘high life’ make this character. Agreed that she is something of a caricature compared to most other characters in the film, but she increases the comic quotient thereby making the film more endearing, not to mention the ‘being-able-to-relate’ angle that she brings in.

The only point of disappointment for me in the entire film was Paresh Rawal and that is surprising because I thought he would carry the film. Younger actors around him overshadowed his somewhat artificial performances in all three personae. Three roles and very little to write home about, Paresh Rawal sadly became the weakest point of the film.

Great visuals, actors, story, songs, and Dibakar’s keen observation are things we hardly see packaged together, and it is this that this hearteningly simple film will stand out for.

Review: Dostana

If you're looking for evidence of Bollywood coming of age, then please direct your glance somewhere far far away from Karan Johar. He has never claimed to be anything more than an entertainer, and that is exactly what he is. One wonders what it means when posters of a film say, 'Karan Johar presents Dostana. Directed by Tarun Mansukhani.' Is he merely a producer, or has he somehow stamped the film with the hoo haa Dharma Productions is famous for?

As is well publicised, Dostana, starring Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham and Priyanka Chopra, is the story of two men in Miami looking for a flat. They find one, and it is perfect because it has two rooms to spare, but it is not meant for them. The landlady tells them only girls (baby-log) can occupy the flat as the third flattie will be her single niece. The two hatch the imperfect plan andpretend to be gay to win the lady's trust and a roof over their heads. They have to continue the pretence in front of the niece, who happens to be the stunning Priyanka, and then in front of some more people, and then some more and it goes on. Needless to say, they fall in love with her and life is all the more complicated.

Just because Bollywood has managed to say the word 'gay' out loud without being shut down, would be a massive change if the film wasn't the way it is. It walks a fine line between severe homophobia and an ability to get over it and look beyond. In spite of statements by Karan Johar himself, the film indeed does indulge in stereotyping at one level. For instance, the scene where Abhishek tells the two women their 'love story', the visual is of exaggerated effeminacy. There is however Boman Irani who plays M, the editor of Verve. Once I was over the stupendous job Irani did, I realised, here is an actual gay character, who might be a tad too colourful for the Indian male palette, but is also a grand success. He is the editor of Verve, and he leaves the job to become Editor in Chief of Diva. He isn't a perfect person, definitely not a saint, but he is also not a closet case, fighting society and sitting ready to die of AIDS, which is the only place homosexual characters have had in Bollywood so far.

This film isn't meant for the upliftment of the unfortunately suppressed and discriminated gay community in our country, in no publicity campaign has it claimed to be so. It does resort to some tried and tested jokes against gay people, and I am sorry to report that they work like magic with the audience, but I am determined to believe that it also looks forward in some very small ways, perhaps even unintentionally. First, because apart from the usual gay jokes, there is an underlying sense of humour in the film, which would worked for it even without its gay-angle. Second, and most significantly, the end of the film. There is a kind of ambiguity it leaves us with, which, given the masculin ideal of Bollywood, is radical. The thought, that even buffed up, sensitive, 'normal' people can be gay. We may not know it, and even they may not know it.

Dostana has a lot of elements associated in our minds with the undefined entity called 'western culture' - be it the roommate arrangement, the clothes, the career choices, the relationship choices, and of course the girl drinking beer in the middle of the day - and audiences seemed to have warmed up to it. The question in my mind is, will the film, with its mass appeal and a conscious decision to not preach, work as the ultimate 'lesson' and coming of age technique for Bollywood and consequently for its audience?

Review: Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (Voyage du Ballon Rouge)

Click here to read an article I wrote on Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri never loses sight of who she is. An Indian, yet an outsider. It isn't an unusual thing to be, and many old NRIs yearn for their home soil and whatnot, but Lahiri's writing walks that thin line between something is dripping with nothing but nostalgia and one that is eager to forget its roots.

With The Interpreter of Maladies, a new identity emerged which has now taken definite shape with Unaccustomed Earth. There is a new Indian - who is not unfamiliar with India, but knows it in tiny details of that are more or less taken for granted. Be it the sabzi-sandwich she takes to school for lunch, or in the Indian, more specifically, Bengali terms of address she uses most mechanically. Unlike the confused hybrid that inhabit NRI writing, these characters are comfortable with their identities, mostly because their creator has come to terms with hers. She puts this part of herself in each of her characters, but then lets them develop as individuals with their own stories and their own struggles. There isn't a preoccupation with nostalgia, a static Indian-ness that dominates writing of this kind, but an acknowledgment of a world that is somewhere a part of each of the characters, which reveals itself in unusual ways.

There are few writers today who write with as much ease as Jhumpa Lahiri. Every word, every story engulfs you in a hauntingly quiet way. As always, her approach is gentle yet effective, and the stories won't leave you easily. With The Namesake, it seemed Lahiri had lost the absolute control and precision she has over her words. It was a moving story, but a tad rambling, and it seems to me now that it is the comparatively shorter life of a short story that she works better in. The novel seemed to guide her, while she is the master of the short story.

Musings on Hellboy and the superhero

With the fuss around the almost-superhero – James Bond, relooking at this much-loved genre becomes inevitable. A strange dichotomy faces us today, technological advances are at an all time high, to put it crudely, with James Bond all but flying, it looks like very few things are unachievable; and yet, the demand for fantasy is growing. Be it Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or the any of the superhero films – the craze is unprecedented. The superhero films are particularly interesting, primarily because they provide the link between the human and the fantastical, with characters that look like you and me, but have that extra something that gives them the power to make the world a better, safer place.

Not unlike most superheroes, Hellboy (created by Mike Mignola, filmed by Guillermo del Toro) lives on earth, separated from his actual parents, and is lovingly adopted by someone he comes to think of as father. And like most, he too has a responsibility towards the people, one of keeping them safe. The question that arises at least once in every superhero film, ‘Does the world need xyz?’ is to facilitate the answer - yes, the world does in fact need a hero – and this is the case with Hellboy (Ron Perlman) as well.

In spite of all these similarities, there is an inherent difference with which Hellboy has been approached. The Hellboy films play a tricky game of in and out of the superhero genre – using the popularity when in, and reflecting on the genre when out.

Hellboy came into the ‘real world’ with the American attempt to destroy a portal made by the Nazis to conjure a power that would ensure their victory in the World War. Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, an American doctor, comes with a small army to stop the Nazis. Their attempt is partially successful, and they are left with a little red creature, with horns on its forehead – evidently not human, but also not animal. Bruttenholm adopts the creature and calls him Hellboy. Hellboy grows up to be a big red monstrous looking creature, but has the superhero-special sort of heart, courage and ability to save the world.

What, then, is Hellboy’s origin? Superman’s father was a scientist on Krypton, Spiderman was licked by a radio-active spider who inadvertently passed on his characteristics to Peter Parker — but where did Hellboy come from? He is a result of the darkest magic that was called upon to destroy the world, (actually to provide victory to the Nazis, but it’s the same thing apparently). The Americans found him in the most hellish times, and therefore, Bruttenholm names him Hellboy. The name is a constant reminder of the existence of a dark side, at least potentially, to this heroic character. It goes hand in hand with the horn stubs that are present on his face. In the first film itself, we can see that the dark side has merely been subsided by his constant interaction with ‘the good’ – the changeover being a matter of skill and strategy in the hands of Rasputin. There is a vision of what the world can be, and by suggestion, how safe it is right now.

There is a question waiting to be asked; del Toro leaves it to the audience to ask it – what is maintaining this balance? The answer is – Hellboy. Or rather his sense of right and wrong, that corresponds with ours. He uses his strength for what is right, but can be pulled into using it for what isn’t. The relatively unidimensional Superman stands in sharp contrast. The White man with neatly parted hair, cannot have a compromising side. This is perhaps the reason he is an iconic figure in a sense America itself – given the costume. Hellboy, with his capacity for evil will never be an icon, or a symbol of America, though he is raised there. He likes candy, swigs beer from cans like any average Joe, and cracks the usual ‘I would give my life for her but she wants me to do the dishes too’ jokes, but he can never be American. There is a particularly moving scene in Hellboy 2, when the public has started fearing Hellboy all of a sudden because the mother of the baby he saved thought he was trying to kill him. Just as Hellboy starts to discover his paternal capacity, he is accused of trying to harm the baby. Liz (Selma Blair) keeps trying to say, he’s trying to help, but no one listens. Of course, the moment could have been more powerful if Blair was a better actress, but the idea comes across fairly well. The people he considers his own, who he risks his life to save, suddenly decide he is a monster. Supernatural elements aside, there is a critique of American society that creeps up here, one that comes at an opportune moment.

The first Hellboy film saw del Toro’s fascination with the ugly, not just in the figure of Hellboy himself, but also in the figures of Abe (Doug Jones) and creatures like Sammael that Rasputin invoked. This art of reversing order and making the ugly attractive took definite shape in Pan’s Labyrinth, and reached perfection with Hellboy 2. The big, clumsy Hellboy and a slimy fish-like Abe are together the most effective duo that come to the rescue of human beings. They are contrasted with Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), the Director of the FBI, the normal among the paranormal. He spends his time trying to deny the existence of Hellboy, and looks idiotic not just to the public, but to the Bureau of Paranormal Research as well as he tries desperately to exercise control, and fails (in both films). The figure of Sammael, the foulest creature in the film, is stretched to a limit in its grotesque appearance that you move beyond the initial distaste and start coming to terms with the scale del Toro has in mind. The emphasis on the grotesque creates a beauty that is, in some senses, removed from the Christian ideal of beauty. The troll market in Hellboy 2 is a good example of what I mean. In one film, there are two worlds visible – that of downtown New York, and that of the underworld, where the troll market is, and Hellboy looks visibly happy to be there – because everyone there is like him – no one stares and no one thinks he’s a freak. The complete vision of the troll-market is almost sublime, in a way where awful really is awe-full. The lack of a definite shape, and instead a kind of grotesque mass that pervades the Hellboy films, has a flowing quality, which gains significance when seen from the perspective of history. The first Hellboy deals directly with historical figures like Rasputin, but then push them beyond all sense of logic, time, space and death. The visual of the purple blood flowing everywhere, gives us a sense of excess, which defies the control of a traditional historical narrative. History then goes beyond the human. Its ugliness and animal-instinct provides a perspective to human history that is fast becoming del Toro’s trademark.

The sense that one goes back with, after watching Hellboy, or any del Toro film for that matter, is far from fleeting. Whether it is a fascination for the superhero, for history or just for sheer theatrics and a grand scale in filmmaking – with Hellboy, he has decided to please everyone.

Confessions of a no-Bond-er

Click here to read article I wrote on the release of Quantum of Solace for NDTVMovies.com.

Naked Voices: The good, the bad, the ugly

A review of a new anthology of Manto's stories.

Rocking is overrated!

I read some film critic calling Abhishek Kapoor’s Rock On, a worthy successor to Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai. I can’t think of a statement further than the truth. There is not a doubt in my mind that, being ‘a worthy successor’, or in less kind terms, ‘cashing in on DCH’s popularity’ is what this film aimed to do. But that doesn’t mean it manages. What it does manage, is to look like a far less competent, ‘inspired’ film, as Bollywood is prone to calling a number of its endeavors.

Here is why I say this, the basic structure of the two films is, a group of male friends as the centre, their wives or girlfriends lurking as side attractions, one major fight – to be more specific – a punch in the face, a broken friendship, changed personalities, and then the patch-up. Dil Chahta Hai came at a time when films about friendship were more or less non-existent in the Bombay film industry. It created this unique new space, a new relationship that is full of mischief, friendship, and nostalgia which is infectious. Some lousy films like Masti tried to recreate that, but were so low in their humour, their look, their acting and direction that they went down badly. To be fair, compared to a lot of muck being produced in Bollywood today, Rock On is a good film. My main complain about it is its lack of originality.

What it doesn’t learn from Dil Chahta Hai is the art of simple and effective story-telling, without compromising on the complexities of relationships between friends and between lovers (or potential lovers).

The structure of Rock On is one that goes nowhere in spite of a great deal of build up. As the film begins, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that there has been a falling out between friends, and that it has changed their lives. But we don’t get to know till three-quarters of the film is over, what the fight was about. And by then, the build up is so great, that almost anything would’ve anti-climactic. In Dil Chahta Hai, the comment that leads to the fall-out was below the belt, and unspeakable in Bolly-world. In Rock On, there is no build up to the actual fight. The tension between the Aditya (Farhan Akhtar) and Joe (Arjun Rampal) starts and ends when the music director starts giving more screen time to Aditya who doesn’t mind and Joe gets all worked up; a fight follows, and Joes punches Aditya. To sit for an hour and a half before you see this little detail, feels like you’ve been cheated.

Where Rock On loses out a great deal in comparison to Dil Chahta Hai is with reference to secondary characters. ‘The evil woman’ who wants to separate male friends was done away with fairly early in Dil Chahta Hai, because slightly unusual relationships were to take that space. I was particularly moved by the relationship between Akshaye Khanna and Dimple Kapadia. The sad turn that Debbie (Shahana Goswami) takes in Rock On is just reinviting the run-of-the-mill. She gets in the way of his reviving friendship, pushes him to do unexciting jobs etc. There is a hint of a woman who’s facing her changed reality, but she is so constantly unpleasant that it is easy to forget that and resent her.

So, yes, Rock On is like Dil Chahta Hai, but only because it is trying so miserably hard. And the only real commonality between the two is Farhan Akhtar, who was much much better in Dil Chahta Hai, as the director.

Lust, Caution

The opening titles of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution situate the film in the years between 1938 and 1942 in Hong Kong. There is the World War, the espionage, the student rebellion, the lust and the caution. But those are mere structures to support one of the most moving war-time films ever made. It digs into the personal sacrifice that shapes any revolution, be it bodily or even spiritual.

It is the story of a group of enthusiastic students who start identifying with the rebellious tone of the play they put up in college and decide to take their action beyond the stage. The group's leader, Kuang Yu Min (Wang Lee-Hom) pulls the group together and they decide to assassinate Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), who is a part of the government that has collaborated with Japanese fascist forces. The quiet and beautiful Wong Chia Chiv (Tang Wei) is chosen to seduce Mr. Yee, win his confidence so that he lets his guard down and the group can kill him. Kuang and Wong are attracted to each other, but it remains an unspoken truth, given the intensity of their project. Things go wrong and the group is forced to run away. Years later Kunag meets Wong again; he is now an official part of the secret resistance group. He introduces her to the mastermind and they decide to continue the affair where it was left off. And it does.

Perhaps this would have been a lesser film without the indescribable talent of Tang Wei. She gives a silently haunting quality to Wong, making the few words she speaks in the film the most meaningful and certainly the most powerful. Far from the wounded, but proudly upheld bodies of soldiers that occupy most war films, we see a critique of the idea that has inhabited feminist theory for a while - the woman's body as the space to define political achievements. The interesting thing is that both sides use Wong's body for very opposite reasons.

