Bitter, sweet: Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums

Among the many talents of the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi is a skill for moving fluidly between forms and genres. A few years ago Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud co-directed a film version of her most famous book Persepolis, an autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic Revolution and her eventual return as a young woman. I liked the film but I had one reservation: it was too often a straightforward cinematic presentation of the drawings Satrapi had already done for the book. Though there were a few well-chosen moments of added animation – such as an Expressionist scene where little Marjane’s features melt until she resembles the screamer in the famous Munch painting – the overall similarity to the source text made the viewing experience repetitive for a reader who was already very familiar with the book.

I was much happier with Satrapi’s decision to turn her book Chicken with Plums (original title Poulet aux Prunes) into a (mostly) live-action film. The movie, shown recently at Cinefan, is beautifully shot, cleverly structured and anchored by an extraordinary performance by French actor Mathieu Amalric as a depressed, middle-aged violinist named Nasser-Ali – based on a distant relative of Satrapi in 1950s Tehran – who decides to end his life. That doesn’t sound like an upbeat story, and indeed the film makes a point of confirming early on that Nasser-Ali does die: a shot of his funeral is followed by a series of flashbacks that take us through his final eight days, as well as flashbacks within flashbacks that recount various earlier episodes, including a tragic love affair that aided his artistic growth but also cast a black shadow over his personal life. (“The love you have lost,” says his music teacher, not channelling Rockstar, “will be in each note you play.”)

What is most notable though is the film’s consistently whimsical tone and its many quaint asides such as the “flash-forwards” to the future lives of Nasser-Ali’s children, or a scene where he is visited by Azrael, the talkative Angel of Death. Chicken with Plums is a demonstration of how a movie can begin on a farcical, even buffoonish, note but gradually reveal its secrets so that – without the viewer even realising it – a deeply moving portrait of an individual and his society emerges. And yet, the light-hearted tone is never forsaken. Certain characters – such as Nasser-Ali’s apparently sullen, shrewish wife – are presented unflatteringly at first, and only later shown in a more poignant light. There are jokes about death, as in the sequence where he mulls and rejects various suicide options (being discovered with a plastic bag over one’s head would not be very dignified, would it?).

This tenor sometimes tilts into over-the-top slapstick: one scene has vignettes from the crass American life destined for Nasser-Ali’s son Cyrus, who will marry his cheerleader girlfriend after he accidentally gets her pregnant, settle into hick domesticity and look goggle-eyed when he learns that his own (pea-brained but elephant-sized) daughter has a bun in the oven. This is broad caricature, but under it is the suggestion that Cyrus’s life may not have taken this turn if his father had been a happier, more fulfilled man. A personal tragedy involving two people echoes across time and space, affecting the lives of generations and spawning its own mini-histories.

This can be described as a bittersweet film, though I feel like that word is a little insubstantial (it has a patronising edge to it, as if saying “This isn’t really serious, but it’ll do until something deeper comes along”). Chicken with Plums allows a viewer to laugh at certain aspects of situations that are essentially tragic; at times it might even seem that we are laughing at Nasser-Ali himself. But the mirth is less specific, more inclusive than that – it recognises how the profound and the ridiculous constantly coexist in human lives. There is a running gag about Nasser-Ali being interrupted by an inappropriate sound whenever he is about to say something meaningful (and one hilarious scene imagines the philosopher Socrates’s last words being similarly interrupted) – these scenes are reminders of the many banana peels strewn on life's roads, waiting to make us look silly just as we are constructing grand narratives or making life-changing decisions. But that doesn’t make us pathetic, only human, and Satrapi's film is gently, wonderfully cognisant of this.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard column. An old post on Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries is here]

The Sender, the street cats and the sourpusses: on Nilanjana Roy's The Wildings

“There are no ordinary cats,” the French novelist Colette said once. Anyone privileged enough to have rubbed noses with these volatile balls of fur will know this is correct, but Mara – an orange kitten in Nilanjana Roy’s debut novel – is preternaturally gifted even by the standards of her species. All cats, The Wildings tells us, can “link” with each other across large distances through whisker transmissions, but Mara is that rarity, a Sender: a cat who can transmit extremely strong signals and even travel far and wide while physically staying in the same spot. Though she lives with humans (or Bigfeet) in a Nizamuddin apartment, her existence poses problems for the neighbourhood strays. When you’re constantly hunting for food and surviving by your wits, it can be unsettling to suddenly hear a kitten’s voice in your head yelling “Thank you, O Bigfeet, for releasing me from the fell captivity of the fearsome sock drawer!”

