Desicritics Author: Qalandar

Movie Review: Guru (Hindi; 2007)

Qalandar — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:21:52 EST

[Warning: This review contains spoilers]

Ek lo ek muft ("Buy one get one free") appears to be the lot of Gurukant Desai (Abhishek Bachchan), that is to say the law of, not unintended consequences, but unintended benefits. When as a boy he fails his exams he is able to wrangle permission from his schoolmaster father to go to Turkey and sell petrol cans, permission that would not have been forthcoming had he passed his school exams.

When he wants a business partner (Jignesh, played by Arya Babbar) he gets a wife too, none other than Jignesh's sister Sujatha (Aishwariya Rai). And when he gets his wife's dowry - the initial capital for his business - he also gets a devoted spouse who radiates quiet strength. When they want a child they get twins. Heck, by film's end we see that in amassing wealth and success Guru gets to wear - muft - the mantle of corporate populist, bringing capitalism and its benefits to the masses. In fact, when Guru arrives in Bombay he gets a surrogate father in "Nanaji" Manikdas Gupta (Mithun Chakraborty), and - also muft - a crusader adversary (egged on by newspaper baron Gupta) in Shyam Saxena (Madhavan), a journalist determined to bring Guru down. Oh well: five out of six ain't bad.

Mani Ratnam's Guru is the story of Gurukant Desai, a villager from Idhar, Gujarat, convinced of his lucky star and determined to succeed in bijness at all costs, no matter the attempts of the corporate establishment to keep him out, and the zeal of a leftist newspaper baron and his editor in bringing him down. His destiny is already written, Gurukant informs a skeptic early on in the film, and there is never any doubt that he is going to end up a business titan, second to none.

But Guru is also the story (as Ratnam sees it) of an India in transition, from colonialism through license raj to free enterprise. As Ratnam concludes the tale the journey is a heroic one indeed, from an India where outsized ambition - in particular, the ambition of amassing great wealth - was frowned upon, to an India where the acquisition of wealth is seen as the great leveler, representing the best hope of the ordinary man for prosperity and happiness.

Ratnam is not blind to the warts inherent in an ambition that will stop at nothing to achieve its aim, and over the course of the film we see the affable, irrepressibly optimistic Guru become less and less accessible, "available" only in private settings or in orchestrated public spectacles before the shareholders of his company, Shakti Trading. Guru's actions too become ever more obscure, available to the audience only through the prism of Nanaji and Shyam. The wide-eyed youth who turned down a coveted job in Turkey to return to India in order to start his own business seems like a distant memory indeed.

But in order to shoehorn his own vision into an overarching narrative of Guru triumphant, Ratnam has to cut some corners: when the journalistic crusade against Guru leads to a government crackdown and a commission of inquiry, Ratnam simply hands over the film to its title character, who proceeds to hold forth as the public incarnate, not bothering to deny any of the allegations of corruption and fraud leveled against him but justifying his transgressions by appealing to a higher law, not God but the public.

"I am the public," Guru rasps in the film's memorable (and troubling) penultimate sequence, and it is clear that he feels his actions are justified because he has empowered the middle classes, and given them a stake in Indian industry. (He has done so by means of Shakti Trading's various public offerings, the polar opposite of the family-run and closed corporation that, Guru suggests, held sway prior to his rise). While the film has hitherto led us to view such claims a bit askance, there is no trace of directorial irony in this sequence, carefully constructed to give Gurukant Desai the last word and to leave him the winner. It's unclear whether Ratnam buys into this, but he certainly wants the audience to buy whatever Guru is selling.

None of this detracts from the fact that Ratnam remains arguably the least judgmental of popular directors in either Hindi or Tamil, and the cinematic magnanimity - able to take in a rather wide range of activity without malice or moralizing - that we have come to expect from films like Mouna Raagam, Nayakan, Iruvar, Dil Se, Alai Payuthey, Kannathil Muthamittal, and Aayitha Ezhuthu/Yuva is very much a hallmark of Guru.

Thus we see that Gurukant marries Sujatha because of her dowry, and we see that he is not above smearing his corporate rivals via the media, or even of whipping up a little class hatred by resorting a little too easily to an "us" versus "them" rhetoric - yet we do not judge him. And nor is he the only one: we see Nanaji insulting Sujatha after she has come to his house to show him her babies; we see that Shyam Saxena is not above a little skullduggery himself if it makes for a racier story; and we see that the upright leftist Nanaji's daughter Meenu (Vidya Balan) appears to be thrilled that Guru manages to get away with everything - thrilled just because - and we do not judge any of them either.

So too with the wider questions raised by Guru. It is surely a fact that, as Guru caustically observes, the license raj regime made it incredibly hard for entrepreneurs to succeed, thereby enabling the rich to get richer and to keep newcomers out of the market, or at least to deny them a seat at the "main" table (though Ratnam should have done more with the point that the same entrepreneurs who complained about the license raj also used it to entrench and enrich themselves). I can certainly agree with Guru's complaint at film's end that he is a creature of the license raj system, and that the latter incentivizes corruption.

But it is also equally a fact that a bureaucrat-heavy system criminalizing ordinary entreprenurial activity is one thing, but - as Shyam Saxena points out - at least some of what Guru does cannot be classified as ordinary entrepreneurial activity. A case in point is when his company commits fraud by getting something for nothing, that is, by sending empty cartons abroad and reporting those as polyester exports. Shakti Trading would then use the export credits thereby received to secure licenses for importing machinery and goods that it could then resell at great profit.

There is something more than a little self-serving about Guru's self-righteousness, and to his credit Ratnam sees that too. That Guru gets to win by film's end is not because he is right but because the public accepts his position to be right. One might see this as a shamelessly commercial decision on Ratnam's part, well aware that the mood of the moviegoing public - or at least that portion of the public that may be expected to patronize Ratnam films in multiplexes - is unabashedly gung ho about entrepreneurship at present. Iindeed it is difficult to imagine a figure more calculated to revolt contemporary India's urban well-heeled than the manifestly leftie, ultra-smug journalist Shyam Saxena.

On the other hand, one might also read Guru's vindication by film's end as logically following from past Ratnam films, an instance of Ratnam's refusal to pass final judgment. Thus, in Iruvar, Anandam (Mohanlal) bests his one-time mentor and friend Tamilchelvam (Prakashraj) in politics not because he is better than the latter, but because that's what "the people" want. So too in Guru: the public wants what Gurukant Desai sells, and as in Iruvar, Ratnam bows to the press of history. Iruvar's Tamilchelvam was left with the memory of a friendship and of a historical moment; to the Gurukant Desais of the world belongs the future.

No discussion of a Ratnam film since Roja can be complete without mention of A.R. Rahman's music. I have already spoken at length of the album, but the background score is - even by Rahman's lofty standards - impressive. The impact of the songs is greatly heightened by their use in the film, in particular the ones - "Ae Hairat-e-Aashiqui" being the most significant of these - that recur in the background at various points over the course of the film, binding together and juxtaposing different stages in the lives of Guru (and Sujatha). That being said, Ratnam's visuals in the songs do not match the peaks of "Pachchai Nirame" (from Alai Payuthey), "Kannathil Muthamittal" (from the film of the same name), "Narumugaiye" (from Iruvar), "Goodbye Nenba/Khuda Hafiz" (from Aayitha Ezhuthu/Yuva), or "Satrangi Re" (from Dil Se), although there are some spectacular visuals in "Barso Re", and striking ones in "Ek Lo Ek Muft", and "Mayya Mayya".

Rajeev Menon's cinematography is consistently of very high quality -- in particular, the film features several jawdropping landscape and monument shots. While this viewer did find himself missing the virtuosity of Kannathil Muthamittal, it is clear that Ratnam has rather deliberately gone in a for a far more accessible visual aesthetic, one reflecting his ambitions for Guru as an all-India film. In a similar vein, the set of Bombay in the 1950s is a landmark in Indian cinema, and worthy of the man who directed Thotta Tharani's Dharavi in Nayakan.

