Qalandar

The Trouble With Azaadi

2008-09-04T16:11:00.002-04:00

My response to a recent piece by Arundhati Roy on Kashmir...

Quick jottings on VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA (English; 2008)

2008-08-20T17:57:00.002-04:00

I caught this film last night in Philadelphia; went with reasonably low expectations, but Woody Allen's latest is a funny and charming film, and while I can't say it has much that is new on the twisted ways of the human heart, it represents those caprices very effectively.

In large part, the film is a spoof -- of a certain American romanticization of Europe, of the "romance of Europe" -- and indeed the film has a mock-earnest voiceover (by, as far as I could tell, Woody Allen himself), as well as "stock" characters too hackneyed to be taken seriously -- such as Javier Bardem's Lothario of a painter Juan Gonzalez, his fiery ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), and the strait-laced American Vicky (Rebecca Hall), not to mention her free-spirited friend Cristina (Scarlett Johansson). But the film is more than a spoof by the time it ends, and it is to Allen's credit that he makes us care about the film's ostensibly cardboard characters (certainly about the two women featured in the title), and appreciate the sheer messiness that romance entails.

And this romance is certainly messy: Gonzalez propositions both Vicki and Cristina; the latter is charmed, the former appalled, at the painter's boldness, but one thing leads to another and both women end up losing their hearts to him. He, in turn, is utterly unable or unwilling to get over his ex-wife, the combustible Maria Elena. To add to the complications, Vicki is engaged, and Cristina moves in with Gonzalez, only to be joined by Maria Elena in an uncomfortable threesome (if seeing Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson lock lips is something that lights your fire, then this is the film for you).

As should go without saying, the shadow of Jules and Jim hangs over this film, and Allen's latest effort certainly cannot approach the subversive playfulness, the sheer sexiness, of Truffaut's masterpiece. But Allen offers us scathing comedy, perhaps at the expense of an American audience (Vicky's field of study is "Catalan Identity", yet she doesn't bat an eyelid when Gonzalez tells her his dad refuses to speak any language other than Spanish -- surely an odd stance for one identified as "Catalan"; and Barcelona seems as Spanish as Spain can be to the American characters in this film -- which would be news to a population so attached to its non- (Castilian) Spanish identity that the provincial government famously took out ads in international magazines on the eve of the Barcelona Olympics, announcing that the games would be held in "Catalonia", no more and no less). Barcelona, and perhaps more broadly, Europe, is not so much a state of mind in this film as a fantasy, perhaps even a delusion.

Overall, 96 minutes well-spent: like many of Woody Allen's recent films, this one too has more than a touch of frivolity about it. This time, though, it is wholly appropriate to its madcap subject.

Mini-Review: THE BURIED BOOK, by David Damrosch

2008-08-08T16:59:00.003-04:00

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch

Mini-Review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
One might be forgiven for thinking that a book that is half-devoted to the archaeological expeditions and discoveries in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth century, and the subsequent attempts of linguists to crack the linguistic "code" that ultimately led to the recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, would be dry. One would be wrong: Damrosch writes with velocity and poise, yet does not sacrifice scholarly heft, weaving in issues of pertaining to colonialism, culture, race, and the arbitrariness of history, as he hurtles backward towards ancient Mesopotamia. Along the way, he attempts to set the record straight by shedding new light on the (unlikely, and remarkable) career of Iraqi archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam, so central to the Western re-discovery of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian pasts, and so often shunted to the side by his British colleagues, whether as an archaeologist or a diplomat; Damrosch's rescue of Rassam's work from oblivion seems to me as much an ethical act as one of scholarship.

But the book offers other pleasures too: Damrosch has a novelist's gift when it comes to characterization, and vividly sketches nineteenth century scholars like George Smith and Henry Rawlinson to life. But most rewarding of all is Damrosch's evocation of the ancient milieu of the epic, and his account of the functionings of the Assyrian court and bureaucrac; not to mention his engagement with the poem itself, and with its abiding relevance. It is man's fate to die, the poem seems to tell us, and even at such great remove, the uncompromising clarity of that insight unsettles.

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Mini-Review: BURY ME STANDING, by Isabel Fonseca

2008-08-06T10:54:00.003-04:00

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca

A Mini-Review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
A deeply moving and insightful account of one of the most "liminal" and persecuted groups of people in the world, the "Gypsies" or "Roma" (though neither term is apparently in wide currency among the people themselves). Few communities can have been so unassimilable, so resistant to modernity -- yet to frame things in that way suggests that the Roma constitute a "problem" (that's certainly how any number of nation states, old and new, have regarded them; and it isn't surprising, given that the Roma's "marginal" status, and the spectre of unstable borders their traditionally nomadic lifestyle suggests, combined with their cultural difference vis-a-vis "Europe", all make the group transgressive of the mindset for which nation-states are the political horizon par excellence) -- Fonseca, certainly addresses that "problem"; but equally valuable is her attempt to present people as they are (as opposed to as symbols pointing elsewhere)...

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THE DARK KNIGHT (English; 2008)

2008-07-28T00:20:00.001-04:00

Right away, you notice that Gotham is different than the city you saw three years ago in Batman Begins: there probably is mud and muck here too, but you can't see it from atop those soaring skyscrapers, all glass and shimmer. In time you will find the Batman here, looking down on his city, but you don't find him as the movie opens. Instead, you see the Joker's henchmen swinging between buildings as you might expect Batman to do so, en route to a superbly staged bank robbery that is as much homage to Hollywood's grand heist tradition as it is to comicdom's most notorious homicidal maniac, the guy you spot even before he's said anything, just from his gait, and the way the camera lingers on him as he's standing at ground level waiting for his ride: the Joker. And just from that walk, those awkward movements, and (in a few minutes), the way that robbery turns out, you know Heath Ledger has got something special in store for you.

Gotham remains different even after the Batman makes his appearance -- this sleek city is a far cry from the dark, almost period urban setting director Christopher Nolan gave us in his first Batman film. And yet the transformation is appropriate: the Gotham of Batman Begins was pre-Batman, whereas this city is a more hopeful one, watched over by the guardian symbol who has taken the fight to the city's criminals since his first appearance. Even Bruce Wayne lives here now (for the moment anyway), in a modern penthouse very far from the living past of Wayne Manor, its neo-Gothic bombast doubtless weighing Wayne down. Life, in short, is getting better: not only is the odd dealer too scared to sell drugs on nights when he can see the Bat-Signal, but Batman's appearance seems to have energized the citizenry as well, which has its own hero: District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), with a face built for a political poster, yet possessed of a genuine passion for crusading against Gotham's mob bosses.

Better? Nolan riddles The Dark Knight with discordant notes right from the start: not only does the film begin with that Joker-planned robbery, but we are soon in a claustrophobic car-park, where Batman has been beaten to a crime scene by a copycat, wearing a similar costume and wielding a gun. The real deal is having none of this, and beats him to a pulp, drawing no distinction between criminals and those whom Batman has inspired to take to costumed crime-fighting. One laughs when Batman quips at the copycat's expense, but a little uneasily. For the Batman plainly thinks he is a law unto himself, and that isn't very comforting.

The Joker is a lot more than uneasy, and decides that he wants to subvert Gotham's new order, not just the Rule of the Bat but the (newfound) Rule of Law. Unlike conventional comic book villains, however, the Joker doesn't want to bring Gotham's order crashing down because it's a first step to world domination, or because he wants to loot a lot of money, or even because he has a personal grudge against Batman, or anyone else. The Joker does what he does simply because. Or, as he memorably puts it towards the film's end, he's like a dog chasing cars, and wouldn't know what to do with one if he caught it. Or, one begins to suspect, the Joker exists because Batman does; that is, the new order -- symbolized by the caped crusader, and comprehensive in its grasp, not limited by national borders or jurisdictions (just ask the Hong Kong-based gangster whom Batman abducts and returns to Gotham) -- engenders its own entropic desire, not a polar opposite so much as a dystopic twin of sorts. No wonder this film begins with the Joker, but concludes with Two-Face.

The quintessential Two-Face story in the Batman comics involves an obsession with doubling: for instance, Gotham law enforcement authorities might be called upon to solve the kidnapping of the twin sons of a wealthy industrialist, suspended near statues of Castor and Pollux, at 2AM, and ... you get the picture (Batman usually does). What is the meaning of this man in The Dark Knight? Two-Face, that is to say Harvey Dent after half his face is burnt away, leaving a maniacal criminal whose crimes are governed by the results of a coin toss, is obviously a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure, a two-in-one man, but in Nolan's movie he is far more: he is, quite simply, the border between Batman and the Joker. "I believe in Harvey Dent," Bruce Wayne intones at a fundraiser, repeating one of Dent's election slogans -- but the Joker believes in him too, as we see when he visits the scarred Dent in hospital, expressing hope that Dent will now see (his) light, and even letting his own fate be decided by Dent's coin toss. Both have good reason to: Two Face's "Batside" is reflected in his obsession with the coin toss, a compulsion to abide by the rule; his "Jokerside" is of course symbolized by the randomness of the coin toss, the fact that the outcome of any particular coin toss is unpredictable, and potentially anarchic. [The old Dent was a cheater: like Jai in Sholay, he carried a two-headed coin that ensured he always won; the new Two-Face might cheat by tossing again if he doesn't like the result of a particular toss, but hasn't completely rigged the system.] By the end of the film, the Joker has won the "battle for Gotham's soul," as he taunts Batman -- Harvey Dent is irremediably Two-Face, and the latter's rule fetish is firmly in the service of violence, revenge, and madness.