And so, the “wildings” – led by the sagacious Miao and the queenly Beraal – set out to deal with this unusual situation while simultaneously keeping an eye on their youngest, an overenthusiastic, trouble-prone kitten named Southpaw. However, a much more serious threat soon arises from another quarter. In the creepy Shuttered House nearby live a group of feral cats led by the sadistic, sociopathic Datura, who is the Gabbar Singh of this narrative (the analogy springs to mind because of a passage involving a doomed green beetle crawling about near this pensive villain). Soon battle-clouds gather and a popular trope of the adventure genre – the little hero entrusted with a very big task – comes into play.

Animal lovers are well aware that other species are poorly represented – if even acknowledged at all – in our literature, outside of narrowly defined genres or heavily anthropomorphic writing for children. How pleasing it is then to find, in the pages of a novel labelled just “Fiction” rather than “Fantasy” or “Children’s Fiction”, a real setting filtered though a non-human perspective. The Wildings may not fit the conventional definition of a Delhi book, but it gives us the familiar vistas of Nizamuddin – its leafy residential areas, the dargah and the baoli, the dilapidated old houses, the nearby Humayun’s Tomb – as they are experienced by the four-legged creatures who roam and scavenge amidst them.

For a reviewer weary of the blithe self-importance of his species, the concept is refreshing in itself, but it helps that this is a warm, imaginative and well-paced book. It is superbly produced too, with Prabha Mallya’s lovely illustrations sharing page-space with text, or even (as with two small butterflies watched by an enthralled Mara, or a swooping cheel with his wings spread out) weaving amidst the words. Both writing and drawings pay tender attention to the many elements of the natural world. Though the cats are the main characters, many other creatures move in and out of the narrative: three zoo tigers and a langur whom Mara befriends during her virtual wanderings; a stately mongoose who speaks the generic tongue Junglee, which all animals can understand; an Alsatian pup mistreated by his human owners; warblers and squirrels, bats and mice.

What I admired most about The Wildings is that it is remarkably free from simple-minded anthropomorphising of the sort where animals are basically people in different shapes. It’s true that the things these cats mew or otherwise communicate to each other are expressed in a human language (this being a necessary limitation of the author and her readers) and it’s also true that any story about talking animals has a certain amount of cutesiness built into it. But a serious, rigorous attempt is made here to imagine what the world – including the many aspects of it that have been shaped by Bigfeet – might feel like to a cat, from the furniture and carpets inside a house to the smells and textures of the outdoors, or the visceral knowledge that a predator is stalking you in the darkness. The device of the “link” works perfectly too: it should strike a chord for anyone who has long-suspected that there is something mystical and otherworldly about cats; that they aren’t letting on everything they know. Perhaps the supercilious things really have been virtual-chatting, Skyping and status updating long before we Bigfeet learnt some of those tricks – and doing it to much more meaningful ends.

Because the internal logic of the story is so carefully worked out, I felt Roy might be in danger of being too restrained, but every now and then there is an exercise in pure whimsy: a mention of a rooster named Sunte Ho, a sudden exclamation of “Bakwaas” in the middle of a refined conversation, a passage where a colony of Supreme Court cats with such names as Affit and Davit react to a Mara sighting by speaking in over-formal legalese. (“My learned self concludes that the kitten qua kitten is a hypothetical kitten.”) If I had to gripe about anything, it would be that some of the action sequences – a fight at the baoli, the long-drawn-out climactic battle with the ferals – didn’t fully hold my attention. Though written with skill and sharply observant of cat manoeuvres and the graceful litheness of their movements, these passages felt a little mechanical compared to the breeziness of the rest of the narrative.

The Wildings is, before anything else, a terrific adventure tale with a fine cast of characters, and because it can be enjoyed wholly at that level one hesitates to over-analyse or get solemn about its themes. But “serious” and “entertaining” are not exclusive categories, and even genres that are viewed as being relatively low-engagement or non-cerebral often produce works of quiet, unselfconscious wisdom. This book has things to say about the potential for kinship between natural adversaries, about rules of conduct in a survival-of-the-fittest situation, about heroism taken to reckless extremes contrasted with reluctance to get involved at all, and about the advisability of taking only as much as you need from the world around you.

