etcetera

Pre­lude: Young man enters movies fresh out of film school, makes a few movies that span the entire emo­tional spec­trum between mushy and corny. Most of them turn out to be big hits, women cry, all the big stars vie to act under his baton, he gets called a top direc­tor, etc. Sud­denly, his luck runs out. Or mush went out of fash­ion. A few movies flop, he has a fall out with the music direc­tor who helped his movies immensely, and he dis­ap­pears from movies, mak­ing only occa­sional appear­ances as a pass­able lyricist.

Now the young man is no longer so young, and he wants to make a comeback.

“How do you make a come­back?”, he asks his muse. Per­haps ’twas a friend he asked, but that’s besides the point. Not that there’s a point to all of this, but thats even more besides the point.

“Easy. Make a youth movie na!”

“Youth movie?”

“Haven’t you seen those? Easy to make… Get a young hero. Get a young hero­ine. No, wait, get two, just to make sure. Give them very lit­tle by way of clothes. Let them all prance around a lit­tle bit. Get a dark look­ing dude, and make him shout out his dia­logues loudly. Call him the come­dian, it seems to work well.”

“Thats it?… what about a vil­lain? Where do I set the movie? What’s the premise?”

“Dude, you are so not in sync. Premise? Ha-Ha-Ha. ”

“No premise? I don’t get it.”

“Ok, have one if you must. Set it wher­ever you want to. Vil­lage, city, what­ever. Get a vil­lian if you must. But remem­ber this: Not much clothes on the girls! You hear that? ”

“…”

“I can’t stress this enough, like for instance, even if the girls have to cry, make sure the cam­era pans to their cleav­age. Or maybe their waists. Ok?”

“How would peo­ple know she is cry­ing if the cam­era is on her cleavage?”

“Duu­u­ude, don’t keep inter­rupt­ing me. Show her eyes for a sec­ond, and pan down, ok. Maybe let her heave her bosom a lit­tle bit when she cries, peo­ple seem to like that. You have to improvise.”

“I think I get the idea. Let me work on it.”

Once young film­maker works on it alright. He gets the half brother of a pop­u­lar hero to star in the movie. (Impro­vi­sa­tion, you see!) And fills the movie with innu­en­dos about how this guy looks like that one. Even fits in a scene (or seven) with the come­dian get­ting him and his half-brother mixed up, and shout­ing out his confusion.

He gets the rec­om­mended two hero­ines. Even goes for “for­eign song shoot­ing.” Like going to Malaysia and set­ting a song inside a car deal­er­ship, who could’ve thought of it. He fills the movie with inno­va­tions, like hav­ing an ant go inside the heroine’s blouse and the guy tak­ing it out, hav­ing the guy do CPR on the girl after sav­ing her from drown­ing inside a shal­low river. Over­all, he feels pretty good about himself.

Just to make sure though, he goes to an astrologer and asks him to make sure his stars are in the right order.

“Hmm…”

“Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, your name has issues. R. V. Udhayaku­mar? It’s like an open invi­ta­tion to all the bad vibes that are out there”

“Oh!”

“Don’t worry, … an extra A at the start of your name will fix it.”

“Aud­hayaku­mar? That sounds a lit­tle funny.”

“Hmm.. ok, A.R.V Udhayaku­mar then. And hey, make sure you use a smaller font for the extra A.”

Leaves him feel­ing even bet­ter. And he names the movie “Karka Kasadara,” — chaste Tamil — sure to please the anti-English lobby in Tamil Nadu.

Movie gets released, and movie sucks. So movie bombs. Shaken, stirred and angry, he looks for his muse, want­ing to do bad things to it. But then, the muse had deserted him a long time ago.

A few weeks later, a cou­ple of doo­fuses walk past a run­down movie the­ater that’s screen­ing the movie. “Loong time since we saw a Tamil movie in a the­ater,” one of them opines. The other agrees and sug­gests that they go in. A few days later, one of the doo­fuses writes a clever review of the movie for his blog. It was not a total waste of time, you see.

San­jay Leela Bhansali’s Black has been called every­thing from “sub­lime” to “‘a clas­sic” to “a turn­ing point in Hindi cin­ema”. Enough to piqué my curios­ity, even though one of the review­ers was Sub­hash K Jha, who uses more superla­tives than arti­cles when he writes.

Black is the story of a girl who loses her vision and hear­ing as an infant, and the teacher who helps her see the world. A premise full of poten­tial – intrigu­ing and orig­i­nal. Bhansali seems to have had half an eye on an inter­na­tional audi­ence (and the big O), and clev­erly chose to set his movie in an Anglo-Indian house­hold in beau­ti­ful Shimla. With Rani Mukher­jee deliv­er­ing an effec­tive, con­trolled per­for­mance as the deaf and blind girl, and a com­pe­tent sup­port­ing cast, Black could have been a really good movie. Could have been.