Violence, revenge, and madness: these terms could apply to Batman as well as to Two-Face (the first and third of these would apply to the Joker, but not, as Ledger plays him, the second), and in a further illustration of Nolan's vision of Two-Face as a "double" of not only Joker but also Batman, it is fitting that at film's end, Batman offers himself up to Commissioner Gordon as a kind of substitute Dent, willing to take responsibility for murders Dent has committed. Batman, that is to say, becomes a sacrifice for Dent, a man who has previously himself been sacrificed in the cause of struggling against Gotham's criminals. [Two sacrifices, the earlier of which was made in the context of a choice posed by the Joker to Batman: he could either save Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) or Dent, both kidnapped at the Joker's behest and held at two different locations, but facing identical predicaments. Nolan is clearly a keen student of the Batman comics, and this joke is very much on (the man who will become) Two-Face: he is a victim of the quintessential Two-Face crime (i.e., centered on the number "two"), the very crime that transforms Harvey Dent into Two-Face.] In sum, The Dark Knight is about Harvey Dent/Two-Face more than it is about Batman or the Joker -- because Dent/Face is in himself "about" Batman and the Joker, and hence about Gotham, a symbol of hope doomed from the start (not least by dramatic irony: the audience always already knows Harvey Dent as the man who will become Two-Face).

Batman can claim no victory here, and is reduced to salvaging a propaganda victory from the wreckage of his hopes for Dent's redemption of the city. The public must never know what Dent has done, Batman convinces Gordon, and hence it is best that Batman bear the blame for Two-Face's crimes, so that the public's faith in Dent's heroism can continue undimmed (presumably Gotham's Finest will announce Dent's death, although he is very much alive, and slated to re-appear in the third Batman film). This is dark stuff indeed: Batman's resort to symbolism -- he initially dons the look of the nocturnal bat, because criminals are a "superstitious, cowardly lot" -- has reached its logical conclusion: the symbol at the cost of truth, propaganda at the cost of an informed citizenry. At film's end, as near the beginning, Batman is a law unto himself.

The late Heath Ledger has rightly garnered most of the acclaim for his sensational turn as the Joker, and it is impossible to begrudge him any of it: his Joker is unsettling because he himself appears unsettled -- from his gestures, to the restless way his eyes dart around, to his sudden laughter -- and sure of nothing except that the world needs some murderous shaking up. Jack Nicholson, eat your heart out: the definitive cinematic Joker is here. But Ledger's performance should not detract from Aaron Eckhart's pitch perfect incarnation of Harvey Dent and Two-Face. It isn't easy to hold your own in a film where you are neither the hero, nor the most flamboyant character, but Eckhart manages it with ease. Ledger perhaps had the more challenging role, but Eckhart's tough boy scout-turned-psycho is the most complete story arc in the film.

Amidst Ledger and Eckhart, many have complained that Batman has been sidelined, but to an extent this criticism misreads the function of the caped crusader in Nolan's film. In The Dark Knight, as in the work of legendary 1970s Batman writer Denny O'Neill (nowhere more memorable than when his writing was married to Neal Adams' artwork), Batman is almost more symbol than man, and often a quasi-mystical symbol at that (O'Neill's influence on Nolan is marked: he and Adams "re-introduced" Two-Face in 1971, the most schematic of Batman villains, after decades of neglect, making him a permanent part of the Bat-canon; O'Neill's creation, Ras's Al Ghul, also makes an appearance in Batman Begins). As a symbol, Batman almost definitionally doesn't have much to do; so far so good, but Nolan is open to some criticism, because he could have made Batman more cerebral -- the film utterly dispenses with the "detective" aspect of O'Neill's Batman -- and, because there is nothing for Batman to figure out in this film (partly because of the contemporary Hollywood addiction to positing ten second magic technological fixes to seemingly insoluble problems -- "Can't find the Joker?! Why, let's rig up a megacoolwidget that'll do the job!"), he seems to be permanently reacting to the Joker's plans. In the O'Neill comics, Batman's sleuthing activities prevented him from being trapped into a static iconicity. In the dark world of this film, the dynamism of the World's Greatest Detective is absent; consequently, Batman isn't sidelined here so much as inert, a "mere" symbol. But for all that, Christian Bale plays Bruce Wayne and Batman as seamlessly as he did the first time, with hardly a false note. If Batman isn't all he ought to be, that is no fault of Bale's. The other characters are uniformly well acted: while Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Alfred (Michael Caine), and Gordon (Gary Oldman) essentially reprise their roles from the first film (not a bad thing), the new Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a vast improvement over her previous avatar as Katie Holmes -- in toughness, personality, and screen presence.

All in all, films based on comic books don't get better than this -- and yet that sort of praise is almost condescending. For The Dark Knight isn't simply a great comic book film, but a darn good film, period: in its metaphysical ambitions, its visual grandeur (dependent on old-school location filmmaking far more than the soulless SFX bonanzas that dominate cinemas these days), and its deep-rooted assumption that detailed characterization matters. It's time the rest of Hollywood learned something from the guys in latex tights.

Music Review: SAKKARAKATTI (Tamil; 2008)

2008-07-24T21:25:00.004-04:00

As I arrived home today to find the Sakkarakatti CD waiting in my mailbox, I was struck by the fact that even thirteen years after I first encountered the sound of A.R. Rahman, even when the soundtrack in question is not associated with a Mani Ratnam film, and promises to be, most assuredly, a "minor" work in the context of Rahman's oeuvre, my excitement when unwrapping the album remains undimmed. Some of that is obviously because Rahman -- even "lesser" Rahman -- speaks to me in a way no other Hindi or Tamil composer does. But much of that is also due to the fact that even "minor" Rahman contains gems, the sort of musical passage that rears up to dazzle the listener when least expected. And much of the excitement is undoubtedly due to the fact that it is often precisely in Rahman's "lesser" work that one encounters the nimble sense of play, the occasional cheekiness, that once made him the most light-footed of all of Indian popular cinema's titanic presences.

On that front, Sakkarakatti does not disappoint: it isn't pathbreaking music, but it is, quite simply (and provisionally, given these are early days for me where the album is concerned), an immensely enjoyable, even satisfying, album. That the master should have it in him to compose a soundtrack so high on the fun quotient just a few months after the ultra-sober (perhaps even staid) Jodha-Akbar speaks volumes about not just Rahman's versatility, but indeed to the composer's need for "smaller" projects. These days, these projects might be among his few opportunities (Shankar's films always excepted) to let his hair down. [Aamir and Murugadoss, I hope you are paying attention.]

Taxi...Taxi... is on the face of it downright silly, a pastiche of neo-hip hop, ragamuffin, and some desi tapori. But its ponderous percussive beat, in contrast to the somewhat drunk quality of the vocals here, that is to say its sheer catchiness, makes it downright irresistible. And there are some moments of genuine zaniness here: from Viviane's French lyrics (delivered in a voice that is nothing if not saucy) to the childishly high-pitched "MamamamamamamamamamaMAMA" refrain, to the incongruous Middle Eastern strains littered over the song. This will never be a great song, but its refreshing to see Rahman hasn't lost the ability to poke some fun at himself.

Marudaani following on the heels of Taxi...Taxi... seems to be the sort of formula that had Munbe Vaa follow the catchy Kummi Aadi on the Sillunu Oru Kaadal soundtrack. But irritation at creative laziness aside, Marudaani is a surprisingly enjoyable song. There's certainly nothing new about this Madhushree (for the most part) solo, and we've heard Rahman croon many many times before -- and yet I was simply unable to resist this song as much as my brain felt I needed to. Old wine in a new bottle? Assuredly. But stale? Far from it: more like one that becomes familiarly mellow with age.

The third song on the album is a rarity in Rahman's recent Tamil work, namely a relatively quiet, almost reflective nocturnal song -- or at least as reflective as a song called I Miss You Da can be. For those who found Sillunu Oru Kaadal's Machakaari too busy, and the same film's Majaa too, well, silly, I Miss You Da is the perfect antidote: it is far simpler than many of Rahman's nighttime songs, but nevertheless one takes it seriously, even on a first listen -- perhaps the result of Indai Haza's forlorn "Yevanay" refrain that recurs over the course of the song; or perhaps because Chinmayi's vocals are recorded at a louder level than one might expect, almost as if she were insisting in one's ear.

If handsome could be a song, then surely the dashing Elay would be it: part tribute to the now-past Urvashi Urvashi era of Rahmania, yet all very much contemporary Rahman in its lush orchestration and assured instrumentation, Elay displays whiffs of a younger, more playful Rahman, but for the most part the urge to experiment is represented here with relative abstraction, reflected in the composer's easy assimilation of a wide array of influences into a recognizably Rahman signature, rather than by means of the instinctive energy of his younger days. There's no reason to complain: the season might be different, but the clarity of the Master's voice shines through just the same. Rahman covers a surprising amount of terrain here, from the peppy opening that brings to mind Roobaroo from Rang De Basanti, but veers off into a more raw vocal direction, while introducing jazzy riffs and even fiddler strains with seeming carelessness. Krish and Naresh Iyer's stolid vocals ground this song, but the music suffusing their words is of a different mind: it wants to soar.

Last but not least, the album recycles two songs from Meenaxi, Ye Rishta into Naan Epoudhu and Chinnamma into a Tamil song of the same name. The former is a straight re-do (even to the point of Reena Bharadwaj's voice), but the latter is, ah, very far from anything denoted by the term "recycling." For through it one gets an insight into how the Tamil masala side of Rahman's brain refracts a tune, a soundscape, he's been living with for quite some time. The result lacks the poise of the Meenaxi number, but more than makes up for it with greater energy, and even -- dare one say it, given how good just about everything in Meenaxi is? -- greater personality. Some of this is undoubtedly the result of Chinnamma's Tamil avatar being a love duet between the expressive Chinmayee and Benny Dayal, as opposed to a Sukhwinder Singh soliloquy, but there's more: the instruments seem more hurried, more assertive, more urban. If the Hindi Chinnamma was bucolic in tone, this one sounds a bit more urban -- and all the while exceptionally well served by the alliterative Tamil lyrics. To this non-Tamil ear, the greater alliteration permitted by that language suits this tune better than the Hindustani of Meenaxi's version. But why compare, when, like all good Rahman fans, one ought to have both?

