Bringing back the magic: on the "Cinemas of India" restorations

In the new issue of The Caravan, I celebrate the NFDC “Cinemas of India” DVDS and do a composite review of four films in the series: Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda and Govind Nihalani’s Party (which I also wrote about here). Full piece here.

(Also see: this post about Mirza’s Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan. I’ll be writing more on some of these films in the coming weeks.)

Shahar aur Cinema in The Hindu

In the 1950s (a period of Nehruvian optimism for the country), the big city is depicted in almost naively positive terms, as a place of hope, opportunity and justice. By the 1970s, the dream is souring...

Another plug for Mihir Pandya’s book on Delhi representations in Indian cinema – here’s a short preview/profile I did around the book for The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine.

Mad maane mother: on Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom

[Did a version of this review for The Hindustan Times. There’s a longer, more personal piece I’d like to write about this book sometime – about the chord it struck for me both as a son and as a writer – but I’m not quite ready for it yet. Some other time, hopefully]

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The easy way to describe Jerry Pinto’s autobiographical novel Em and the Big Hoom is to say that it is a son’s account of life with a mentally unstable mother. Imelda Mendes is called “Em” by her two children, the unnamed narrator and his elder sister Susan. Their father Augustine – affectionate, dependable but taciturn – is “the Big Hoom”, and they all live together in a one-BHK flat in Mahim. Imelda has always been an energetic woman, but at some point after her children were born “someone turned on a tap” and a crippling depression set in - she has a few good days, but on the many bad ones even the trenches dug by the municipal corporation outside the house might seem like part of a threatening conspiracy. (“We never knew when the weather would change dramatically with Em.”) The family rallies around her and each other; the narrator describes their lives with a heartbreaking mix of tenderness and humour.

Mad is an everyday, ordinary word. It is compact. It fits into songs. As the old Hindi film song has it, M-A-D, mad maane paagal. It can become a phrase - "Maddaw-what?" which began life as "Are you mad or what?". It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother. Then the world wakes up from time to time and blinks at you, eyes of fire.

That makes this sound like a very particular story about a very particular person, but Em and the Big Hoom is much more universal in its appeal. Read carefully and you might agree that it isn’t just about a “special” mother, it is about parents in a more general sense – parents as the looking glasses that we sometimes recoil from because in their aging faces and increasingly erratic behaviour we see our future selves – as well as a reminder that “normalcy” and “madness” are not airtight categories. Anyone who has ever experienced the fading of a parent should feel a shudder of recognition when the narrator mulls living in a world that “continues to be idyllic and inviting for you but your mother is being sucked into the centre of the earth [...]The imperium of the world’s timetable will allow you to break step and fall out for a while, but it will abandon you too if you linger too long”.

This gentle, multi-layered narrative is many other things. It is a remembrance of the long courtship between Imelda and Augustine, and a son's attempt to understand what two people he takes for granted (“if you would just get that familiarity thing out of your eyes...” his mother tells him) might have been like in a very distant time, the Mumbai of the 50s and 60s (when Imelda worked as a stenotypist in an engineering-goods company, one of the few options available to a girl from her community and background). It is a story about four people living in a small house where privacy is not an option, a litany of very candid conversations (not all of them occurring beneath a facade of mental illness) and delightful pen-portraits: consider Em’s mother, who speaks in elisions, omitting important words in every sentence so that one has to infer what a question like “Where do you thissing?” might mean.
 
And this is also, in a strange but illuminating way, a book about writers and writing. Much of our understanding of Em’s state of mind comes from her journal entries, reproduced throughout the narrative, and letters such as the meandering one in which she acknowledges the seriousness of her relationship with Augustine (and her realisation that she was no longer just an “I” but part of a “we”). We are told that she was a seemingly effortless writer – one who might have made a career out of it in another lifetime – but also that compulsive writing may be a manifestation of her condition. “She was free associating, gliding through language.”

Given this, it is notable that the narrator himself tries to fight his genes by seeking refuge in the rigours of writing. “One of the defences I had devised against the possibility of madness was that I would explain every feeling I had to myself, track everything down to its source [...] I worked it out on a piece of paper...” And at another point: “I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words ... you would be able to deal with the world.” The writer in him reaches for ways to convey his feelings about his mother, but also recognises the impossibility of the task; after writing half a page of elegant prose about dark towers and their residents, he concedes that “as all analogies must, this one breaks down too”.