Returning to the film's penultimate scene, if Guru's harangue jars because it does not really follow from what has preceded it - Guru has always been in the game to make money, not to benefit the middle classes by giving them a stake in his company; indeed Shakti Trading's first public offering is simply a consequence of the banks' unwillingness to lend to the new kid on the block - the film does not really suffer from it. The reason is Abhishek Bachchan, who carries the scene (and the rest of the film) off with a bravura performance that is surely one for the ages.

Abhishek exhibits great range in this role, and is convincing and compelling - in a word, superb - in all his character's hues, from the wide-eyed youngster to the determined businessman to the unctuous, self-satisfied middle-aged tycoon, and finally as a stroke-riddled icon, a prophet of the future. Perhaps the finest compliment one can pay his work here is to say that Ratnam puts him on terrain previously inhabited by Kamal Haasan in Nayakan, and Mohanlal in Iruvar, and Abhishek does not let his director's faith down.

While Iruvar's Anandam remains a class apart for Mohanlal's freakishly natural yet ineffably mysterious act, I consider it no exaggeration to put Abhishek's Gurukant on at least the same level as Kamal's Velu Naicker - not to mention that Abhishek's screen presence and charisma comfortably outdo that of his illustrious forebear. On more than one occasion one discerns traces of Amitabh Bachchan's own legendary turn as Vijay Deenanath Chauhan in Agneepath, yet the intersection of these two trajectories - Amitabh's legacy and Ratnam's Tamil cinema - results in a performance that while owing many debts, is at the same time very much Abhishek's own.

It is fortunate - for Guru, which could not otherwise "work" at any level - that Abhishek is in such good form, for he needed to be given the presence of Mithun Chakraborty and Madhavan in the cast. The former's is the more obvious performance, solid and effective at all times but not especially nuanced. In a relative sense, and despite being abruptly written out of the film, it is Madhavan who tests Abhishek's dominance the most in this film, with a quietly strong performance bordering on the sinister: contempt for Guru and everything he represents shines in Madhavan's eyes virtually every time he is on screen. In particular, Madhavan's entry scene, featuring Mithun and Abhishek as well, is a masala fan's delight. So is the only other meeting between Shyam Saxena and Guru, where Madhavan's understated naturalness serves as a great foil to Abhisek's anger.

Aishwariya Rai had a lot more to do in this film than I had initially expected, and after Iruvar and Guru it is now clear that Ratnam is able to get more from her than just about anyone else. At no point is she less than convincing, first as the spunky village girl and then as Guru's wife. Especially welcome is Ratnam's characterization of Sujatha as an equal partner in her marriage, a relief given the rampant sexism of so much of our cinema. Aishwariya's Sujatha inspires confidence, even when she isn't saying anything.

Vidya Balan's Meenu is an intriguing character, afflicted by multiple sclerosis and clearly fascinated by Guru's audacity. While Ratnam does not explore her psychology as much as I would have liked, one is left with the distinct impression that to this young woman who lives with constant pain and the thought of impending death, there is something immensely compelling about Guru's vitality, his hunger for more of everything. Meenu keeps joking that she wants to marry Guru, offering a glimpse of her psyche and of the position Guru holds within it: outsider, rebel, and possessed of great appetite. In a word: life.

Mani Ratnam is one of my favorite directors when it comes to capturing "little" scenes of the sort that other directors either pass over or can only conceptualize in overwrought terms. Guru is no exception, and there are a host of private moments that make the characters human (indeed Guru far surpasses Nayakan in terms of the number of memorable characters it features). Gurukant and Sujatha have several of these (mostly in the film's first half; one of the casualties of the second half's focus on Guru's struggles against Nanaji and Shyam Saxena is the endearing relationship between husband and wife), including a playful bedroom scene. Towards the end the couple re-visit their first home in Bombay to reminisce, and although Ratnam inserts this scene somewhat abruptly, the cocktail of affection and nostalgia - and an Abhishek-Aishwariya pairing that is very comfortable and effective - is too strong to resist.

I conclude by noting that Madhavan and Vidya Balan form a strange counterpoint to the Abhishek-Aishwariya pair in the film's second half, and I was especially struck by the charming romantic scene where Shyam asks Meenu to marry him. The scene is the only indication we have that Shyam is more than just a relentless activist, and goes a long way toward humanizing him. More significantly, Shyam's response to Meenu's claim that there would be little purpose to marriage as she only has four hundred-odd days to live - Shyam says he wants every single one of those days - highlights the difference between Gurukant's calculus - he decides to marry Sujatha upon hearing of her dowry - and Shyam's own worldview. The four hundred days Shyam wants is not a question of calculation, but of incalculable joy. Ratnam's irony here is dark indeed: the latter couple is oriented towards death - Meenu will die, and die childless - while Guru and Sujatha are oriented towards life - Gurukant will live, and live to see his children grow up. The future, that is to say, is Guru's.

Music Review: I See You (Vishal-Shekhar)

Qalandar — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:54:48 EST

Imagine the regular Hindi film song run through a blender, with a mixture equal parts outright pop (at its most trivial) and the ambient music of Brian Eno and Bang on a Can. Or: don't imagine it, just check out I See You, the latest (and unexpectedly compelling) offering from Vishal-Shekhar. I am quite a fan of their "anthologizing" aesthetic as displayed in Bluffmaster!, but it is heartening to see that I See You is not more of the same. And it's damn good.

I initially set out to write a straight music review, proceeding song by song, but soon realized that was not the way to approach this little slice of ambient Bollywood. The album has the "playing in the background" and hence unintrusive quality of some of Talvin Singh's work -- except these are also supposed to be filmi gaanas! As I've framed I See You it sounds like a paradox, although I like to believe that it is not an incoherent one, as it insinuates itself into the listener's mood, sneaking by in its filmi disguise.

Vishal's and Shekar's orchestration is impressive here, and the duo is ever conscious of the intended effect: even the most seemingly resonant tracks here -- "Subah Subah" and "Haalo Haalo" -- sound much louder when one sings them than they do on the album, where the vocals are never permitted to escape the wider music in which they are embedded. The achievement -- of control and effect -- is particularly impressive in the case of "Haalo Haalo", an ostensibly "straight" neo-Punjabi tune sung with customary enthusiasm by Sukhwinder Singh and Sunidhi Chauhan. Vishal-Shekhar do not allow this song to "get away", smothering its immediacy beneath layers of electronic abstraction.

The overall result is a glossy, bejewelled album, certainly impressive, though verging on the lifeless, at least for my ears (Midival Punditz are equally electronic, but far more luxuriant and in-your-face; the musical aesthetic of I See You is almost ascetic by comparison). But -- and this is a rarity these days -- I See You is an album, and what lingers is the cumulative effect, rather than any one track (although "Haalo Haalo" comes closest with its relative energy and addictive refrain).

As for the rest of the songs: Sunidhi Chauhan's vocals are an especial revelation in "Sach Hui" once the unmistakably ambient beginning that pays homage to A.R. Rahman's "Chinatown" from Fire is out of the way. I for one had not expected her to sound so sweet and girlish as she does here, far from the muscularity and assertive sexuality of Omkara's "Beedi". While I certainly don't want the Vishal-Shekhar treatment on a regular basis as applied to Chauhan's resonant voice, in the context of this album it works, serving as a reminder that she is no one-trick pony.

"Kehna Jai Jo", with its half-hearted nod to lesser fare from Strings, is the least of the album's four songs, although I stress that the variance is -- by design -- not large here. This is not an album to pick tracks from, but one that will either work for you as a whole -- or won't. It's worth checking out because it's interesting, which is more than I can say for most of what is out there at the moment.

DVD Review: Vettaiyaadu Vilayaadu (Tamil; 2006)

Qalandar — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:00:05 EST

Vettaiyaadu Vilayaadu is really two films: the first of these (roughly the first half) is a taut detective story, seamlessly merging the script and director Gautam Menon's technically slick vision, while also doing justice to a parallel budding friendship and romance between DCP Raghavan (Kamal Haasan) and Maya (Jyotika). The two are neighbors at a New York hotel where Raghavan has landed up to continue a murder investigation begun back in India; it is rare indeed to find such an "adult" representation of a man-woman relationship in a mainstream Indian film.