SARKAR RAJ (Hindi; 2008)

2008-06-09T02:09:00.004-04:00

[Warning: This review contains spoilers.]

James Joyce once famously dismissed Proust's writing as "still life", and it is hard not to think of the same term when coming to grips with director Ram Gopal Varma's Sarkar films, which are remarkable in their naked desire to incarnate a cinema of the pure image. The "moving" aspect is downplayed beyond belief, and one is left with something in between the painted portrait and the motion picture. The result is (as I noted years ago with respect to Sarkar) above all an exercise in iconography, in an ideology that has "Bachchan" as its only thought. It is an unusual propaganda exercise -- unusual because it seeks to exalt no particular ideology, but simply Bachchans-qua-Bachchans, and hence does not "point" to anything outside the film in the way that political propaganda would; indeed rather than focus the audience on the off-screen genealogical link between the two Bachchans at the core of Sarkar, the film re-creates all symbolically potent genealogies within the film -- including, in the case of the sequel, Aishwariya Rai as well. The result was a film that was often deeply frustrating, devoid of drama, dynamism, subtlety, or even passable dialogues.

Sarkar Raj is ostensibly more of the same: the dialog remains atrocious (its emptiness revealed when Hassan Qazi (Govind Namdeo) tells his fellow baddies he has a plan to take care of Shankar Nagre, the thorn in everyone's side. "What?!" they anxiously yell; after a long pause Qazi says "Abhi poori tarah se aaya nahin" -- you can't make this up), the narrative just as turgid, the characterization just as basic, and the politics just as stupid. And yet, through it all, Varma has managed to make a sequel significantly better than its predecessor -- that is to say more meaningful. He has done it because the film's meaning lies not in what it has to say about the politics of this or that, but in what it has to say about the law of the father.

Shepperd executive Anita Rajan (Aishwariya Rai), daughter of a sleazy corporate tycoon (Victor Banerjee) wants to make a power plant in Maharashtra's Thakrewadi -- which brings her to the Nagre doorstep, as it seems to be conceded by all that the plant cannot be built absent the seal of approval of Sarkar Subhash Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan) or his son Shankar (Abhishek Bachchan). The elder Nagre is hostile to the project when Anita explains it to him, but as her traitorous business partner Hassan Qazi later notes, Shankar didn't say a word during her presentation to the Nagres. Anita doesn't get the significance, but we of course do: for in the world of Sarkar, power is characterized by slowness, and by silence (the talkers are ridiculous, such as Selvar Mani in the first film or Deputy Chief Minister Kanga (Sayaji Shinde) here. Shankar Nagre, that is to say, is smitten by the project, and convinces his father to go along with it in a dazzlingly shot scene that separates us from the Nagres by a glass table, and pays homage to the famous Bachchan-Prem Chopra confrontation in Kaala Patthar while going one better -- unlike in the 1978 classic, the camera, and hence our glass-filtered perspective, keeps shifting, driving home the point that there is no Prem Chopra-type baddie in the frame here. From there the action shifts to rural Maharashtra (though even I could make out enough Telugu signs to give any bona fide Thackeray a heart attack), where we are introduced to Subhash Nagre's mentor Raoji (Dilip Prabhavalkar) and his firebrand grandson Somji (Raj Shringarpure), who is determined to stop the power plant at all costs. Shankar ultimately brings Somji around after rescuing him from a kidnappers' lair (in a fine action sequence involving two great masala props, fire and darkness; and the choice of weapon for Shankar -- a shovel -- is nothing short of inspired, as Varma makes him seem like a mythical creature, but not so much larger-than-life as other-than-human) and salvages the project. Or so he thinks: by film's end he is dead, his murder bringing Anita and Subhash Nagre together to ensure his dream of a power plant in rural Maharashtra is completed.

The above sounds like the premise of a really fantastic kinetic film -- but this is Varma, and so much of the above plot is in a sense simply beside the point: major events are simply announced by the film's protagonists (as opposed to depicted), and even when the film turns into a whodunnit towards the end there is no element of detection -- Subhas Nagre simply announces what he has deduced about Shankar's murder. And while it might seem unfair to expect from Varma what he clearly isn't inclined to give us -- dynamism -- it isn't untoward to expect him to justify his efforts with material that is compelling. At the level of narrative and dialogue, Varma clearly disappoints. But where he scores, where he is most cinematic, is in driving home the darkness that underlies the dynastic paradigm. And he is most cinematic here because he doesn't preach: he simply shows us.

Varma does so by means of an inversion: in Sarkar it is Shankar who, by the end of the film, will carry on the work of his father. In Sarkar Raj it's upside down, with Subhash Nagre and Anita carrying on Shankar's work. This might seem backwards, except for the fact that, as Varma has had his characters say on multiple occasions over the two films, "Sarkar" isn't a man but a way of thinking. And with the clan (now incorporating Anita) focused on getting the power plant built in Maharashtra by film's end, it is clear that Shankar's way of thinking has prevailed (Subhash is never on board with the idea, and is swept away by his son's enthusiasm, which is not quite the same thing as being persuaded). The project the Nagre clan is dedicated to is now Shankar's dream.

Shankar's murder shouldn't come as a total surprise, given the succession of "heroes" who meet sudden ends in Varma's gangster films: Satya belonged to Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj Bajpai), suddenly felled, and avenged by the taciturn title character (played by Chakravarthy); Company of course had Malik (Ajay Devgan), and while he isn't redeemed he is (as Shankar Nagre is) survived by an older man and a friend. But what is new about Sarkar Raj in Varma's oeuvre follows from the fact that the Nagres are the most overtly politically charged of Varma's gangland figures (they even have their own banners and insignia) -- they are explicitly in the realm of politics, and thus are the only "gangsters" in Varma's films to bequeath "projects" to posterity. I used "they" although the project is of course Shankar's, who educates his father and leaves him to continue the legacy -- aptly, the most shocking moment in the film for me was when Shankar casually refers to himself and his father as "neta". One would be hard pressed to imagine anyone in the first Sarkar using that term (indeed in that film Shankar is defending his father from Katrina Kaif's accusation that he is a mere gangster).

The link between legacy and death reveals Sarkar Raj to be a darker film than its predecessor, and nowhere more so than in the aftermath of Subhash Nagre's monologue before the photograph of his dead son. He coolly sits at his desk (re-occupies, one catches oneself thinking, now that his son is dead) and orders his wife to summon his grandson. This is stunning, and tells us that when Subhash tells Shankar's photo that had he known the price his son would pay for his actions he would have done things differently, he is lying -- to himself, and to his son. For he is willing to put yet another Nagre in the firing line, despite knowing (indeed because of) the fate that has befallen Shankar. The law of the father is implacable in this film, and demands the blood of its own -- precisely why Shankar looks a bit angry when he tells his father that he doesn't regret killing Vishnu, and Subhash Nagre shouldn't either. Shankar might not always get the politics and dangers of the situation he finds himself in, but he always knows the score within the family. And the score is that the father must have his legacy, no matter the cost -- the only way to win is to overturn the game by dying first, making a survivor of one's father and placing him under a permanent debt. The trope is an old one (Shakti opens with it, as does Kranti), but nowhere in Hindi cinema is it presented so explicitly as in Sarkar Raj. Varma's world is a lot bleaker here than in Sarkar: in Sarkar Raj, sons are cursed by virtue of being sons -- as long as they live they must carry on the father's work, and the only way to get the father to bow to a new dispensation is to die. That is, to be transformed into spirit as it were.

Which is as good a segue as any into the performances, inseparable from the film given the extent to which this film is about its cast (to the exclusion of all else), and in a way few films are: this cannot be Abhishek Bachchan's best performance -- the role lacks the human interest that Mani Rathnam seems to breathe into his Abhishek roles -- but it is his most serene, bordering almost on the mystical. Sarkar is more "soch" than man, the Chief Minister said in the first film, and Abhishek here represents that existential calm better than anyone else in either film (almost; Rasheed (Zakir Husain) in the first film deserves a special nod on that front), his more forceful father included (it is this unflappable equanimity, at least as long as anyone isn't hearkening to Deewar and calling his father a chor, that makes Shankar seem like a much darker figure than anyone else in the film) -- the sort of calm that reminds one of the old joke about the six year old boy whose parents took him to a doctor because they were concerned that their son hadn't started talking yet; when the doctor examined the boy, found nothing wrong, and asked him "Well young man, why don't you talk?!", the boy replied "What's there to talk about?". The same cannot be said of Amitabh Bachchan, whose Subhash Nagre doesn't have a mystical bone in his body, and is a far less complicated character -- his legendary authority is apparent here too, and he is most compelling when he gives free rein to his mean streak after Shankar's death (perhaps to tide over his feelings of guilt -- as the film's denouement makes clear, it is Subhash Nagre's miscalculation and naivete that have led to his son's death), but while the charisma is undimmed, much nuance has been sacrificed. Aishwariya Rai is effective in her part, which is principally that of an observer -- her character has its own shades of grey, as she is both unsettled by and enamored of Shankar's criminality (she herself has father issues, which might serve the cinematic function of hinting at and paralleling Shankar's own repressed issues with patriarchy, elsewhere suggested only in Shankar's impatience with the sort of traditional rituals his father accepts as natural), but ultimately the film isn't about her, although it would be poorer without her. Shringarpure deserves a special moment: his Somji knows only one gear, but what an entertaining cracker of a gear it is! The other villains are pathetic and banal, and one waits in vain for anyone to equal Zakir Husain's menace in the first film (perhaps because Shankar seems to have leeched some of his old enemy's qualities into himself). But little lingers here beyond the two Bachchans, exactly as Varma intended, and if one had to choose this reviewer would have to pick the younger Bachchan's more insinuating air over his father's more obvious turn as the most memorable performance of the film. Ultimately, that father-son agon (somewhat more difficult and unconventional here than in the first film), virtual inasmuch as its highlights occur when each is not with the other on screen, is perhaps more memorable than any single performance, and goes a long way toward making this film significantly more compelling than its predecessor.