Bhansali is con­tent to use hack­neyed traits for his char­ac­ters: Thus the teacher lives in a run­down room, and car­ries on point­less con­ver­sa­tions with a stern look­ing woman called Mrs. Nair, who has a soft cor­ner for him. He is an alco­holic, with a past that involves a sis­ter who was deaf and blind. The idea being that in the in the process of res­cu­ing the girl, the teacher redeems him­self. Remem­ber all those Hol­ly­wood movies where a (baseball/football/basketball) coach helps a team of (poor/inner city/woman) play­ers? The coach is usu­ally alco­holic, and speaks cryp­tic sen­tences in a wry tone. Yes, this is like that only.

To ensure that no cliché gets left behind, the girl’s dad is skep­tic of Bachchan’s unusual meth­ods of teach­ing and wants him out right away. And the mother is a timid woman who secretly helps the teacher against her husband’s wishes.

Bachchan deliv­ers an atro­cious per­for­mance as the teacher. His larger than life per­sona detracts from the role, and he screams out most of his dia­logues in vaguely British accented Eng­lish. For a role that required him to be a head­strong, slightly mis­chie­vous alco­holic with melan­cholic under­tones, he comes across as a boor­ish clown most of the time, read­ing out imag­i­nary let­ters to Mrs. Nair, updat­ing her of what­ever progress he made that day. Almost cartoonish.

As the girl starts to see the world — even man­ag­ing to get into a school for “reg­u­lar” stu­dents — the teacher starts dete­ri­o­rat­ing into demen­tia, afflicted with Alzheimer’s. The slide is dra­ma­tized overly — a series of star­tling inci­dents illus­trat­ing the slow loss of mem­ory as the movie draws to a pre­dictable end awash in melodrama.

The film is shot beau­ti­fully– like many Bol­ly­wood direc­tors, Bhansali val­ues style — some­times at the expense of sub­stance, and Black has scenes that are there just because they are visu­ally appeal­ing. This predilec­tion for visual beauty over real­ism led Kamal­has­san astray in Hey Ram, and is prob­a­bly why lat­ter day Mani Rath­nam movies don’t appeal as much.

Bhansali’s direc­tion in Black is as stale as the script was fresh, turn­ing an excit­ing premise into a mushy melo­drama. Black is another poten­tially very good movie that ends up being just a good Hindi movie. Good, by the abysmal stan­dards Bol­ly­wood has set for itself.

This is more up Manoj’s alley, but the pla­gia­rism is so glar­ingly obvi­ous here that the moment I lis­tened to the song all I could say was, Ada paavi! (or Holy Crap!)

Prema Prema, by Chakri from the Tel­ugu movie Kabaddi Kabaddi, ~ circa 2004.

Poovarasam­poo, by Ilai­yaraaja from Kizhakke Pogum Rail, Tamil, ~circa 1980.

Ada Paavi!

You get asked cer­tain hard to answer ques­tions a lot if you are Tamil. Like why are your film actresses [insert favorite euphemism for fat here]? A mat­ter of pref­er­ence, you think? Good guess, but you are dead wrong. The real answer is a ruth­less clan of [insert sec­ond favorite euphemism for fat here] actresses, oper­at­ing in and around Madras. Don’t believe me? Read on.

Take the case of Rahasya, a svelte, slim, pretty (ok, ok, I’ll take that back) vamp. She appeared first in an item num­ber in Kamalhassan’s remake of Munna Bhai MBBS, and has fast become the go-to girl for one-song num­bers in Tamil. Pop­u­lar enough, that the cabal started tak­ing note. So, when she went to a bar in the city to chill out and prac­tice a dance move or two, she had a sur­prise in store.

As she is danc­ing, she feels some­thing strike her from behind. Turn­ing around, she sees the cul­prit: the cor­pu­lent behind of Kiran, rumored to be pretty high up in the hier­ar­chy of the clan. Prob­a­bly an acci­dent she assumes, and con­tin­ues danc­ing. Bad assump­tion. Soon, strike two. With a lot more inten­sity, caus­ing her to almost fall. “What the …”, she turns around and asks in what­ever lan­guage she speaks. Bad move again. You never talk back to a cabalite.

Kiran calls for rein­force­ments. Enter San­gavi. In and out of the cabal, but never so out to make the cabal angry. Together they do their thing to Rahasya: mostly stan­dard cabal oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure, just falling on the vic­tim from dif­fer­ent angles. It can be pretty effec­tive: When you have two 300lb objects falling on you from dif­fer­ent direc­tions simul­ta­ne­ously, it tends to hurt.

Last I heard, Rahasya is now on a diet con­sist­ing exclu­sively of things rich in sat­u­rated fat (no trans fat though: that is bad). “Maybe,” she was heard crow­ing, “I will become a cabalite one day.” Sure.

PS: What about Sim­ran, you ask? Well asked wise reader. Answer: This.

PPS: Does this sound like a stu­pid fan­tasy of a deluded engi­neer? Again, good think­ing. But I have a link to prove this hap­pened. And they are far more descrip­tive than I am. Although, they have a ques­tion mark at the end of the page title, which makes you won­der if they are spec­u­lat­ing …, but hey, no one’s imag­i­na­tion is that good. Kiran, San­gavi and fought with Ragasya?