The resistance movement, from its amateur student stage, assumes that since Wong is the one chosen to seduce Yee, she will have to sleep with him if the affair reaches that stage. There is a poignant moment when she returns from their first date and announces that sex will be on the table the next time, only to realise that the group had hardly waited for her consent to decide that for her.

Even when she rejoins the resistance - now at a more profesional, national scale - the assumptions remain the same. The only difference is that this time, she is wiser and has assumed the assumption herself.

With Yee, the affair is hardly an ordinary one. The physical violence of the intercourse is disturbing, but not as much as the comfort it gives Yee. What surprises is the emotion behind the violence that is gradually commuincated. The desperation and powerlessnes of Yee's position comes through in his relationship with Wong. His actions in this very private sphere become reflective of his lack of power in the political sphere, where he may be part of the government, but it is ultimately a government that is dictated by the Japanese.

The change is Wong's character, from an enthusiastic student looking to change the fate of China - to a broken woman is developed at a masterful pace. She finally breaks her silence about the abuse in the quietest way imaginable - in a moment asking for hysteria, Ang Lee exercises commendable control and the film is all the superior for it. As far as Wong is concerned, it is as if the two groups work in tandem with each other; the resistance group expects and allows a violent sexual relationship to go on while Yee delivers. They are both as guilty of battering her body.

In the climactic moment of the film, we see that Wong and Yee actually serve the same purpose in their respective circles. They are both dictated, used people, who are in ultimate analysis, absolutely alone - as it made very literal in the final move to the jewelry shop when Wong looks around for her fellow conspirators, but finds every post unoccupied. Yee's group too knew of Wong's affiliations, but they never said anything, allowing him to face the risk when it comes. And when that realisation comes through, her 'loyalty' suddenly enters an undefinable space - from political to personal. 'Her people', in that moment, are not the resistance group, but one more like her - whose life is endangered for the cause. The irony is that the two causes are at complete odds with each other.

It has been sixty years and more since the World War, and yet most of us (and that includes most filmmakers) haven't been able to shed the most simplistic good guy-bad guy binary. Even the most celebrated films finally boil down to, or even cash in the sufferings of the Jews, the atrocities of concentration camps or the eternal Red scare. A bit of reflection beyond these hyperbolic tendencies is rare and desirable - and Ang Lee has achieved that and more with this one. Leaving even Brokeback Mountain - his Academy Awarder miles behind, Lee has done his bit to change war films, and maybe even films in general.

Silly Revolution

Here are a few things I heard about Bachna Ae Haseeno before I watched the film: Ranbir Kapoor is Bollywood's new chocolate boy, Deepika Padukone is good, but she is far behind Bipasha Basu as far as sex-appeal is concerned, a collage of foreign location shoots etc etc.
Here is what I didn't hear but I saw: a flippant but strangely revolutionary film. Maybe revolutionary is too magnanimous a word for a film where the lead actor, as good-looking as he may be, cannot act. But there is something new that happens with this film that is easy to ignore or not even notice in all the glamour it boasts of.

To cut a long story short, it is the tale of a casanova who, after playing with the emotions of a few women, finally falls in love, but is denied when he proposes marriage. He finally understands that it 'hurts' and decides to go back and clear himself of his past sins.

To say that Ranbir Kapoor is new Raj (ref: Shahrukh Khan in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge) is not accurate, because that is precisely what he isn't. The Raj in the film consciously moves away from the mischevious but ultimately very sanitised Raj of DDLJ. Recall the scene in DDLJ when Raj tricks Simran into believing they've slept together. She starts crying and he confesses his joke and then finally gets serious and tells her he knows 'Hindustani ladki ki izzat kya hoti hai' etc etc. The Raj in Bachna has no just noble interior, at least not in the beginning, he does come to a realisation, but the charm of the film is in the portrayal of non-saintly, real, and basically new kinds of characters.

Almost every character in the film engages with the traditional roles as well as some new world responses. And it is the give and take between popular social conceptions and a commentary on them that makes this film refreshing. Take Minissha Lamba's character Mahi for instance. She is the most basic stock character we'll meet. Young, pretty and naive like every good Indian girl should be. She is shocked and teary eyed when she is faced with the awful truth of Raj's character. However what impressed me was one line she says when he comes back to India to apologise to her. She asks him if he thinks she is a goddess at the feet of whom he can wash all his sins. I was amazed that not only was the woman equals goddess rubbish wasn't happening, but that it was being confronted, in this very mainstream film.

Then there is Deepika's character Gayatri. An Indian student in Australia, who juggles work and studies and is determined to make something of herself, by herself. She isn't a female casanova like Raj (too soon for that?) but she makes her position very clear. She is not interested in marriage. Romance yes, future no. She questions him at his proposal, asks him if he'll let her continue on her own, do her odd jobs and let her support her studies, will he not want to intervene and want to pay her fees and more importantly, will he not say something now and want something else later. The snippets of a conversation about business and video games at which she speaks like a pro is a good contributor. I was impressed. Yes, she does come around and want the secure future, which might mean a marriage, but that doesn't take away from the questions put forward.

And there is of course Ranbir who plays Raj. I liked his character, because he seemed closer to people that age we meet in our social circles. A guy who likes to go to bars, who has committment issues, who likes to play around and one who has sex before gets married and most importantly, buys condoms. I think this is a first in Indian cinema. And we have to applaud it. He isn't the Raj who is happy with a peck on the cheek or with hand-holding. So far, in Indian films, at least in mainstream Bollywood, such a guy is mostly the villain. The simplist distinction is usually followed - protagonist and antagonist. The former being loaded with all the good qualities, like respect for elders, patriotism, looking after the 'honour' of women (the number of scenes when the hero comes and covers the woman with a shawl or a jacket is just countless), sensitive, loving, good fahterly etc. And the trend continues till today, our leading men are Bharat Kumars in western clothes.

What also struck me was how the film worked in parts as social commentry. Radhika (Bipasha) and Raj live together. Radhika wants to marry him and is willing to make a few sacrifices for it, but he wants to run away. He says very clearly, if she is the 'kind of girl' who lives with you before you get married, she'll be ok with never getting married. When he goes to apologise to her, seh confronts him with this. In other words, undertones of dealing with new gender roles and stronger voices were visible in this film.

And what's more, it is an enjoyable film. For once, Bollywood has dared to break common perception and be a bit more thought provoking without being arthouse cinema that precisely three people watch. Yes, there have been a few predecessors, Salaam Namaste which was awful for a variety of reasons, but still, there is hope it seems!

Ramchand Pakistani - Review

There's a lot about Mehreen Jabbar's film, Ramchand Pakistani, that can be appreciated. Syed Fazal Hussain, who plays Ramchand, is on the top of that list, Nandita Das is close to the bottom, and the film itself hovers somewhere in the middle.

To clear the air, it is important to mention that the balanced political standpoint of the film speaks to its credit. For once, an India-Pakistan film isn't about terrorism and the big bad guy across the border. And that is a huge relief. But that is almost all that is convincing about the film. It has moments with immense potential. Whether it is with reference to relationships that build up or even a comment on prisoners and their state, especially the fact of innocent people who have been thrown into jail for small mistakes, as is the case of Ramchand and his father. Unfortunately, they remain mere moments.

The story, as it might be evident already, is about Ramchand, a young, tribal Hindu boy living in Pakistan, his mother (played by Nandita Das) and his father (Rashid Farooqui). One day, the boy unknowingly walks across the border near the Thar desert, and his father follows, trying to stop him. They are both arrested and sent to jail in the Kutch region on the Indian side of the border. The mother tries in vain to locate them, she registers FIRs, makes endless rounds of the police station, but to no avail.

The jail Shankar (the father) and Ramchand are thrown into, would be any prisoner's paradise. The interaction with the police starts with suggested torture but for the rest of the film, it turns into an example of communal, social harmony. With the exception of one potential child molester, the inmates all get along famously, they help each other like family members and all is a little too well in jail-land. The inspectors, both male and female, are sympathetic, kind and concerned. Without any provocation, the head arranges for Ramchand to study and brings in a special female inspector for the purpose. The lady, who has some strangely mixed-Mumbaiya-cum north Indian speech, makes a few remarks about the boy, who is an untouchable, touching her utensils, but one little blurt from him pretty much silences her.

What I'm trying to point out here is the lack of a follow up of any potential leads that could give this film a strong base. There are a few stray interesting incidents, or potential relationships that, for all practical purposes, are in the pipeline, but they just don't develop. They remain connection-less episodes. An example: at one point, Shankar tells the inspector that they treated like dogs in the jail; and while that may be the reality of the actual situation, that is not what is communicated in the film. There is an assumed connection with the real world, and that doesn't work, not when what we see in the film is the very opoosite of 'being treated like dogs'.

There was also the beginning of another relationship, between Champa (Das) and a Muslim member of the community, Abdullah (Noman Ijaz). The tenderness of their relationship is moving and once again has immense potential, but all it takes is one little, almost matter-of-fact comment by a friend that has Abdullah pack his bags and leave the scene. The anxieties of these relationships could be many and they weren't explored in this film. And that is the case with the depiction of jail life as well. I was a bit shocked to realise that the Pakistani prisoners blend in that easily with the rest. No strife? I know people to people relations are good, but there are always malefactors. But they were wished away. Also, who is Ramchand going back to? It is a million dollar question, but it is packed off in one little statement. There is no room for exploration therefore. In fact, i would say that with these mistakes, the film digs its own grave because it chooses to crush the intensity of things in simple statements.

I am not saying, at any point, that everything should be literalised and made all to evident as it is in any run of the mill film. This particular case is more disappointing, precisely because there was so much possible within the ambit of the same film, keeping intact the sensitivity with which it has been approached.

Of ghosts and ruins: Mrinal Sen's Khandar

“I’m going to stop talking now,” said Mrinal Sen as he got up to introduce his film Khandar (1983) at the 10th Osian’s Cinefan Festival, where he is this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner. “Because if I don’t, I will contradict myself.” It is hard to believe this of a man who has been known for keeping steady on the path of radical political cinema. He created the Indian New Wave, and he still rules the roost there. No one before or after has had the courage to be the man, so many of whose films were, as he says himself, “popular failures at the box office.”

It seems that Mrinal Sen cannot possibly be content with simplistic emotions. Joy and tears are not nuanced enough to portray reality. Take Khandarfor instance, there is a story, and it has five important characters. The story doesn’t take a back-seat but it lets its characters grow. It is perhaps this aspect of it that made Sen grab it. What is evident is that he directed the actors in such a way that every emotion, every glance, and gesture is loaded. Those who speak the least communicate the most. Sadness doesn’t explain what Jamini (Shabana Azmi) feels when Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah) suddenly agrees to marry her, or when he finally leaves. There is instead a build up of desire, one that engulfs the happy and the sad, hope and curiosity etc etc. And it is the contradiction between an emotion this fluid and the attempt to freeze it that is at the core of this film. Yes, Khandar is very much about ‘the ravages of time’ the ruins it leaves behind. But it is also about the attempt to preserve what is left.
Photography is therefore key to the film. It opens with freeze frames of photos, Jamini’s photos. The pictures have a story behind them but at that point we don’t know that story. The events as they unfold give more meaning to the photo, and in the end when we see him develop it, it is almost as if it is a different picture. Because this time, we know the emotions it captured and in spite of being a photo, it tells the story of the whole film—maybe not the plot, but the crux of its emotions.

This restlessness has a link with the way in which the idea of the film came about. Sen narrates the anecdote, “Every time I completed a film, I passed through a crisis about what my next subject would be. Once, I woke up in the middle of the might and for obvious reasons could not sleep. I left my bed, walked around, ideas popping into my head…I went to my study, stood before a bookshelf and just pulled out a book of short stories by Premendra Mitra. I had read the story so many times, but that fateful night, I read it again and without my knowing how and why, suddenly I could read cinema in the lines, in every line, also between the lines.” Khandar has the dream-cast of almost any director, and they work wonderfully as an ensemble. The three stooges from The National School of Drama (Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur and Annu Kapur) follow each other well and Shabana Azmi is like we’ve never seen her before, strong yet demure, exhausted and desirable, hopeful and yet without hope…this one can be called her best. Though it can’t be called Sen’s best…that place was occupied soon after his film career took off, and therefore, way before Khandar came about. It is still the scathing critique of society, of bureaucracy and the state that is classic Mrinal Sen. Satire, is a lost art today in Indian cinema, especially one that is political in nature. Stark realism gets ovations wherever it goes, but today it seems, no one has the wit and understanding to create a workable satire. Sen however, remains a staunch supporter of the genre, and takes on the task of defending it, “Not many, but happily quite a few of my films have satirical kicks, because it is a tremendous force…not just in literature and drama, but indeed in cinema as well. Think of Chaplin, he’s a master.”
And he hasn’t lost the will to fight for this ‘other’ in Indian cinema. “Social agendas and aesthetics go hand in hand, gracefully and powerfully,” he insists, brushing away all attempts to gather a preference for one or the other.
And who will follow his footsteps? He is philosophical, “Did I have footsteps at all?” he asks, then answers it himself, “ghosts don’t have footsteps.”

Krishnakanta's Will: Nothing Novel

I did it to myself. I had read the novel, not liked it, but curiosity got the better of me and off I went to watch Raja Sen’s adaptation of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel, Krishnakanta’s Will. Did you ever watch The Mahabharata? Well this film seemed longer. In college, we were told this was a novella, a short novel. The film, however, bore no resemblance of this distinction.

A quick recap of the story. There is a patriarch called Krishnakanta Roy, who has disinherited his son, Harilal, for all sorts of reasons. Harilal decides to get a fake will made and with the help of a young widow, Rohini, he manages to exchange the real will for the forged one. Soon the young widow realizes that her action will disinherit the man’s cousin, Gobindalal who is a kind soul and has dealt with Rohini with understanding and affection. Rohini soon falls in love with Gobindalal who is already married. His wife, Bhramar, is jealous. Gobindalal gets attracted to Rohini. They elope. Soon after, Bhramar falls fatally ill while there is trouble brewing between the illicit couple thanks to Bhramar’s father who sought revenge.

It might be evident that it is a fairly stock story. Love, the other woman, jealousy, inheritance, villains, greed, death etc. What I’m struggling with at this point is whether I should even bother to write any more since that is the beginning and end of this film. It is tempting to be critical of Bankim Chandra’s novel because it reeks of his conservative stance in almost every chapter, but that would be unfair—not just because the novel has some unique, appealing features, but because the film didn’t bother with any of the nuances the book had to offer.