This may help one understand why Pinto – a prolific, busy writer-journalist known for juggling projects with ease – took more than two decades to complete this very personal book (which, he has said in interviews, was originally 10 times its current length). And this brings me to my one quibble about Em and the Big Hoom: the fact that it is presented as a work of fiction. While it works as a novel on its own terms (the writing is consistently vivid and moving enough to appeal to the reader who approaches it as a purely made-up story), I think it works even better if you know who the narrator is, and a little more about his own writing life.

I don’t usually spend time thinking about how “autobiographical” a novel is (any book, even one set in an imagined fantasy landscape, is in some sense autobiography) or how "exaggerated" a memoir is, but reading Em and the Big Hoom, I felt – for the first time in a long while – that it mattered. At least it matters to me because, speaking as a reader-writer envious of the quality and range of Pinto’s work, this book seems to reveal much about his own imperatives. Trivial though this might sound (and unconnected with the very high quality of the writing), I wish it had “Memoir” printed on its jacket flap.

The strange fate of a passive man: on Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan

A few posts ago, I mentioned the new NFDC “Cinemas of India” DVDs – fine restorations of long-neglected films which could, with a little more effort, become something akin to a Criterion Collection for Indian cinema. In the past few weeks I’ve been watching movies such as Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi, Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, Shyam Benegal’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda and Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor ki Maut on prints that allow one to fully appreciate the visual flair of these films (they also help overcome a mental block against discussing “serious”, non-mainstream movies in terms of their aesthetic appeal, but more on that in a later post).

There is much to appreciate, visually and aurally, in Saeed Mirza’s first directorial feature Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (1978). For starters, it has one of the most skilfully crafted opening sequences I have seen in a Hindi film. The first images – little huts, fields, poor people minding their children – are from a village or a very small town. A woman lights a chulha and a minimalist music score begins; it’s little more than the gentle plucking of a string instrument, but the sound becomes more hypnotic the more you hear it. We see measurements being taken, cloth being dyed, posts being driven into the ground, threads stretched across them – and soon we realise that we are watching an intricately embroidered carpet coming into existence. Women and little children labour away at it.

As the soundtrack gets busier, we hear people talking in the language of the marketplace - trading, negotiating. From a shot of a wall with the finished carpet spread over it, there is a cut to the inside of a room with the same carpet on display; the camera tracks forward and we see we are no longer in the village, we are in a showroom in the city. This is where the product of all that hard labour will be sold at prices that the original craftsmen could scarcely imagine.

Other handicrafts come into view, a hand passes over the carpet, gently stroking it. Foreign tourists - we don't see their faces, only hear them - murmur to each other in wonderment. “It must be frightfully expensive!” a woman says; she makes soft sounds of pleasure as she runs her hand over a Kashmiri fox fur. A purchase is made, they leave the showroom; in long-shot we see a sweeper toiling on the road outside. And then the opening titles begin with an illustration of a man’s head gradually filling with red colour.

****

When we first see Arvind Desai (Dilip Dhawan) – the son of the businessman who owns the showroom – he is in his car, watching a street show at a traffic intersection. Driving through his city, Arvind is the picture of a handsome, confident young man taking in the sights (and there are some great vistas of 1970s Bombay in these scenes, including advertising boards of the time and promotional material for Amar Akbar Anthony). But early appearances are misleading, for Arvind is neither confident nor happy: subsequent events show him to be a drifter, uncomfortable in his own skin and never quite certain of where he is going.

Though he seems concerned about social injustice, we see that he is unlikely to ever take a real stand against it; perhaps he perceives himself as being trapped by the world he was born into. Speaking to a dealer who is asking for a higher margin, Arvind shows sympathy for the “mazdoor log” whom he has never met. “Unhein zyaada nahin milna chahiye?” he asks, “Aap aur hum toh unhee ke banaaye huye cheezon pe zinda hain, na?” (“Shouldn’t they get more? People like you and I are existing on the things they make.”) He berates the middleman for being unwilling to reduce his own profit, and then suddenly snaps, “You’re worse than me.” It’s an odd, non-contextual remark, but it seems to come from the hidden depths of a man who is guiltily aware of his cushy existence.