It is also a story about the perils of being secluded to the point of becoming agoraphobic, so that even a glimpse of the sky can be frightening because “it was such a long way away” – the telling contrast is between the sheltered Mara, who opts to move out of her comfort zone and deal with her responsibilities, and the vicious Datura, who is capable of engaging with the outside world only by trying to crush it. But none of these ideas are thickly scribbled on a placard and waved in front of the reader’s nose; they move beneath the surface of a consistently charming story about a diffident kitten and the world that gradually reveals itself to her. By the book’s end I wanted to “link” into the author’s head so I could read the sequel in advance.

[Did this review for Tehelka]

Dissecting the universe

[This is an essay I did for Forbes Life magazine about popular-science books, including works by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and V S Ramachandran. Have written about some of these books at greater length earlier; see links at the bottom of the post]

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As a child I had an almost crippling dread of science, perpetuated largely by the textbooks shoved down our throats in school. Here were difficult-to-understand concepts expressed in dry, pedantic language; one got the sense of having to constantly dissect...not just crawly things in the biology lab, but ideas that seemed irrelevant to our everyday lives. The theories and explanations seemed calculated to take the joy out of things - it was a bit like being told you couldn’t play cricket in the park unless you knew the parabolic equation that described the arc of every delivery bowled by a spinner.

At the time my only voluntary reading about the natural world was Gerald Durrell’s Corfu trilogy: My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods. Durrell’s Corfu – the little Greek island where he spent his idyllic childhood – was one of the classic literary Edens, alongside Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree and P G Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle. His books married the sense of wonder one found in Blyton’s tales with engaging facts about all manner of real-world creatures, from garden geckos to dung beetles. Even his impromptu disembowelment of a turtle carcass (the stink causing his family to hyperventilate) was rivetingly told, right down to his discovery of nearly-formed eggs in the cadaver’s innards.

These were not “science” books, narrowly defined, but they were refreshing alternatives to textbooks, made even more fun by the sense that Durrell took pleasure in the writing; that he had a creative side. (Later I learnt that these were, in fact, embellished memoirs with a few factual discrepancies.) And here arises another point: someone who develops an early interest in the arts might become wary of science because it seems to take morbid pleasure in deflating human pride; in reminding us that we are not the centre of all things, that our cultural achievements amount to a grain of sand in a desert a million times larger than the Sahara.

But where old worlds close, others open up. Much of the popular-science writing I’ve discovered as an adult has revealed pathways to new treasures. Take the work of Richard Dawkins, the very title of whose Unweaving the Rainbow is based on John Keats’s observation that science had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by “explaining” its colours. Dawkins’s books are an elegant riposte to this idea. Most of his writing is in the field of evolutionary biology, and for a layman the best is perhaps the essay collection Climbing Mount Improbable – “Mount Improbable” being a metaphor to explain the illusion of design in living things. My favourite section is about the eye: with the aid of diagrams made by his wife, the actress-illustrator Lalla Ward, Dawkins explains how this most intricate of organs has evolved independently in various parts of the animal kingdom, from its most primitive forms in single-celled organisms billions of years ago (“...eyes so simple that they scarcely deserve to be recognized as eyes at all. It is better to say that the general body surface is slightly sensitive to light”) to the critical step that was the evolution of the lens. Elsewhere, there are analyses of how wings and spider webs came into existence, and descriptions of astonishing feats of mimickry in the insect world.

Dawkins gets bad press from those who find his anti-religion writings strident, but in his popular-science writing he often (and only part-ironically) uses phrases that evoke conventional religion, which points to the reverence he feels for his own subject: “The Forty-Fold Path to Enlightenment” (to describe the steps in the eye’s evolution), “The Devil’s Chaplain”, “River Out of Eden”, and most notably, “A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life” as the subhead of his excellent book The Ancestor’s Tale, in which – channelling Chaucer’s pilgrims – he takes us backward in time through billions of years until we reach the point where the paths of all creatures alive today converge. His achievement here is to make the personal struggles of even a tapeworm or the rhizobium bacteria stimulating, and to remind us of how closely linked we are to every other form of life.