The most interesting aspect of the novel was its narrator. A playful, opinionated story-teller who made this simplistic series of events and relationships more connected and hinted an oral flavour. The two overt references to widow-remarriage are not the end of the matter. The novel is not about relationships, it is about women, more importantly, about widows and Bankim’s reservations (let’s be polite and call it that) on the idea of widows getting married again. The narrator hints at these social comments of the writer with much more depth than the actual characters do. And the film does away with the narrator. Just to think of how fascinating a film this could have bee had this voice been retained, makes me dislike it even more. Even while reading the novel, I remember being wary of this ensnaring narrator. One had to think with him and then beyond him. And it is that process that made the experience worth anything, not the story. For instance the character of Rohini. We have no choice but to listen to the narrator pass judgements on her character, but then we think of more erudite concepts like desire, sexuality and the possibility of innocence co-existing with these qualities. There was a point early in the film when there was a hint of this understanding. But the moment she falls for a married man, she is shunned to the dark side, and the director seems more than content with that action. The caring, soft-spoken Rohini turned into a devilish creature who decides to raise Bhramar’s envy. The ‘basicness’ —to concoct an obvious word— of the emotions portrayed is jarring. And clearly if the director is happy with these basic emotions, then the actors will not push themselves and will be happy to remain simple actors in a simple story.

Another telling feature of the novel is how it ends. Gobindalal is blinded by jealousy and realization of Rohini’s ‘loose character’ and thereby of Bhramar’s godliness. Both women die (Gobindalal kills Rohini), and a golden statue of Bhramar is erected. For all those who were in any doubt about the intention of this novel and its construction of the good woman and the bad one, this move changes everything. And the film doesn’t deem it important enough to retain. One can argue that being a man of the 21st century, Raja Sen was distancing himself from this literal deification of women. But if that were the case, Sen wouldn’t have picked this novel or rather this writer at all. What’s the point of basing yourself on a novel if you erase all traces of its uniqueness from your rendition?

What I do have to admit is the one sensible thing I saw in the film. The novel has a very vocal working class that is visible in the peripheries of the plot. A kind of social critique comes through with the various servants we encounter and Sen had the good sense to highlight them.
The greatest mystery however is the look of the film that prompted more than one person to wonder when it was made. The director clarified that it was made in 2007. It is difficult to explain what exactly I mean when I say that it seemed the film was made in the 70s. Try to recall the inherent superficiality of colours that is evident to us today when we watch the first few colour films. The colour seems super-imposed and far from natural. That is true of this film. There must be some secret formula Sen used for it because as far as I know, that quality is now so obsolete that it is impossible to achieve.

I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I won’t say anymore because there isn’t anything more to the film. The possibilities were immense and they were obviously not even in the vicinity of the filmmakers thoughts, and besides, the damage has been done.

Aamir: A do-gooder gone wrong

Rajkumar Gupta’s recent film Aamir has created a stir it seems in the country. And not just because it stars Rajeev Khandelwal—a relatively new face on the big screen, but also because it is one of the films that dares to approach the tabooed Muslims-in-India issue. The long and short of the film is that it is about Aamir, a young doctor who has just stepped foot on Indian soil after finishing studies in the UK. No sooner than he has cleared customs starts a harrowing journey that he is pushed into by the Islamic fundamentalist underworld. They are unbelievably well-coordinated with each other and have the longest process all worked out for this less than enthusiastic young man. The journey resembles a treasure hunt of sorts, at the end of which his abducted family will be released.
The film presents a picture of the two kinds of Muslims that there are. The modern, educated, liberal, secular in thought kind and the crazed, fundamentalist, psychotic, terrorist kind. My problem with this film is actually not just with this film alone, it is with the gamut that it belongs to. Irrespective of their religious, political or social inclination, many filmmakers have tread this path of representing the Muslim post 9/11. Thankfully, some recent ones have distanced themselves from the jingoism of Border and LoC (1997, 2003 resp, J.P Dutta) etc. However, if you think about it, most films made in India (and I’m talking primarily Hindi cinema) with central characters that are Muslim, hover around the territory of terrorism in some form or the other. Either that they are terrorist and traitors, or that they invariably get involved in such situations. Perhaps there is a need for bringing the prejudice and the humiliation to the forefront, but the group as it grows in this lone direction, is counter-productive. It doesn’t help the suspicions that plague Muslims in the country. Because in the long-run, it seems, as if they all will without a doubt and maybe without their consent or desire have some role to play in the terror situation. It might be because they don’t have a choice, but that is a small consideration in the larger picture, which seemingly concerns itself with personal and even national safety. And this is troubling because these films flood the mainstream and their superficially balanced approach attracts some undecided or superficially liberal audience, making the film a critical and often even a commercial success. Think Fanaa (2006, Kunal Kohli), Fiza (2000, Khalid Mohammed), Mission Kashmir (2000, Vidhu Vinod Chopra) and now Aamir, among a whole host of films not just in our own country but also from all over the world – most recently Pakistan (Khuda Ke Liye - 2007, Shoiab Mansoor) and the big-daddy of pedantic views on everything – Hollywood. At the cost of appearing impossible to please, I will say that the apparently liberal view is often as damaging as anything else.
Come back to Aamir. Agreed that there is an attempt to portray a new Muslim. Educated, liberal, human. But despite this educated, modern protagonist occupying the screen a good 95% of the duration, his views are weak and remarkably forgettable. What stayed with me after the film was not his meek three lines (literally) about modern secularism, but the guttural and extremely repetitive dialogues of the nameless and nearly faceless underworld don. I’m not sure if one should blame the writer (also Rajkumar Gupta) for his terrible script indicative of a serious lack of imagination or should one congratulate him on achieving his aim of showing the communal fanaticism of this Muslim don. The repetitive use of the word and the idea of ‘kaum’ (community) is not just jarring to the ear; it has a more sinister result—of convincing the audience that this is the only driving, determining force for a large part of the Muslim community. The elaborate Muslims community that is shown to be at work to bomb innocent people (because it is some twisted form of revenge), is hardly dented by Aamir’s secular squeaks. And at a more obvious level, he dies and they don’t. So what kind of Muslim lives on? The terrorist, monstrous kind. The one who says, ‘phone band mat karna mujhe bomb ki awaaz sunni hai’ (don’t switch off the phone, I want to hear the sound of the bomb blast).
The film adopts an ‘aesthetic of garbage’ and takes is very seriously, to the extent of one getting numb to its impact. It seems as if the director is trying to do to the audience what the don is trying to do with Aamir – acquaint us and him to the pathetic, filthy conditions of Muslims in India. There is no doubt that there is lower class that occupies slums all over India. But the determining factor there is class for a better part of it, not religion. Agreed that there are areas where the majority consists of people of one religion, but there isn’t any place that I have heard of, that is one hundred per cent Muslims, all of whom, needless to say are filthy, uneducated, fanatic, butchers. There is one lone modern Muslim in this film. But we don’t see his house, his locality, the hygiene conditions of his surroundings. We are instead thrown into the muck of a few slums that will now be considered the beginning and end of Muslim existence in the country. How does that help the image, for me it only further deteriorates it. Okay, so it maps the city to an extent, so what? Is the context right? Is it balanced? I don’t think so. I find it passive aggressive.

In between Tehzeeb (2003, Khalid Mohammed)—a film most would have forgotten even if they ever watched it at all and more recently, Chak De! India (2007, Shimit Amin), there have barely been any films that think Muslims in India can have any concern other than terrorism. What this group of films that Aamir belongs to is doing is to create a denial in society about a large group of Muslims, who are definitely concerned about the state of affairs in the world, but live in very normal conditions. Those who are not terrorist and never will be. They don’t live in slums, they are educated, they don’t spell every English word incorrectly, they don’t wear short pajamas and a religious cap and they are as enraged as anyone else at the loss of innocent lives in terror attacks.

JUNO

Every once in a while a film comes along that can leave you a bit stunned. Primarily because it’ll trick you into believing that you have a fairly good idea of what it is about. This Oscar season, the dark horse was Juno.
Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, this film was last year’s charmer. And the charm is a collective effort of the story-tellers and the actors who leave little to be desired. To say that Juno is a pregnancy comedy is doing it a great deal of injustice because it leaves a category as simple as that many miles behind. It is the story of an accidental pregnancy and an inexperienced teenager, Juno (Ellen Page) who decides to have the child and give some parents-in-the-wings “a gift of life or whatever”. The film walks a tight rope between the expected and the unexpected, taking care to be fresh and subtly comment without shocking anyone out of their comfort zone. And the greatest achievement of the film is its approach towards relationships. For once, we are taken on a trip where we see not just the hopelessly crumbling families of suburban America but a family that still has it together without being righteous or sugar-sweet about it. What is evident however is that it takes work. A stepmother who is evidently at her stepdaughter’s side at every step of this less-than-normal situation is a hallmark of this unusual film. Consider, for instance, the parents' response to Juno's announcement of the pregnancy. No hysterics, no broken relationships, no boyfriend dragging yet so real. They are concerned about her health, about her being able to handle this situation she isn’t ready for in any way imaginable. Instead of a trailer park teenage pregnancy of a drug-addict single mother we're in a family surrounding.
Another twist from the usual pregnancy comedy (or tragedy for that matter) is the father of the child, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Before we actually see the boy, we are made to think of him as the jock who knocked up the girl and will then not accept responsibility. There is complete preparation for this image by the film-maker - we see Bleeker's running outfit, his health-conscious food routine, his wrist-bands etc, but then we see him— a shockingly innocent, not to mention, unlikely candidate for such a situation. One who is unsure about how to respond to the girl’s announcement and is further confused at her statement, “it wasn’t your idea anyway” and is left mumbling, “uh…then whose idea was it?”
The best however is revealed to us much later. The seemingly perfect couple Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bates and Jennifer Garner) who are in reality less than perfect. A born mother and a repressed rock-star turned adman. Initially ware led in a direction where we might disapprove of Vanessa’s apparent control over Mark, but once again, we are asked to be a bit less judgmental and see the picture from either side. The scene in the shopping complex is what captures the finesse of the film in the second half. Jennifer Garner outdoes herself in this scene.
The film ends in the only possible way one would (by then) expect the expert drivers to steer it in. Happy and a bit more mature.
One of the most well-deserved Academy Awards went to Diablo Cody who came up with a screenplay and dialogues one wouldn’t expect in one film, examples of favourite lines range from, Brenda asking, “Juno, did you barf in my urn?” to Juno telling her friend Leah “Dude, I’m telling you I am pregnant and you are acting shockingly cavalier.” And as she said in her acceptance speech, Ellen Page really is ‘superhuman’. She makes this film so lovable that most have gone back to it more than once.

Goya en Bordeos – From One Artist to Another

Velasquez's Las Meninas-one of the most talked about paintings in the history of European Art is a mere reference towards the end of Carlos Saura's film Goya en Bordeos. The young artist examines the painting-as it inhabits a dark go down-with growing realisation with each passing moment. It is a while before he can understand the enormity and the complexity of that painting, where Velasquez has painted representation itself. Subject, painter, canvas and mirrors occupy the painting, bringing to mind Saura's self-confessed ideal form of representation-one which is yet incomplete. "What fascinates me is the process, the preparation for a performance where every step that goes into the making of the final performance, every effort is visible." he said in an interview in New Delhi recently.[1]
Saura plays with light and colour in every frame of his films, seemingly prioritising aesthetics over any other principle of filmmaking, yet Goya en Bordeos is arguably Saura's most direct engagement with art. Not unlike some of his other films, Saura invests a bit of himself in his protagonist. Only this time it is surprising because he manages to find the link between himself - a 20th century filmmaker and Goya - a 19th century painter, that goes beyond the Spanish connection. The link is that of camaraderie of art and artists. Through Goya en Bordeos and a number of other films, Saura deliberates on questions of the relationship between an artist and history, both personal and political, on the meaning of art as expression and art as profession.

There is a central image that binds this film - that of the spiral as Goya etches it on the window early in the film. The fact of a centre from which all else is born and by extension that to which everything is connected becomes a symbol not only for art and also for life itself. And it connects the two artistes-Goya and Saura, both of whom were occupied with ideas of representation (a telling example is Goya's two paintings - one clothed and one naked - in the same posture of one woman who was widely rumoured to be The Duchess of Alba), of social commentary through art, prevalence to aesthetics and of course the question of censorship.

The symbol haunts the entire film. At times literally, at times by the power of suggestion. The film opens on a violent note with the image of a dead animal, hung from the ceiling, and the tools of his demise occupying the foreground in the mis-en-scene. The entire surface is drenched in a red light that looks like blood - in fact we can't tell the red of the light from the red of the blood that is probably on the rope and pail that we see before we finally see the entire body of the animal being pulled up, and hung, not unlike the crucifixion. Biblical undertones return towards the end of the film in a long sequence, beginning once again with deep shades of red, this time with actual crosses, another crucifixion-like image and violence directed at people. Buried bodies, lost, dead children, and people in chains - this sequence is at once biblical and contemporaneous for Goya and Saura both of whom saw violence and destruction in their time. In an attention to detail, we see a number of dogs inhabiting the space of the exodus with the people, signifying the barbaric instinct though somewhat ironically because they are the least threatening presence in the scenario. What it does bring to mind is the presence of dogs in a number of portraits (Goya was known for portraiture) to suggest masculinity and loyalty. However, true to the cycle of life function of the symbol, soon after the carnage in this scene and the death of Goya, the film closes with the image of birth. Just as the dying Goya finishes drawing the symbol in the air for the last time and calls out to his progeny, there is a stunning manifestation of the spiral symbol in the staircase from which his daughter Rosarita comes running down. (see above)

Notions of death occur in different ways through the film, particularly in dreams and paintings. The balance is created perhaps with the closed, womb-like set-up of Goya's room, where a majority of the film is played out. (At the very end of the film, as Goya dies, the same room is transformed and a child is born there). A translucent red wall, made, it seems, of cloth, which at once walls in in a confining sort of way, while allowing a view of the outside. Except for one scene in the park, most of the film is set in closed spaces - perhaps because Saura thinks the outside distracts the audience and is superfluous. Yet, the one scene in the open leads to our realisation of a feeling of being closed-up all this while and for time to come. And since most scenes are played out in the interiors of his house, we see the paintings as Goya meant for them to be seen – in the dark, where the painter has control over the light and the consequent effect on the viewing of a painting.

It is curious that a film which occupies closed spaces opens itself out to a history that is constructed by a heady mix of dreams and reality. Saura plays with the narrative, flirting with post-modern ideas of layered time, fragmented reality and memory - but ultimately comes back to the original idea of the bio-pic. And therefore, the spiral returns to assert its focus, which is the artist and the art. He doesn't abandon his focus but it is clear through this film (and others) and his interview that he is a staunch advocate of a wild imagination. "Reality is not just what we see, but also what we dream." he said. And it is this fluid reality that he presents in Goya en Bordeos. The film uses passageways lit in contrasting colors, from a bare white in the beginning to black as a background for his paintings making a connection between an artist's unconscious and his work. Further emphasising the contentious nature of truth, Saura literalises a few probables of Goya’s life, in particular his relationships. For instance, most biographies of the painter throw open a vague suggestion of a relationship with The Duchess of Alba, but Saura makes her the centre of the spiral of Goya's life - his muse, his subject, his only memory - she was ‘Only Goya's' as her portrait says.

