All About Eve

The two parts of Gangs of Wasseypur strike a strange note, odd but not discordant. The victims are all men in this testosterone navigated drama despite the significant presence of female characters in the film. Think about it. Coppola’s Godfather trilogy had wives, mothers and sisters claiming screen space but they performed to a script framed by the men in their lives. Kashyap’s magnum opus marches to an entirely different tune. Not that the women remain untouched by violence perpetuated by the men in their lives. But the interesting thing is, be it Nagma, Sardar Khan’s first wife or his second spouse Durga, both of them are more than willing to be the catalysts for the blood and gore that lashes the dusty by lanes of Wasseypur. While one happily sends her husband to his death, the other extorts her son ‘tum logon ko khana kaise hazm hota hai, after her husband gets shot in cold blood. She knows that one barb is enough to turn him into an avenging angel. She is also aware that he will end up paying with his life to humour her vengeance, but it is amply evident from the subtext that the consequence matters little to her. The male characters in the film may be busy terrorising the town they live in, but in a neat quirky turn, all of them seem to be a little afraid of the women in their lives. Right down to Definite, Durga’s remorseless progeny.

Starting with his first success, Kashyap has steadfastly refused to treat his female characters as whining victims in any of his films. His version of Devdas had only one wimp, the protagonist. It was the two women in his life, Paro and Chanda who made all the decisions for him. Whether it was the former cycling with a mattress tied at the back of her bicycle to make love to him in the mustard fields or the latter awakening his conscience in the climax. Kashyap obviously likes his women to assert themselves, however male and macho the fictional context of his cinema may be. And thankfully most of the new age film makers seem to be following on his footsteps without a trace of self consciousness permeating the feminist undertones of their films.

Be it the comic Vicky Donor or the compromised Cocktail, the female protagonist is increasingly being projected as more nuanced and ultimately more substantive than her male counterpart. After the failure of her first marriage, Ashima Roy in Vicky Donor is slow to respond to the maverick hero’s advances but once she thaws, she treats the relationship with utmost integrity, coming clean with him about her past while he conceals his ‘donor’ status from her. But it is in the treatment of the secondary female characters the director Shoojit Sircar scores. Vicky’s beautician mother and his feisty grandmother are a treat to behold in their drinking sessions late in the night. Ashima’s middle aged aunt who has remained single is another marvellous characterisation. There is no back story to her but the writing by Juhi Chaturvedi is so clever that the viewer understands why she has remained unmarried without any explanations being provided.

Critics have been disappointed with the tame ending of the Imtiaz Ali produced and Homi Adjania directed Cocktail. Gautam Kapoor opts for the more Indian Meera but there is something about the abandon with which Deepika Padukone surrenders to her portrayal of Veronica that you leave the theatre feeling she is better off without the confused Gautam and his domineering mother. We would like to believe that she is going to eventually realize all her attempts to fit into the stereotype was a big mistake. It is the spunky Veronica who ends up being the hero of the film. Cocktail is her show and knowing the strange subversive ways of Adjania from his first film Being Cyrus, this may very well have been his intention.

Of course when it comes to Vidya Balan, only a fool would try to fit her into the conventional Bhartiya Nari mould. From Ishqiya to No One Killed Jessica, from The Dirty Picture to Kahaani, Balan has managed to change all the rules pertaining to the female protagonist in Hindi cinema. When you find her doing a silly Lavani item in an entirely undeserving film, it’s not only your aesthetic sensibilities that are affronted you also get angry with the film maker for wasting her like this. Hopefully Kashyap will cast her in one of his films soon and viewers can rejoice at the coming together of the most revolutionary director and the most astounding actor of our times.

It must be a sign of our times that even Yash Raj films seems to have outgrown wallflowers who liked being courted in the snow clad only in the sheerest of chiffons. Zoya in Ishaqzaade can out curse her ruffian suitor and climb walls to aim at him with a country pistol. The only way he can get the better of her is by resorting to lies and deception. It is also amusing to note that it is the villainous Parma who is treated as an object of lust by the local courtesan Chand. We don’t know whether this was intentional on the part of director Habib Faisal, but it is a nice touch nonetheless, turning the paradigm of the ‘female item’ in commercial cinema on its head.

The portrayal of women characters is all the more interesting when the work is helmed by a female director. In Kiran Rao’s directorial debut, Dhobi Ghat, Shai one of the film’s four protagonists is not afraid to stalk the man who has a one night stand with her because she believes they have a connection. Nor does she think twice before using a young boy from the slums who is besotted by her to achieve her dubious ends. Thankfully Rao’s directorial skills ensure that the viewer continues to vouch for Shai’s vulnerability and does not condemn her.