Watching this film, I wondered: is Arvind the most passive “hero” in the history of Hindi cinema? He’s certainly a candidate, and his passivity is central to this intriguingly titled movie. (“Ajeeb dastaan”? Some viewers would say that nothing remotely interesting happens to him.) More than once, we see him going to visit someone (a friend, a cousin), sitting around for a bit without doing anything, then getting up and saying he has to leave because he has to be somewhere else. He spends time with his girlfriend Alice, but there is no hint of physical intimacy. Instead we see him visit a prostitute with a disfigured face, but here again it’s as if he is following a script – making a naive, half-hearted effort to “connect” with the underprivileged.

Trapped in a smart suit on office days – and looking like the typical heir apparent of a wealthy family – he wears a kurta when he goes to visit his “Leftist” friend Rajan (Om Puri), and this too seems like a self-conscious attempt to fit in with Rajan and his jhola-carrying crowd. But when they actually begin talking about such things as existential angst and the effects of industrialisation, Arvind seems unable to participate; instead he goes to the window and stares at passing trains, a dreamy little smile on his face. “I’m not intellectual like you,” he tells Rajan with a little laugh.

But what is he exactly? We see him strolling about indolently in a bookstore, as if needing to prove something to himself; he glances at a shelf containing titles by Russian writers like Solzhenitsyn, but he doesn’t pick one up. Is this how an intellectual manqué window-shops?

****

Arvind is good-looking, but in a vacant, callow sort of way - his expressions range from an unconvincing sternness (when he is dealing with a dishonest employee) to a bashful, boyish smile (when he is joking with Rajan). His voice is mostly flat and inexpressive. And there is a question to be asked here: to what extent are these qualities attributable to the rawness of Dilip Dhawan the actor? Dhawan was very young when he appeared in this film, his lack of experience occasionally shows, and perhaps this is why he comes off so well as a vulnerable young man who is uncertain of his place in the world. This could be a case of excellent casting or serendipity: a first-time director making a low-budget film gives the lead role to one of his colleagues from the film institute, and he turns out to be just right for the part.

Otherwise too, Mirza’s film has a compellingly off-kilter quality. It looks and feels like a movie made by someone who had recently graduated from the FTII, his head chockful of Antonioni and Welles and Godard and dozens of other cinematic possibilities. There is formal inventiveness here, and some of it works very well: I liked the many scenes where people walk in and out of little rooms or cabins in the claustrophobic showroom, doors closing behind them and briefly cutting off their voices so we only get an incomplete sense of what is being said. (The showroom, with its many hushed whispers, is like a temple of capitalism, and one can see why someone with Arvind’s delicate sensibilities feels suffocated in it.) I also liked the use of overlapping dialogue in a party scene populated by the swish set; it is disconcerting both for the viewer and for Arvind himself. At other times, though, I felt Mirza was simply imitating the techniques of other filmmakers to little effect: the Godardian jump-cuts when Arvind drives his car, for instance.

If you’re familiar with Mirza’s other work (including his writing), you’ll know that he can be irreverent and polemical in equal measure, and at the same time. This film is often drily funny about the relationship between the poor and the rich, a running theme being that the former are smarter and more dialled in than the latter think. Going by the indulgent glow on his face, Arvind thinks he is being kind to a street boy by asking him to keep a watch on his car and promising him employment, but the kid makes fun of him behind his back. Later, at a booze shop, when Arvind hurriedly walks away after handing over more money than he was supposed to pay, the shopkeeper (instead of being grateful for the “tip”) shakes his head and chuckles to his assistant “Saalon ko paise lene mein bhi takleef hoti hai.” (“These rich people find it irksome to even take their money back.”)

In the final analysis, though, humour and scorn are the only weapons that the poor have (and this too is a theme that recurs through Mirza's cinema). The film ends with the eyes of the helpless carpet-makers staring out at us as the soundtrack becomes percussive and angrier. That ending – with the drumbeats, the unflinching gaze and the silent accusation – might remind you of the final seconds of the debut film made by Mirza’s friend and colleague Kundan Shah a few years later. But it also seems to underline Arvind Desai’s status as a cipher - a well-meaning but inconsequential man - in his own story.