Fluidity pervades Saura's style as well - for in spite of being under the influence of Dali, Lorca and his mentor Bunuel, he has never based his work on any one of these celebrated styles. He found his own way to defy linearity even while working in the most straightforward of genres like the bio-pic. I can't think of a literary enough term to classify Saura's work for he uses light and colour like a painter would, creating something so unique that to call it anything more general than ‘Sauraesque' would be doing it great injustice. And it's just as well, because as he said, he doesn't believe in schools.

[1] Carlos Saura came to New Delhi, India and was in conversation with Aruna Vasudev on the 10th of March, 2008.

Charlie Wilson’s War: The Then and Now of the United States?

This year’s Oscar nominee, Charlie Wilson’s War (Philip Seymour Huffman for Best Supporting Actor) is a puzzle. It could be one of two things: an incredibly clever, subtle scathing comment on the history of American foreign policy, or a fairly uni-dimensional – not to mention jingoistic – addition to the ‘great America’ series that occupies a significant place in Hollywood.
The film is based on the life of Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), who, in spite of being a rampant womaniser and a person of generally questionable morals, was greatly moved by the plight of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan during the Cold War when Soviet Russia was attacking Afghanistan.
The US believed in erring on what they considered the side of caution as far as Communist or for that matter any left-wing radical tendencies were concerned. Caution being represented by unsubstantiated accusations, murders, curbs on intellectual, artistic freedom and in more extreme cases, bans and the overall witch-hunt that started in the McCarthy era. One is tempted to admire their handiwork in creating mass-hysteria for generations to come against leftist tendencies or beliefs. Charlie Wilson is upheld as a force that may have changed the history of the world, saving it from drowning in the deep waters of Communism and domination by the godless Soviets.
The film too, at least in its surface structure, charts the journey of this small-time congressman who overcame great hurdles, both political and personal, to make drastic changes in not just US foreign policy, but also diplomatic affairs of other countries like Pakistan. Wilson moves from a courtesy call to President Zia ul Haq to the undying commitment he developed to bettering the plight of the Afghani people and fighting on their behalf. Why this film seems like it might be yet another piece of American propaganda is because like all propaganda films, it shows just one point of view – statistics and images of death and despair selected with a clear agenda — to clarify the good from the evil. Russian pilots are shown for a sum-total of thirty seconds, where they display their soullessness (since they were godless they had to be soulless as well, right?) very satisfactorily. Gradually, Wilson had the US parliament convinced that it is their moral duty to help Afghanistan fight the Soviets. And slowly, the Government of the United States of America increased the arms budget for the Mujahideen of Afghanistan from $ 5 million to a whopping billions dollars.
However, there could be a deep structure to this film, a kind of subtlety we haven’t witnessed in a long time, if ever. And this structure is imaginable only because of the decade we are in, where the US and Afghanistan have once again found mention on the same page, only this time, not so friendly. In this decade, the US graduated to a new pet-hate after Communism – Islam. Signifiers of a critique in the film are so small that in the success story of Charlie Wilson, they can elude us. The keywords are Afghanistan, Mujahideen and the Arms supply and budget from the US to the Mujahideen. The film went as far as to specify that the Mujahideen ran schools that trained students for armed battle against the enemy. What they don’t obviously mention is that Osama bin Laden, 9/11 and a number of world terrorist attacks are a result of the Mujahideen. For once there was a mainstream American film accepting responsibility for arming and funding the Mujahideen. Is there an acceptance of their role in the world terror situation? An acceptance of the partial amnesia that the US has undergone about this little heal-the-world project it undertook? In my opinion, Mujahideen is too topical, too well-known a word for the filmmakers to expect an overlooking. Another contributor to this sneaking hope is one image in the film. Tom Hanks with his back to us, standing with the Mujahideen, holding a big gun, raising it to the sky as if dedicating it to God. I was instantly reminded of so many pictures of terrorists in a variety of media. Once again, too loaded an image to have used lightly. I am reminded of Soldier Blue where dominant images of the Vietnam War (the soldier holding a dead girl) were used in the mis-en-scene of the film’s final sequence.
Like most political films about the US in recent times, this has an opinion – by means of implication – on the Iraq war. In the final scene, when Wilson tries to get funds for education and the rebuilding of Afghanistan, he meets disappointment. US officials weren’t interested in any actual development activity once they had achieved the defeat of Russians. The Mujahideen went on to ruin any semblance of order in the country, ultimately giving rise to the Taliban. The question is: Is history being repeated in Iraq? This sequence of the film doesn’t actively question the fact of interference in the affairs of another country (the Soviet Union was invited by the government of Afghanistan), maybe not even question the US’s hysterical stance on Communism, but it does bring forth their role in the destruction of a country – one they had set out to save.
In the wake of growing sympathy for the US forces stationed in Iraq and in the increasing strength of the demand to call them back, Hollywood is playing its very crucial part by exploring all the reasons why US should retreat from Iraq. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is more explicit since it takes names and is more openly self-critical. I have a feeling, Charlie Wilson’s War has that inclination too, only it does it very subtly, perhaps too subtly. And maybe not at all. But that’s not what I like to believe.

No Disgrace

There are some writers who can justifiably be subjects of legends true and false. J.M Coetzee is one such. It is said that he never laughs, and his Nobel Prize winning work, Disgrace confirms it. Disgrace had shaken me out of the comfort zone of politically correct and somewhat idealistic views on the much celebrated end of apartheid in South Africa. There were parallel stories, imagery, comment on history, violence, society etc…and all captured with a kind of precision that seems impossible. I feel ridiculous building up a book so much, but it really was the perfect novel. With this baggage it is only too easy to guess what I expected from Slow Man, Coetzee’s next novel. And I have to say that I was a little disappointed.

Paul Rayment’s life changes when he is hit by a speeding car. His leg is amputated and he is maimed for life. He hires a nurse, Marijana, who he is attracted to. There is no evident future with Marijana because she is married with a large family of three children, all of whom Paul tries to win over. In an unexpected turn of events, Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello comes into their lives, into Paul’s home, uninvited, with no promise of leaving.

In Slow Man, J.M. Coetzee moves out of South Africa, into Australia, and in the process seems to lose some of his grip. Perhaps because he belongs, in more ways than one, to South Africa. He hasn’t completely acclimatized to this new literary locale. One would think that this physical move is a mere detail since his position remains essentially the same, that of the settler, one who has been assimilated into the culture and lifestyle he inhabits, even though his origins lie elsewhere, in white Europe to be specific. Like a lot of Australian literature, in this novel, Coetzee dabbles with ideas of identity, of language, of origins and ultimately of history.

In classic Coetzee style, there is careful deliberation on each sentence, on the very use of language, which the writer often discusses with the reader. The novel opens with these lines, “The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies though the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.”
He does something similar in his comparison of the two women of almost identical names, Marianna, a call-girl of sorts who Elizabeth Costello arranges for, and Marijana, who Paul loves. “He says Marianna, she says Marianna, but it is not the same name. His Marianna is still coloured by Marijana…not the French Marianne? (he asks)…Not French. A pity. France would be something in common, like a blanket to deploy over the pair of them.”

The question of identity is central to this novel. Why does Paul fall in love with Marijana, is he really in love or is it just desire, fulfillment of which will provide him with a sense of superiority? Paul talks of being in love and in the same breath he says he wants to look after Marijana and her family, including her husband. In this attempt he offers to fund her son’s college education, and pays a considerable amount to bail out her daughter of a petty theft accusation. Coetzee invites his reader to join him in observing his protagonist, no doubt with a knowing smile. For instance, Paul writes a letter to Marijana’s husband clarifying his position, “It is not just money I offer. I offer certain other tangibles too, human tangibles…I employ(ed) the word godfather. I do not know whether in Catholic Croatia you have the institution of the godfather. But you must be familiar with the concept…the godfather is the personification of the Holy Ghost.”
At the same time, Paul doesn’t find it in him to be condescending to Elizabeth Costello of white European descent like him. He isn’t in love with her, but she forces him to treat her like an equal, in her mystical way she insists that she didn’t come to him, rather he came to her. There is no explanation as to why she came, from where and when she will go back, and in the way the story develops, she becomes a counterfoil to Paul. She offers him a better life, away from the present, she offers her company and support, a bit like Paul’s Holy Ghost analogy, only more subtle, more humble! She seems to know everything Paul knows or has been through and even those things that he suspects, but doesn’t speak of.
But what is identity without history, arguably Coetzee’s favourite topic. In each of his novels, Coetzee designs different ways of representing history. At times it is through people, some times through spaces, through language. Slow Man uses a metaphor more predictable, photographs. Paul is ready to go miles to help Drago or any member of Marijana’s family, but when Drago steals an original photograph from his collection, we see, for the first time, a stern Paul. In a sequence of events not out of the ordinary, Drago steals the original and makes a copy in which he has superimposed his grandfather’s image. The idea of rewriting history is only too obvious, especially since Paul has made it abundantly clear that it is through his collection of photographs that he wants to immortalize himself. The pictures aren’t his, neither are they taken by him, but they belong to him. To add to it there is the usual conversation about how he has left France far away and is a mere speck in his memory, it isn’t a culture he can blend with any more. It’s too direct, it’s lacking the usual craft that one associates with Coetzee’s writing. The gamut of emotions, conflicting, tearing the reader apart that are signature Coetzee in so many of his novels, The Master of Petersburgh, Youth, Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace etc, are compromised in favour of the discourse of identity. A limiting of thought that is disappointing.

Slow Man still has some features of a classic Coetzee novel. The central protagonist is a middle-aged, single, lonely man, who is very difficult to identify with, and sometimes impossible to sympathise with. There is desire that appears almost perverse, but also very real. There are the women that come out looking stronger than the men in spite of being secondary characters.
Slow Man took its time coming, but it hasn’t been able to match the standard Coetzee had set with Disgrace. Not by a mile.

Taare Zameen Par: Review

It Matters coz its Black or White

It often happens that when you have low expectations of a film, you end up enjoying it because it has something that you didn’t expect it to have. When I read the tagline of this film – Every Child is Special – every cynical bone in my body had low expectations of the film. Unfortunately, even that could not redeem the painful experience that was Taare Zameen Par. For a person hailed as a perfectionist, Aamir Khan sure didn’t deliver in his directorial debut.

Some may think that this is the view of a cynic, who doesn’t appreciate the moving journey of a little boy’s struggle with dyslexia. And I would like to set the record straight by saying I was moved by the boy, but not because his story was depicted with any complexity, but only because Darsheel Safary (who plays Ishaan, the dyslexic child) gave a memorable performance. In fact, the emotional quotient is the root of the problem of this film. Aamir Khan is a thinking, responsible individual of the film community and he has proved this more than once by joining hands with social causes that need support. And one appreciates that. However, in this film, in his attempt to bring this issue into mainstream cinema, he seems to have lost his grip. The film is a long, trite and preachy classroom lecture on dyslexia. The humour in the first forty minutes of the film, that showed some promise in terms of treatment of a serious social-medical issue, soon gave way to a good two hours of constant weeping. I'll begin with the mother, a character that held immense potential for the depth of the film, was brutally limited since her response to any of Ishaan’s or her husband’s activities or decisions was to cry. I can’t recall a single scene in which she didn’t have tears in her eyes. This is not to be insensitive to the struggle and frustration of a parent who can’t understand her child’s disability, but really, I feel that the insensitivity isn’t mine, but that of the filmmaker who has created such a formulaic mother - who will be read as the archetypal woman who has no opinions at all, and if she does (considering she is an educated woman who cares a lot for her son) she doesn’t feel the need to voice them.

Continuing with the poor characterisation, there is the father. Even if I am to be extremely kind and say that perhaps the father stands for the competitive, straitjacketed world, he falls miserably short. A trained actor, Vipin Sharma, is one of the weakest presences in the film. His responses as an actor are extremely contrived, as if out of a very dated Acting for Dummies kind of manual. He has three major conversations with Mr Nikumbh (Aamir Khan) in the film, and the graph of each is strikingly similar. It starts with him on the offensive about his son’s weaknesses, about his role as a father and Nikumbh’s place as a teacher. This is followed by an inspirational (read extremely trite) speech by Nikumbh about how every child has his strengths and how parents don’t understand this and pressure the child. And this is followed by the previously mentioned predictable facial responses of the father who looks down to show understanding and shame. The question to ask is, if this tempo was followed in the first conversation where there was a sense of understanding and shame in the father, why does he come back to repeat the pattern? It is a real waste of effort and not to mention our time, if the father is back to a tabula rasa state by the second conversation.

This brings us to Nikumbh, the character who makes this film the painful diatribe that it is. He enters the scene as a clown with big ears and a funny moustache, dressed in bright colors, uttering gibberish and basically establishing himself as the anti-thesis of the teachers we witnessed before (images of a whistling Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society haunted me). The greatest problem of Taare Zameen Par is that polar opposites define the film. There isn’t any scope of layers, or of shades of grey of any character, particularly the teachers, who therefore become caricatures rather than characters. That the cartoons of the three teachers at the art mela captured their entire essence should have been a clue to Aamir Khan. Ishaan and his brother, the mother and the father are the other polar opposites that exist in the film. Coming back to Nikumbh, quite predictably he is an art teacher. Predictable not just because a dozen films have used it before (Mona Lisa Smile and Notes on a Scandal to name a few recent ones) but because it is an easy way out to make art the polar opposite of any ‘actual subjects’ that are taught by the other teachers. I certainly expected Aamir Khan to think a little more out of the box. There is almost nothing believable about Khan’s character (and here I am willfully ignoring the fact of a singing and dancing teacher). He legally teaches in two schools, he addresses little eight-year-olds as ‘doston’, and comes up with the most didactic, unreal dialogues about how a table is too small to handle the weight of a child’s imagination etc. The listing of famous and successful dyslexic people was accompanied by technical sounding descriptions of their achievements that were out-of-place to say the least. Somewhere in the film, it seems, as if Khan got confused about how to treat these eight-year-olds, like adults or to become a child along with them.