Empowered women are increasingly making their presence felt even in the popular works of regional cinemas. Manimegalai in Engeyum Eppothum directed by newcomer M Sarvanan puts her silent admirer through many tests including getting him tested for HIV before she allows him in her life. Vazhakku Enn 18/9, another recent success in Tamil Cinema has the victim of an acid attack extracting revenge on the policeman who has exploited her tragedy to make a quick buck for himself. She refuses to remain a mute victim.

Neighbouring Kerala has not been lagging behind when it comes to a more rounded depiction of female characters rather than cubby holing them as victims or paragons of virtue. The young nurse Tessa is no saint in 22 Female Kottayam helmed by Aashiq Abu. She has no problems about going to a pub with her boyfriend to have a drink or living in with him without getting married. When he betrays her to get her brutally raped not once but twice by his boss, she waits for her bruised body and soul to recover before she goes about extracting her revenge. What is interesting are the long counselling sessions she has with him after chaining him to a bed in the climax. Veteran director Kamal, whose Perumazhakkalam was remade as Dor by Nagesh Kukunoor has made a film on the plight of women from Kerala who are sent to Saudi Arabia as domestic helps. His Khaddama could very well have been a melodramatic tear jerker but the director’s vision as well as the intelligent interpretation by the actor Kavya Madhavan vests the character with a luminous dignity.

Bengali Cinema too is no longer dependent solely on Aparna Sen and Rituparna Ghosh for sensitive depiction of women on screen. In the last one decade, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury has depicted some really complex women characters with shades of grey in films like Antaheen and Aparajita Tumi. His films usually revolve around the politics of marriage and his female protagonists are often the perpetuators of the conflict they find themselves in. But even when they are not, they come across as strong and capable individuals with clear perspectives on life and living and turn out to be much more interesting than the men in their lives.

Quite obviously, the new breed of Indian film makers are not just portraying women more realistically, but also imbuing them with their own enlightened sensibilities without bothering about the existing frameworks of the sacrificing heroine and the evil vamp. As long as Indian cinema is driven by the male superstars of the 100 Crore clubs, Chikni Chameli will continue with her shenanigans with a 100 men panting behind her. But the new age film makers are clearly not impressed. They seem to be a little bored of her just like the more discerning audience. And hopefully their enlightened take on the gender divide will sooner or later permeate down to chauvinistic males across the country. From Guwati to Mangalore.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Amu- The story that must not be told and the film that must not be shown

I had noticed the DVD of ‘Amu’ displayed at Habitat, the Mecca for the lovers of good cinema and music in Bangalore. But I gave it a miss every time, thinking sooner or later, I’ll catch it on television. It seemed to belong to a genre that is telecast repeatedly on film channels. I have watched Deepa Mehta’s ‘Earth’ twice on television in the past one year. Amu appeared to be similar.

Yesterday, while walking on Church Street I found myself in that DVD rental shop after months. I was looking for a particular Swedish movie they didn’t have and ended up borrowing four DVDs impulsively. One of them was Amu, the film on the Sikh massacre of 1984, following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The film is directed by Shonali Bose who was 19 and studying in Delhi when the horror unfolded. She was living in a college hostel and went through the trauma of knowing that hundreds were being butchered in her neighbourhood and she was helpless to do anything about it.

I have never really understood why we term these shameful acts of violence riots. For me the connotations of a riot are that two equally powerful groups of individuals attack and destroy each other. This is not true in our country. Typically it is the majority that singles out the minority in a city to rape, murder and plnder with the active connivance of police and politicians. In some pockets the minorities retaliate but the scale of that is miniscule compared to what is happening to them elsewhere in the city.

Amu is a political film. It has Brinda Karat playing a crucial part in the film as a woman who adopts a little girl from a Sikh refugee camp. I am no fan of the Karats. They look too well heeled to be leftists to me. And Brinda Karat always gets my goat when she is on television talking in that shrill uppity voice of hers. But she endeared herself to me in this film. She is the director’s aunt and may have bagged the role solely on grounds of nepotism but she has justified her niece’s faith in her as an actor. Her care and concern for her adopted daughter is evident even in the scenes where she doesn’t have any lines.

Amu is played by Konkana Sen Sharma, an actor I am ambivalent about. I liked her very much in ‘Wake up Sid’ but disliked her interpretation of the south Indian wife in ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer.’ That Tamil accent she affected was extremely off putting although Konkana seems to be rather proud of the fact that she sounded exactly like a Mylapore housewife, whatever that means.

In Amu too, Konkana does this ABCD accent initially but decides to give it up somewhere in the middle. Apart from that jarring note, she’s very good in this one. She even underplays the confrontations and that is brilliant. It makes it that much more powerful. When she asks another actor in the film in a confused, matter of fact manner ‘Come on, you are saying 5000 people were killed in three days. That’s more than the 9/11 count and you mean to say the police didn’t do anything about it,’ it makes for one of the most compelling moments in an Indian film.

The massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 is as shameful a chapter in the history of independent India as is the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat after the Godhra incident. In both cases, an entire community had to pay the price of a crime committed by one or two or a handful of miscreants. For the massacre of the Sikhs in 1984, the Congress politicians drew their daring from their leader Rajiv Gandhi whose reaction to the violence that followed his mother’s assassination was ‘If you chop off a giant tree, there are bound to be tremors.’ The rogue politicians of Delhi took that statement to be a battle cry against all Sikhs and engaged in the kind of senseless bloody orgy only politicians understand and unleash with the connivance of the uniformed men who are meant to protect the citizens of this country.

A film that depicts this reality was never in any danger of finding favour with the establishment and the predictable happened. Despite winning accolades in film festivals across the world, the censor board in India found a lot of faults with the work. The primary one being that the film depicted a shameful chapter from our history that all of us would much rather forget.

Is that correct? We may not want these wounds to fester but forgetting them or wiping them out, sounds like a very Nazi response to me. Like saying we will own and showcase everything that’s grand and beautiful in our country like the Taj Mahal or the 11% growth, but not these shameful episodes as we don’t want anyone to stop us from having another bloody orgy in our backyard the next time we feel like it.

What is interesting is the film was made in 2004 and was released in 2005 when Sharmila Tagore was the chairperson of the censor board. Three years later, Nandita Das’s ‘Firaaq’ came out, an equally powerful indictment of the Gujarat genocide and no one saw that as an unacceptable depiction of modern India. This whole mess has one message for me and it is that the Congress is as communal as the BJP and Sharmila Tagore who’s always trying to talk like an intellectual is a big fraud.

Next the Censor Board made the telecast of the film in India impossible by demanding that the film chop off any reference to the 1984 violence to get a U/A certification that’s mandatory for a film to be shown on television. Apparently films with an A certificate cannot be telecast. How can a film that’s all about a young woman coming of age in the context of her discovery that she was adopted not because her parents died in an epidemic but because they were victims of a state backed massacre not have any reference to the violence? The film makers gave up at this point of time and released the film on DVD. If you haven’t watched the film as yet, please head to the nearest store and borrow it...better still buy it. The film is by no means perfect and has the excessive earnestness many films by first timers have but it appeals to the heart. It’s the sort of film first timers should be encouraged to make. The funny thing is they also gave two national awards to the film but made sure it didn't reach too many people.

Shonali Bose also turned her screenplay into a novel and I plan to read it. However what surprises me that the media largely ignored the film and the book. But then the Indian media, especially the ones who work in English publications and channels have not grown up as yet. They only value the big brands or those who come hyped from the west. Since Amu adhered to neither of these types, they didn’t have much to say about it.

Bose didn’t have an easy time making the film either. The Indian production house that backed her initially, deserted her at the last minute. When she approached the American studios, they wanted it to be a story about an American girl. None of Bose’s reasoning that the film was about an American girl with Indian origins cut any ice with them. Maybe they felt if Anne Hathaway can’t be cast as the protagonist, the film wasn’t worth it. Finally she made the film from the money her husband who is a scientist at Nasa, had earned by getting a patent on the smallest camera he had invented.

Bedabrata Pain, Bose’s scientist husband has also made a film ‘Chittagong’ based on the Chittagong uprising. He had approached Jaya Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan with the script and apparently Jaya Bachchan loved the script. The next thing we knew is that Ashutosh Gowariker, who had earlier made the historical ‘Jodha Akbar’ with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, swung into action and made a film on the same subject with Abhishek Bachchan . He claimed he had based it on Manini Chatterjee’s book. Anurag Kashyap left a disgusted note on FB about how the Bachchans were influencing the distributors not to release Chittagong before Gowariker’s film, even though it had been completed earlier. I am sure you can put two and two together like I did and figure out what really happened behind scenes in this sorry mess.

Not that Gowariker’s film helped anyone including him. I can’t recall the film’s name but I know it sank like the Titanic and doomed the Junior Bachchan’s career forever. It flopped so badly that it has had a reverberating impact on every film Bachchan has come out with subsequently. They have all bombed. Now no producer is likely to invest money on either Bachchan or Gowariker unless Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan decide to fund the film from their personal wealth.

But all this must be of small consolation to Pain whose film is still stuck in the cans.

Hanna and Shaitan

It has been two Fridays and two matinees at a trot, both about a young female damaged protagonist, one in English and one in Hindi.