Here's a trailer for the NFDC DVD:




P.S. In Saeed Mirza’s book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother (which I wrote about here), there is an amusing passage about Mirza’s mother watching the preview of Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan and telling him “There was no story [...] I wish it had more drama.” I can sympathise with her – this is a slow, self-conscious film – but I think it’s possible to become so immersed in it that the question “what happens?” becomes irrelevant.

Out of the well and into the ocean: a superficial book on Aamir Khan

Confronted with a book whose subject matter he has strong opinions on, the honest reviewer should show his hand, or at least try to examine his own biases. So let me touch on a passage in Christina Daniels’ I’ll do it My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan where it is said of the 1990 film Dil that “it excelled in the use of light-hearted comedy”, that it was “a complete entertainer” and “a path-breaking film”.

How to say this politely: I disagree. Dil was among a handful of movies that had me fleeing, at the age of 14, from Hindi cinema (and I stayed away for over a decade). I remember it now as a tacky, cliché-filled romance featuring defiant lovers and bickering parents, all of whom lived in a state of comical hyper-intensity. Aamir Khan’s nostrils flared continually, Madhuri Dixit endured one of the most impressive sartorial crises of her career, and there were Anand-Milind songs that might loosely be described as tuneful (in the sense that I could hum them today if someone held a gun to my head and told me to) but not memorable in any proper sense of the word.

This is, of course, just a difference of opinion about a single film, but more generally I’ll do it My Way reads like a motivational book built around a pre-formulated thesis. The myth-making begins with the first chapter, which has vignettes from Aamir’s childhood, including an anecdote about the 12-year-old practising alone on a tennis court, turning down an offer to hit with another boy on the grounds that it would spoil his game. Such an incident, at such a young age, can be interpreted in many ways (and one doesn’t have to read deep meaning into it), but Daniels uses it to buttress a narrative about the perfectionism that Aamir would later become associated with. “Aamir focussed on his goal, be that tennis, chess, the Rubik’s Cube (sic), clearly showing the beginnings of his later single-minded pursuit of excellence.”

She then examines his career via approximately 20 movies, beginning with Qayamat se Qayamat Tak and the under-seen Raakh, and a theme emerges: nearly each of these films is “unique” or “significant”, and a step forward in Aamir’s relentless evolution as an actor who has done innovative/offbeat things while continuing to be a popular mainstream star. Naturally, this means that every film has to be discussed in portentous terms. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw QSQT being described as “the unusual story of a great love cut short”. (The story was hackneyed enough in the 16th century when Shakespeare plagiarised plot elements from Ovid for Romeo and Juliet, but even in the context of the action-dominated Hindi cinema of the 1980s it wasn’t all that radical. Narcissistic-tragic-young-love had already been a tradition in recent hits like Ek Duje ke Liye and Sohni Mahiwal.)

In the past decade or so, Aamir’s movie choices have entailed an increased self-consciousness about doing “message-oriented” cinema (or introducing speech-making into even light films). Little wonder then that things get more fraught in the sections about the recent movies. One telling passage goes: “His projects at this time like The Rising and Rang de Basanti were not just films. They were driven forward by powerful themes that made them milestones in their genres.”

Apart from there being no obvious link between the second sentence and the first, the phrasing "not just films" reveals a distinct attitude: what Aamir does is more important and transcendent than mere movie-making. The implication is almost that one must admire The Rising and Rang de Basanti for the heft of their themes and ambitions, irrespective of their cinematic worth. In this view of things, a film like 3 Idiots becomes most “significant” at precisely the point where I personally would find it most tedious: when Aamir’s character turns into the voice of conscience and catharsis, speaking nobly against a flawed education system.

But by now, it’s clear that this book is a worshipful tribute to Aamir Khan, and one can argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with such a venture – if Daniels honestly sees his career as an unbroken series of triumphs, well-judged image makeovers and inspirational films that have altered the landscape of Hindi cinema, so be it. But one would expect such a thesis to be backed by rigorous analyses of the films themselves – or at least by the personal gushing of an unapologetic fan. Instead, the author’s own voice is absent from large swathes of the book; in its place are quotes from old newspaper reports and magazine articles, and long transcripts of the inputs she got from Aamir’s colleagues. The latter make up the bulk of the text, and while some of them are informative, too many of them say the same things over and over again, in increasingly florid language.