Similar views about interconnectedness and about the majesty of scientific “revelation” are echoed by Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot (the title is a reference to an ephemeral, vulnerable-looking Earth as seen in a galactic photograph taken by a spacecraft 3.7 billion miles away). In one terrific chapter, Sagan imagines an alien visitor orbiting our planet for the first time and trying to understand its topography and possible life presence. Simply by writing from the point of view of an outsider who has no prior knowledge about Earth, he shakes many of our cosy certainties. From space, he notes, it’s possible to observe the effects of such things as bovine flatulence, but “so much of our monumental architecture, our great engineering works, are efforts to care for one another, are wholly invisible. It’s a kind of parable.”

Eventually the alien (who is forbidden to come too close to Earth’s surface) concludes that the multi-coloured beings it sees moving in orderly formation along criss-crossing lines are the planet’s main life forms (though any human reader will recognise them as road vehicles). At a stronger resolution, it observes “tiny parasites that occasionally enter and exit the dominant organisms”, but it doesn’t think of them as particularly important. One recalls another, very different sort of book, Douglas Adams’s manic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the alien Ford Prefect chooses his name thinking it will help him stay inconspicuous because this car is surely the planet’s dominant creature!

****

The American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a contemporary of Dawkins (with whom he had much-publicised differences of opinion on evolutionary theory specifics) and Sagan, was a dauntingly erudite man and some of his writing requires specialised knowledge. But for the beginning reader I recommend the anthology The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (edited by Paul McGarr and Steven Rose). The essays included here (under such subheads as “Autobiography” and “Racism, Scientific and Otherwise”) are a good representative sample of Gould’s writing career and principal concerns (including his famous love for baseball!), but his strengths are especially on view in two pieces about famous hoaxes.

In “The Lying Stones of Marrakech”, he writes insightfully about the early 18th century professor Adam Beringer who was deceived by fabricated fossils depicting heavenly objects and other wonders. And in “The Piltdown Conspiracy” – about the 1912 fraud involving the discovery of skull fragments that appeared to have belonged to a proto-human creature – he engages in a skilful investigation complete with suppositions and presentation of evidence to support the possibility that the respected priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had been involved in the deception. Like all of Gould’s best pieces, these essays work on multiple levels: as character studies, as meditations on guilt and remorse, and as elegies for promising careers misdirected or ruined.

Great scientists like Gould can be intimidating figures if you first encounter them as middle-aged men expertly giving lectures on difficult subjects – and so, it can be comforting to read a book that traces an individual’s journey from the point where a subject started to fascinate him. The celebrated neurologist Oliver Sacks has written at length about his encounters with unusual medical conditions (notably in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), but my favourite among his works involves a branch of science that he didn’t specialise in. His memoir Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood is about a childhood interest that began with a visit to a lightbulb-manufacturing factory run by an uncle; here, little Oliver became obsessed with the metal tungsten, which alone seemed resistant to the corrosive effects of mercury. “Don’t worry,” his uncle said to him, “If I put this little bar of tungsten in the mercury, it would not be affected at all – it would be just as bright and shiny a million years from now.” Tungsten, muses the boy in an unusual but poignant case of adolescent hero-worship, was a rare stable thing in a very precarious world.

The subject of one of Sacks’ best-known articles, “An Anthropologist on Mars”, was Temple Grandin – a woman who was diagnosed with autism as a child and went through a long struggle to understand how her condition made her different from most other people. Along the way, Grandin realised that her autism was “a way station on the road from animals to humans, which puts people like me in a perfect position to translate ‘animal talk’ into English”. She has done far-reaching work in the fields of animal behaviour and welfare, helping to revolutionise techniques used in the US livestock industry, and her book Animals in Translation provides many insights into the inner lives and perceptual skills of animals.

One of the book’s motifs is the inattentional blindness of “normal” people, whose brains convert details into words and abstractions – whereas autistic people (and animals) tend to be visual thinkers who process details. This helps explain the startling results of visual experiments such as “Gorillas in our Midst”, where 50 percent of the people watching a short video failed to see a man in a gorilla suit even though he was right in front of them. Or the scary flight-simulation tests where a significant percentage of trained pilots don’t see a plane parked on the runway they are about to land on. The gorilla project was executed by the experimental psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, and in their own book The Invisible Gorilla, they discuss the repercussions of the experiment, placing it in the context of real-life incidents such as the case of a policeman who failed to see his colleagues beating up an innocent man right in front of his eyes (he was chasing a criminal at the time).