Sold (Out)

2008-05-16T01:27:00.004-04:00

A piece of mine was recently published in the Sakaal Times (click on the image above for a clearer view).

Due to space considerations, the published version is about 100-150 words shorter than the piece I had submitted; the un-edited text is pasted below:

An air of self-congratulation is common among Hindi film audiences these days. Evidently, now that the over-the-top baddie, the weepy mother, the saccharine sister, and the rape scene, have been banished into the furthest recesses of our memory (banished so deep, in fact, that some in the contemporary audience seem to believe these were staples of every Bollywood era; Om Shanti Om, for instance, was especially notable in its inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Bollywood’s 1980s and preceding eras), we can all sit back, relax, and watch “edgier”, “different”, and “new” films – and ensconced in multiplex luxury to boot. Some weeks – the weeks when a Taare Zameen Par, Chak de India, Johnny Gaddar, or Black Friday is released – even I find myself succumbing to the dream of the popular cinema renaissance that is just around the corner. It’s just as well I manage to snap myself out of my reverie, for if I ever did get to wherever it is they’re staging the renaissance, I’d be terribly bored not to find any women at the party.
The marginalization of women is one of the best kept secrets in the new Bollywood: right in front of our eyes, and beneath the radar. In most contemporary Hindi films, lead actresses have nothing to do. Certainly, there’s plenty for women to do, given the hordes of Eastern European imports needed to serve as eye-candy in dance sequences, the number of poles that must be shimmied up and down, the excess of bastardized hip-hop tropes mindlessly re-cycled into Hindi song videos. Just don’t expect it to include meaningful characterization, or even much dialogue. With the exception of a Bhool Bhulaiya or a Jodha-Akbar, our lead actresses have been reduced to a gym-toned skin-show that tends more toward bland sameness than sexiness, and hence toward a fungibility that would have shocked predecessors like Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit, or Kajol, let alone the likes of Meena Kumari or Nargis. And even meatier female roles (e.g. in Dhoom 2 or Tashan) are sold as “about” the lead actress showing more than we’ve ever seen before (Yashraj’s Tashan website lists Kareena’s character Pooja’s “[q]ualifications” – as part of a mock CV the website had for all the film’s main characters – as “34-22-34”, a line that speaks volumes about the true function of the most intelligent character in the film).
Substantial female roles ostensibly survive in some of the more traditional Hindi film genres, though even here the game seems to be up, what with the male halves of the Shah Rukh Khan-Kajol and Saif Ali Khan-Rani Mukherjee pairs having moved on to romantic films with curiously passive heroines with nothing to do but smile (e.g. Om Shanti Om); or “thrillers” where it doesn’t matter who’s shedding clothes, as long as enough of ‘em are doing it (e.g. Race). As for the rest, the love stories have morphed into brain-dead comedies (do I really need to list them?) and wannabe styleathons (Dhoom 2). In fact, watching previews of U, Me aur Hum gave me the odd sensation of watching a throwback: the heroine was actually having a conversation. Strange indeed (and the sort of strangeness that perhaps explains why Imtiaz Ali’s films have struck a chord with youngsters; though casting the leggy and inept Deepika Padukone in his next film smells of an impending sellout). Nor are films like Laaga Chunri Mein Daagh or Saawariya much better: these certainly have women in important roles, but they are “about” womanhood itself, more specifically, about the problem of womanhood (in a world where femininity only exists in two relevant flavors, whorish and virginal; personally, I wanted lemon). Needless to say, neither film was even remotely progressive, or even interesting, in its representation of gender issues (although Laaga Chunri Mein Daagh went some way in subverting the easy complacencies of the sort of “family values” film the 1990s fed us dollops of).
Ultimately, filmmakers cannot be absolved of all responsibility – they are not mere mirrors of our taste, and shape it in important and subliminal ways – but neither can the audience. Its unwillingness to watch any film with a woman as the principal character (Aaja Nachle and Umraojaan, anyone?) speaks volumes about our preferred on-screen representation of contemporary femininity: lips parted and shaking her ass. Indeed, globalization has exacerbated the problem: sexism has never been a stranger to Bollywood, but today sexism is sold (and consumed) as the liberation of Bollywood’s on-screen personae. But those (like Shobha De) who (usefully) remind us that it is refreshing to see mean, manipulative, and tough women after a steady diet for years of good girls, also overstate the case. For while we’ve imported the stance, the gesturality, of Western film and music as far as representations of femininity are concerned, we (and Bollywood) certainly seem far less eager to import Western feminism(s), or even the West’s greater commitment to formal gender equality. In the absence of a concomitant intellectual frame shift, we and our films run the risk of reinforcing traditional inequities in new and more insidious ways – precisely while thinking that the shackles have been broken.

The Bhaiyya's Revenge: On Tashan (OUTLOOK)

2008-05-09T00:28:00.001-04:00

A revised version of my piece on Tashan makes its way onto Outlook's website. Yenjoy.

The Bhaiyya's Revenge

'Bizarre, outlandish and a crashing bore; so over-smart, smug and self-indulgent...'? Was Tashan really all that bad? What accounts for severe panning from just about every reviewer?

Namrata Joshi's is perhaps the best review of all those panning Tashan: unlike most of her peers, she has an eye for the film's "smugness", that is to say its self-conscious nod to its masala roots, and is surely right when she says director Vijay Krishna Acharya has a tendency to lull the writer in him into a deep sleep (to her credit; most other reviewers have trashed the film on the same grounds--a wafer-thin plot; implausible characterization; poor dialogue--that don't seem to give them pause where other films are concerned (contrast the generally favorable reviews a farce like Race received), suggesting that something other than the film's thin storyline might have ticked them off. As for what that might be, and why and how there's a lot more at work in Tashan than Ms. Joshi has given it credit for, the answer lies in Kanpur--not so much the real-life industrial city that has seen better days, but the Kanpur of (Acharya's) imagination, a city "representative" of the heartland, and of a state of mind that might seem anachronistic in contemporary Hindi cinema.

There's little doubt that Tashan is deeply mindful of the cinematic tradition it is heir to, but it would be a mistake to think of Tashan as a "retro" film, unless by that term one refers simply to any film that is conscious in this way, or one means simply that the director in question has great affection for the films he grew up watching. Both of these are manifestly true of Tashan, but the film is no mere homage, nor is it smug in the "Look at how many films I've watched" way Quentin Tarantino has mastered. For homage, ironic distance from the past one wishes to not so much capture but allude to is an essential ingredient. Think Bluffmaster! or Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, each of which made reference to the Bollywood past, but used a combination of humor and affectionate remembrance to drive home the point that the films, the mood, were pretty darn good way back then--but that the past is irremediably past.

Tashan is in fact a rarer bird: it plays it straight, essentially seeking to present a masala movie in 2008 garb. But what separates it from the likes of, say, a Halla Bol, is Acharya's instinct for packaging designed to appeal to contemporary multiplex audiences (by now, sadly, the only audiences that seem to matter to the Hindi film industry), and his breezy--albeit uneven--humor. Not to mention a sensibility far removed from the earnestness of Raj Kumar Santoshi: whereas Halla Bol seemed to hope that upwardly mobile audiences would overlook a cinematic idiom that seemed to be past its sell by date, Acharya seems well aware of the challenge before him. Indeed, Acharya renders the challenge explicit by making a film that is unabashedly on the side of the bhaiyya--specifically, one called Bachchan Pandey (Akshay Kumar)--cheerfully excluded from fluency in English (an abstraction given flesh in the form of Jimmy (Saif Ali Khan)), and set against the course of over a decade of Bollywood history.This sensibility is not just a question of dialect (although Tashan includes liberal doses of what I am told is--but wouldn't recognize as--Kanpur's Hindi dialect) or of a character who isn't a yuppie from a major metro, or of a story that doesn't unfold in New York or Sydney or London. Rather, it is a question of an entire worldview: by privileging Bachchan Pandey's character, and (more importantly) his story, and by ensuring that only the Kanpuriyas have a "history" in this film, Acharya privileges the Ganga kinaare waala ethos (whether real or imagined; or, more appropriately in the context of a cinematic tradition stretching back at least to the Bachchan song of the same name in Don, imagined and real), and puts "the heartland" at the core of Hindi cinema in a way we haven't seen since Bunty aur Babli--and in a far more explicit, and (given the tastes of contemporary Bollywood audiences) courageous manner than Shaad Ali's 2005 laugh romp.