Moving on to the theme of the film. I am in two minds about the ethical question behind the treatment of dyslexic people and in effect people suffering from any misunderstood mental disorders who have to struggle harder than others to survive in society. I strongly agree that there need to be more avenues for creating awareness and sensitivity about neurological disorders. At the same time, I feel that we do the sufferers a great injustice by pitying them. Perhaps the greatest oversight (in some ways an oversight is the opposite of perfection) is that dyslexia is equated with physical and mental challenges. That is completely incorrect. "Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that manifests primarily as a difficulty with written language, particularly with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as deficiencies in intelligence...Evidence suggests that dyslexia results from differences in how the brain processes written and/or verbal language. Although dyslexia is the result of a neurological difference, it is not an intellectual disability." [1] So, all the connections made with the school for mentally and physically challenged children and the documentary footage used with the closing credits only succeeds in evoking pity which is a response that results from a sense of superiority. And in the simplistic treatment of the life of Ishaan in the film, I believe the film hasn’t achieved any real sensitization, rather only a long weeping trip that wears off soon after we leave the cinema-hall because apart from anything else, all was well at the end of the film and it seemed to take precious little to cure the boy. Three quarters of the film was about Ishaan’s struggle with dyslexia, while it took just the duration of a song to fix it all. It seems to reduce the pain and the effort it must take to even begin to make some progress in cases of dyslexic children.

Besides by the end of the film, he has 'won' in the traditional, somewhat conservative sense - his report card has moved his parents to tears (sadly that is their response to a good and a bad report card)...he has achieved it all - he is on the front and the back cover of the yearbook. The feel-good factor ruins the aim of the film. Let me justify this, while interpreting Walter Benjamin’s stance on television, Alan Meek says, “TV positions us as subjects of a technological imaginary and…virtual participants in what modernist theorists once called ‘mass culture’.”[2] We can extend this argument to the experience of a film in the cinema hall as well, in fact it perhaps works better that way because with television we are still aware of other people and things around us to bring us back to our reality, but in the cinema hall, the attempt is at building an intimate relation between us and the film. Another form of mimicry, this leads to viewers responding as characters in the film. As a result, what remains at the end of the experience is not the hard part, but the warm feeling inside of having done something good. If we are so satisfied with the way things turned out the process of sensitization is over with the film.

But one must end on a positive note – Darsheel Safary is a treat because he is the only actor who has a character that goes through a journey in the film and he does great justice to the role. We see him transforming from a wonderfully spirited child to one who seems to have given up on the world. He cries and makes you cry, but that is not his defining feature – he has captured the frustrations, joys and the life of Ishaan in a way that makes him the only believable character in the entire film. The flip-book was a great device but its greatness is slammed in your face till you are tired of it and its sentimental implications.

So I guess while every child may be special, every film might not be, and this one certainly isn’t.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia

[2] http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir998/AMfr4e.htm

Pan's Labyrinth - The Labyrinth of History

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s deep spiritual struggle with the representation of the Spanish Civil War was first visible in The Devil’s Backbone in 2001. He chose the ghost-story as a natural symbol for a tragic history, one that hasn’t been avenged and therefore put to rest – quite literally, it spoke of history as a something that haunts the present. It was perhaps this literal quality that pushed him to look at the event again in 2006, with Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), this time with a dual purpose; first, to play not just the historical event but to explore its agents. Second, in the process, also examine the space that encompasses the event—that of the historical narrative. As a result, the film doesn’t fit into any single traditional or modern or post-modern trope of history writing. With the introduction of the fantastic, del Toro has added another layer to the filmic representation of the Spanish Civil War. With this added element, the film can lay claims not just to traditional and post-modern forms of representing history but also to allegory.

As a rule, allegory refers to a story with a double meaning – a primary or surface meaning and a secondary or under-the-surface meaning. It is a story that can be read, understood and interpreted at two levels.[1] It is in its use of the fantastic that the film becomes part of the allegorical mode of representation. The most usual understanding of the use of fantasy is with respect to escaping a brutal reality. A seminal example of this is C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia where the children approach the closet and hence the world of Narnia when they are trying to escape punishment in the real world. In a film based on a fascist camp in Spain during the Second World War it would be easy to think that Ofelia will use the fantastic as a space where she can escape Vidal and his cruelties. And that del Toro will use the fantastic as symbolic of the real, in a way masking it. This is precisely what he does not do. The fantastic doesn’t becoming a stylised way of suggesting the violence, because the violence is not suggested, it is shown in detail, for instance, when Vidal deliberates on each tool of torture that he will use on the rebel he has captured. At the end of the film in particular, he takes us to a point where our willing suspension of disbelief is at its height and we are just about to feel comfortable and somewhat happy at the joyful reunion and Ofelia’s success when we are pulled back to face the dying Ofelia.

Del Toro has introduced the fabulist element for a purpose very different, and in some ways quite contrary, to the tropes of escapist cinema and literature. It is a two-point agenda:
First, there are three orders that are visible in this film: Vidal’s fascist group, the revolutionaries and Ofelia’s imaginary world. In an interview del Toro explains that in the film, everything is in threes, there are three fairies, three tasks, three doors etc. The relationship between the fascists, the revolutionaries and the imaginary world too functions like a triangle – with the fascist group on one side and the other two on the other side. We see the revolutionaries primarily in the peripheries, and as Pedro says, they might not be able to eradicate the fascists, but they can at least make things difficult for them. Therefore, the world of the revolutionaries is defined by that of the fascists.

The imaginary world becomes another way of deterring the order created by Vidal. It facilitates and almost demands a disobedience of the existing order. For instance, Ofelia first sees the fairy when she is asked to address Vidal as father; the pressure on this new relationship seems to work as the catalyst to the desire for an alternative order. Even when she enters the dead tree to fight the frog, her dress – meant to ‘make her beautiful for the captain’ – is ruined beyond recognition; in effect, she refuses to comply with the concept of beauty as it is defined in the real world. Ofelia underscores the action of the rebels who we see mostly in the peripheries; fantasy then isn’t an escape, but an extension of the revolutionary forces. In some ways, del Toro plays on the concept of the underworld – using it to refer to the imaginary underworld as well as the political underworld.

A key similarity between the world of the rebels and that of Ofelia lies in the question of choice. In the scene where Vidal kills the doctor, we see that these two worlds are different from the fascist world primarily because they have the desire to choose something other than the absolute order of Vidal (and thereby Franco). The very creation of the alternative order is a manifestation of a choice. Just before the faun tells Ofelia about the final task that will reopen the world of Princess Moanna, he starts resembling Vidal and the fascists when he asks her never to question him or his tasks again. Ofelia not only questions him, but she also defies him by refusing to shed her brother’s blood. The biblical overtones of the idea of sacrifice link the episode to the Book of Genesis[2] where God asks Abraham to sacrifice the life of his only son Isaac, and Abraham agrees; in her refusal, Ofelia rejects the Christian order that was an undercurrent of the Spanish Civil War. The difference between the two worlds is made clear because in the imaginary world she becomes Princess Moanna in spite of her defiance, perhaps because of it, whereas in the real world, it kills her.

The defining feature of the fascist world is the lack of choice, and this is evident from the onset; when Ofelia and her mother reach the camp, Vidal forces Carmen to sit in the wheelchair despite her protests that she is perfectly capable of walking. This is a clear act of taking away her agency, and it is this that Ofelia wants to rectify in her world. In her world, she has to be guided but she has agency nevertheless— she has to complete the three tasks at the end of which she will be a princess. And her responsibility is larger than one would imagine; when the faun reprimands her for disobeying him in the second task, he says, “Your spirit shall forever remain among the humans. You shall age like them, you shall die like them. And all memory of you shall fade in time. And we’ll vanish along with it.”(emphasis added).

There is a somewhat similar treatment of Mercedes in the film. Both women become key players in their alternative orders, in fact, at times they function as heroes. Ofelia saves the ‘kingdom’ from the frog and Mercedes risks her life to bring food and medicine etc to the rebels. Both Mercedes and Ofelia have one very basic tool that helps them escape monsters, real and imaginary – Mercedes has the little knife and Ofelia has the chalk. So if Ofelia is a parallel to Mercedes, the imaginary world is a parallel to the world of the revolutionaries, because ultimately, both worlds have to fight monsters.

The second agenda fulfilled by the use of fantasy, the beneath-the-surface layer is del Toro’s defiance of the laws that define historiography and the real. Hence, the labyrinth. The very physical structure of the labyrinth is at variance with the decidedly straight, linear appearance of history in traditional history-writing tropes, particularly the annals as described by Hayden White where the event is more important than the agent. “…(the annals figure) forth a world in which things happen to people rather than one in which people do things.”[3] In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro redefines historiography as a coming together of the political and the personal. He defines the entry into the labyrinth as a journey of Ofelia discovering herself. “Unlike a maze, a labyrinth is actually a constant transit of finding, not getting lost. It’s about finding, not losing, your way…I can ascribe two concrete meanings of the labyrinth in the movie. One is the transit of the girl towards her own center, and towards her own, inside reality, which is real. I think that Western cultures make a difference about inner and outer reality, with one having more weight than the other. I don’t. And I have found that [the inner] reality is as important as the one that I’m looking at right now.”[4]

Like Ofelia, del Toro has created a logic that isn’t governed by the laws of the real world, but is logic nevertheless. The logic of exactitude in Vidal’s world where every activity is preceded by a visual reference to the pocket watch is in contrast to a logic where time is measured by the moon and hourglasses. While a chronology dominates the real world, del Toro introduces multiple dimensions of time in the imaginary world which has a past where Princess Moanna lived with her father the king, a present where the faun is trying to test the princess’s essence, and a future that is introduced when she is invited to share the throne with her father and mother. The history that del Toro endorses is therefore more visceral, one where different layers exist simultaneously. There isn’t any absolute in this version of history, it lends it self to the realm of a fluid truth as well. Therefore, the film doesn’t fix history in a moment, it gives it layers of meaning. It doesn’t halt or attempt to cure history in its narrative[5] and this is most evident in the way the film ends with the image of a dying child.

The internal logic of del Toro’s worldview is captured in the fact that the world where a sense of the grotesque and the baroque are in contest with the very visible neatness of Vidal’s world, the former wins. Vidal is characterised by well-oiled, closely combed hair, wearing a crisp uniform and repeatedly shown shaving and polishing his boots. In contrast, physically, almost all characters in Ofelia’s world look somewhat monstrous. The Pale Man, the Frog (and the yellowy mass he throws up, full of huge beetles), the Faun and even the fairies look like unappealing insects in the beginning. The allegory is most effective in the comparison it inevitably creates between the two worlds because gradually, the ‘real’ becomes more frightening and more grotesque than the imaginary despite the literal monsters in the latter. There is a sense of comfort about the imaginary world with reference to the horror that occupies the real world and the grotesque that under rides it. We are as relieved as Ofelia when the faun comes back to give her another chance.

What this does to the idea of fantasy is bring it to the level of the real, therefore, one can no longer justifiably limit the fantastic to escape. Del Toro’s comment therefore is on the usual gap that comes between the real and the decoding of the allegory and its symbolism. While the fantastic enhances the representation of the real, making it more nuanced, the brutality of the real is in no way diluted. A reality that so closely borders on horror requires fantastic means to comprehend it. Del Toro says this himself, “She’s (Ofelia) actually articulating the world through her fantasy. So the things in her fantasy would reflect things in the real world. It’s not really her way of coping with the real world, more like interpreting.”[6] And through Ofelia, we come close to actually understanding what that reality must have been like. The magical occupies the gap between the madness of Franco’s Spain and us. This brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Speech, he says, “A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”



[1] A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Cuddon, J.A. 1982. London: Penguin Books
[2] The Book of Genesis: 22.
[3] White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7:1, autumn, 1980, 5-27.
[4] http://movies.about.com/od/panslabyrinth/a/pansgt122206.htm
[5] Staiger, Janet, “Securing the Fictional Narrative as a Tale of the Historical Real” in The South Atlantic Quarterly vol.88:2, 1989.
[6] http://www.aintitcool.com/node/31084 (Capone interviews Guillermo del Toro)

Dancer in the Dark

Dancer in the Dark: Lars von Trier and the Golden Heart

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier makes no secret of his deep criticism of the United States of America. He made Dancer in the Dark, the third part of his ‘Golden Heart’ trilogy, in 2000, and the film served, in many ways, as a precursor to the ‘USA: Land of Opportunity’ trilogy that he began after being criticised by American filmmakers at the Cannes Film Festival when he went to showcase Dancer in the Dark—he was told that he had no right to make a film about the United States without actually visiting the country.[1]
Von Trier uses the protagonist Selma Jezkova, a Czech immigrant, to enter into the discourse of the construction of America as the land of possibility. Selma moves to America from Czechoslovakia because in America there is technology that can cure her son’s poor eyesight that he has inherited from her. She confesses that she knew he would get the disease that would escalate to total blindness, but she had him nevertheless. Her aim then, in moving to the United States, becomes an attempt at expiation of the guilt. The biting irony lies in this very guilt, because as the film progresses, we see that Selma is among the few that has no reason to be guilty, hers is the golden heart.

“More than anything, there are more images in evil. Evil is based far more on the visual, whereas good has no good images at all.”[2]
Von Trier’s attack on America is methodical and whole— it is the system that tramples this golden heart. The individual, the family, the professional set-up, or the justice system—every step of society seems either helplessly or consciously embedded in deceit. Bill and Linda are Selma’s landlords (they own the land on which she has her trailer) and friends. Though Linda thinks that Bill has great inherited wealth, he is actually in great debt and doesn’t have the courage to tell her about this. He tells Selma that Linda is a compulsive spender and he can’t do anything to stop her. Caught desperately in the consumer culture, Bill decides to steal from Selma the two thousand odd dollars she has saved up over the years for her son Gene’s eye operation. Von Trier invests a great deal of thought in Bill’s character—though he is the reason for Selma’s tragedy, we see his compulsions as well. The scene where Selma finally kills him, the struggle gets transferred from the actual physical struggle between him and her to Bill’s emotional struggle between the guilt of stealing and the somewhat involuntary response of taking advantage of Selma’s blindness.
Samuel, the director of The Sound of Music production that Selma is a part of, is a more directly deceitful character, more meticulous and cunning in the way he helps the police capture Selma.

“My films have become highly moral recently.”
But individuals aside, von Trier’s most poignant attack in the film is for the American justice system. Almost every one who testifies against Selma is either lying or constructing a somewhat imagined version of the truth. For instance, Linda’s testimony is partly what she was lead to believe, but was part exaggeration to direct sympathy towards Bill. As a result of her build up, the all-American jury is most-likely to see it as an attack of the outsider on the American victim. The prosecuting lawyer spells this out, he says, “She didn’t show the pity she is now expecting from us…After all that this country gave her, this is how she repays us.” What is interesting and probably the sharpest comment against the farcical proceedings is that the prosecution is not able to tell the difference between the real and imagined; the lawyer takes Selma’s statement that her father is the Czech tap-dancer Oldrich Novy seriously, and he summons him to court to testify against her. The reflection on a justice system that can’t tell the real from the imaginary is complete. Selma isn’t really the one who appears blind. Conspicuously, we see the prosecution build a case against Selma for a good half hour, while we don’t hear the defense at all. Even the lawyer Catherine hires doesn’t get a chance to defend her. So effectively, Selma doesn’t get a defense.