Of course, such experiments are never foolproof – scientific assertions are always open to being revised in the light of fresh evidence. Inevitably, then, most of these books contain reminders that facts we take for granted today had not even yet been imagined in the world of a few hundred years ago. Matthew Cobb’s The Egg & Sperm Race – about the 16th and 17th century European biologists who gradually unraveled the secrets of birth – is a good example. The heroes of Cobb’s story (written mostly in the style of a compelling narrative) include men like Reinier de Graaf and Jan Swammerdam, who made pioneering contributions to the understanding of the human egg; and the Dutch draper Antoni Leeuwenhoek, who used a microscope to examine his own semen (less than “six beats of the pulse” after ejaculation), and discovered “a vast number of living animalcules...moving about with a snake-like motion of the tail”. Cobbs never lets us forget that these men worked in the face of enormous odds, including primitive technology and theological opposition. Even the most brilliant thinkers of the time genuinely believed that insects, and some small animals, came into being through “spontaneous generation”. There were proposed “recipes” for creating toads (they could be fashioned from the corpses of ducks placed on a dung heap!) and snakes (put a woman’s hair in a damp but sunny place).

We’ve come a long way since then, but much remains to be discovered. “What a unique privilege it will be for our generation, and our children’s,” writes V S Ramachandran in the preface to Phantoms in the Brain, “to witness what I believe will be the greatest revolution in the history of the human race: understanding ourselves.” Ramachandran’s territory – like Oliver Sacks’s – is the human brain, and his book is a compendium of incredible case studies involving phantom limbs (patients “experiencing” sensations of pain in their amputated arms), false pregnancies (with every symptom of true pregnancy – except the baby) and stimulated temporal lobes which facilitate a “God experience”. He details his own treatments of some of these cases, including what might be “the first successful amputation of a phantom limb” by using a transposing mirror to trick the sufferer’s brain. His book, like all the others mentioned here, allows the reader to step out of his own head for a while, and to consider the strange fact that we simian-like creatures – still so limited in many ways – have the capacity to think about the nuts and bolts of the universe, our place in it, and even understand the delusions that our minds might experience. If that isn't both mystical and uplifting, what is?

[Some related posts: Charles Darwin the good novelist; Richard Dawkins on coincidences; Stephen Gould and optimum size; the egg-and-sperm race; climbing Mount Improbable]

The hills are alive (but only just) - on Kalpish Ratna's new book

[Did this review for The Sunday Guardian]

“Who would want to imprison a hill?”

The question might seem to come from the fantasy genre – from something like the story of Tolkien’s tree-like Ents, sundered from their kin, their gardens destroyed by the forces of evil. Like many such fables, Kalpish Ratna’s Once Upon a Hill is a cautionary tale and an elegy for the natural world, but its silent hero is a real hill – or rather, something that was once part of a hill: a 60-metre-high column of rock in Mumbai’s Andheri, a surreal presence (for someone who actually looks at it instead of taking it for granted) in the heart of a dirty, crowded urban settlement. And Gilbert Hill isn’t imprisoned only in the sense that it has been separated from its hill friends and plonked into a city: when the author views it early one Sunday morning, it is literally behind a gate – “barred, padlocked, grilled”.

Make that “authors”, for Kalpish Ratna is the lyrical pseudonym used by Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, who write together (this can sometimes be confusing: the book’s narrator mentions “my daughter Afaaf” – the reference is to Syed’s child – and there are incidents that read like a single person’s experiences). Even if you don’t know that they are professional surgeons, you might guess it from some of the descriptors they use: the east face of the hill is a “dry ulcer, an ugly keloid of crumbling tissue that will never be repaired again”; from one angle, it “looks like an über-scar”.

Their intention, however, is to discover what Gilbert Hill really is, what it tells us about Bombay’s geological past and about ourselves. How did its distinctive hexagonal columns form? What of the shrine – to a mysterious goddess named Gaodevi – at the top? What of its modern history – its sale and subsequent quarrying? These questions are addressed through much research (including a study of the papers of the 19th century surgeon Henry John Carter), the consultation of old maps, and many dead ends. There is a hint of detective story here; like the protagonist in Swaminathan’s Lalli books, the authors rigorously work things out, conducting an investigation that reaches back to 65 million years ago, when the landmass we now call India had not yet collided into Asia; they scrutinise the whys and hows of rock formations, peck at the exact meaning of “basalt”.