And if the masala fan in me was none too thrilled at seeing a film so very Hollywood (and hence, broadly, derivative), I was nevertheless enthralled by Menon's control. Note to mention by Kamal Haasan's excellent articulation of a middle-aged, low key cop (low key, that is, barring the somewhat incongruous opening sequence, wherein Raghavan beats the crap out of an entire gang all by his lonesome), one tormented by his failure to save his late wife from criminals eight years ago, and anguished by the brutal rape and murder of his best friend's daughter.

Unfortunately, the second film, which begins when the killers are introduced, is a crude, lurid crapfest of a movie, involving much yelling, pointless plot developments, and rather sordid violence against women. The result is that Vettaiyaadu Vilayaadu is one confused movie, its two halves never quite gelling into anything coherent.

I couldn't shake the impression (confirmed by Menon's recent interview with Baradwaj Rangan) that Menon felt he had to compromise on his vision in order to make a commercially safe film. One wonders if he went too far: certainly Menon's previous film -- Kaaka Kaaka -- was very successful, and that "episode in a police officer's life" did not have the acrid smell of blatant compromise so thick about it.

Overall, I would say that the film is worth watching more for Kamal's performance than anything else. Vettaiyaadu Vilayaadu confirms my impression that he is best in relatively understated roles. Doubtless, within the parameters of mainstream cinema Kamal certainly has one here, and he handles it with authority laced with the odd vulnerable moment.

The latter highlighting the fact that although the film may have begun on an "overman" note, DCP Raghavan is no larger-than-life mangod. More pity, then, that Menon did not stay true to his vision: either an out-and-out masala film, or a relatively realistic policier, would have been preferable to this mish-mash, which cannot but impinge on Raghavan's characterization in all sorts of unfortunate ways.

Kamal and Jyotika make for a good pair, and are that rarest of things, namely a mature couple playing characters close to their real ages. In the film's first half their interludes highlight the grey nature of the world Raghavan and Maya inhabit; in the second half one is relieved to get some reprieve from the baddies.

A word on the songs: Harris Jayaraj's music is better than some of his recent (disappointing) fare, though the videos are uniformly disappointing (it is especially difficult to forgive Menon his lame conceptualization of "Paartha Mudhal").

All in all, this is a disappointing outing for Menon as far as I am concerned, and only Kamal fans will be sad to miss this one.

Rahmania!

Qalandar — Mon, 1 Jan 2007 07:20:26 EST

I had never listened to a Tamil song when I walked into a Tower Records store on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the summer of 2002 -- not because I didn't want to but because the thought that this was something I might enjoy doing had never occurred to me.

Tamil film songs -- and more generally, Tamil or any other "regional" cinema -- were simply invisible to me. More broadly, Indian films and the music associated with them were pretty invisible in New York, patronised almost exclusively by the city's large desi population, itself segmented into audiences for one's "own" language. The "India" section of the "World Music" category at mainstream music stores and chains like Tower Records or Virgin consisted of the usual suspects: Zakir Hussain, Ravi Shankar, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (often misclassified with Middle Eastern music), and other assorted classical musicians. One might also have found various lounge and club refugees, straddling the border between ambient music and traditional song, the "world" part of their music consisting of allegiance to a global -- and often rather generic -- club/lounge musical culture.

Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but what was unusual about this trip to my neighbourhood Tower Records store was that the "India" section included an album called Mondo India -- AR Rahman. Clearly designed for an audience unfamiliar with Indian film music, and with explanatory liner notes, the CD contained about ten Rahman songs -- from Tamil films like Sangamam, Iruvar, Alai Payuthey, Thenali, and the odd Hindi song from Zubeidaa. Needless to say I bought the CD, and the sounds in my apartment have never been the same, bearing witness to a continuing love affair with Tamil (and Malayalam, and to a limited extent Telugu) cinema and its music, by now encompassing not only every Rahman album in whatever language, but also the work of other contemporary composers, such as Yuvan Shankar Raja, Harris Jayaraj, Devi Sri Prasad, and of course the ageless grand-daddy of them all, Ilaiyaraja.

But it's worth returning to the thought that first struck me when "Varaga Nathi" from Sangamam started playing: how could this music possibly be heard across cultural barriers? Or more accurately: what about this music rendered it accessible not only to Hindi and Urdu-speakers like me but to people who had never heard a film song, let alone ones in languages they didn't understand? It is often noted that Rahman's strengths are great orchestration and outstanding production values, almost as if his technical wizardry were somewhat of an interloper in the realm of "pure" film music. But the truth of the observation about Rahman's technical wizardry, far from diminishing the extent of his achievement, highlights it. For Rahman took what was essentially a tunefying art, traditionally dependent upon legendary vocalists like Rafi, Yesudas, Mukesh, Kishore, Lata, Asha, S. Janaki and others to imbue a pleasing tune with musical unforgettability, and in his best work transformed it into a piece.

That is to say, Rahman saw himself -- perhaps always but doubtless increasingly so from the mid-1990s onward -- not as a creator of songs but as a maker of music. The songs shaded into soundscapes, and the characteristic multi-layered feel rendered the best of them susceptible to a sort of auditory archaeology: each layer possessed its own musical logic and instrumentation, and the net effect was a smorgasbord of sound. If the above sounds like something one might say for a classical or other "high brow" musician rather than the guy who gets Vasundhara Das to croon so sexily in "Hey Hey Enna Aachi" from Kaadal Virus, it is so by design. For Rahman is no "mere" purveyor of songs -- and not because there is anything slight or trivial about Indian culture's vast heritage of popular, film or folk songs -- but because, by this late date, "tunefication" is played out, perhaps exhausted, but certainly brought to its logical conclusion by Rahman's illustrious predecessors. Faced with the prospect of mere repetition and replication of a great tradition, it is not surprising that Rahman chose to adopt a different path.

The primacy of "music" over "song" goes a long way toward explaining Rahman's growing acclaim among far-flung audiences. Some have posited a Western sensibility on Rahman's part -- at odds with some imagined Indianness -- but it would be fairer to say that Rahman's focus on a musically "total" experience straddles the (always problematic) divide between "high-brow" and "popular" music. The latter is far more likely to be culturally specific, inaccessible to those who are unfamiliar with the language or cultural context; the pleasures of the former are more difficult, but at the same time the combination of musical virtuosity and the comprehensive nature of the experience offered is impressionistically appealing, even to those (like me) who have no firm grounding in classical music. It is thus no surprise that Indian classical musicians have acquired a far more substantial audience in the West than Bollywood music ever has. (Bollywood's recent profile in the West is partly a result of people like Rahman, and cannot meaningfully be said to be a cause of Rahman's growing, albeit niche, appeal.) The qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is an even better example of a difficult yet holistic -- and utterly compelling -- musical form in rhythmic sync with contemporary tastes beyond just those of "native" audiences. Rahman partakes of this ethos, and while he is not the first of India's popular composers to do this -- R.D. Burman comes to mind, and also Ilaiyaraja -- he is the most consistently devoted to it.

And then there is the question of Rahman's cosmopolitanism -- the open texture of his music, inviting in newer ears rather than shutting them out. He is truly a "world" musician, but minus the banality -- devoid of personality -- that the term implies. This catholicity itself shows that he has imbibed an awful lot, indeed more than from any other source, from the traditions of Indian popular (especially film) music, which have always been open to sounds, beats and tropes from all over the world. And in fact I would go so far as to say that "open" is too closed, too definitive a word -- in that it purports to demarcate cleanly an inside and an outside -- given that what we have is a process of creative appropriation, whereby that which might once have been imagined as foreign ends up being the ne plus ultra of Indianness.
Rahman encapsulates this tendency nicely, though his technical virtuosity, his facility for "clean" sounds combined with raw and distinctive vocal medleys, puts him in a class apart. He ranges effortlessly through qawwali (filmi ones, as in "Noor-un-Aala" from Meenaxi, but also Arabicised ones, as in "Zikr" from Bose), neo-classical mélanges (as in the song "Alai Payuthey" from the film of the same name, or in certain tracks from Sangamam; add "Chhodo Mori Baiyyan" from Zubeidaa and it is clear that Hindustani or Carnatic, all are equally grist for his mill), folk (the rest of the songs in the amazingly rich Sangamam), lyrical ballads ("Ye Jo Des Hai Tera" from Swades), transcendent genre-benders (such as "Anaarkali" in Kangalal Kaidhu Sei; a remixed version of "Chaiyya Chaiyya" from Dil Se opens the proceedings in Spike Lee's The Inside Man), instrumentals (Rahman's haunting Bombay instrumental recently showed up in the Hollywood film Lord of War), the melodious (just about anything in Karuthamma), the singular (the unforgettable "Raasaathi" from Thiruda Thiruda, and more urgently -- but less radically -- the "Mangal Mangal" triptych from Mangal Pandey, the album itself a primer on masala music), the exotic ("Mayya Mayya" from Guru), the pop ("Vande Mataram" from the album of the same name), the frankly foreign (Warriors of Heaven and Earth), heck even un peu de Mozart (midway through "Veerapandi Kottayilae" from Thiruda Thiruda).