I wrote above that this sensibility is not simply a question of dialect--equally, however, the question of language is never very far from this film's lead male characters, each of whom has serious language issues. For instance, Acharya is acutely conscious of the privileged status Jimmy's access to English bestows upon him--not only is he a call center executive but an English-language instructor, the sort who grants Indians access not to the wealth of English literature or Anglo-American thought, but to the opportunity to serve customers who expect English to be the world's lingua franca. But Jimmy's privilege isn't simply because of the greater demand for his services in India's new economic paradigm; as the reverence of Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor) for Jimmy's well-turned out English phrases makes clear, to speak like Jimmy in the new India is to be the new (and uber-) Brahmin, potentially able to intimidate even those north of one on the totem pole of wealth and power. Bachchan Pandey is the opposite of Bhaiyyaji: for him, Jimmy's facility with English is itself suspicious, a sign of insufficient Indianness. For Pandey--who, in his name, incarnates two larger-than-life U.P. waalas, Hindi cinema's biggest star and the 1857 sepoy who graced our cinema screens only a few years ago--and, one suspects, for Acharya, the "real deal," the "asli" Indian, cannot be found in the India of the call centers and the shiny malls, but in the sort of galee where boys steal electricity to impress girls (watch the film, you'll see what I mean).

As a corrective to the recent indifference of Bollywood toward much of its erstwhile audience, and to the ease with which denizens of "the metros" in my experience dismiss "Bihar vihaar", I found the spirit of Tashan irresistible. And never more so than when Akshay Kumar makes his entry dressed as Ravana in a sequence that is utterly, wonderfully, compelling, clearly out to upset the complacency of audiences who uncritically see the recent arc of Hindi cinema as a narrative of virtue, moving from "cinema for the rickshawaalas" to the "advanced" cinema that won't make it cringe--although Acharya's essentialism is hardly unproblematic, and I can easily see just why this film might be alienating for an audience that prefers to watch just the sort of film Bachchan Pandey would sneer at. Acharya's crude tonic is welcome to me, but I must concede that it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of commercial sense.

Itna aagay nikal gaye, aur ab tak story ke baare mein nahin bataaya? Skirt chaser Jimmy falls for Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor, more skeletal than sex symbol, and miles removed from the kohl-rimmed hotness of Asoka) at first sight, and agrees to give her private English classes--except the classes aren't for her but for her boss, a U.P. don called Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor) with an addiction to broken English. Jimmy and Pooja fall in love (or so he thinks), until one 25-crore scam and one irate gangster later, Pooja is on the run, Jimmy's getting the living daylights beaten out of him by Bhaiyyaji's henchmen, and bounty hunter Bachchan Pandey is on the money's trail. The three meet up and hit the road together, and by film's end we have (mediocre) action sequences, khoya hua bachpan ka pyar, and two extended flashbacks set in Kanpur's lanes (one of which bizarrely erupts towards the end of the film). In short: paisa vasool for this viewer. And then some.

Acharya's debut film is unquestionably superior to the last action/adventure film featuring two male leads and a female thief he was involved with--while both Dhoom 2 (which Acharya wrote) and Tashan suffer from egregious wannabe moments, the latter has genuine soul at points, and is never merely plastic (at least if you exclude song videos like Chaliya, Yash Raj Films' latest ill conceived attempt to manufacture sexiness by means of skimpy clothing). Not to mention that it features far better visuals (a large share of the credit for which must doubtless go to cinematographer Anayanka Bose), music, and dialogue than 2006's biggest grosser. And more affecting performances than anything in the earlier film, none more so than Akshay Kumar in what is for me his best performance since Khakee: he's heavy handed here as he typically is, but nevertheless manages to plausibly incarnate not only a rowdy antisocial with Manoj Kumar's soul, but also the wide-eyed air of a boy from the boondocks.

Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor are both effective, although Khan doesn't have very much to do once Akshay enters the proceedings. Khan is perfectly cast though (although not perfectly styled; I was struck by how "off" Jimmy's get-up seemed to be given the sort of chap the film would have us believe he is), and easily carries the film through its first half hour. Kapoor has rather more to do, and while her role does not call for much nuance (at least none that is very plausible) she is good fun to watch as the tease trying to get close to Pandey so that she can pull off one more scam.

Somewhat surprisingly, Anil Kapoor's is by far the worst performance in the film: his Bhaiyyaji is labored and downright unfunny, or, more accurately, Bhaiyyaji commits the worst sin a villain can. He is funny enough not to seem very dangerous, but not funny enough to justify the number of lines of broken English he is given. Kapoor's non-performance must squarely be laid at Acharya's door; Bhaiyyaji's role is so farcical and contrived, the dialogues associated with it so bad, it would likely fell greater actors than Anil Kapoor. A special mention must be made of Yashpal Sharma, who is superb as the Haryanvi A.C.P. Hooda on the crooks' trail--he has no more than a few scenes in the movie, and is the best thing about every one of them.

I must admit to having been somewhat ungenerous to Vishal-Shekhar's music prior to Tashan's release. In the context of the film the songs work quite well (although Falak Tak might as well be from a different film, or just about any film; a pity, given that the rest of the music is very far from generic).Piyush Mishra's lyrics are in sync with Acharya's vision, ranging from Urdu (in Chaliya); to grand Hindustani lyrics in the testosterone-drenched tradition of Firoz Khan's films (as in Tashan Mein; when was the last time you heard a song go "Apni to… har baat niraali hai / Apne to … Khoon mein ishq ki laali hai", or "Hum se hairaan hai teer Sikandar ka / Hum pe qurbaan hai neel samandar ka"?); and bhaiyyaspeak (just about everywhere) is refreshing after the endemic contemporary Bolly-overdose of all things Punjabi.

Tashan certainly has its flaws: it isn't always clear on what sort of film it wants to be, the dialogue should have been much better than it was, the song videos were generally underwhelming, and the action scenes are a let down (an unpardonable sin in these action-starved times). But I can forgive it much because it is clear on the sort of film it does not want to be. That is, Tashan is no spoof, nor is it afflicted by the sort of retro-clever that borders on obscurity. By means of it, Acharya has placed his studio's money on the wager that a relatively "straight" masala movie that turns its back on Bollywood's recent history can be viable at the box office. I hope he's right on that--certainly if convincing this reviewer were all that were required Acharya would be well on his way--although the irate theatergoers I walked past after the show had ended serve to underscore how daunting Acharya's task is: the bhaiyyas have left the building, likely priced out of the new multiplexes, and a generation brought up on the easy inanities of Hindi cinema's brain-dead comedies or its addled NRI love stories might well find Tashan's brew not simply bakwaas, but ideologically offensive.

IRON MAN (English; 2008)

2008-05-05T18:55:00.005-04:00

The Marvel comics explosion at the start of the 1960s was a two-headed beast. On the one hand the world was treated to newfangled types of superheroes like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, "all too human" in a way unrecognizable from many of the godlike (and boring) DC comics superheroes of the 1940s (we won't speak of the 1950s, the imbecilic decade that gave us the Batbaby), and even from Marvel's own Captain America. Spidey, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men were fresh, and they were most definitely A-list (although the X-Men probably had to wait till the mid-1970s before they could be considered permanent fixtures of comicdom's upper echelon). The second head of the Marvel Janus, however, were superheroes who were either knockoffs of characters created by the Distinguished Competition, or too weird to be loved by the public-at-large (Antman, anyone?), or even low-grade versions of Marvel's OWN A-listers (Daredevil vis-a-vis Spiderman; the blind man's revenge would be long in coming, but once it did in the form of Frank Miller, it would be pretty permanent). We may callously group these cheerful, but low-prestige, heroes together as Marvel's B-listers.

Iron Man was one of them. Old tin can didn't even have his own comic until 1970, and had to share Tales of Suspense with fellow Avenger Captain America (who was, of course, the bigger draw) in a "split book" format. And while things did change for Tony Stark and Iron Man in the decades to follow, he never could live down the sense that the multi-millionaire Stark was simply a brasher version of Bruce Wayne; never did make it to Marvel's upper echelon; nor did he ever cross over into the wider popular (i.e. non-comic reading) culture in the way that Batman, Hulk, and Spiderman did. He did become a stalwart of the Marvel universe, however, even becoming a pivotal (if somewhat authoritarian) figure during Marvel's recent "Civil War" story arc, willing to serve as Uncle Sam's super-suited cop against his old friends and teammates (not to mention that he enabled Marvel to pander to post-9/11 Republican readers in addition to whatever Democratic ones they might have been pandering to with Captain America). All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying, my friends, that if ever there was a hero who wouldn't be in a $100 million opening weekend film, it was Iron Man.

Oops. Scratch that last sentence.

Iron Man's sensational opening weekend illustrates yet again that this is truly the golden age of superhero movies: not only has the special effects technology caught up to the comic books' conceit, but just as important, the filmmakers behind Batman Begins, X-Men, Spiderman, and now Iron Man, have displayed a firm grasp on the comic medium, and on how its heroes might be re-imagined for cinema. Often the goofy earnestness of the 1960s comics is preserved to an extent, but blended with much-needed contemporary irony. The over-arching conviction, of course, is that comics are as respectable a medium as any other: and rather than crushing the filmmakers beneath the weight of pious attempts to placate fanboys, this conviction seems have liberated Hollywood to take as many liberties with them as they do with literary adaptations. All of which weirdly preserves the freshness of the 1960s comics, no small feat given that we've seen it all by now, and means: bring on Ant Man (Henry Pym, we never knew ye).

Iron Man reaps the benefit of having an unusually strong cast for a superhero film: Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark, the billionaire scientist-genius, tycoon, and playboy, who is captured by Afghan warlords and forced to build his famed weapons for them. Except what he builds is the first Iron Man suit, using it to kick some ass and high tail it out of the bad guys' lair. Stark's character has rightly been termed "preposterous", absurdly so, in fact, yet Downey plays him to perfection, with the sort of twinkle-eyed lightness that is essential for pulling off the sort of role even the film's target audiences will have trouble taking seriously. Downey is matched step-for-step by Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Stark's long-suffering assistant Pepper Potts with a bemused charm that would be the envy of bombshells everywhere (such as the journalist who beds Stark, reminding me that I went to the wrong college). Jeff Bridges was almost unrecognizable as Stark's business partner Obadiah Stern, but no less wonderful for that, an old-school baddie you can see coming a mile away.