One sees here a trademark of Kalpish Ratna’s work: obsessive attention to detail and a propensity to cut through – or fold back – the surfaces of things to discover what lies beneath them (the reviewer’s pen trembles for trite analogies involving surgery and scalpels). But another quality – one I admire greatly – is a visible love for the nuts and bolts of writing. This duo has never been content to run with a good plot (or, as in this case, a worthy non-fiction subject) – their writing, at a sentence by sentence level, is rich, inventive, full of sharp imagery (“a tinsel arc of water shivers in the air as an autorickshaw gets its morning sluice”) that sometimes steers close to over-descriptiveness.

Thus, inanimate things are given life – a large construction crane becomes a steel tyrannosaurus, tearing away the pavement with its “titanic mandibles”. There is humour (“a one-headed dog” rises from a guttery Styx; an archaeologist “has a bright future and is equally illuminating about the past”), there is poetry (“flatten the hills, push back the sea, make even more space for the builder and me”), and even a whimsical firsthand account by a fossilised turtle whose memories stretch back to a time the authors themselves can barely imagine. Mostly, these are cases of form enhancing content – the language shakes up the reader, giving us new ways of looking at things that might otherwise be tediously familiar – though there are stray passages where the flair is overdone and the serrated narrative becomes a barrier to a clear understanding of the issues involved.

Flowing beneath the stylistic playfulness – like the rock-forming magma often mentioned in the text – is a deep anger about our ravaged ecology and the planet’s future. “To flatten a hill is the very acme of arrogance, but to leave it rotting thus in its flayed layers is psychotic,” the narrator observes. “Your fossil name is homo sapiens sapiens, the creature who can think about thinking,” the turtle chides the narrator, “Isn’t it time you thought about that?” Once Upon a Hill is a testament to forgotten landscapes that now host manicured urban settlements; a reminder that the lives of even very old cities would barely register on the geological time-scale, and that human beings – whose hubris and dominance is just another blip on that scale – have responsibilities.

The denser, more jargon-ridden passages of this difficult-to-classify book may test the patience of even the engaged reader (quick, what’s the difference between a batholith and a lopolith?), but it occupies a special place in the ever-growing library of literature about Bombay – and it should be just as relevant to those who aren’t from that city. I have lived in a south Delhi colony for 25 years and Gilbert Hill has never loomed on my horizon; but now, each time I look at the little mound – barely a few feet high – in the park near my flat, with a newly built Metro station running directly beneath it, I wonder what this terrain was like before the sapiens arrived with their construction cranes – and what it will be like a hundred years from now.

Post abhi baaki hai...some more Wasseypur rambling

[Warning: none of this will make any sense if you haven't seen Gangs of Wasseypur, and possibly even if you have]

Looking at my GoW post again, I realised it came across as more negative than intended, perhaps giving the impression that I didn’t like the film – which is very far from the truth. Part of the reason is that the post wasn’t a consolidated “review”, it was a specific attempt to discuss some things that didn’t work for me – and so, the tone necessarily leant in a particular direction. (I could have written a piece twice as long gushing about the many things I loved in the film, but that wasn’t the intention here.)

It’s always a good thing when a movie can provoke impassioned, well-articulated conversations, and GoW has certainly been doing this. I’m not about to quote all my email chats with friends on the subject, but here’s an example of a discussion of a relatively minor plot point. My friend Shougat has written three separate pieces about GoW for Tehelka. In the last of these, he notes:

An arresting image, Kashyap should be told, is not the same as an idea. For instance, in GoW1, a consigliere (one of two, like everything in this film) of the Khan family crime syndicate self-flagellates in the manner of Shia Muslims to punish himself for his lust. There are other scenes of collective Shia self-flagellation in GoW1, and in GoW2 the same character once again cracks the lash against his back, his face set in stoic denial, while listening to Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Huma Qureshi’s extended post-nuptial frolicking. This must mean something, you think, must reflect something about this man’s character, or perhaps make some general point. But, no, Kashyap just likes the sight and sound of a man whipping himself.

My response to the above passage:

Actually, I think Farhan's self-flagellating was intended to make a point about his character (whether it's made convincingly is another matter). His inability to control his sexual drives in the first film plays a big part in defining Faisal's life trajectory, and one gets the impression that from this point onwards Farhan is on a relentless, self-conscious mission to detach himself from the material world in the face of his baser instincts. (His role as the sutradhaar lusting after successive generations of clan women reminded me oddly of Vyasa's ambiguous role in the Mahabharata.) Perhaps there is some sort of moral point intended in the fact that, all those namaazes and self-flagellations later, he is essentially the sole survivor at the end (and looking after Mohsina and her child the same way Vyasa was lingering about at the epic’s end as preceptor for the heir-apparent Parikshit after the Pandavas f***ed off to Heaven). Or perhaps nothing moral is intended.