Just about everyone may find something recognisable in Rahman's music, a hook to latch on to, and it is hard not to attribute at least some part of Rahman's popularity to his alchemist's ability to take what we already know -- or think we do -- and transmute it into something rich and strange. And there's a recording studio analogue to this too: Rahman loves to take singers "out" of their comfort zone (for instance, by using Hindi/Urdu singers like Udit Narayan and Adnan Sami in Tamil songs for films like Ratchagan, Boys and Aayitha Ezhuthu; and equally by having several Tamil singers sing in Hindi). Be it in the sounds or in Rahman's choice of vocalists, if the man has a musical schema, it is to hold up a mirror -- in which one beholds oneself in the image of another, not oneself so much as another.

Film Review: Thalapathi (1991)

Qalandar — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:44:55 EST

It begins in black and white, at Bogi, the festival where folks throw out their old and unwanted trash; and this Bogi, after being shunned by the community and giving birth in the forest, a thirteen or fourteen-year old girl is going to abandon her newborn son like so much kuppa (trash), placing him on a cargo train bound for the city. The baby is ultimately found by an old woman on the riverbank, the setting framed by the wreckage of industrialization, modernity's eerie intrusion into this self-consciously mythic landscape. We don't need to see this baby grown up to know who he will be: Rajnikanth.

Thalapathi is an often overlooked Ratnam film, following Nayakan by a few years and still some time away from Ratnam's undoubted magnum opus, Iruvar. Certainly it is not as thoughtful or provocative as Iruvar, nor as forceful as Nayakan, nor even as visually poetic as some of the later Ratnam. It is, to my mind, nothing other than an out-and-out masala film, a mode Ratnam has become increasingly reluctant to indulge with the years, an unfortunate casualty of the "serious filmmaker" tag that is inescapably part of his image today (that he has not forgotten how to make such a film is evidenced by Alai Payuthey, flashes of which may be gleaned even from the hopelessly overmatched Hindi remake Saathiya).

And what a masala film Thalapathi is! In the space of two-and-a-half hours Ratnam touches upon all the principal themes that have traditionally formed the grist for the Indian commercial cinema mill: family, identity, love, belonging, friendship, crime, justice, villainy -- and oh yes, songs. And dances. And a grand spectacle of a video as well (but more on that at the end of this review). All of which adds up to a movie on a grand scale, befitting a cast that boasts of Rajnikanth and Mammoothy as the two pillars holding the film up.

Surya (Rajnikanth) is the Thalapathi ("General") of the title, the foundling having grown up to become a general do-gooder and beat 'em up kinda guy; a run in with a well-connected lackey brings him into conflict with said lackey's boss, the underworld don Devaraj (Mammoothy), who recognizes the justice of Surya's actions and bails him out of jail (where he has been languishing on a murder charge). The friendless Surya develops an intense affection for the man who has helped him (even if he was the one who had Surya jailed in the first place), and Devaraj in turn sees in Surya a combination of right-hand man and brother. The combination of Surya's wild fearlessness and Devaraj's stolid strength is irresistible, and in short order Devaraj and his General rule the roost in their town, meting out justice as they see fit. And if this state of affairs ruffles the feathers of Devaraj's arch-enemy Kalivardhan (Amrish Puri, speaking in an impostor's dubbed voice), that's just too bad.

Which brings us to Arjun (Arvind Swamy, as inert as ever), the IAS officer posted to Devaraj's town and determined to clean it up. No prizes for guessing that Arjun's mother, Kalyani (Srividya), is perennially weepy because her long lost son is none other than the Surya whom Ratnam and his sensational cinematographer regularly frame against the rising sun. But there's also an unexpected twist when Surya's lover Subbulaxmi (Shobana) is married off by her orthodox Brahmin father to Arjun (can't really blame her dad; in the eligibility stakes, IAS officer wins over basti rowdy everytime). By film's end, the truth about Surya is revealed, even if at the cost of Devaraj's death. Kalivardhan is responsible for the latter, which makes Surya very unhappy -- and Kalivardhan very dead.

Thalapathi is visually so superb so often, so unsurpassed by anything in Ratnam's oeuvre not named Iruvar or perhaps Kannathil Muthamittal, that Ratnam really should have had a better script; in particular, Ratnam's intense focus on the familial angle means that Amrish Puri is rather wasted here, and this anti-social viewer would certainly have liked to have seen more ass-whupping by the combined forces of Mammoothy and Rajni.

But all that pales into insignificance when one re-visits the film's opening, one of my favorite in all Indian cinema: in sparse yet paradoxically luxuriant black and white sequences, a woman pours water over her husband, interrupting his bath long enough to callously turn away the young girl racked with labor pains at her doorstep (she isn't married, you see). The scene then shifts to a forest, and the serene camera movement, placid bullock, and remarkable interplay of sunlight and foliage (still in black and white), construct a setting that I can only call magical. Yet this is no fairyland: Ratnam does not allow the viewer the luxury of tranquility as the girl's cries of agony serve as the soundtrack to this scene, ultimately replaced by the newborn baby's bawling. It is at once the oldest trick in the Indian film book of melodrama, yet transmuted by virtue of Ratnam's and cinematographer Santosh Sivan's alchemy into cinematic gold.

One could go on: I mentioned the scene where the baby Surya is found at the outset of this review; and no discussion of the visuals of Thalapathi could be complete without mention of the first meeting between Surya and Devaraj: as in the former's (adult) entry-scene, rain pours down, so thick and straight it appears as the stuff of myth, seeking not to wet our heroes but to batter them. That Devaraj's clothes remain pristine white in the midst of all this is a wonder, starched lungi and kurta as will to power, and symptomatic of a man who is nothing if not in command.

Devaraj is kept dry by an umbrella, the traditional symbol of Hindu kingship (especially prominent during Tamil Nadu's Nayaka period, though hardly exclusive to the latter). That is, the chatrapati, the holder of the umbrella, is the earthly king; and the chatri is held for the "real" monarch, Lord Vishnu himself. The question of Ratnam's umbrella motif is a complicated one, and in some of its later manifestations -- such as in Iruvar or on the Guru poster -- the "overman" figure faces a crowd of umbrella-wielders, perhaps fitting given that in a democracy it is the people who are supposed to wield earthly power, but equally reminding us that the "real" signified is the "overman" figure for whom the umbrellas are held. In Kannathil Muthamittal "The Umbrella" is the title of a story written by an "Indra", and although the latter is the name of the king of the Vedic deities it is clear that in this story within the film, the umbrella is a symbol not of power but of the powerlessness of the refugees from Sri Lanka, who have no shelter (or none but that which Indra -- who takes the orphan refugee baby into his, or even "her" given Indra is both the author's pen name and his wife's real one, home -- can provide).