Let me start with ‘Hanna’ because I watched that one last week. I suspect it is soon going to turn into a cult classic. It is directed by that young British auteur Joe Wright, who didn’t get a high school diploma because of his dyslexia but is the youngest director to have his film ‘Atonement’ premier at the Venice Film Festival. That should tell us something about how redundant formal education is.

Hanna is about this seventeen year old who has been raised in isolation in a forest by her father. She has been trained to be a killing machine to help her survive against the violent machinations of an evil CIA agent played by that genius actor Cate Blanchett. The rest of the cast is equally effective. Saoirse Ronan, the delightful Irish actor introduced by Wright in ‘Atonement’ plays Hanna with sprite agility, mining the meaty role for all its sub textual richness of loneliness and wonderment. Eric Bana is equally effective as her noble father. There is this interesting twist in the story that educates the audience about the unconventional upbringing Hanna has had that we are both prepared for and yet not prepared for, which is what a thriller giving you your money’s worth is all about. I am amazed at Wright’s versatility. He is in his late thirties currently and that means he was younger when he directed this one and the ones that came before including ‘Atonement.’ I am sure I will catch all the subsequent movies he makes and can’t wait for the DVD of ‘Hanna’ to come out to add to my collection.

Bejoy Nambiar is in his thirties too and has made a stunning debut with ‘Shaitan,’ produced by Anurag Kashyap. I think of Kashyap as a modern day ‘Jung’ to Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘Freud’. Kashyap started out with Varma and was as responsible for Satya’s success, having written the screenplay. Now Varma has been reduced to a paranoid shadow of his earlier creative self, churning out one horrible film after another whereas Kashyap is having a great innings. Not only did’ Dev D’ that Kashyap directed change the rule of film making in Bollywood and made us realise how ‘thoo-thoo’ the films of Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra are, but his banner has also introduced some young talented directors who have made kick ass films like Vikramaditya Motwane and ‘Udaan’ and now Nambiar and ‘Shaitan.’

I think a lot of the film critics get jealous of the young directors Kashyap introduces, as they want to be discovered too. I certainly picked up a tinge of envy in Raja Sen’s review. He was trying too hard to attribute the film’s strengths to Kashyap rather than Nambiar. That’s just slimy behaviour rather than an honest critique. The film has been made by Nambiar and the credit or discredit for the film goes to him and not to anyone else. Kashyap comes across as someone who has a lot of integrity speaking on behalf of other directors like Onir and Dibakar Banerjee when they get into trouble with publicity hungry starlets. He doesn’t need a front to make his films.

‘Shaitan’ is also about a young damaged female protagonist played by Kalki Koechlin. Now Koechlin has a long way to go before she can come anywhere near Ronan as far as acting chops are concerned but she has one great quality none of the female Indian actors have. She is not afraid of making herself ugly in front of the camera. That’s a terrific trait to have for an actor and helps her to make her character believable despite the inconsistencies in her interpretation. Much has been made about the acting of the other young actors in the ensemble cast but really I don’t think there was much of a demand placed on them. I am sure none of them are addicts but apart from that character trait, they pretty much interact like most urban youngsters do, cracking poor jokes and appreciating each other for the ‘come backs’ in the barbs that fly to and fro among them. Any other set of young intelligent actors would have done as well if asked to have fun in front of the camera. Rajiv Khandelwal is very good though and the unknown female actor who plays his wife has the most interesting and haunting face I have seen for a long time in Hindi films. Who is she?

But the star of the show is undoubtedly Nambiar. His shot taking is unusual and sometimes his scenes play out inordinately long like in a Tarentino film but he keeps the audience riveted and the film stays with you long after it is over. Nambiar spent some time in Bangalore and even directed a play in the city and he pays a tribute to his theatre days by including the veteran playwright and theatre person Poile Sengupta in the cast of his film

He moved to Mumbai and got married to Juhi Babbar. That must have been terrible. The Babbars are probably the most clownish theatre and film family in Mumbai. The matriarch Nadira Babbar runs a theatre group in Mumbai that along with Dinesh Thakur’s troupe stages the most god-awful plays in Prithvi. The two talentless ugly kids –Juhi and Arya play significant lead roles in most of the home productions. The patriarch Raj Babbar tried to make his mark as a slimy rapist in his debut film in the early eighties. Afterwards he tried to be a hero but all his films flopped, so he turned into a UP politician. His innings in politics has been as sidey as his films but he is a hoot to watch whenever he tries to speak in English. If you want to have some cheap thrills, you can always invite the Senior Babbar for an event and ask him to give his speech in English. The audience will die laughing. Raj Babbar is also the father of Prateik Babbar, Smita Patil’s son. Pratiek has been sensible enough to drop the surname. Nambiar and juhi Babbar are divorced now.

Thank god Nambiar made the intelligent transition from the Babbars to Kashyap and discovered the ‘Shaitan’ in him.