“Regarding the rule about colour, that one was for me, because I have always felt it difficult to accept the way a colour film looks. I have always spent a lot of energy changing it one way or other, so I could bear looking at it, and therefore it was a wonderful rule for me.”
The thing we notice first about Dancer in the Dark is its curious technique, specifically, the camera work and the use of the musical form.
Sudden shifts in appearance telling the real world from Selma’s imagination are made evident with the help of lighting and the jerky movement from one shot to the next. Privy to the shift from real to the imaginary, we know that switching to the mode of the musical is Selma’s way of dealing with a situation she has no control over in real life. And surprisingly enough, we need this shift as much as she does, it becomes our breather. The level of empathy is completed with the hand-held camera which gives a documentary-like feel to the film, allowing it a kind of truth claim.

“The problem about a musical is that it’s a little hard to swallow that suddenly they’re like dum-dee-dee-dum-dum this is always a little difficult.”
The film begins with Selma rehearsing for a Broadway musical – The Sound of Music, where she is to play the role of Maria. Von Trier’s use of The Sound of Music establishes Dancer in the Dark’s claim to the genre of the musical, simultaneously marking the differences between the two. The Sound of Music becomes the traditional musical as opposed to the more experimental musical that is Dancer in the Dark. With the parallel drawn between the two, a part of us expects a similar, bitter-sweet end like in The Sound of Music, and therefore, the end here is that much more striking.
Von Trier accepts the musical's escapist potential and uses it to describe just that...the need to deny reality. Yet, in the film neither the protagonist nor the viewer is spared any trauma. Von Trier uses The Sound of Music as a stepping stone, only to move ahead and redefine the musical. While Selma uses this form to run away from reality, she is brought back each time and the harshness of the reality hasn’t gone or reduced. Once again, this is used most effectively in the end when she is hanged suddenly in the middle of a song titled ‘The next to last song’.

“Visible good easily becomes trite…”
Only here, it doesn’t.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier
[2] All quotes used as titles are statements made by Lars von Trier. They have been taken from the site: http://www.quotesandpoem.com/quotes/showquotes/author/lars-von-trier/

Om Shanti Om

Let me state for the record that I love Shahrukh Khan. I know his acting skills support him only as far as he plays romantic roles, his attempts at variety are usually disastrous—the prime example of which is Duplicate—and that we are lucky he tries this on rare occasions. So I went to watch Om Shanti Om expecting a ridiculous plot (everyone said it was a remake of Karz), and bad acting — not only from Shahrukh, but this new model-turned actress, Deepika Padukone. I don't remember the last time I was so happy to be wrong. Om Shanti Om is easily one of the better films made in our film industry in a long long time. Farah Khan keeps the promise she made at the time of Main Hoon Na.

First of all, it is not a remake of Karz, unless Karz was a biting irony about itself and the entire film fraternity. Farah Khan picks up the element of rebirth and karma etc from Subhash Ghai's film, only to turn it on its head, not just for the sake of mockery, but to bring attention to the most important element of the relationship between the filmmakers (whether it is the director or the actor) and the audience — a relationship that very easily embeds itself in the willing suspension of disbelief. Farah Khan strategically inserts a dialogue in the film where, through Sandy, she defends what we call ridiculous plotlines and situations. The reality or plausibility of an action or a situation is not what is of the essence, it is whether the audience is engaged with the story. The space of the cinema hall then becomes a transient space that allows the audience to let go of the bounds of rationality that rule their daily lives. Why is it any different from fantasy that has held a proud place in the hallowed world of great literature? It is a way of dealing with reality, a means of escape, and in this case a way of looking inwards and laughing at oneself.

What is creditable about this film is that without the usual tricks of gaining access to the category of experimental cinema, it creates levels and deals with them with great ease, not letting the viewer complain of a single dull, trying-to-be-intellectual moment where the filmmaker along with some scholars revels in the greatness of a single shot while the general audience is left guessing what was so great about a great film. Calling the film within the film Om Shanti Om as well is not unusual and it works very well here, especially in the last song, where Shahrukh (the reincarnated Om, also called Om) retells the story of the first half of the film with clips recreating those scenes. If we pay attention to the lyrics of the song, its heightened self-consciousness at its melodramatic content is evident. Though it hardly matters to the audience, who for all their rationality, are enthralled by the suspense and melodrama of the moment, the film creates levels where the lyrics of the song are simultaneously referring to Om Shanti Om starring Om Kapoor and Om Shanti Om starring Shahrukh Khan. It's meta-fiction, people!!!

Irony directed at oneself is the greatest achievement of this film, and it was heart warming to see so many in industry come out and laugh at themselves. The award ceremony is one such scene where we see industry greats like Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Hrithik Roshan, Rani Mukherjee etc show the persona adopted by filmstars around the media. Shabana Azmi's jab on herself and the long line of leading ladies saying a variety of "We are just good friends" are highlights of this scene. There is also a pointed reference to remakes and plagiarism as the film very obviously lifts the climactic scene from Madhumati. The formulaic stories and appearances, the focus on NRI representation in Bollywood, and the annoyingly repetitive gestures between friends add to the mockery riot this film is.

But jokes aside, Arjun Rampal's character isn't around as just the killer, it adds to the complicity of the film and its comment, he shows the side of the industry where relationships are determined by their monetary implications, with secret marriages that are never discussed to keep open the possibility for further relationships, where producers forge ways of draining the insurance company after 'failed' projects, and of course the variations of the casting couch.

In all, Om Shanti Om is a great coming together of intelligent film-making and total masala entertainment. And for those who aren't interested in the self-reflexivity, the irony and the layers, go watch a funny, melodramatic film that will keep you thoroughly entertained. Shahrukh can certainly be a better actor, and the film would be more convincing if he were, Deepika Padukone is a refreshing surprise and Kirron Kher is a delight. And of course, you can see 31 stars dancing!!

Innocence and History in Forrest Gump


The 60s have held a fascination in the minds of millions across the world— the Beat Generation, the hippie culture, Joan Baez, Holden Caulfield, the Beatles, lifting the ban off Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Catch 22 etc have appealed to the rebellious desires of artists, writers and filmmakers for years. In the romance of the rebellion, it is easy to forget what it was that gave strength to this counterculture—the Vietnam War. American cinema is flooded with films about the Vietnam War and it is interesting to note that an entire chunk of these films were made in the 90s. Most of these films are centered around a sense of loss and hopelessness as they base themselves on (and at the same time also create) the veteran discourse.
Robert Zemeckis’s multiple Oscar-winning film, Forrest Gump (1994) isn’t just about the Vietnam War though it tells the story of a war veteran. It records the history of America in and around the 1960s through the figure of a slow-witted man, Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks). In this paper, I would like to discuss how Zemeckis’ representation of the Vietnam War is significantly different from most accounts of the War, especially a film like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and why Zemeckis feels the need to take a somewhat simplistic view of history. Is it that by the 90s America had finally reached a place where the trauma had been dealt with and there was space for alternative views on the War in popular culture? Or is it embedded in a more political reason, whereby a conservative worldview had to be justified and encouraged?

I

The problem with Forrest Gump begins with the beginning, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” True to this opening line, the film treats American history of the decades between the 1950s and the 1970s as a box of chocolates; you might not know what flavour you are going to get, but whatever it is, it will still be chocolate. The view of history the film will adopt can be ascertained by the fact that the original quote in Winston Groom’s book on which the film is based, was, “…bein’ an idiot is no box of chocolates.” In the film, Forrest flows in and out of events that shaped American history, particularly in the 1960s, like George Wallace and the desegregation of Alabama University, the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War etc. Through Forrest, we see a linear American history¾no mistakes, no looking back, just success. Simple. Encapsulated. In this triumphant march of history, or rather of America, the representation of the Vietnam War is what suffers the most. Numerous critics have debated the conservative or radical impulse of this film, but it is in the representation of the War and the counterculture that the film becomes conservative.

In the latter half of the 80s and through the 90s, America saw an intellectual and artistic revival of the experience of the war in Vietnam where the United States sided with South Vietnam against the Communist regime of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War was the subject of more than thirty films that appeared in this period, the most widely acclaimed of which is Oliver Stone’s Platoon. As Marita Sturken says, Platoon was marketed as ‘the first real Vietnam film’ because of its autobiographical content.[1] Through the film, we are rooted in the landscape of Vietnam and the feeling of no escape is transferred from the soldier to the spectator for whom that landscape is as alien. The film begins with the ominous image of dead bodies wrapped up, ready to be sent back; this is the first view of Vietnam for the protagonist Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) as well as the spectator. The film doesn’t spare us the brutality that ruled that space and time, and this is most evident when Taylor fires at a Vietnamese boy who is expected to keep jumping from one side to the other to protect himself from the shots. Taylor can’t seem to understand why he is doing what he is, he doesn’t understand the anger that is growing inside him, which he decodes only when the film closes, he says, “we weren’t fighting the enemy, we were fighting ourselves…the enemy was within us.” There is death everywhere, not just of American soldiers, but also of the Vietnamese, American GIs burn down entire villages, kill innocent civilians and even attempt a gang rape. There is a critique of the self (read the American), its brutal abilities and the role it plays in the carnage that is made most visible through the film.

Forrest Gump too looks at the Vietnam War, it uses the traditional vocabulary and references¾ the use of the word ‘Charlie’, the reference to the incessant rain, the weapons used, the phones connecting the lieutenant of a platoon to the base camp etc— yet it depicts a different, a softer history. Unlike the opening shot of Platoon, when Forrest appears in Vietnam, the mise en scene is that of a beach party, there are barbeques and stacks of beer cans everywhere, there are GIs playing cards, and there is music in the background. In fact, the comic is introduced in the next scene in an overlap between Forrest’s omniscient narrative and mise en scene. When the GIs are patrolling, Forrest’s omniscient narrative voice says, “Lieutenant Dan was always getting these funny feelings so he’d tell us to get down, shut up.” And then Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) repeats, “get down, shut up.”
Most importantly, we don’t see any Vietnamese people in Vietnam. We don’t see the Americans as aggressors in any way, only as helpless GIs—all of whose names and hometowns have been discussed by Forrest—who merely defend themselves, against the faceless oppressors. Quite naturally, the spectator’s sympathy is directed towards the young, innocent, injured familiar figure of the American GI, not with the faceless Vietnamese attacker. In the way the War appears in this film, even in their defense, the Americans didn’t kill or injure a single Vietnamese, because the only dead and injured that we see are the Americans.
It is interesting how Zemeckis tries to deal with the political situation of very real events and at the same time tries to distance himself and his film from any direct political comment. He shirks the responsibility of the statements made through the film by focusing on the innocence that Forrest embodies. The pretence is that of an ‘objective’ history; for instance, he places the blame of the injuries and death in the war on a loosely defined entity, that is never shown and hardly ever referred to directly. Whatever else this entity may be, it is not American, so there is no space for self-reflexivity. In Platoon, there is a sense of guilt that comes across in Sergeant Elias’s (Willem Dafoe) statement, “…what happened today is just the beginning, we are going to lose this war…we’ve been kicking other people’s asses for so long, I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.”
The impact and suggestions of Forrest Gump regarding Vietnam are very different from other such films where the spectator and the filmmaker have to come to terms with the destruction and the unending sense of doom that stems from the fact that USA lost the War, something that Zemeckis chooses not to mention. The real difference therefore lies in the struggle with the self and its sense of morality and also with one’s country that continues to be hailed as the moral saviour of the world in the moment when films like Platoon were made. It is the lack of this struggle that marks Zemeckis’ film, where events flow with so much ease that the War, the loss and the entire age seem mocked at.

II
The question that needs to be answered, however, is why the last fifteen years of the 20th century keep coming back to the 60s moment. There are two broad possibilities:
First; as Marita Sturken says, “American society slouches toward the 21st century as a culture deeply suspicious of its history. We have moved from various phases of late modern optimism into cold-war fears, from 1960s disillusion to a late 20th century culture in which conspiracy theory forms a primary narrative…the contemporary paranoia of American culture and about American history can be seen as a direct outcome of the political and social upheaval of the 1960s.”[2]
So while Platoon occupies one end of the spectrum with Stone’s deeply critical view of the Vietnam War, Forrest Gump occupies the other where not only is the significance and impact of the War underplayed and shielded from the viewer, but the American GI is looked at most uncritically. Look at the figure of Forrest. He is the physical embodiment of all boy-scout qualities—he is honest, courageous, loyal and masculine (in his chivalry, also physically, he is a star football player, and during the War, he has the physical strength to carry his injured friends to safety). Very early in the film, we are told that he has an IQ of 75, a mere five points lower than the level required for public schools. In every other way he surpasses ‘normal’ – he is emotionally intact and knows how to respond to love, jealousy, disappointment etc, he is successful, humble, and an eager parent. In other words, he is good at everything he does. The lack of cynicism that functions as the catchphrase of the film is a result of a careful process of selection done by Zemeckis from the original novel. Zemeckis decides to leave out almost all of Forrest’s failures as they appear in Groom’s text—that he went to a special school, failed in college, could not marry his friend Jenny, smoked pot and had an incredibly troubled relationship with his son.[3]

The publicity material for this film stated, “Forrest is the embodiment of an era, an innocent at large in an America that is losing its innocence.” Losing its innocence perhaps because of the darker side of benevolent America with its sensitive, heroic, self-sacrificing soldiers is explored and thus made available for the world to see by films like Platoon and earlier by a film like Soldier Blue.
Second: till the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States of America focused in everyway at containing Communist forces across the world. The Cold War was depicted as the war over evil and liberty. With the end of the Cold War there was a disintegration of this focus and a sense of direction. American authorities could not afford to let go of the status of the saviours of democracy and freedom. Secretary of State James Baker addressed the World Affairs Council in March 1990. He said, “Already a great, new debate —actually a great, old debate —has broken out, an argument as old as our republic. Now that the adversaries of democracy are weaker, some say we should retire, mission accomplished, to tend our problems at home. I am not among them. In the new world struggling to be born, like the old world now rapidly passing away, there is no substitute for American leadership.”[4]
At this point the United States was also looking at interference in a number of other countries, the Gulf and Central America for instance. The public had to be convinced of this foreign policy, they had to be convinced of the reasons for fighting this war that had no direct consequences for the American people. The larger-good-of-mankind argument had to be made in the context of the Gulf War. And since a similar argument was used for Vietnam, the ghosts of that war had to be touched up and re-presented. In Forrest Gump’s version of the Vietnam War, there is less violence, one death (of Forrest’s friend Bubba) and the possibility of looking forward—the Vietnam War introduces Forrest to ping-pong, bringing him fame (he meets the President again and appears alongside John Lennon on The Dick Cavett Show) and money to start the shrimping business which in turn brings him more success and financial security. Ironically, it seems as if Forrest Gump begins where Platoon leaves off, where Taylor says, “Those of us who did make it, have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to life.”
There was a need in the 90s therefore to bend popular opinion towards ideas of a free world that America had an obligation to build, and it was necessary to convince the public to ensure that a counterculture like the one that appeared in the 60s didn’t raise its head again.
Thus the other indicator of Forrest Gump’s conservative nature is the representation of the counterculture of the 60s. In the film, the counterculture is signified through the figure of Jenny (Robin Wright), Forrest’s friend, object of desire and ultimately his wife. Through Jenny, the counterculture is represented as the darker side of American history, that which was unsuccessful and destructive.
Despite their friendship, Jenny is always the anti-thesis of Forrest. She is engendered in an atmosphere of abuse and has no stable home at any point during the film. She avoids her father’s house, and then moves in with her grandmother who lives in a trailer; Jenny is seen at every point in the film near cars and buses—means of escape, leaving for someplace where she’ll look for meaning. This is reflective of the very mobile hippie culture that she invariably becomes a part of. Not daring to think out of the box, Zemeckis places her in very traditional images of drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts, abusive relationships, and misguided youth—represented through the leader of the Black Panthers Party whose personality comes across as confused, aggressive and astray—and not surprisingly, all of these become characteristics of the counterculture. At various junctures of the film, Forrest comes to her rescue, the most interesting of which is the episode at the headquarters of the Black Panthers Party where in spite of his agitated speech about women being mistreated as a result of the War, the leader and his entire group stand and watch as Jenny’s boyfriend beats her, it is only Forrest who intervenes. Until she decides to unite with Forrest, Jenny, and hence the counterculture is a failure. Constructive aspects of the counterculture like its art, literature and music are conspicuously ignored or ridiculed—for instance, Jenny aspires to be like Joan Baez, and while we do see her singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’, she is doing it in a strip club where no one is paying attention to her song. Through the protesters who force unknowing people (like Forrest) into the peace congregation, the ‘host’ at this congregation who wears the American flag and repeatedly uses obscenities encouraging the mob to cheer, and through the leader of the Black Panthers, the counterculture is not only severely criticised but also caricatured.