In Thalapathi, however, the usage is more conventional, and on my reading enables Ratnam to pay cinematic homage to two of India's greatest cinematic icons: the "real" signified is Mammoothy, who as Devaraj is the actual monarch in the film; and the one who may be said to hold his umbrella is the earthly Thalaivar ("Leader", a term used for Rajni, and possibly contemporary Tamil cinema's most famous honorific). Yet there is also an inversion of significance: the Thalaivar, Devaraj's second-in-command, is also Surya (the sun), a deity in himself, perhaps even reminiscent of the divine Krishna, Arjuna's charioteer in The Mahabharata (in the film Surya tells his wife's daughter that his mother abandoned him because he wasn't fair, evocative of the figure of Krishna -- whose name is Sanskrit for "black" -- also brought up by a woman not his mother), thus making of Surya a "real" signified of sorts too. No surprises: this is, of course, Rajni's Tamil Nadu.

Ratnam's much-noted penchant for duos finds extreme expression in this film: Surya is at the center of two overlapping -- and conflicting -- pairs, Devaraj and Surya on the one hand, and Arjun and Surya on the other. The former is bound by affection, the latter by blood. And there's more: Kalyani's sons are fathered by two different men, Subbulaxmi loves one brother but is married to another, and Surya himself is his wife's second husband, and her daughter's second father, her first one having been killed by Surya himself. If it is true that in Ratnam's world whereever there is one there are two, each one inextricably bound and yet implacably opposed to the other, nowhere is that truer than in Thalapathi (except perhaps in the disappointing Agni Natchathiram)

In a film featuring two icons of the magnitude of Mammoothy and Rajnikanth, it seems odd to think of anyone else as the star of the show, but Santosh Sivan comes close, articulating Ratnam's vision with a highly stylized aesthetic that, although not always evenly brilliant, at its best moments might yet remain the benchmark for mainstream Indian cinema. The Ratnam/Sivan achievement is wonderful, and always utterly rooted in the film (in contrast to the more intrusive, even if impressive, efforts of Bhansali/Ravi Chandran in Black, for instance); the best compliment I can think of is to assert that not even the greater art of Iruvar can render the achievement in Thalapathi superfluous.

Mammoothy is superb as Devaraj, essaying a potentially hackneyed role with great dignity and authority, although he doesn't have much of significance to do in the film's second half; indeed it would be no exaggeration to say that most of his best moments come early on in the film, culminating in a wrenching blood-soaked battle with Kalivardhan's goons where Mammoothy's character is outnumbered perhaps ten to one, yet -- hacked, chopped, and stabbed seemingly dozens of times -- lives (albeit barely) to tell the tale. This action sequence is the most intense in the film, yet Ratnam somewhat unsatisfyingly truncates this, almost as if he were trying very hard not to let Thalapathi become an action film. Darn it Mani, you can't keep a good sickle out...

Rajni is, well, Rajni, that is to say he has that rarest of luxuries in that he never needs to be anything more or other than Rajni. To speak of someone acting "better" than Rajni almost makes no sense, so irrelevant is acting of the sort that a Mammoothy is capable of to the effect Rajni evokes and thrives on. The Thalaivar is not really a bad actor based on my limited experience with his work; he just seems to leave that sort of thing to mere mortals.

A masala movie needs worthy songs, at least one of which must be rollicking -- and it doesn't get much better (even if you are Ilaiyaraja) than Raakamma: has there ever been a catchier song? The unusual Kattukuyulu is no slouch either, and is aptly picturized on the two male leads at the heart of Thalapathi; but it is Soundari with which I conclude, simply because it is one of the finest Ratnam song videos ever, in its magisterial sweep taking in the stereotypical lovelorn girl as well as the larger-than-life iconography of Rajnikanth, all by means of an overt homage to Kurosawa's samurai cinema. The video moves between the ever-sweet looking Shobana and recurring battlefield settings without missing a beat, as if to announce Ratnam's command over both registers, the intimate and the epic. For such cinematic ambition, much may be forgiven.

Indian Pluralism and Its Discontents

Qalandar — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:22:47 EST

I have long argued that many of the most overt political problems facing India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh today are the result of the partition of 1947, a result, that is to say, of the metaphysical bases and assumptions underlying that partition. Paradoxically, however, most "peace-oriented" political discourse in the region tends to focus on forgetting the past, almost as if we were afraid that we know of no other mode of historical examination and re-examination other than recrimination.

Mukul Kesavan's recent piece in The Telegraph is a refreshing exception (even if I suspect I would fall into the category of the sorts of paranoid domino-theorists that Kesavan talks about). Kesavan does cite a prescriptive purpose, stating that one way to tackle the problem of the Indian state's failure to confront secessionist demands except within the framework of violent confrontation, is to be aware of and ponder the basis of Indian nationalism as set forth in that article, but it's unclear how that would end any violence. Who, for instance, would draw the lesson? That is, if one were a Kashmiri who is (like most Kashmiris I suspect) disaffected and none too thrilled about the state remaining part of India, is the realistic lesson to be drawn that India simply won't "let go" of Kashmir? That's certainly the lesson I submit one ought to draw, and that making the best of it in a pluralistic state isn't such a bad deal, but I doubt that's what Kesavan means.

The above notwithstanding, and as I've previously argued, the sort of analysis Kesavan undertakes remains an indispensable starting point for any understanding of the nature of Indian nationalism and of the state birthed by that nationalism. Of particular interest is Kesavan's insight that the Indian state's pluralism is (inextricably?) linked to the repressive means it has resorted to in the face of violent secessionist movements in Kashmir and in the North-East. In other words, given the partition of 1947 -- which irreducibly raises the specter of a "Hindu country" as a counterpoint to and mirror image of the "Muslim country" created by the partition -- India cannot be pluralist unless it is (to use Kesavan's term) "dogmatic" about its borders. In short, Kesavan to his credit squarely appreciates the logic of 1947, raising the discomfiting possibility that India's commitment to pluralism in a post-partition context might pre-dispose it to confronting secessionist demands with violence (and I'd add that the partition of 1947 might pre-dispose it to being presented with secessionist demands in the first place; if as Sunil Khilnani put it the "pornography of borders" characterizes post-colonial identity politics, the results of 1947 are surely the ultimate titillation):

The history of republican India is the history of a state which, when pushed, will recognize every sort of identity -- linguistic, tribal even religious -- for the sake of pluralist equilibrium and political peace. You can see this happen in the formation of linguistic states, in the creation of a Muslim majority district in Kerala, in the segmentation of the North-east into tiny states. But when it comes to its borders, India is dogmatically, even violently status quoist. It will deface every map that shows Kashmir with its ears missing, it will defend a glacier down to the last soldier, it will go to war with China (and endure humiliating defeat) in defence of a colonial border and it will inflict sickening violence upon insurgent nationalists in the north-eastern states. Every secessionist movement and every disputed border is, for this insecure heir to the Raj, a domino. Committed to the principle that the diversity of the subcontinent can be housed within a democratic state, it will let no one leave home.

Not to mention that the intellectual failure of Indian politics -- even (especially?) "progressive" politics -- to invoke the spirit of pluralism, heck to consciously think the thought that is pluralism, so wedded are its practitioners to the chimera of "secularism", is dismaying (and it raises the question whether the problem might not be that Indian pluralism is merely reflexive and not the content of a deliberate political ideology for any except a handful, remaining primarily a cultural instinct as opposed to an idea):

A subcontinental nation with inherited borders that refused to invoke a homogenizing essence to justify its nationhood was always going to feel insecure about threats to its territorial integrity. This would have been true even if the Congress had achieved an unpartitioned India. The Raj had made its nationalism cohere by giving it a target: its departure in any circumstance would have left a vacuum behind. But in an India that had suffered the violence of Partition, and in a Congress whose reason for being had been challenged by the creation of Pakistan, a normal statist concern about secure borders flared into an existential anxiety about unity.

All in all, one is not sure what lesson the "Nehruvian nationalist" may draw from Kesavan's insight. It might be true that "[e]very secessionist movement and every disputed border is, for this insecure heir to the Raj, a domino," but, unlike for instance the Cold War American domino theory necessitating the defense of Vietnam, or the theory that made such a fetish of the supposed Arab regard for naked force that it posited regime after regime falling in the wake of the American-led invasion of Iraq, the theory has hardly been disproved in the case of India, and there is no reason to believe that it would not come true. Put another way, an India less committed to pluralism might find it easier to "give up" on Kashmir, but conversely, given its current political ideology (increasingly under strain by virtue of the rise of Hindutva over the last two decades, but not exhausted by any means), any India that found it "easy" to give up on Kashmir or parts of the North-East could not long maintain even the semblance of pluralism.