I hardly ever watch Bol­ly­wood movies. My Hindi is lim­ited at best and I have a strong dis­like for the gloss-is-all-that-matters for­mula movies that Hindi film­mak­ers have been churn­ing out over the last few years. But Page 3 came highly rec­om­mended — every­one had good things to say about it, and Konkona Sen Sharma was being hailed as the best Indian actress since Saif Ali Khan (ok, that was a cheap dig) so I decided to take the plunge.

The movie is mostly a series of par­ties at the homes of sev­eral rich peo­ple, attended by other rich peo­ple. They all hate each other, but don’t mind attend­ing par­ties together. Each party con­sists of a girl danc­ing on a poorly lit stage to the voice of one of the old women that sing all Hindi songs, men dis­cussing busi­ness, a bum­bling America-returned-Indian try­ing to get everyone’s atten­tion, women bitch­ing about other women to groups of women not includ­ing the bitchee, and car-drivers diss­ing about their bosses.In order to ensure that you get the mes­sage, sev­eral groups of men are shown talk­ing busi­ness, mul­ti­ple women are shown indulging in bitch­ing and so on. I am sure you get the mes­sage. There is also a lot of ogling — the direc­tor tak­ing care to cover all the pos­si­ble ogling per­mu­ta­tions between peo­ple belong­ing to both sexes.

Observ­ing all this with a mostly quizzi­cal expres­sion is Konkona — a mid­dle class jour­nal­ist with val­ues, high ambi­tion, a col­lec­tion of cot­ton dresses and a sea­son ticket to the Bom­bay metro — start­ing off her career cov­er­ing par­ties for a news­pa­per. She stays with a cou­ple of room­mates, flight atten­dant Sand­hya Mridul (who by the way, acted much bet­ter than Konkona in the movie) and Tara Sharma — a wannabe actress who looks like she’s about to cry at any moment, even when she is laughing.

In between the par­ties, Konkona man­ages to acquire a boyfriend and sev­eral friends of dif­fer­ent sex­ual ori­en­ta­tions, while one of her room­mates acquires a rich, old man for a boyfriend. Mean­while, her other room­mate man­ages to get her­self preg­nant, attempts sui­cide and hauls off to Delhi in a huff.

There is a badass reporter at Konkona’s office, who is friends with an equally badass cop. The badass reporter has a one-man infor­mant net­work that meets him at bars and passes on tips about the bad things that the peo­ple that attend par­ties do. The reporter relays the infor­ma­tion to the badass cop. The cop inflicts var­i­ous types of pun­ish­ments on the cul­prits, includ­ing but not lim­ited to push­ing them out of cars, twist­ing their arms, break­ing their jaws and talk­ing to them in Eng­lish. After inflict­ing such pun­ish­ments, the badass cop looks at no one in par­tic­u­lar and talks about Indian val­ues. The badass cop’s boss is a not-so-badass-cop who goes to par­ties and car­ries on con­ver­sa­tions with everyone.

Did I men­tion the funeral? Some­one dies, and all that any­one attend­ing her funeral wants to do is dress well and either talk busi­ness or bitch depend­ing on their sex. Again, to ensure that you get the point, any per­son or per­sons car­ry­ing on any con­ver­sa­tion at the funeral is given some screen time. And, not sur­pris­ingly, all they do is talk busi­ness or bitch. Konkona is disillusioned.

Thus dis­il­lu­sioned, Konkona sees the badass reporter at work and decides that she wants to be a seri­ous jour­nal­ist her­self. No more par­ties for me. Her skep­tic edi­tor lets her do it and Konkona and badass are now part­ners. After a riot and another party she catches her boyfriend indulging in ques­tion­able activ­i­ties of a sex­ual nature with one of her male friends. More dis­il­lu­sion­ment.

Konkona then hooks up with her partner’s infor­mant and goes with badass cop to raid a pow­er­ful par­ty­goer — a child moles­ter, and the hus­band of the woman who died ear­lier. And so it goes.

To give credit to Bhan­darkar, the movie is dif­fer­ent from your run of the mill Bol­ly­wood fare. He has dared to explore the shadier side of India’s élite, and dis­cussed homo­sex­u­al­ity pretty openly — a big no-no in Indian films. And, over­all the act­ing was above aver­age for an Indian movie. An hon­est attempt, for sure.

But an hon­est attempt does not make a good movie. Fif­teen min­utes into the movie, each char­ac­ter is well-defined. After that, the whole movie is just a reit­er­a­tion of the def­i­n­i­tions made in the first fif­teen min­utes. And there was a lot of stereo­typ­ing going on– hon­est mid­dle class girl, promis­cu­ous flight atten­dant, good cop, bad boss, arty direc­tor inter­ested in bed­ding actresses. Plus, there were too many par­ties — it took me a long time to get rid of my hangover.