We see both Forrest and Jenny growing up together, but since the film is his (fictional) biopic, we see the process of his growth, while she is seen in relation to him. We see him as a witness or a participant in the events that shaped 20th century American history, and this is achieved most convincingly through the interpolations in documentary images that are used throughout the film—he meets almost every president of the United States, he is present at the desegregation of Alabama University, he cracks the Watergate Scandal leading to Nixon’s resignation, and he is a soldier fighting in Vietnam. Jenny’s life however is not seen as a selection of events, but as moments. They are more like snapshots that have no explanation, they are just images. The corroboration of his history with actual events are in contrast to her history, which is caricatured, and also, in comparison, open to debates about authenticity. This establishes Forrest’s as the master narrative, the mainstream, and hers as the disturbed fringe that is tolerated as an unfortunate detail.

The closing decade of the 20th century saw a culture of affluence in the United States; in the Introduction to a New Yorker anthology, David Remnick says, “The American record of economic growth (was) unprecedented and, since March 1991, uninterrupted, and (had) inscribed itself on the landscape¾the McMansions of suburbia, the princely constructions along the oceans, the real-estate manias from Manhattan to Palo Alto…” Remnick recalls a sentence from The Great Gatsby, “He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” he places this sentence at the heart of the contradiction that defined America in its ‘moment of prosperity, satisfaction and self-satisfaction’.[5] It was perhaps this contradiction of the ‘New Gilded Age’ that lead to the oppositional instincts of self-satisfaction and self-exploration.
Despite its simplified representation of the Vietnam War and the counterculture, some of these contradictions occupy Forrest Gump as well, because the Vietnam War is just one aspect of this film, and therefore all questions are not yet answered.

[1] Marita Sturken. ‘Reenactment, Fantasy and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas’ in History and Theory volume 36:4:36, December 1997.
[2] Marita Sturken. ‘Reenactment, Fantasy and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas’ in History and Theory volume 36:4:36, December 1997.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump
[4] American Foreign Policy Current Documents 1990 (1991). From http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/61.htm
[5] David Remnick (ed). The New Gilded Age—The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence. New York: The Modern Library (2000/2001). All references in this paragraph are from David Remnick’s Introduction to the anthology.

The Politics of Space in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

The Politics of Space in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace


Much has been said about J.M. Coetzee’s discomfort at being branded as a South African novelist and not just a novelist. Much has also been said about his “impatience” with history defining and dominating literature. While one notices this trend in most of Coetzee’s writings, Disgrace works differently. In fact, it deals with history in the most upfront manner. I would like to argue that the changing settings of the narrative work as an enveloping device encasing the concerns Coetzee tries to communicate to his readers.

I

The novel works around two major well defined spaces, namely Cape Town and Lucy’s smallholding in the Eastern Cape. At first glance, there are stark, and predictable differences between these two spaces. Cape Town is typified by the University which allows regular interaction among different races, by the supermarket and the sophisticated and ‘discreet’ escort service. The smallholding, on the other hand, appears, at first, to be a contemporary pastoral space. In Coetzee’s words, “(the) smallholding is at the end of a winding dirt track some miles outside the town: five hectares of land, most of it arable, a wind-pump, stables and outbuildings, and a low sprawling farmhouse painted yellow with a galvanized-iron roof and a covered stoep. The front boundary is marked by a wire fence and clumps of nasturtiums and geraniums; the rest of the front is dust and gravel.” Coetzee takes great pains to present an ideal picture of the countryside in this description, only to shatter that image completely later. While one can see the obvious distinctions between these two descriptions, they undergo visible changes once parallels are drawn between Lurie’s sexual encounter with Melanie in Cape Town and Lucy’s rape at the smallholding. In both cases there is sexual intercourse between people of two different races and in either case, it is not consensual on the woman’s part. A further parallel is highlighted by Gareth Cornwell when he says that Lucy’s determination to not report the rape rests on the argument that what happened to her was a “purely private matter.” This statement ironically mirrors Lurie’s explanation to Lucy regarding his response to the enquiry against him where he said, “Private life is public business. They wanted a spectacle: breast beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn’t oblige.”[1]
Therefore, as Rita Barnard suggests, “the distinctions between the city and the country are effaced. The erosion of the old pastoral opposition of country and city, is but one aspect of a general erasure of boundaries in the world of the novel.”

Taking off from the question of Lurie’s encounters with Melanie and Lucy’s rape, one can say that another parallel between the two spaces is that of sexual subjugation of women which is supplemented by racial discrimination. To highlight Lurie’s contribution in this Cornwell brings attention to a statement made in the novel by Farodia Rasool, a member of the enquiry committee. She says, “Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part.”[2] This situation is ironically inverted in the context of Lucy’s rape, for there it is the exploitation of a white woman by black men. Yet, the history of exploitation from the period of apartheid continues. In both cases, space plays an important part. Let us first consider the Lurie-Melanie case: each time there is a breach of appropriate space that takes place. First, Lurie invites Melanie, his student to his house for a drink, an act that, in layman’s language, can safely be called ‘unprofessional’. Next, he almost forces himself into her flat despite her clear protests. Not only is that a breach of professional conduct, it is a clear refusal on his part to adhere to her wishes and a violation of her space. Lastly, when Melanie comes to stay with him, his initial thoughts are: “Now here she is in his house, trailing complications behind her.” But soon he thinks, “Every night she will be here; every night he can slip into her bed like this, slip into her.”
Coming now to Lucy’s rape: the way in which she understands it is reflected in her statement to Lurie when she says, “What if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.” Secondly, the role of Petrus in Lucy’s rape: he was clearly aware of it, and therefore made sure he was away at the time. The way in which he benefited from it was in terms of land. He knew that once Lucy was ‘warned’ by the attack, she would either ultimately be persuaded by her father and leave the farm for him, or have no choice but to accept his ‘protection’ which would come at the price of letting go of her mastery over the farm. And that is exactly what happens. Lucy accepts his supremacy, and gives up all the land except the house and the kennels. It is interesting to note that Petrus is a name borrowed from Gordimer’s story, ‘Six Feet of the Country’, in which Petrus is a helpless black peasant who is refused land for the burial of his family member.[3] It is therefore no coincidence that here Petrus becomes the master of a large plot of land, some of it acquired, (almost by force) from a white woman. Rita Barnard sees Disgrace as a “striking response to the post-apartheid moment, or the ‘new South Africa’…where Coetzee seems to have relinquished this earlier dream of a maternal and deconstructive pastoral mode. In the ‘new South Africa’ of the novel, the urge to stake one’s claim, to own, to procreate is forcefully present.”[4] This can be seen not only in Petrus but also in Lurie who tries to appropriate Melanie’s identity by twisting around the pronunciation of her name to Meláni, the dark one, who he can dominate.
The entire discourse of the female body as a site for declaring mastery, political and social, comes into play in this situation, but since that is another tangent altogether, I will not go further into it.

II

In Lucy’s relationship with the farm we can see, at an allegorical level, the changes South African society was undergoing post apartheid. When we first see Lucy, she stands sturdily on her patch of land, “(her) toes gripping the red earth, leaving clear prints”, the meaning of this hardly needs to be glossed. From this, it moves on to the stage where according to Cornwell, Lucy’s reading of the rape as her debt or tax is a deluded attempt of a traumatized woman to make logical sense of what has happened to her, to make her experience meaningful by construing it in some sense as necessary or deserved.[5] From here, we move on to Lucy’s statement which is, “Yes, the road I am following may be the wrong one. But if I leave the farm now I will leave defeated, and will taste that defeat for the rest of my life.” There seems to be a hint of indignation in her tone. This determination undergoes complete transformation when she accepts Petrus’ mastery over her and by extension over her land. The farm is her identity, this is where she came when she gave up life like her ‘city folk, intellectual’ parents and pursued her alternative identity as a woman, a lesbian who runs a farm. She had, in all ways, proven that she did not need male support, instead she was paying Petrus and had given him space to stay in the old stables on her land, and then gave shelter to her father when he needed to get away from Cape Town. In a violent turn of events, this feminist ideal was shattered, leaving her in her pregnant (reasserting her ‘womanhood’ and forcibly resituating her in the ‘feminine ideal’ as the bearer of children) after the rape, her father looks after her, advises her and ultimately Petrus will become her husband, in order to be the male presence that would protect her. Towards the close of the novel, Lucy is barely left as a master of her house, and is instead fixed in the romantic pastoral feminine ideal: “Lucy is at work among the flowers…she is wearing a pale summer dress, boots and a wide straw hat... the wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness he would wish prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers: and at the centre of the picture a young woman. A scene ready made for a Sargent or a Bonnard.” Lucy has been stuck in the ambit of the ideal female. The untranslated German phrase means, the eternal feminine, it is borrowed from Goethe’s Faust, holding the idea of redemption. According to Barnard, Lurie’s desire to prolong this beautiful moment goes hand in hand with a desire to view the present as a recurrence of the past. His gaze and discourse remain masculine, European, traditional, a matter of received ideas of rural life…[6]
It would be extremely reductive, almost incorrect to view this as an attempt on Coetzee’s part to indicate that only the whites in South Africa had to undergo adjustments and that he was forwarding the post apartheid white paranoia that they were being driven out of South Africa. It is on the other hand, an inverted gaze at the history of exploitation and subjugation and a self conscious realization of the ever-present burden of history.

III

After the attack on Lucy, Lurie becomes more actively involved in two activities that have hitherto been ignored or attempted half heartedly by him: the animal hospital and the chamber opera based on the life of Byron in Italy. In his involvement in both these activities one can see a visible change in Lurie.
The animal hospital run by Bev Shaw seems to be a value neutral space since neither of the two ‘crimes’ that are central events of the novel, took place here. Lurie’s work at the hospital can be seen as a redemptive exercise, for something as seemingly trivial as giving the dead dogs an honorable funeral becomes a driving force for him. The identification with the dogs and there space started in the early stages of his arrival at the smallholding when he began his ‘interaction’ with Katy with the words, “abandoned, are we?” and the identification becomes complete when he shares Katy’s kennel and sleeps there peacefully. The way he was locked up and unable to save his daughter, so was Katy, the abandoned dog. Coming back to the hospital, he seems to understand the peace the animals feel when they are under Bev Shaw’s care at the hospital. Therefore, his services seem to work as an attempt to redeem himself of his own sense of disgrace. While he appears to be reduced to this activity from the position of a professor at an esteemed university, one can certainly feel a higher sense of his self worth by the time the novel closes.

The chamber opera that he has been planning for years does not move forward till much after the attack on Lucy. After the incident, however, it changes tracks completely, from an opera about Byron’s life in Italy with borrowed music, to one about his mistress Teresa and his abandoned daughter Allegra. And this time around, he ‘composes’ the music himself even if it is the simple ‘plink plunk plonk’ of the strings of a banjo. So far Lurie’s image has been linked to Byron, the seducer, but now, according to critic Kimberly Segall, he shifts his narrative into the space of the violated woman exemplified by the ghostly girl he sees in his dream, Teresa and Allegra. The figure of Allegra critiques the self absorption and trend of tragedy in Byron and by extension in Lurie. This shift suggests Lurie’s shift from emotional detachment to an emergent recognition of female suffering.[7]
Therefore we can say that, the hospital and the chamber opera serve as Lurie’s alternative spaces.