It isn't too hard to imagine an alternative history where the border mattered less: if partition had not happened, would India be so willing to spend blood and treasure to keep this or that North-Eastern sliver of territory within the Union? Maybe, but maybe not; certainly the departure of sliver x or y would not raise existensial concerns, would not have such fraught implications for the nature of the Indian polity. Paradoxically, the 1947 break-up of the country and subsequent Nehruvian "settlement" in favor of, what is often passed off as "secularism" but is really anything but, and is really in many ways one of the twentieth century's great experiments in, pluralism, seems to have put subsequent negotiations that go to the borders of the post-1947 state "off limits" (which in turn negatively impacts Indian pluralism). I don't see how it could be otherwise, but I firmly believe that any analysis that does not ponder the implications of India's 1947 settlement for its future course as a polity, cannot be called realistic.

[Check out my blog post for interesting responses by Kesavan himself, as well as Satyam and Nitin].

Movie Review: What Nayakan Means To Me

Qalandar — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 10:41:44 EST

Some films are impossible to review in themselves: such is their impact, so thorough their influence, that when one re-visits them, even if after a deliberately long lapse of time, one is unable to view them afresh, for in them the film as it must have been back when it was released is only dimly discernible, and the prism of the film's history and what it has come to mean almost the only vantage point that affords a view any longer. Almost. For the great film (like the great book, painting, or any other work of art) is not merely reducible to the history of its reception, even if it is inextricable from it.

Mani Ratnam's Nayakan (Tamil; 1987) is such a film, and it would be no exaggeration to cite it as the one Tamil film that even Indians who have never seen any Tamil film are likely to have heard of. Yet its status as one of the seminal works of Indian popular cinema rests on more than this, on more than the fact that it was commercially successful or that the film arguably represents the high point in the storied career of its lead actor, Kamal Haasan, on more even than the sort of acclaim that saw it win a place in Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss' list of the 100 greatest movies ever. Nayakan deserves its place in the annals of Indian film history because it changed what we came to expect from our movies, and thus in time came to change how movies were made. Whether the industry is Hindi, Telugu, or Tamil, the film Parinda, Pattiyal or Company, the director Mukul Anand, Mahesh Manjrekar, or Ram Gopal Verma, the representation of crime and criminality (and the problematic glamorisation of the same), of the life and death associated with India's mean streets, heck of Mumbai itself, that by now has come to seem normal to us in Indian film, is unimaginable without Nayakan.

Underneath it all is the story of Velu Naicker (Kamal Haasan) - rumoured to be modeled after the legendary Tamil Mumbai don (and folk hero to "his own") Varadarajan - who while yet a boy kills the policeman who has murdered Velu's trade unionist father and flees to Bombay, in time becoming a basti hero in Dharavi and ultimately an underworld don. Along the way the police kill his foster father, rival gangsters his wife, a criminal mishap his son, not to mention that his daughter ends up appalled at and alienated from his worldview. The film ends as all Indian gangster films after Deewar must, with the death of Velu himself, shot by the retarded son of the first man Velu killed in Mumbai. In the end, Velu's karma catches up with him.

Nayakan is not an especially profound film, and does not to my mind offer any new insight into the nature of power or of criminality; as in Bombay from a few years later, Ratnam's politics are fairly conventional (that is to say genteel bourgeois), and certainly nothing in this film matches the visionary cinematic mode of Iruvar a decade later (still the best Indian film from the last twenty years that I have seen). But in the context of Indian cinema Nayakan is the more important and influential film, and rests on a number of assumptions that have irrevocably marked Hindi and Tamil cinema, mostly for better (though, in the hands of unthinking filmmakers, also for worse). The most important of these is the refusal to condescend to the viewer, and for the film to at all points take its audience's intelligence for granted. In practice this meant that not every detail of the inner life of Nayakan's characters needed to be spelled out, leading to a more suggestive, more nuanced way of filmmaking for those who have followed Ratnam's lead. Obviously not everyone has (and I certainly don't mean to suggest that everyone should), but it would be no exaggeration to suggest that the majority of the more intelligent popular films have tended to appreciate the virtues of this approach over the last two decades.

A second and related feature was Ratnam's insistence on making a film that could be very Indian, very rooted, without necessarily hewing to a formula. Thus Nayakan has no parallel comedy track, and no hero/heroine song and dance sequences. And that's not because Ratnam was embarrassed by his cinematic heritage, far from it: Nayakan has a number of songs, but most of them are superbly situational, and are inescapably part of the experience of watching this film. Songs are one of the singular pleasures of mainstream Indian cinema, and Ratnam accords them the respect that is due by ensuring that in Nayakan they do not seem forced into the narrative. The lesson has not always been learned well (witness the recent Pokiri or Dhoom 2) but it has been learned by many, and by filmmakers as diverse as Bala, the Rakeysh Mehra of Rang de Basanti, the Ashutosh Gowariker of Lagaan, not to mention the usual suspects like Manjrekar, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and even Ram Gopal Verma on occasion(ironically, the later Ratnam's excellence at song videos has been similarly, though often unfortunately, influential, leading many a director and viewer to conceptualize songs as breaks in, and hence removed from, the film of which they are part, something that no Ratnam film I have seen is guilty of, barring Agni Natchathiram, although no doubt in the later Ratnam the songs often become more abstract than the film around them). This too is part of the filmmaker's respect for the audience, in that "the people" are to be conceptualized democratically, as thinking beings who may be counted on to appreciate a film on its merits, not a mass who will simply react to stimuli presented according to a certain formula. The Nayakan way certainly doesn't guarantee commercial success (the film was a hit, but many of Ratnam's subsequent films have not fared well at the box office), but it does lead to more engaged viewers (and in any event I would argue that the surprising degree of success achieved by a Raja Hindustani or Pokiri or Dhoom 2 suggests that something other than formulaic repetition is at work, since mere repetition is inconsistent with such exceptional success).

No discussion of Nayakan would be complete without a word about Kamal Haasan's performance, which is both one of the most overrated performances in Indian history and at the same time nothing less than a superb and ineffably memorable showing by Kamal Haasan. Haasan - who deservedly won a National Award for his role here - cannot be taken to task for the former, and acquits himself faultlessly when it comes to what he was responsible for, namely incarnating a Velu Naicker that would be true to Ratnam's vision. The result is one of Indian popular cinema's most iconic performances, and a perennially fashionable one if the slew of post-Nayakan "down home" gangsters housed in "ordinary" homes and in "regular" clothes is anything to go by. And this is about more than "ethnic chic", reflecting as it does a democratic India where power -- political and street -- is increasingly being assumed by those once summarily dismissed as "vernacular."

Kamal's performance may be divided in two, but not necessarily by Velu's age. Rather, I see Velu prior to his coronation as different from the later Velu, the former's combination of sullenness and naivete having given way to an unshakable confidence and resolve. The former is impressive (one can see more than a few traces of it in Madhavan's own wonderful performance as the "bigtime" writer early on in Kannathil Muthamittal), but it is the latter - showy, obvious, and oh-so-compelling - that makes the role for me. One might cavil that Kamal's performance lacks the nuance and refinement of Mohanlal's matchless turn in Iruvar (though who could?), but that ignores the fact that Velu is a far less complicated being than Anandam. Velu is a stubby, direct, and forthright man, one who traffics in brute facts more than anything else. And Kamal Haasan is perhaps the ideal actor to essay this role, of a man who simply does what he feels is right (a similar line crops up in Sarkar, in the context of which film it was a statement not of simplicity or correctness but of naked power, reflective of the different concerns of Ratnam and Ram Gopal Verma, respectively). Kamal fits in seamlessly with the relativism of Ratnam's vision: as the famous confrontation scene between Velu and his daughter makes clear, Ratnam is aware of the problematic nature of an ethical code that is purely personal, but he is equally aware that judgment can be presumptuous in the extreme given that who one is amounts to a great extent, in the final analysis, to what has happened to one. This scene is frankly reminiscent of one of the two famous "confrontations" between Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor in Deewar (there the third in the frame was their mother; in Nayakan it is Velu's friend and right-hand man Selva), but where the urgency of Bachchan's charisma and resentful claim draws the viewer firmly to his side, Ratnam and Kamal resolutely refuse to do so, making clear that they are not going to go down the Deewar way (perhaps because if one seeks to replicate that inimitable film as a formula, one might be left with the neo-fascist flirtations of Sarkar as the only real possibility). Velu is not wrong vis-a-vis his daughter Chaaramma, but he is not right either. Velu seems to realize this by film's end -- when his grandson asks him if he is "good" or "bad", his response is simply that he doesn't know -- and Ratnam seems to want his audience to realize it too, for in this film (and how radical this was in an Indian popular film!) it is childish to ask such questions.