The story, or how-do-we-get-to-the-part-with-the-nifty-suit: Stark's sojourn in Afghanistan has revealed to him the human cost of the international weapons industry his work helps propel, and he decides to get Stark Industries out of the business of weapons manufacture. He also decides to devote time to perfecting his Iron Man concept (in order to track down the baddies who've been using Stark weaponry, and take out their stockpiles), and while the run-up to the new suit's unveiling is about as hackneyed as they come, it nevertheless succeeds in holding the viewer's attention. Director Jon Favreau is able to do this because he dwells long enough upon the plot to make it seem that he is taking it seriously, but not long enough to be bogged down by its silliness. Many wonderful SFX moments and a (to me, disappointing) climactic fight with a "bad" Iron Man later (and, much much later, Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury), the movie does not so much end as point toward a sequel -- which might well be even more fun than this instalment.

Iron Man contains much to delight the comic book purists too: the red-and-golden armor is a throwback to one of the "classic" Iron Man looks (thank God they dispensed with the golden monstrosity Stark wore in Avengers #1), and it was gratifying to see Stark's first armor as grey as it was in the 1960s comics when he created it in captivity at the hands of Communists in South-East Asia -- indeed, the scenes of the first Iron Man armor being forged in an underground cavern in Afghanistan went a longer way toward justifying Stark's character (independent of the spectre of Bruce Wayne) than anything I'd encountered in the comic books; for in those sequences, Stark's brashness, his rough edges, began to make sense: he is the Marvel Universe's Hephaestus, metalsmith to the Gods, and a practical, blunt, fact of a man (in contrast to Wayne's blue-blooded intellectualism; the latter loves to play detective, the former, to get his hands greasy taking things apart). There are plenty of other "insider" references to comic nerds like yours truly: to Stark's budding alcoholism; to just how much of a mouthful the long form of the acronym for Marvel's premier cloak and dagger agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., is; to the fact that Stark's buddy Jim Rhodes did end up wearing the Iron Man armour for a period in the comics; and to the sheer lameness of the notion that Stark's secret identity was protected by virtue of the pretense that Iron Man was really his bodyguard (the movie puts this idea in play, and then cheerfully discards it).

Iron Man will never have the mythic resonance of a well-made Batman film; but Favreau is to be commended for avoiding the sort of fake angst that can mar even a well-made Spiderman film. Despite his heart condition, public ridicule, and threats to his life, Tony Stark knows life is good (why wouldn't it be, when you have Gwyneth Paltrow for an assistant?). And Favreau, given a monster budget to seemingly do as he wished, knows it too. The film reflects that; and, as its opening weekend box office receipts showed, good cheer can be infectious.

TASHAN (Hindi; 2008)

2008-04-27T21:02:00.005-04:00

It would be a mistake to think of Tashan as a “retro” film, unless by that term one refers simply to any film that is conscious of the cinematic tradition it is heir to, or one means simply that the director in question has great affection for the films he grew up watching. Both of these are manifestly true of Tashan, but the film is no mere homage. For homage, ironic distance from the past one wishes to not so much capture but allude to is an essential ingredient. Tashan is in fact a rarer bird: it plays it straight, essentially seeking to present a thoroughly masala movie in 2008 garb. But what separates it from the likes of Halla Bol is director Vijay Krishna Acharya’s instinct (indulged in liberally though not uniformly in Tashan) for packaging designed to appeal to contemporary multiplex audiences (by now, sadly, the only audiences that seem to matter to the Hindi film industry), and his breezy – albeit uneven – humor. Not to mention a sensibility far removed from the earnestness of Raj Kumar Santoshi: whereas Halla Bol seemed to hope that upwardly mobile audiences would overlook a cinematic idiom that seemed to be past its sell by date, Acharya seems well aware of the challenge before him. Indeed, Acharya renders the challenge explicit by making a film that is unabashedly on the side of the bhaiyya – specifically, one called Bachchan Pandey (Akshay Kumar) -- cheerfully excluded from fluency in English – an abstraction given flesh in the form of Jimmy (Saif Ali Khan) – and set against the course of over a decade of Bollywood history. This sensibility is not just a question of dialect (although Tashan includes doses of what I am told is – but wouldn’t recognize as – Kanpur’s Hindi dialect) or of a character who isn’t a yuppie from a major metro, or of a story that doesn’t unfold in New York or Sydney or London. Rather, it is a question of an entire worldview: by privileging Bachchan Pandey’s character, and (more importantly) his story, and by ensuring that only the Kanpuriyas have a “history” in this film (Jimmy's one minute of "flashback" isn't even allowed the dignity of a real place, and serves as stagey contrast to the lovingly imagined Kanpur lanes of Pandey's past), Acharya privileges the Ganga kinaare waala ethos (whether real or imagined), and puts “the heartland” at the core of Hindi cinema in a way we haven’t seen since Bunty aur Babli – and in a far more explicit, and (given the tastes of contemporary Bollywood audiences) more courageous manner than Shaad Ali’s 2005 breezy romp.

I wrote above that this sensibility is not simply a question of dialect – equally, however, the question of language is never very far from this film’s lead male characters, each of whom has serious language issues. For instance, Acharya is acutely conscious of the privileged status Jimmy’s access to English bestows upon him – not only is he a call center executive but an English-language instructor, granting Indians access not to the wealth of English literature or Anglo-American thought, but to the opportunity to serve customers who expect English to be the world’s lingua franca. But Jimmy’s privilege isn’t simply because of the greater demand for his services in the new economic paradigm; as Bhaiyyaji’s reverence for Jimmy’s well-turned out English phrases makes clear, to speak like Saif in the new India is to be the new uber-Brahmin, potentially able to intimidate even those north of one on the totem pole of wealth and power. Bachchan Pandey is the opposite of Bhaiyyaji: for him, Jimmy’s facility with English is itself suspicious, a sign of insufficient Indianness. For Pandey – who, in his name, incarnates two larger-than-life U.P.waalas, Hindi cinema’s biggest star and the 1857 sepoy who graced our cinema screens only a few years ago – and, one suspects, for Acharya, the “real deal” of the "asli" Indian cannot be found in the India of the call centers and the shiny malls, but in the sort of galee where boys steal electricity to impress girls (um, watch the film, you’ll see what I mean). As a corrective to the recent indifference of Bollywood to much of its erstwhile audience, and to the ease with which denizens of “the metros” in my experience dismiss “Bihar vihaar”, I found the spirit of Tashan irresistible – Akshay Kumar makes his entry dressed as Ravana in a sequence that is utterly, wonderfully, compelling, and he is clearly out to upset the complacency of audiences who uncritically see the recent arc of Hindi cinema as a narrative of virtue, moving from “cinema for the rickshawaalas” to the “advanced” cinema that won’t make them cringe – although Acharya’s essentialism is hardly unproblematic, and I can easily see just why this film might be alienating for an audience that prefers to watch just the sort of film Bachchan Pandey would sneer at. Acharya’s crude tonic is welcome to me, but I must concede that it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of commercial sense.

Itna aagay nikal gaye, aur ab tak story ke baare mein nahin bataaya? Skirt chaser Jimmy falls for Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor, more skeletal than sex symbol) at first sight and agrees to give her private English classes – except the classes aren’t for her but for her boss, a U.P. don called Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor) with an addiction to broken English. Jimmy and Pooja fall in love (or so he thinks), until one 25-crore scam and an irate gangster later, Pooja is on the run, Jimmy’s getting the living daylights beaten out of him by Bhaiyyaji’s henchmen, and bounty hunter Bachchan Pandey is on the money’s trail. The three meet up and hit the road together, and by film’s end we have action, khoya hua bachpan ka pyar, and two extended flashbacks set in Kanpur’s lanes (one of which bizarrely pops up towards the end of the film). In short: paisa vasool for this viewer. And then some.

Acharya’s debut film is unquestionably superior to the last action/adventure film featuring two male leads and a female thief he was involved with – while both Dhoom 2 (which Acharya wrote) and Tashan suffer from egregious wannabe moments, the latter has genuine soul at points, and is never merely plastic (at least if you exclude song videos like Chaliya, Yash Raj Films’ latest ill conceived attempt to manufacture sexiness). Not to mention that it features far better visuals (a large share of the credit for which must doubtless go to cinematographer Anayanka Bose), music, and dialogue than 2006’s biggest grosser. And more affecting performances than anything in the earlier film, none more so than Akshay Kumar in what is for me his best performance since Khakee: he’s heavy handed here as he typically is, but nevertheless manages to plausibly incarnate not only a rowdy antisocial with Manoj Kumar’s soul, but also the wide-eyed air of a boy from the boondocks.

Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor are both effective, although Khan doesn’t have very much to do once Akshay enters the proceedings. Khan is perfectly cast though (although not perfectly styled; I was struck by how “off” Jimmy’s dressing seemed to be given the sort of chap the film would have us believe he is), and easily carries the film through its first half hour. Kapoor has rather more to do, and while her role does not call for much nuance (at least none that is very plausible) she is good fun to watch as the tease trying to get close to Pandey so that she can pull off one more scam. Somewhat surprisingly, Anil Kapoor’s is by far the worst performance in the film: his Bhaiyyaji is labored and downright unfunny, or, more accurately, Bhaiyyaji commits the worst sin a villain can. He is funny enough not to seem very dangerous, but not funny enough to justify the number of lines of broken English he is given. Kapoor’s non-performance must squarely be laid at Acharya’s door; Bhaiyyaji’s role is so farcical and contrived, the dialogues associated with it so bad, it would likely fell greater actors than Anil Kapoor. A special mention must be made of Yashpal Sharma, who is superb as the Haryanvi A.C.P. Hooda on the crooks’ trail – he has no more than a few scenes in the movie, and is the best thing about every one of them.