Through the figures of Lurie, Lucy, Petrus etc. Coetzee showcases the changes that are taking place in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid, and the role played by history in contemporary social conditions and social relations. The reason why space is a factor in this novel is because it works around the tenets of apartheid which were based on a physical segregation of the South African people. Coetzee is among the few white writers who confronts and accepts the equal presence of black South Africans and he does this in Disgrace by situating them in an actual physical space. In Disgrace, he challenges the comfort zone of the whites where the unsaid rule is, “If people are starving, let them starve far away in the bush, where their thin bodies will not be a reproach. If they have no work, if they migrate to the cities, let there be roadblocks, let there be curfews, let there be laws against vagrancy, begging, and squatting, and let offenders be locked away so that no one has to hear or see them.”[8] It is Coetzee’s attempt as a white person, to realize what he repeatedly asserts throughout the novel, that, “this place is South Africa”.
[1] ‘Realism, Rape and J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Gareth Cornwell, Studies in Contemporary Literature, Rhodes University, 2002
[2] ‘Realism, Rape and J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Gareth Cornwell, Studies in Contemporary Literature, Rhodes University, 2002


[3]Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral – Rita Barnard, Contemporary Literature, Volume 44, No.2, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 (From JSTOR.org)
[4] Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral – Rita Barnard, Contemporary Literature, Volume 44, No.2, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 (From JSTOR.org)


[5] ‘Realism, Rape and J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Gareth Cornwell, Studies in Contemporary Literature, Rhodes University, 2002

[6] Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral – Rita Barnard, Contemporary Literature, Volume 44, No.2, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 (From JSTOR.org)


[7] ‘Pursuing Ghosts: The Traumatic Sublime in J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Kimberly Wedeven Segall, Research in African Literatures, Indiana University Press, 2005
[8] ‘Dream Topographies: J.M Coetzee and the South African Pastoral’ – Rita Barnard, South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 93, No.1, 1994

Review - United 93

United 93 : Polite Propaganda

Let’s start with some basic facts. United 93 was one of the four planes that were hijacked on September 11, 2001. The plane probably missed its intended target and crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania leaving no survivors.
Now United 93 is the film made by Paul Greengrass that tries to capture what might have happened on the flight and restructures the scenes at the various air control centres across the United States as they discovered one hijack after another.
The film has an immediate emotional impact as the viewer feels the fear and helplessness of the passengers on the flight. The moment when the door to the aircraft closes is given enough cinematic time for the audience to understand the relevance and finality of the action. After that the aircraft becomes a sealed space, and since the camera only captures the insider perspective, the viewer becomes a virtual passenger who shares that impenetrable space. Once we become a part of the victim group, the interplay between the real and the supposed begins.
However, there is an attempt to pass off the film as reality, even though, (as Greengrass says himself in an interview) most of what happened on the plane is purely speculative[1]: The poster of the film fixes it in real life (“September 11, 2001. Four Planes Were Hijacked…”) people like Ben Sliney and Shawna Fox etc play themselves, real conversations have been used and the film is in real time. Many have tried to string together the content of the various phone calls that were made from the flight to understand the situation. But that is all we have and it can, at best, help to construct a part of the reality. And in this constructed reality, the portrayal of the terrorist is what is most poorly done. Its poor as in simplistic or poor as in reactionary.

The film opens with one of the terrorists chanting from The Quran. While he is still chanting, there is a change on screen and the camera captures a long shot, top view of Boston at its serene best. The desired effect of the calm before the storm is easily achieved. Film Critic Roger Ebert praises the film saying, “We know what they (the passengers) know when they know it, and nothing else. Nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about Osama bin Laden, nothing about Afghanistan or Iraq, only events as they unfold.”[2] This however is not true. We might share the fears of those on that flight, but we know more than they, we do know about Al Qaeda, we do know about Osama and most importantly, we know about 9/11. We know the fate of the passengers before they do. That is why the effect of the omniscient chanting appears ominous to us. A small detail that adds to this feeling of impending doom is when the terrorists are on their way to the airport, and apart from the calm surroundings, we see a container with the text, “God Bless America”. There is a contrast that sets in at this point, between the two references to God. And it is this contrast that flows through the entire film. Later in the film it is done directly with some of the passengers saying The Lord’s Prayer that seems countered by the terrorists whispering verses from The Quran.
The primary problem is that it shows us the hijackers not as members of specific terrorist groups, but more as Muslims in general. They don’t really speak much through the film, but are seen muttering religious verses to themselves (or shouting it out) for atleast 95% of their screen time. And since most of the American audience will not know what language they spoke in, it will once again be seen as ‘Muslimness’.[3] A significant line Ben Sliney says in the film captures the essence of the thought the film projects, “Anything is suspicious now.” The first signs of trouble on American Airline Flight 11 came about when some one heard a transmission that he didn’t understand. What he says is, “It was not American, it was foreign”, and the opposing binaries are well set.
The only identifiable thing one hears from the hijackers, are phrases like “Allahu Akbar” and “Ya Allah”. In fact the attack on the flight starts with a sudden shout of “Allahu Akbar” and the hijacker brutally stabs a passenger with repeated cries of the same phrase. Even if you ignore the fact that it is a childish stereotype the objection here is obvious; these are the most usual, everyday phrases used by Muslims all over the world, and Greengrass fixes them in the context of 9/11. This, in any case, is not all, the two hijackers in the cockpit repeatedly ask for Allah’s blessings for their heinous crimes, saying things like, “To you I submit myself”. Now what can that possibly mean, that Islam, or more stupidly, the ‘Islamic God’ asks his followers to kill innocent people? A lot of what the hijackers say is in fact left untranslated therefore it is the continuous random religious shouting that becomes the language of the brutal killers. There is so much wrong with this representation; it links Islam with violence of the most heartless kind, and in a more contemporary context, it links it with terrorism. Not Al Qaeda, not Osama, but Islam.

In the film’s diatribe of show and tell, it is difficult to think beyond what the filmmaker wants you to and therefore easy to forget that it is largely a hypothesis. All the phone calls that the passengers or crew members made, were at the risk of being stabbed by the angry militants, and therefore (as shown in the film as well) chances are that no one wasted time in trying to identify the terrorists or their cultural background. So, what evidence can there be that without doubt points towards the identity of these terrorists. The actors playing the terrorists, are of Iraqi, Egyptian and British extraction[4] giving the crime a pan-Muslim image.
It seems as if the film looks back at The Holy Crusades, in one way re-enacting it and in another re-writing it. In this context, the word, ‘United’, in the title of the film can acquire several meanings. From the United States of America, to the united people of the west (primarily American) fighting for the ‘holy land’, which ironically, translates into America! This is manifested in the coming together of all the hostages to fight the terrorists. The survival instinct of a helpless group of victims is used to glorify America.

We, in our spirit of understanding, forgive this depiction, because after all America did suffer from the greatest injustice. So what if this film comes from a country where hate crimes against regular Muslims are steadily rising[5]; from a country that attacked Sikhs because they thought they were Arabs[6]; from a country where we have people (Republican Congressman Peter King among others[7]) demanding racial profiling; from a country where a WMAL-AM[8] host stated on air that: 1. “Islam is a terrorist organization.” 2. “The problem is not extremism. The problem is Islam.” and 3. “We are at war with a terrorist organization named Islam.”[9]
If you are still wondering about the film’s connection to this list, here is the icing on the cake: In Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 29, 2006, three young Muslim women wearing head-covers were verbally attacked by a middle-aged couple who indicated to them that they had watched the movie. After asking the young women if they were Muslim, the couple told them "Take off your fucking burqas and get the fuck out of this country. We don't want you in this country. Go home."[10]
I rest my case.

[1] From an interview with Gavin Smith, Film Comment, May-June 2006.“It’s catharsis, it’s a reliving, it’s a reconstruction. It’s a hypothesis.” Greengrass also said, “The critical thing was to say, What might have happened? Here’s what we know, and here’s what seems to be reasonable supposition – now let’s take those two elements… and try to ‘play’ in such a way that we can unlock a believable truth.”
[2] From: http://www.rogerebert.com. April 28, 2006
[3] While I couldn’t decipher the language and accents of the terrorists, a few viewers have said that they spoke in varying accents and dialects:
“Hollywood doesn't differentiate between Iraqi dialect and other Arabic dialects. So he (Greengrass) went with the Iraqi dialect.”
From, http://www.fayrouz.blogspot.com April 29, 2006
[4] “Iraqi born actor Lewis Alsamari was denied a visa by the US immigration authorities when he applied to visit New York for the premier of the film. The reason given was that he had once been a conscripted member of the Iraqi army.”
From, http://www.answers.com/topic/united-93
[5] From, www.cair.com/pdf/2006-CAIR-Civil-Rights-Report.pdf
[6] From, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_attacks#Public_response

[7] Republican Congressman Peter King said, "I think it is time to end political correctness. To me, if a person is of Middle Eastern descent it is legitimate for the screener to ask more questions." Quoted in the article, ‘Increased Calls for Racial Profiling At Airports In Wake of Foiled British Plot’ by, Bill Rogers in Washington D.C, August 2006. In http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-08-23-voa45.cfm

[8] WMAL-AM is a Radio New Station based in Washington D.C
[9] From, www.cair.com/pdf/2006-CAIR-Civil-Rights-Report.pdf, page 29

[10] From http://www.answers.com/topic/united-93 .
Another instance of how films like this one can work as propaganda lies in the predecessor film, Flight 93, Jerry Mazza said, “Flight 93’s patriotic spin landed before the sentencing of Zaccharias Moussaoui, who has been thrust in the role of scapegoat for the entire 9/11 debacle, even though he was in jail at the time. So we have a little multi-media propaganda to stir up the jury and America’s misguided rage.”
From, http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_752.shtml

The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye: The Language of a Rebel

‘I am not aiming high
I am only trying to keep myself alive
Just a little longer’
— Charles Bukowski

By virtue of being published in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye didn’t fit into any well defined literary canon, it was too early to be part of the Beat generation and too late to be in the highly respected Modernist group. The creation of Holden Caulfield however, is considered to have been a stroke of Salinger’s genius. It was perhaps this lack of any existing pattern that made The Catcher in the Rye a best seller for all time to come. So popular was the novel that Salinger, who shared a desire for anonymity with Holden, had to instruct his publishers not to print his photograph with his biographical note at the end of the book.
The protagonist, Holden Caulfield personified the desires, fears and frustrations of the American youth after the Second World War in the typical teenager vernacular of the 1950s. The conversational style of Holden’s language was unusual, and its apparent lack of pretension or ‘phoniness’ was what attracted thousands to the book. The faulty structure of Holden’s sentences is quite common and typical in vocal expression.[1] It indicates that Salinger wanted the language to represent spoken speech rather than formal written (read recordable) speech. The conscious use of these phrases and a deliberate violation of grammar rules is not only a part of teenage vernacular, but also an act of defiance on Holden’s part and hence Salinger’s.

Holden seems incapable of definite thoughts, as most of his sentences are incomplete and only broadly convey the idea he has in mind. His language is replete with sentences ending ‘…and all’ or ‘something’, especially where these phrases are not required; for instance, “Somebody with sense and all.” or “I should’ve at least made it for cocktails or something.” This recurrence suggests a sense of looseness of expression and of thought which becomes a part of Holden and helps to characterize him.[2] Salinger very consciously draws a distinction between Holden and the precocious Carl Luce. The difference between them becomes clear in their respective usages of language. An extract from their conversation serves as a telling example: Holden says, ‘In her later thirties? Yeah? You like that? You like ’em that old?’ to which Luce replies, ‘I like a mature person, if that’s what you mean. Certainly.’ to which Holden asks again, ‘You do? Why? No kidding, they better for sex and all?’ In this exchange, Luce comes across as controlled and confident, like an adult. The important thing is however, that the sympathy of the reader lies with Holden, because Luce, like Stradlater, appears sophisticated, but is ultimately a ‘phony’, whereas, Holden’s transparency and evident lack of tact suggest a childish innocence.
Holden seems very conscious of his speech and confesses his lack of communication skills which becomes apparent in the number of times he repeats himself. In spite of his disdain for school, he is somewhat embarrassed of his position as an outcast of the education system. In his conversation with members of society, he often adopts characteristics. He pretends to have friends, to be a regular donor to charities, and in general to be older and more mature. This highlights his sense of alienation and his lack of confidence, which also becomes evident in language. He is also extremely aware of the ‘phony’ quality of many words and phrases that he uses, such as, ‘grand’, ‘prince’, ‘traveling incognito’ etc.

One of Holden’s main concerns is the ‘phoniness’ of the world. Almost everything seems fake and ‘phony’ and just ‘kills him’. For instance, ‘“How marvelous to see you!” old Lillian Simmons said. Strictly phony.’ This one word is repeated numerous times in the novel and it captures the American ethos of the 1940s and the 1950s. Interestingly, the other phrase Holden constantly uses, ‘It really was’ or ‘I really did’, works in contradiction to the ‘phony’ world, as he feels compelled to reinforce his sincerity and truthfulness.[3] It was a response to the post Second World War and early Cold War era, where all alliances were political and temporary. This period saw a breakdown of old political, cultural and moral structures. As John Updike explains, America’s artists and intellectuals, like those of the Twenties, felt mostly a sardonic estrangement from a government that extolled business and mediocrity.[4] The public realm seemed ruled by a variety of fantasies, both comic and dreadful[5], and the people felt the need to find an escape route from the overbearing control of the ‘superstate’. This is effectively portrayed when Holden says he would like to be ‘the catcher in the rye’. He says, ‘I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all…and nobody’s around, nobody big…I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.”
The most important aspect of the language in The Catcher in the Rye is the distance between the writer and the protagonist. As the novel is recounted in first person, this distinction is often blurred. The use of a colloquial, ‘tangy’ idiom was an extremely conscious step on Salinger’s part to create this distance between himself and the teenage Holden. Simeon Potter identifies the use of slang as a means of increasing intimacy, because it allows the speaker to drop into a lower key, to meet his fellow on even terms and to have ‘a word in his ear’.[6] The American reader could identify not only with Holden’s character but also with his language.
The late forties saw new writers making a visible effort to change the style and language of fiction. The Catcher in the Rye borrows aspects of the Modernist movement in art and literature. This becomes evident in a number of ways; firstly, in the opening line of the novel: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Salinger rejects the established method of story telling, with a snide remark reserved especially for Dickens — representative of canonical storytellers. Secondly, the novel, like most Modernist works, focuses on the microcosm, the individual – Holden Caulfield. In Holden, Salinger creates a confused character who tells a rather fragmented story. While the direct focus is on the individual, ultimately, it serves as an analysis of society.
In the fiction of the period, the trend was to negate the realist and naturalist style that dominated the literary scene. Salinger, however, borrowed aspects of the naturalist tradition in his portrayal of Holden’s gloomy life full of betrayals and dejections and an unfulfilled desire for love and acceptance. At the same time, Salinger distanced himself from the tradition in his use of an extremely informal language full of slang and swear-words. What really separates Salinger from other naturalist writers is that he doesn’t attempt a disinterested, detached portrayal of Holden. In this novel, like in a lot of American fiction following the Second World War, the controlling image of the hero was that of the rebel-victim. Almost always, he was an outsider, a child, adolescent, criminal, saint, scapegoat or clown compounded in ironic or grotesque measures.[7] Again, the reason America could relate to Holden was that they saw bits of themselves in the character.
It is this sense of the world and its people being fake that gave rise to the Beat generation of which Salinger can be considered a part in spite of the ten odd years that lie between him and the peak of the Beat movement. The Catcher in the Rye is a follow up of a long list of trends and influences from Camus, to The American Dream and predates a long list of symbols of rebellion from Cacth-22 to Elvis Presley. The novel’s experimentation, rebellion and consequent staggering popularity influenced an entire generation of literature to come.

[1] ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’ – David P. Costello. From Salinger – Henry A. Grunwald (ed)
[2] ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’ – David P. Costello. From Salinger – Henry A. Grunwald (ed)

[3] ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’ – David P. Costello. From Salinger – Henry A. Grunwald (ed)
[4] More Matter: Essays and Criticisms – John Updike
[5]‘The New Consciousness’. From Literary History of the United States
[6] ‘Slang and Dialect’. From Our Language - Simeon Potter
[7] ‘Resisting Orthodoxy: Dissent and experiment in fiction’. From Literary History of the United States.