Finally: Dharavi; that is, the set erected in Madras for Nayakan is one of the most impressive I have ever seen in any film, so vivid it fits in seamlessly with Ratnam's on-location shots of various Mumbai landmarks, the combination of the two so memorable that the city would never again be the same on celluloid, as attested to by Parinda, Satya, Company, and even Black Friday. Ratnam does not efface the ramshackle reality of the slum, but he is uncompromising in his insistence that beauty, song, life in the fullest sense, exist here too. He is aided in his efforts by a superb soundtrack by Ilaiyaraja, one that does not seem stale even two decades later, even for those who were first introduced to snippets of it in bastardized form in Firoz Khan's unfortunate remake Dayavan. The anonymous (to us) technicians and workers who constructed the set are among the true heroes of Nayakan, and while we will never know all of their names, Ratnam's incorporation of their work in -- indeed the centrality of their work to -- Nayakan is a permanent memorial to their efforts, and, like all else about this film, a great one.

Media Coverage of the Maharashtra Violence - Dalit Rage?

Qalandar — Thu, 7 Dec 2006 03:14:47 EST

Media coverage of the recent Dalit violence has been somewhat discomfiting for me (not the first time, I might add). Not because of a "pro-" or "anti-" this or that stance, but because of the media's relentless focus on how the violence constitutes a protest against (multiple) desecration(s) of statues of Ambedkar. In the mainstream media account, and distressingly in much of the Indian blogosphere as well, the violence has no history, and there is no context it need be placed in. A statue was desecrated, the narrative goes, and the Dalits are protesting.

The framing of such events, more accurately the politics that underly them, and is encoded in, the way in which Dalit rage is framed, deserves serious consideration. Let's not kid ourselves: if the debate is framed in terms of what Dalits have or have not done in response to vandalism of Ambedkar statues, the game is automatically rigged in favor of a finding that the "response" is out of proportion, and insanely so. The wider stakes are lost from view.

The necessity of attempting to understand stressed above is not to be confused with patronising "what else can they do" hand-wringing also in evidence from some in the media punditclass. Dalits are not animals, destined to react in this manner if the stimulus is the right one, and supposed "well wishers" should stop acting as if they are.

The question I keep coming back to is not what "they" are doing but what "we" have done such that this sort of violence seems like the only way Dalit "issues" can get on our (increasingly celebrity obsessed) front pages. And what is done here includes the configuration of a national polity in which certain demographics get to be "we", and others must peer from the outside in, needing to fight for every last scrap and seat at the table.

Amidst the general bankruptcy, Outlook carried a good piece on the violence. Although I don't endorse everything here (would be nice to get one piece about caste violence that does not mention "varna"), the author's approach is welcome, her tone searing and polemical -- as it should be.

Film Review: Black Friday (Hindi; 2004)

Qalandar — Tue, 5 Dec 2006 12:31:45 EST

The "plot" is, by now, known to all of us: on March 12, 1993 ten bombs went off in quick succession at prominent locations in Bombay, killing hundreds and injuring thousands, the latest in a series of calamities to hit a city still sullen in the aftermath of vicious communal violence and pogroms over the preceding few months. The blasts were the handiwork of Muslim criminals, masterminded by one of Dawood Ibrahim's lieutenants, "Tiger" Memon, and executed by assorted individuals, many of them petty criminals and victims of communal violence, all of them aggrieved by the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the ensuing communal violence, which in Bombay occurred in two waves, the second of which was little other than a pogrom against Muslims organized by the Shiv Sena and abetted by numerous elements in the state machinery, including the police, both by outright connivance and criminal indifference. Until September 11, 2001, the "Black Friday" blasts constituted quite simply the deadliest terrorist attack ever.

Director Anurag Kashyap's film (based on a book by journalist Husain Zaidi) isn't narrowly focused on any one aspect of the story, and jumps between the police investigation in the blasts' aftermath; the story of Badshah Khan (Aditya Srivastava), one of the perpetrators; and the "back story" leading up to March 12, 1993. The film thus has an episodic, even jerky, quality, regularly "returning" to a number of repetitive (and harrowing) police interrogation sequences presided over by Inspector Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay), who has been assigned the task of cracking the case. In short, if you're looking for a linear (or even coherent) plot, Black Friday is not the film for you.

And yet the film is nevertheless a remarkable triumph of ambience and tone: Kashyap draws the viewer so relentlessly into the world of the blasts accused and of the cops focused on nabbing them that the dominant experience of watching this film is claustrophobia (though Kashyap's vision seems downright uninteresting in the sequences set outside Bombay, including in a caricature of a terrorist training camp). Kashyap achieves his Bombay-centric claustrophobia by means of a disturbing "neutrality" that puts his film at the frontier where films meet documentaries. One tells oneself that this couldn't really be a documentary, that no-one really is privy to (for instance) Dawood Ibrahim's conversations with "Tiger" Memon -- but it doesn't matter, as Kashyap's vision wears the viewer down, until the latter simply accepts the film, not just as film but as "truth." Simultaneously, Kashyap disorients the viewer by refusing to pass judgment, either on any of the accused (thereby enabling the "backstory" of the blasts and the motivations of the plotters to stand on their own terms) or on the cops (and the methods utilized by them) on their trail. The result of such commitment to a matter-of-fact tone is a deeply psychotic film, one in which the actions of both policemen and terrorists ultimately come to appear -- shockingly -- "normal."

But Black Friday is far from being a morally relativist work, bookended as it is by a quote of Mahatma Gandhi: "An eye for an eye makes the world go blind." The quote clues us into the fact that for Kashyap the blasts are not merely a singular event, Big Bang as it were, but are the product of a history, forming part of a tit-for-tat cycle of violence in which the blasts themselves are hardly the last word ("Bombay is now Mumbai" the film drily notes at the end, perhaps mocking the naivete of the likes of "Tiger" Memon, who believed that the blasts offered a permanent "solution" to the problem of anti-Muslim violence; surely the state's utter failure to control either the communal violence in Maharashtra or to demonstrate its competence in tackling terrorism played a crucial role in the rise of the Shiv-Sena/BJP combine to power in the state; one of the new dispensation's symbolically most powerful acts was the renaming of Bombay). Gandhi, it turns out, was wiser. Kashyap approaches the mentality that believes violence is the answer with the mindset of a Newtonian physicist: in his view violence will beget equal and "opposite" violence, in an unendingly grim spiral to hell. There can be no solution, indeed there is no way for the film to offer a programmatic antidote without crossing the line into farce, and a deeply offensive one at that. Kashyap pays his audience the respect it is owed, and does not offer any: he simply offers his violence equation to the audience, and lets it percolate once the film is over.

Black Friday ] can be highly offensive, not because of its language or frank depictions of police brutality, but because Kashyap's refusal to take sides means that the police and D-company all end up in the same boat, as mirror images of each other (I repeat, not because Kashyap is a moral relativist but because he sees both sorts of violence as feeding off of, and magnifying, each other). That's disorienting and deeply upsetting, but in the context of this film amounts to a compulsive viewing experience, a train wreck from which one cannot avert one's eyes.