Without wanting to underestimate the true fan’s resilience, I imagine that some of these quotes would try the patience (or tickle the funny bone) of even Aamir’s biggest devotees. Indra Kumar must have felt that the line “I saw Aamir turning from a larva to a beautiful butterfly” wasn’t adequate to express the full scope of his feelings, so he continues: “He can transform himself into a beautiful evening or a brilliant sunset with clouds of magnificent colours. He has the capacity to be the moon shimmering in the water below. He is such a powerhouse of talent that he can transform his personality into all these things and look beautiful [...] now he has acquired the capacity to create a spectrum of his own. That is his evolution.”

“He’s not swimming in the well,” says director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, channelling Master Yoda and Paulo Coelho, “He is out there in the ocean ... Aamir does not belong to a particular time and space. When we look back 20 years from now, he would have defined this era [...] Sixty years from today, when you look back, it will not even matter that he was in this era. He will become even bigger.”

Other transcripts are tediously long-winded, with no attempt made to render them crisp, or to even make them seem truly personal or relevant to the subject. Thus, after rambling on for eight pages, Raja Hindustani’s director Dharmesh Darshan says, “The only other actor in consideration for Aamir Khan’s role was Shahrukh Khan. But I had finalised on Aamir Khan. Of course, it would be a pleasure to work with Shahrukh Khan also.” That last sentence reads like part of a more general PR exercise, accidentally included in this book.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that Daniels herself can’t resist sun imagery in the mysterious final sentences, “For him, today’s peak becomes tomorrow’s sunset. Aamir Khan follows the eternal sunrise.” I’ll do it My Way is a good-looking book: well-produced, neatly structured, with a nice collection of photographs (but, it has to be said, some sloppy editing. At one point Mann is translated as “heart”. Um, no, that’s Dil). It passes muster as a history lite of one of the major movie careers of the last quarter-century. But it is best read – or rather, flipped through – by someone who already deifies Aamir Khan and who prefers mixed metaphors to in-depth analysis.

[Did a version of this review for Business Standard]

शहर और सिनेमा: मिहिर पंड्या की नयी किताब

An early shout-out for a book that I’m going to make time to read over the next few weeks (it will take a while because my Hindi-reading speed is very slow). शहर और सिनेमा: वाया दिल्ली (Shahar aur Cinema: Via Delhi) is by my young friend Mihir Pandya, who blogs at आवारा हूँ – the book examines representations of the city, specifically Delhi, in Hindi cinema over the decades. (Apart from being a subject that interests me personally, it is also very relevant at the present moment – what with Delhi having just completed 100 years of being India’s capital, and Indian cinema having just entered its hundredth year.) There are essays on movies ranging from Ab Dilli Dur Nahin, Tere Ghar ke Saamne and Chashme Baddoor to Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi, Khosla ka Ghosla and Dev D, as well as the transcript of a long conversation on cinema and Delhi, which was organised especially for the book – the discussion features Mihir along with writer-historian-Dastango Mahmood Farooqui, NDTV India’s Ravish Kumar, Delhi Belly writer Akshat Verma and writer-historian Ravikant.

I’ve often complained in this space about the lack of good film literature in India, and Mihir tells me that this is even more the case in Hindi publishing. If the quality of the film writing on his blog is anything to go by, his book will help fill this gap. Distribution and display are always a problem for Hindi publications, so I’m glad Flipkart is making it available – here’s the link. Please do spread the word to anyone who might be interested.

On Tabish Khair's How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

[A version of this review appeared in The Hindustan Times]

The three central characters in Tabish Khair’s new novel contain many sets of polarities. The unnamed narrator – a thirty-something lecturer living in Arhus, Denmark – is a Pakistani Muslim by birth but also an atheist (“I had given up on God a long time back; if God had existed, I am sure he would have reciprocated in kind”). His friend Ravi, a tall, good-looking man working on a PhD in history, is an irreligious Hindu who becomes interested in the nuts and bolts of Islamic practice. And their landlord Karim Bhai – who has lived in Denmark for years but appears generally indifferent to the country – is a devout Indian Muslim who holds Quran sessions in their flat every week.