To which Shougat tersely replied:

Sounds plausible to me... except that two scenes of the chap whipping himself followed by a last scene in Bombay is very little on which to hang an elaborate but interesting analysis.

Indeed, so rushed is the pace of GoW and so hard is it to take anything in it at face value that at times it feels like the only way to discuss the film is through subtextual analysis, playful speculation and guesswork. Which might simply mean that we need the evolution of a new mode of criticism to deal with a new type of cinema.

[Speaking of the Pandavas - and subtextual analysis - did Faisal’s ganja addiction remind anyone else of Yudhisthira’s gambling? Did Perpendicular’s activities put you in mind of Bheema’s appetite for random, cruel violence? No? Well, then.]

****

The fun thing about discussing this film is that nearly every intelligent viewer I know has expressed some ambivalence about their reactions, and wondered if they misread the tone of a crucial scene. On my post and elsewhere, the possibility has been raised that even Faisal’s big emotional moment near the end may have been an inside joke – another meta-reference to how the hero of a “typical” mainstream Hindi movie might be expected to behave in a certain situation. It has also been suggested that the characters of GoW – or at least the characters of GoW 2 – are not meant to have the interiority and roundedness that so many reviewers have been seeking; they are meant to be nothing more than hollow constructs of the movies they watch.

At risk of getting “meta” and self-indulgent myself, I want to again clarify something about my main objection to the film. I can’t do better than to simply quote a poster named Ami, who (in the comments thread of this blog) articulated my position better than I did. Here goes (bold marks mine):

I don’t think he is criticizing the film for its tragicomedic humour but for the fact that it cannot decide whether it wants the viewers to be emotionally invested in its characters and view them as real people or whether it wants to present its characters more as archetypical composites of popular culture living in a cardboard universe that is playfully derivative of gangster films and masala movies.

[...] He’s objecting to the uneven emotional engagement that the film provokes – not the fact that it is both serious and playful but the fact that it is both emotionally superficial and emotionally deep.

To reiterate: I respect any work that recognises the possibility of playfulness/levity in a tragic moment, and vice versa. (The scene where Faisal stumbles back to wear his shoes is one of a few scenes in GoW where I thought this was done quite nicely.) But I also think that in the really successful examples of such juxtapositions, those apparently contradictory moods are integrated within a given context. And in GoW, there were too many cases of the film simply telling us “This is how you're supposed to feel about these characters” in one scene and then “Now you have to feel this way” in the next scene.

Anyway, like I said in the earlier post, I look forward to watching the whole 6-hour shebang a second time and quite possibly changing my mind about it completely. Maybe a second viewing will reveal that the entire story is a ganja dream along the lines of the hallucinatory opium den scenes in Once Upon a Time in America.

Mind the gaps: conflicting thoughts on Gangs of Wasseypur

Much of the conversation around Anurag Kashyap’s multi-generational gangland epic Gangs of Wasseypur has centred on authenticity (or its absence). Some of the negative criticism has been based on pre-release publicity that appeared to flag GoW as a grittily realistic film with its roots firmly in the hinterland. I’ll avoid getting into that particular argument because I know nothing about the real Wasseypur, about its violent history and about when its young people first discovered the special pleasures of sunglasses – but also because “authenticity” and “realism” in cinema are always ambiguous things. I find it more useful to consider another level of reality – the one involving the creation of an internally consistent world. Given that GoW is a family epic involving layers of personal tragedy, I was perplexed by its wildly shifting tone, which made it difficult (for me at least) to feel strongly invested in its people.

In what is essentially a single five-and-a-half-hour film (released in two parts), it’s strange how little attempt there is at sustained character development. Partly, that’s because of the sheer size of the canvas – perhaps as big as any Hindi film has ever had. The narrative, with its panoply of characters, spans six decades, and the use of a voiceover (by Piyush Mishra’s sutradhaar Farhan) facilitates a speedy recording of events: courtships are hurriedly conducted, children are born, they grow up and we learn all the essential things about them in a few minutes (or seconds); vignettes flash by in the time it takes for a revolver to be cocked. Colourful characters (like an adolescent thug with a speech impediment and the nickname Perpendicular) hold the screen briefly and then exit, the main purpose of their existence being to amuse the viewer. Which in itself is fine (the totla Perpendicular’s mangling of cuss words - bhen tod - provides a superb laugh-out-loud moment), but it can become problematic if they divide the film’s running time among themselves in such a way that one doesn’t get to spend enough time with the principal characters.