Film Review: Athadu (Telugu - 2005)

Qalandar — Tue, 5 Dec 2006 10:20:39 EST

From the very first frame of Athadu it is apparent that Trivikram Srinivas is a promising director. Not because of his urban slickness, often reminiscent of Ram Gopal Verma and Mani Ratnam, but because of his harnessing of the idiom of contemporary mainstream Indian cinema in the service of an old-school "massy" actioner. Thus Nandu (Mahesh Babu) is depicted in the film's first song as a modern day Narsimha -- except he's a ruthless contract killer. And unlike in Pokiri, he's really not a very nice guy, Trivikram's relatively laconic style of film making etching a deadpan, "minimalist" sort of Mahesh Babu, one who is glamorous according to the best conventions of this sort of film, but disturbing nonetheless. The back story is even more powerful, as the film's opening sequences (among the most memorable in recent times, and which in themselves make checking Athadu out worth one's while) introduce the viewer to a desolate Vijaywada setting, where the mere act of stopping at a tea stall in the rain can be fatal, before taking off through a gang initiation (and baptism by fire) of the young boy who has fled Vijaywada for the streets of Hyderabad, and then to a contract killing in the heart of Hyderabad's Old City that culminates in a thrilling chase. The object of the chase is Nandu, now all grown up, and even before the background song begins we know that the nods to Verma's "urban grit" school of visuals are merely means for Trivikram to reinterpret and reinvent the "overman" persona using a new and technically sophisticated idiom. And more power to him: Ram Gopal Verma's work is only rarely as watchable as Athadu, which in slickness and technical finesse stands shoulder to shoulder with much of the best that Hindi and Tamil cinema have to offer.

The plot is engaging enough: opposition leader Siva Reddy (Sayaji Shinde), facing the prospect of yet another election defeat at the hands of the Chief Minister, decides to stage his own assassination attempt, gambling that the resulting sympathy wave will help him in the elections. The venue is to be an election rally (captured by Trivikram with great vividness), and the instrument Nandu himself, for the best in the business is required for an operation so delicate. But -- can you see this coming? -- things go horribly wrong: in a wonderfully exciting sequence, just as Nandu is about to pull the trigger, Siva Reddy is shot dead, and mayhem ensues. Nandu is now on the run, having leaped on to a moving train from the building from where he was supposed to shoot Siva Reddy, with the police in hot pursuit. On the train Nandu meets Parthu (Rajeev Kanakala), returning to his village twelve years after having run away from it as a boy. One thing leads to another, and when Parthu is felled by a police bullet intended for Nandu, the latter shows up in Parthu's village and home, as Parthu himself. Parthu's family takes an instant liking to Nandu, from the resident patriarch Sathyanarayanamurthy (Nasser) all the way down to the children of the house.

On the surface the hardworking Parthu and the ruthless Nandu can have little in common, but in a suggestive vignette we are informed that Parthu ran away because he had unwittingly caused the death of another boy; although Trivikram does not explore this angle as much as I would have liked, he does enough to underscore the symbolic and mythic richness that Indian cinema is heir to (richness that far too many filmmakers are in the process of reflexively discarding in the pursuit of the "deracinated" banality of films like Don -- The Chase Begins Again or Dhoom 2): Parthu's karma has come full circle, unwitting victim as he was once unwitting killer; simultaneously he is also the scapegoat, in symbolic terms paying with his life for the sins of another. Of course, the scapegoat is always one who dies in the place of someone else, that is, one who dies so that someone else might live, and it is thus fitting that Parthu has died so that his "double", the man who would take his place in his own life, can live. Somewhat discomfiting? You bet, as all tales about "doubles" invariably are, reminding one of the arbitrariness of identity. But there's more: one's destiny is provisional -- given the ease with which one's place can be taken -- but also pitiless. For when one comes face to face with one's double, one of the two must die, an artistic representation of the necessity that the "real" truth (who one "is" may not be taken for granted) be repressed in favor of a cathartic and ultimately comforting fiction (there is only going to be "one" me, even if the last man standing might not really be "me"). This, loosely speaking, is the terrain of Dushman (even if Rajesh Khanna couldn't quite pull it off in the face of Meena Kumari's brilliance), of Don (where the doubling is literal), of Le Retour de Martin Guerre (and of its hapless Hollywood remake Sommersby), and of The Great Gambler (involving a doubling so perverse that on more than one occasion the audience couldn't tell which Bachchan was which; both doubles live at film's end, and one might see this comforting resolution as an attempt to evade the doppelganger myth by means of a "brother myth" -- both Bachchans are long-lost identical twins -- although the added baggage put more strain on the schema than it could comfortably bear). And this is the symbolic terrain of Athadu as well.

Unquestionably, Trivikram's slickness deserts him somewhat once Athadu shifts to the rural "family film" setting, with its by-now usual tropes of puerile female characters indistinguishable from one film to another (this one's female lead is Poori (Trisha Krishnan)) and gratuitous sexism. I found this segment of the film rather flat, although it's insubstantiality prevented it from being seriously grating. To his credit Trivikram intersperses this sequence with fairly engaging snippets dealing with a CBI officer (the ubiquitous Prakashraj, in a likable fluid performance) and his investigation into the killing of Siva Reddy, as well as a few rousing action sequences involving Mahesh Babu taking on several goons all by his lonesome, first when they try and usurp some land belonging to Sathyanarayanamurthy (Trivikram's vision of uninviting flat agricultural land stretching out as far as the eye can see, serving as backdrop to Mahesh Babu's face-off with the land-grabbing Naidu and co., is reminiscent of a Western, and drives home the point that Trivikram's grasp over the masala action registers is inspired indeed), and second (to far lesser effect) when the goons attack Nandu/Parthu and Poori at a village festival. Ultimately however one is left with the impression that the film has lost its way amidst yet another cloying gharelu love story, and perhaps that was the price Trivikram had to pay to ensure that audiences got what they tend to look for in a "big" Mahesh Babu film. The action is ratcheted up several notches when the truth is out, as Nandu must get to the bottom of the mystery -- which he does, amidst a trail of gunshots, bodies, and (in a Face Off-inspired action sequence alternately outlandish and thrilling) a devastated church.

Credit is due to Mahesh Babu, in what is perhaps my favorite of his three "bigtime" roles (Okkadu and Pokiri being the other two; the latter is supposedly one of the biggest hits in Telugu history, although Athadu itself was no slouch, and by some accounts was the biggest hit of 2005, celebrating 100 days in at least one theater in no less than thirty-eight centers; the equivalent figure for Pokiri? Gulp! Two hundred!, although I have read a 144-center figure too): Babu strikes me as a somewhat limited and obvious actor, but compensates by displaying a rare intelligence, preferring to make the understated, deadpan style his own. The result -- a choirboy who almost always looks rather mean and dangerous -- is strangely discomfiting, and perfectly suited to Mahesh Babu's screen presence and charisma (though it does mean that the guy who shows up for the song and dance sequences, only marginally less forced here than in Pokiri, seems like a different person altogether).

Ultimately, however, Athadu works because Mahesh Babu's star power is effectively harnessed by the filmmakers' slick vision of what a "massy" actioner should be like,and kudos to director Trivikram and cinematographer K.V. Guhan for taking a fairly predictable story and situations and imbuing them with great pizzazz: the film's opening sequence, and the thrilling chase on foot through the Old City that introduces us to Mahesh Babu, have already been mentioned (though this viewer continues to be dismayed by the fact that this is the second Mahesh Babu film I have seen where the Old City and its Muslim denizens are depicted as vaguely threatening "others"); nothing in the rest of the film quite lives up to this early visual promise, but it does have its moments: watch out for the special shot from the interior of Sathyanarayanamurthy's house after the family has learned the truth about Parthu and Nandu, taking in Sathyanarayanamuthy's back and the festive decorations that now wear a melancholy air. The dialogues too appear to be a cut above the usual (even in subtitled form), especially as the film draws to a close, and are well-suited to the ethos of Athadu, which by the end firmly comes down on the side of myth rather than the truth/lie dichotomy fleetingly suggested by the film's nod to the "whodunnit" genre. In the final analysis, of course, it doesn't matter who killed Siva Reddy, not even to the CBI investigating the matter; what does matter -- what was always going to matter -- is Mahesh Babu riding off into the sunset.