I must admit to having been somewhat ungenerous to Vishal-Shekhar’s music prior to Tashan’s release. In the context of the film the songs work quite well (although Falak Tak might as well be from a different film, or just about any film; a pity, given that the rest of the music is very far from generic), and the album’s nod to Urdu (in Chaliya); grand Hindustani lyrics in the tradition of Firoz Khan’s films (as in Tashan Mein; when was the last time you heard a song go “Apni to… har baat niraali hai / Apne to … Khoon mein ishq ki laali hai”?); and bhaiyyaspeak (just about everywhere) is refreshing after the endemic contemporary overdose of all things Punjabi.

Tashan certainly has its flaws: it isn’t always clear on what sort of film it wants to be, the dialogue should have been much better than it is, the song videos were generally underwhelming, and the action scenes are a let down (an unpardonable sin in these action-starved times). But I can forgive it much (even apart from its mouthwatering shots of Indian locales) because it is clear on the sort of film it does not want to be. That is, Tashan is no spoof, nor is it afflicted by the sort of retro-clever that borders on obscurity. By means of it, Acharya has placed his studio’s money on the wager that a relatively “straight” masala movie that turns its back on Bollywood’s recent history can, if packaged and sold right, be viable at the box office. I hope he’s right on that – certainly if convincing this reviewer were all that were required Acharya would be well on his way – although the irate theatergoers I walked past after the show had ended serve to underscore how daunting Acharya’s task is.

Ellora & Ajanta

2008-02-17T22:24:00.002-05:00

It is well nigh impossible to over-esteem the stupendous achievements in architecture, sculpture, and painting visible at Ellora & Ajanta, where the temples, monasteries, and sculptures were not "built" or "made" but simply excavated from solid rock, mostly in the first millenium A.D. Nowhere are the challenges associated with these endeavors (and one's awe, bordering on disbelief, at their realization) driven home more clearly than in Ellora's Cave 16, a mammoth Kailash temple that was excavated and shaped over a century and a half. Not to put too fine a point on it, the temple -- apparently intended as an earthly replica of Mount Kailash, abode of Shiva and Parvati -- is simply one of the most impressive sights I've ever seen. But the paintings that have survived at Ajanta add yet another layer of wonder -- at the mere fact of their survival, but also because the Ajanta paintings humanize the sculptural setting, by enabling the viewer access to a more intimate register, one that does not overawe with its scale but with its vividness. The scale of the artistry on view at these sites, and the forbidding light conditions of the caves, mean that any notion of doing justice to Ajanta & Ellora by means of these photos is frivolous.

Mumbaaaaaaai

2008-02-01T22:05:00.000-05:00

...no, not that awful song from Shootout at Lokhandwala, just some pics of the incomparable city.

Aurangabad & Khuldabad...

2008-01-27T21:11:00.000-05:00

Aurangabad was my base for the sublime pleasures of Ajanta & Ellora, but the town itself (one-time capital of the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb during the latter portion of his reign) is well worth a visit...

...as is the nearby tomb/dargah-drenched town of Khuldabad, famous for the graves of Aurangzeb, Asaf Jah I (the first Nizam of Hyderabad), not to mention a robe of the Prophet Muhammad and a plethora of graves of relatively minor Sufi saints of the Chistiya order...

A selection of my pictures is on shutterfly...

HALLA BOL (Hindi; 2008)

2008-01-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

If multiplex Bollywood were a Persian rug in a rich, powerful person's home, Raj Kumar Santoshi would be the guy pissing on it. If you think this is an odd (or crude) way to begin a film review, you evidently aren't familiar with Santoshi's oeuvre, and you certainly haven't seen Halla Bol, a nearly three hour long birdie flipped by Santoshi to over a decade and a half of Hindi film history. No songless films for Santoshi, no sequences in New York or Sydney or Switzerland, no low-key dialogues either. There's no chance of unobtrusive background music, and as for de-mythologized, "naturalistic" characters? !@#$%?! 'em. By the way (in case you haven't been reading my blog for long), in my book those are all potentially good things, and I thus went to see Halla Bol with great expectation. For Santoshi has over the course of his career been determined not to throw out the baby of Indian modes of storytelling and characterization along with the bathwater of cinematic mediocrity; nowhere is this attitude more apparent than in the uncompromising Khakee, at once a damning indictment of our political cynicism and an old fashioned, unabashed actioner. Sadly, this attitude is only intermittently evident in Santoshi's latest offering, which left this viewer ruing the weak script and clunky treatment. The end result is an uneven nostalgia trip, featuring a few scenes of awesome power and resonance, and ending up as a film that is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Ashfaque (Ajay Devgan) is an actor in the street theater troupe of one-time dacoit, now social activist, Sidhu (Pankaj Kapoor), with dreams of making it big in Bollywood, so much so that Ashfaque has no qualms about admitting to his lady love Sneha (Vidya Balan) that if pressed to choose between his lover and his acting career, he would opt for the latter. [Incidentally, the parents of Muslim Ashfaque and Hindu Sneha seem utterly indifferent to the religious identity of their child's lover; in the typical masala film this would hardly be an issue, but in a film so self-consciously political, the blitheness of the protagonists' parents makes them seem not so much from a small town as from another planet.] Ashfaque -- reborn in Bollywood as Sameer Khan -- does find fame and fortune, losing his soul in the process and becoming the archetype of the narcissistic celebrity who thinks the most important thing in the world is his career, his position, and his gratification.

The above is presented to us by way of flashback; Halla Bol begins with the "fallen" Sameer Khan, and while the creative choice probably makes the film's length seem more manageable (by mildly interrupting the linear narrative the film so badly wants to be), it robs the flashback of any dramatic tension. That is, we already know what Sameer Khan became, and while that in itself is not a meaningful criticism, Ashfaque's journey is hardly presented in any new or resonant light. This failure is symptomatic of the wider failure that is Halla Bol: a stale air hangs over the film, which seems to have been cobbled together from bits and pieces of films we have seen earlier. The film works as an exercise in nostalgia, particularly for those of us who have watched with dismay as contemporary Hindi filmmakers have begun marching to the rhythm of Hollywood films as if there were no other path to cinematic "progress". But at its worst one is reminded of Khakee, and not in a good way: Halla Bol is less bold, less pungent, and less fun than that Santoshi masala masterpiece. No doubt masala may be enjoyable without breaking any new ground (look no further, given that Vikram's Bheema has just hit the screens, than Saamy), but not when the film carries as much baggage, and takes itself as seriously, as Halla Bol does.

Nevertheless, once Sameer Khan's life is thrown into crisis by a cold blooded murder committed before his eyes, there are enough flashes of the sort of drama Santoshi is capable of to keep the viewer's attention engaged. The sons of two very powerful men murder a woman who has spurned their advances -- in the middle of a party, no less. Sameer Khan and dozens of high society's brightest and best are witnesses, yet no-one does anything to prevent the killers coolly walking out and, as is all too depressingly familiar from the newspapers, no-one is subsequently willing to step forward to testify against the criminals. No-one, that is, until Sameer Khan wakes up to his calling in life, and decides to speak truth to power, destroying his career and public standing in the process (and winning back the respect of his estranged wife and former guru). By film's end, the good guys have won, somewhat hearteningly not just because some judge rules in their favor but because Sameer's and Sidhu's courage sparks a popular movement determined to bring the killers to justice. The film's conclusion, that is, does not so much focus on the judicial outcome -- the wrongdoers' conviction -- so much as on the prerequisite to a healthy justice system: a vigorous and concerned citizenry. For Santoshi, the real culprits are not the villains but our own apathy. The director's clarity (so welcome in the wake of the Madhur Bhandarkars of the world, who seek to assuage the audience's collective conscience by pointing to a fantastically corrupt and decadent "other") is laudable, but sadly Halla Bol works better as a concept than as a movie. It's just not engaging enough to be a good film.

That Halla Bol works at all is due in no small measure to the strength of the mythic paradigm Santoshi taps into, not to mention a film-stealing (albeit uneven) performance by Pankaj Kapoor: he hits only one note, and does it with great panache at times, although he lacks the raw screen presence to pull off the sort of herogiri Santoshi insists on foisting upon him. Devgan's performance is, as is his wont these days, curiously passive, and Santoshi seems to appreciate this given the extent to which the second half of Halla Bol is propelled by Pankaj Kapoor. Devgan is in far better form playing the callous superstar of the film's initial reels: even if the film's satire of shallow celebrities is a bit too heavy handed, both Santoshi and Devgan seem to be having fun doing it. Vidya Balan is utterly wasted in a role virtually anyone could have done, and Sneha's presence in the plot seems wholly instrumental. Darshan Jariwala deserves special mention: his old-school baddie, the minister father of the man who actually fired the shots, is the sort of menace for whom cinematic time stopped in 1987: he's loud, crude, and always engaging, the last a quality the film could certainly have used more of.

Much can be forgiven Santoshi, however, for two contrasting scenes: the second of these occurs when Sameer Khan, fresh from a humbling defeat in court, shows up drunk at the minister's house in the middle of the night. Jariwala gloats with abandon, convinced that Sameer has come to make peace on bent knee, and points out the multi-cultural (and presumably ill gotten) splendors of his palatial home: a chandelier from Belgium, a painting from Holland, a rug from Persia, and whisky from Scotland. Jariwala can do it all, because (as he keeps reminding us) he has "paisa, power, and the public" behind him; while he prepares Sameer's drink, we hear the hiss of urine falling on the horrified minister's Persian rug. "Ye dhaar hai -- pure Indian," Sameer sneers at his enemy, reminding him that for some things one doesn't need paisa, power, or the public, but simply "gurda...jo mere paas hai." Much of the family audience at the sedate Dubai multiplex I saw Halla Bol at seemed horrified; the anti-social riff-raff element (including yours truly), however, were reminded of the thunder of a bygone era, and erupted in cheers, wild hooting, and whistles. As the Mastercard commercial would say: Priceless.