What unfolds as these men go about their lives is a narrative about reading yourself and other people. Ravi and the narrator are the more obvious kindred spirits, liberal men who can banter about any subject. They go on blind dates hoping to find that elusive Danish woman “who doesn’t date only white men or only coloured men”, and their conversations turn on the intricacies of race and religion: the attraction that Oriental exoticism holds for a certain sort of white person; the subtle difference between “Allah hafiz” and “Khuda hafiz” as forms of greeting. Eventually Ravi – much to his own surprise – falls deeply in love and the narrator begins a pleasant but less intense relationship of his own.

We never get a similar perspective on Karim’s interior life. Though a seemingly decent sort, he is also an incongruous, shadowy presence – much like the protagonist of Khair’s last novel The Thing about Thugs, a Bihari man who becomes a murder suspect in 1830s England. We see Karim through the narrator’s eyes, and the narrator is wary of this “narrow, religious man, intolerant of so many aspects of modernity”. When he mentions the Prophet, we are told he does so with “that irritating glaze in his dark-edged eyes that fellow Muslims often get when speaking of the founder of the religion”. He receives mysterious phone calls, displays homophobia and there are occasionally loud arguments in his room. Through it all, the narrator – writing with hindsight – makes teasing allusions to a terror-related incident that the reader presumably knows all about; we think about the Danish cartoon controversy from a few years ago, and our suspicions are further roused.

Perhaps most damningly for Karim, he does not have a sense of humour or irony. This is a trait that irreligious people (perhaps with some justification) tend to associate with the very religious, but I think it also shapes the reader’s attitude towards the character: it might be said that the die is loaded against the po-faced Karim because irreverent humour is so central to this book’s appeal.

Almost throughout, there is a beguilingly light touch to the writing. (The opening scene, which takes place in a suburban side-street early one morning, combines the following disparate elements: a harried husband, a pending lecture, masturbation and a cruising patrol car.) Khair has a talent for effortlessly funny sentences - when Ravi and the narrator enter a bar unfrequented by Asian men and the inebriated occupants turn around to watch them, “one man revolved all the way round under his initial impetus and had to try again”. A line like “Bastard was a term of affection between us, as it usually is in the subcontinent between men who share a Catholic missionary school education” is a reminder of how holy cows might be skewered when they pass from one cultural tradition to another. Late in the narrative, there is a brilliantly deadpan account of an old man locking himself in his bathroom, calling the police and munching on a sandwich to pass the time while a would-be assassin tries to hammer down his door.

The more flamboyant humour usually comes from Ravi’s distinct voice – a relentless wordsmith, he theorises passionately (dating only “plain” girls, categorising his relationships as Platonic, Gandhian and Marxist), uses deliberately cheesy sentence constructions (“You are one picky Paki, pardner!”) and often lapses into his “oratorical mode”. But beneath this showiness one sees a more sensible side. He is in a way a bridge between the narrator and Karim – he can joke about complicated namaaz postures being “the gym of Islam”, but he is also genuinely interested in (and unprejudiced against) Karim’s orthodox religiosity.

Ravi’s transformation in our eyes from being a shallow child of privilege to a principled, inclusive figure is an important aspect of a story about blinkers and crossed connections. Misleading gestures and inflections – and inadequate attempts to understand them – run through this narrative. Describing a man who is later arrested for a criminal act, a shop-girl says he looked distracted, but then changes her statement to “he looked very intense”. To a white man’s ears, a Somali’s threats sound like “some gobbledygook language”. More than once, the narrator notes Karim’s expression or reaction when something is said, and draws a conclusion from it.

It might sound frivolous to say this of a book about the clash of civilisations, cultures and individual attitudes, but my only real problem with How to Fight Islamist Terror... is that it isn’t as consistently funny as it might have been. The pace slows down along the way and the narrative is stymied somewhat by a romantic thread and by symbolism involving glasses half-full with love (or tolerance or understanding, or whatever qualities we must aspire to in our dealings with other people). But though this weighs down the book’s midsection, no lasting damage is done. This is, for much of its length, a clever, self-reflective tale about (as the narrator puts it in another context) the difference between what we seem to be and what we are to ourselves.