The first scene is the work of a far more subtle sensibility, and is, I suspect, destined to be one of my favorite scenes this decade. Sameer Khan has been named a youth icon; the star, his mind perturbed by the murder he has recently witnessed, arrives onstage and is startled by his outsized image opposite him. In what is to my mind the most perceptive observation on the nature of celebrity ever made in a Hindi film, Sameer Khan acknowledges that he is wholly other than his on-screen persona. "Ye sab kuch kar sakta hai," Sameer says wistfully, rendered impotent by his own success, "aur mein kuch bhi nahin." This scene is uncanny, revealing nothing so much as the impossibility of stardom: Ashfaque has strived for years to be in this position, yet the one in this position is someone other than Ashfaque, one who has rendered Ashfaque an imposter to himself. Nothing else in Halla Bol approaches this pinnacle, but make no mistake: this scene is itself worth the price of admission. While it cannot redeem the film, it offers hope for Santoshi the director, and means that when he next decides to present to the audience a glimpse of his vision, his stubborn adherence to a cinematic idiom out of step with the upwardly mobile consumers at India's ever burgeoning multiplex population, I'll still be in line waiting for a ticket.

Khajuraho

2008-01-15T16:30:00.001-05:00

Khajuraho has become something of a cliche, but no amount of tourist over-exposure can render a visit to the millennium-old religious seat of the Chandella dynasty an anti-climax. It makes little sense to speak of the temple "architecture" versus the sculpture populating the walls of most of the surviving temples: here, architecture and sculpture are inextricable, and the resulting achievement is extraordinarily vivid, combining spiritual ardour, frank eroticism, and artistic ambition in a vertigo-inducing cocktail. Or, stated differently, decades of tourism have been unable to bury the event, and it is impossible to inoculate the visitor against the shock of encountering the uncanny...

Datia

2008-01-06T09:23:00.000-05:00

Datia wasn't originally on my itinerary; but a couple of days in Orchcha were enough to convince me that I needed to make a detour to check out that other wonderful palace built by the Bundela raja Bir Singh Deo. The palace did not disappoint, set amidst and atop a basti that has grown around it, and all but forgotten by tourists. Its confusing staircases and dark passages are almost impossible to navigate without a guide, but one's efforts are well rewarded by gorgeous architecture and spectacular views of the surrounding area; several rooms preserve portions of the original tile- and coloured stone-work, and towards the top lies the grave of Abul Fazl (more accurately, of his head), killed by Bir Singh Deo on the orders of Prince Salim (the future emperor Jahangir). There is something incredibly moving about the unmarked grave of one of the brightest of Akbar's nau rattan, who did more than perhaps anyone else to cultivate the aura of the Mughal emperor, a mythos that survived the loss of temporal sovereignty all the way down to the revolt of 1857. Abul Fazl's grave is small, reflecting the fact that only his head is buried in the palace at Datia.

Orchcha

2007-12-08T05:16:00.000-05:00

I went to Orchcha in search of the palaces and tombs of the Bundela rajas; I expected a medieval ghost town, and while I certainly found my share of atmospheric ruins and monuments, I was pleasantly surprised to find a contemporary pilgrimage center and temple town as well...

The result: pictures. Lots of 'em...

Gangu Teli

2007-12-05T10:30:00.000-05:00

Pictures from Bhopal (supposedly named after Raja Bhoj), where I have family and spent a few relaxing days last month and this week...

Warangal

2007-12-01T08:21:00.000-05:00

Check out some of the many pictures I took on a day trip to Warangal from Hyderabad in mid-November...

SAAWARIYA (Hindi; 2007)

2007-11-13T01:16:00.000-05:00

Midway through Saawariya an overhead shot shows us a boat docking at a green and blue tiled shimmer of a pavement, the sort of image that takes one’s breath away. It isn’t the first shot in the film that is reminiscent of the work of Barcelona’s modernist architect genius Antonio Gaudi, and it won’t be the last, in a film that owes an ample debt to Gaudi’s love of riotous color and dynamic surfaces, and of the glazed tiles that hearken to Iberia’s Moorish past (a characteristic Gaudi shared with other Barcelona modernists, perhaps none more so than Domenech i Montaner, whose masterpiece, the Palau de la Musica Catalunya, just has to be the most beautiful concert hall in the world). The tribute is apt, given that Saawariya is itself set in a fantasy city partly out of the Arabian Nights, and partly out of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, a self-consciously stagey backdrop to the one-sided love story of itinerant minstrel Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) and Sakina (Sonam Kapoor), and (briefly) Sakina and Imaan (Salman Khan), as narrated by Gulabji (Rani Mukherji, in yet another role playing a hooker with a heart of gold). So striking are the visuals (despite the outsized debt to Luhrman), so successful director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s and art director Omung Kumar’s claustrophobic reverie of a world immune to whiffs from the outside (so much so that Imaan’s explanation to Sakina that he has to leave her for a year because he works for "the country", is jarring – could anything so real as a country exist in the world of Saawariya?), that nothing in this or any other review should dissuade one from seeing this film on the big screen. One of Hindi cinema’s most unique visual idioms deserves no less.

The film (purportedly an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s White Nights) takes place over four nights, and centers on Ranbir’s love for Sakina, a shy girl he sees waiting on a bridge. She is waiting for Imaan, a former tenant and lover who has left her with a promise to meet her a year later on the bridge. Sakina is clearly drawn to Ranbir, but stops short of committing herself, verging on succumbing only when Ranbir convinces her that Imaan will not return. Except of course he does, and Sakina returns to him, completing the rather slight allegory: Ranbir has a hard time believing Imaan even exists, but Sakina (the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s great-granddaughter, and in Shiite Islam a symbol of patience and suffering womanhood in light of the slaughter of virtually all her male relatives by the forces of the Caliph Yazid) keeps the faith (“imaan”), and her devotion is given flesh and blood form by film’s end (a fantastic Salman Khan, whose hyper-stylized presence works well with Bhansali’s vision). Not for nothing is the film set in a Muslim ambience, and one might see a basic Sufi allegory of imaan fulfilled as partially operative here. And as in much North Indian Sufism, Krishna imagery suffuses Saawariya: Sakina is a sort of Mirabai, and Krishna was of course the original saawariya (“dark one”), although Bhansali, in an inversion of the trope of the eternally waiting woman, ultimately makes a Mira out of his saawariya, leaving Sakina and the kohl-rimmed Imaan as Radha and Krishna. The dark deity is manifest in the film’s colors too: Bhansali has gone on record to the effect that the film’s blue-green hues are meant to evoke the peacock (symbolizing Krishna), and the point is driven home by the film’s endless night, Krishna’s own black cloak as the song from Satyam Shivam Sundaram memorably phrased it (reminiscent also of Muhammad’s black shawl; indeed each is referred to in song and popular tradition as the “kaali kamli waala”, most recently in Bunty aur Babli's Kajra Re).

In the final analysis, however, nothing can make up for the fact that Saawariya is wretchedly boring, the sort of unabashed snoozefest that makes one’s jaw drop in disbelief. Contrary to Bhansali’s protestations on television, this has nothing to do with whether or not Saawariya is a work of art (or Work of Art, as Bhansali would doubtless prefer it), or with his (disingenuous) posturing that absent Saawariya, Hindi cinema would be left to a stagnant inertia of puerile comedies and hackneyed genres, or with media hostility (though Bhansali is doubtless right to complain about the intellectual dishonesty and sheer incompetence that has characterized most of the film’s reviews thus far). Rather, it has something to do with the fact that Saawariya has nothing to say, or at least nothing that hasn’t been done to death. Some films, that is, are structured around a plot driven by events (e.g. Sholay); other films are simply vehicles for their stars (e.g. Sivaji); yet others are driven not so much by events as by meaning and signification (e.g. 8 ½). In the last instance, it isn’t that the action is devoid of events, merely that the film’s meaning cannot be reduced to them, and in fact self-consciously exceeds them.

Saawariya is clearly intended as this kind of film, and fails miserably in saying anything meaningful about the themes it puts in play: love, desire, devotion, sacrifice, the ethics of being in the world. Instead, we get a pose, a gesture, and a stale one at that – the waiting woman and the nomad who wishes to “rescue” her, a sort of Peter Pan view of Indian femininity (stressed ad nauseam in his interviews by Bhansali, who is prone to characterizing those who disagree as culturally inauthentic “screaming” feminists) and of love, drained as it is of any urgency or passion. The Sufi/Krishna imagery remains no more than a schema, and is never incarnated for the audience: the fault lies in an under-developed script, inexperienced debutantes who are impressively assured but cannot suggest gravitas, and Bhansali’s repeated attempts to evoke the specter of Raj Kapoor, the sort of cheap dynasticism more at home in the world of Karan Johar or Sarkar than in Saawariya. The burden of Raj Kapoor’s tramp persona is too great on Ranbir Kapoor, all but smothering his natural boyish charm. Sonam Kapoor is not given much to work with (entirely consistent with Bhansali’s track record with heroines in love stories), but suggests enough to make me look forward to seeing more of her.

It isn’t often that I urge people to go watch films I’ve disliked; I’ll make an exception here, warranted by Saawariya’s scale and its filmmakers’ vision. This creative failure demands engagement.