[Two earlier posts about Khair's books: a review of Filming; and a snippet on The Thing about Thugs]

75 years old and still dancing - on Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow

In the 2003 film Baghban, there’s a scene where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini – playing an aging couple mistreated by their children – find themselves outside a car showroom. An oily salesman (Gajendra Chauhan, who was Dharmaraj Yudhisthira in another lifetime) practically forces the protesting duo into test-driving a fancy car, and then gets abusive and even violent when it turns out they don’t have the money to buy it. This pat, emotionally manipulative scene provides a pretext for good son Salman Khan to show up and lay some of the old dhishum-dhishum across the sales guy’s noggin, as Damon Runyon might have put it – viewer catharsis is easily achieved.

Now flashback to six-and-a-half decades earlier, and a similar scene in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow – also about an old couple on the verge of being abandoned, or at least separated. Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy (the magnificent Beulah Bondi) are still deeply in love, and spending what will likely be their last few hours together – the result of circumstances that make it difficult for any of their children to take them both in. A car salesman sees them through a window, figures they look the “type” to make an impulse purchase, and takes them on a joy-ride, listening with amusement to their reminiscences. But when he discovers that they aren’t potential customers, he tips his hat and puts them at ease – he just wanted to show off his new car, he says. Having dropped them at the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon 50 years earlier, he leaves.

Comparisons can be misleading, and you might argue that the Make Way for Tomorrow scene is idealistic in its own way. (A separate argument might be that the film’s superb final half-hour isn’t meant to be realistic anyway – it’s more like the realisation of a dream where two helpless, dependent people reclaim themselves and enter a kinder world.) However, the contrast in the two car scenes does clarify the very different methods of the films. Baghban wants to make it as easy as possible for the viewer, clearly delineating the people we should root against (evil children, evil salesman, etc). All that’s missing from many of its scenes is a subtitle telling us how we are supposed to respond. But the Make Way for Tomorrow worldview can’t accommodate clean divisions: it opens with the revelation that Barkley and Lucy (who can be lovable, vulnerable and exasperating all at once) are partly to blame for their predicament – they put their children in a tight spot by waiting until the last possible moment to drop the bombshell that their house has been taken over by the bank (this is the Depression Era).

What follows as the old couple try out various staying arrangements, occasionally making a nuisance of themselves, is a morally complex story about the generation gap – one that is more concerned with giving viewers (of all ages) shudders of recognition than in demanding judgement. As a pre-credit title puts it, “There is no magic that will draw together in perfect understanding the aged and the young. There is a canyon between us.” (I thought the use of “us” as opposed to “them” was significant; it’s as if the film is placing itself and its viewers right in the spectrum of human experience rather than watching from a safe distance.)

None of this should be surprising if you’re familiar with Leo McCarey’s work. He was one of a band of directors – among them Ernst Lubitsch, Yasujiro Ozu, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Satyajit Ray – whose films are remarkably free of villainous “types”; people whose wicked actions set a plot in motion, giving us emotional cues and allowing us to feel that unfathomable injustices could be explained and dealt with; that by surgically removing those who were responsible for bad things, we could make the world a better place. And Make Way for Tomorrow is one of his most mature works. Though made years before Hollywood began its full-fledged dalliance with gritty “psychological realism”, it contains scenes that anticipate the age of Method actors. It was rare, for instance, to see half-completed sentences and unexpected pauses in speech in 1930s Hollywood movies, but watch the early scene where the couple’s eldest son George (the always-wonderful Thomas Mitchell) enters the family home and says hello to his parents and siblings in turn. Addressing a sister whom he hasn’t seen in a long while, he tries to say the right thing – “I don’t know, we plan and plan...” but then trails off abruptly, almost as if realising how hollow his words are; everyone is leading their own lives, might as well fess up to it instead of pretending that tremendous efforts are being made.

Something similar is achieved in the exchange where George tries to build up the courage to tell his mother that he needs to send her to an old persons’ home, but she anticipates his discomfort and takes the responsibility on herself. On view here is a perfectly performed duet of little gestures and glances, where first we see that she knows, and then realise that he knows that she knows. There are other wonderful little moments, a few of which teeter on the brink of being too cute. But the final passage, with Bark and Lucy in the city together, is among the most graceful and uncompromising I’ve seen in any film – it manages somehow to have the texture of both a personal fantasy and a social documentary.

All this adds up to an emotionally demanding movie, and little wonder that McCarey (who directed the wonderful comedy The Awful Truth that same year) was under studio pressure to make it more upbeat. But he resisted and Make Way for Tomorrow was a commercial dud, with some reviewers of the time even warning viewers to stay away because it was so sad! (Of course, the promotional machinery chugged on unhindered: one gobsmacking theatrical poster shows a scene that isn’t even in the film – Bark dancing gaily with a young woman, presumably his granddaughter.)

When one thinks of Hollywood movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s that broke away from studio executives’ notions of what was good for the box-office, one usually thinks of dark, deeply cynical visions of human nature. (Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole comes to mind.) Make Way for Tomorrow can be seen as a pessimistic film too, but it arrives at its pessimism from an almost opposite direction – by taking a positive view of most people and suggesting that personal circumstances (along with unbridgeable gulfs in personalities and needs) are what cause much of the world’s misery.

At one point, Lucy’s granddaughter Rhoda tells her to stop dreaming and face facts. “When you’re 17 and the world is beautiful,” Lucy replies, “facing facts is just slick fun, like dancing or going to parties. But when you’re seventy... well, you don’t care about dancing, you don’t think about parties anymore, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there ain’t any facts to face. So would you mind if I just went on pretending?” Well, McCarey's film itself turns 75 this month (it was released in May 1937) but there is little pretence in its treatment of the old and the young. And it only occasionally shows its age.

Yet another pedantic post on subject and treatment

I recently read an essay by one of my favourite film writers, V F Perkins, author of the outstanding book Film as Film. The essay is “The Cinema of Nicholas Ray”, and though it’s best appreciated by readers who are familiar with Ray’s work, this bit should be of value to anyone who wants to write professionally about movies (or literature, for that matter):

All our critics distinguish, more or less explicitly, between commercial and personal cinema. The distinction is occasionally valid, often silly, and always dangerous ... [It] has become a weapon for use against films which do not impress by the obvious seriousness of their stories and dialogue [...] It is nonsense to say that in Party Girl Ray’s talent is “squandered on a perfect idiocy” (Louis Marcorelles in, of all places, “Cahiers du Cinema”). The treatment may or may not have been successful: there is no such thing as an unsuccessful subject.

Ray has himself criticised the literary preoccupations of some screenwriters. “ ‘It was all in the script’ a disillusioned writer will tell you. But it was never all in the script. If it were, why make the movie?” The disillusioned writer and the insensitive critic are alike in discounting the very things for which one goes to the cinema: the extraordinary resonances which a director can provoke by his use of actors, decor, movement, colour, shape, of all that can be seen and heard.

Read this sentence again – “The treatment may or may not have been successful: there is no such thing as an unsuccessful subject.” It’s one of the keys not just to assessing a film but also to assessing a piece of writing - and a good riposte to anyone who reads a plot summary and says “That can’t be a good movie.” (It’s always more reasonable to say “That isn’t something I’d be interested in watching just now”, but even pre-judgement of this sort can be misplaced – it can keep you from making serendipitous discoveries about cinema and yourself.)

As a writer, the motif of the supposedly unworthy subject matter strikes a chord on another level too. Reading feedback on (well-written) magazine or newspaper articles, it’s common to find people saying things like “Why have you wasted so many pages on [so-and-so topic]?” - one often gets the impression that they haven't bothered to read the piece at all. (Here’s a recent example of a good article on a subject not many people deem analysis-worthy.) But the idea that certain things shouldn’t be written about in depth because they don't “deserve” it is most puzzling. Fact: ANY subject under the sun is worth engaging with, no matter how lowbrow it might seem. What matters is the quality of that engagement.

[For anyone interested, the full Perkins essay is here. And some related thoughts on story and treatment are here]