Consequently Gangs of Wasseypur can be a confounding film to watch. There are so many brilliant things in it (and regardless of everything I say here, I look forward to watching Part I and Part II back to back on DVD at some point). There are the performances, notably by Manoj Bajpai, Richa Chadda, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and especially the film’s co-writer Zeishan Qadri in an (ahem) author-backed part as the imperturbable Definite. There is Sneha Khanwalkar’s versatile music score, ranging from the 1940s-style ballad “Ik Bagal” (written by the multitalented Mishra) to the reggae-hippie song “I am a Hunter” (which incorporates elements from Trinidadian music with what sounds – to my ears – like a hint of the classic children’s song “Nani teri morni”).

In Part II the music becomes noisily contrapuntal, and by this point the film in general is defined by constantly clashing tones. Many of the darkest scenes are treated with humour, occasionally to the point of inappropriateness (so that it’s common to find audience members laughing during moments of extreme violence, as they would during a Tom and Jerry cartoon). Admittedly, some of the little touches of levity are well done. When a sleeping (and probably ganja-addled) Faisal Khan is told that his father has been killed, he jumps off the charpoy and dashes down a stairway and out of the frame, looking very much the purposeful hero about to assume a responsibility – but a second later he scampers back awkwardly because he has forgotten to put on his shoes. It’s a nice touch – a pointer to the mundane things that can interfere with the playing out of the dramatic “scenes” in our lives, and the kind of shot one wouldn’t see in the Bachchan-starrer Trishul, which Faisal is so obsessed with. (More about that in this post.)

A notable thing about GoW is how its characters are influenced by cinema, and there is explicit commentary on this in one of the rare quiet scenes in Part II where the ancient Ramadhir Singh (looking increasingly like the old Don Ciccio, destined to be cleanly gutted by De Niro’s Vito Corleone near the end of The Godfather Part II) mulls that one reason he has stayed alive for so long is “kyonke main cinema nahin dekhta” – he has never been swayed by the flair and the heroics he sees onscreen, played out over the decades by generations of movie stars from Dilip Kumar through “Bachchan Amitabh” to Salman Khan. Elsewhere, there is much evidence of personalities and relationships shaped by celluloid dreams, such as when Mohsina (Huma Qureshi) sees that Faisal has come to her house to ask for her hand in marriage, and reacts by pirouetting dreamily in slow-motion the way Madhuri Dixit might have done in a less self-conscious film of an earlier age. These scenes are notable as meta-commentary about a people’s connection with their cinema, but it also means that most of the characters in Gangs of Wasseypur are about as fleshed out as movie-star posters.

The strongest emotional response I had to any killing in the film was when the imperial, dignified Shahid Khan is assassinated in Varanasi relatively early in Part I. And after watching Part II, just because of that “main cinema nahin dekhta” scene, I came away feeling like Ramadhir Singh was the character I knew best in the entire film. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both these moments involve members of the old guard – people whose heyday takes place very early in this epic story. This could be tied to the idea that there was a certain intrinsic honour in the earlier generations, even a rationale for violence, and that the younger lot – culminating in the amoral Perpendicular and the opportunistic Definite – have lost that grounding; nihilism has set in.

Caught between these two worlds is the Faisal Khan character, who might be called GoW's protagonist. The role is well-performed and Faisal’s initial trajectory recalls Michael Corleone in The Godfather – the innocent sucked into a vortex of crime. Indeed he even has a scene late in the second part where he cries in his wife’s arms about how he didn’t want to have anything to do with this violent life. Yet there’s something random about this scene: it comes out of nowhere, feels psychologically improbable given how far gone Faisal is by this point (besides, if he was initially unwilling, it was probably because he was immersed in ganja, not because of any moral compulsions) and I thought it existed only to give us a reason to feel sorry for Faisal in light of what will happen later. In any case this pathos-filled moment is soon rendered meaningless: the grim bloodbath that Faisal engages in at the end doesn’t suggest someone who was ever a reluctant participant – this is killing for the fun of it, pure bloodlust combined with a boy’s fantasy of cornering his mortal enemy in a no-escape position and emptying round after round into his body.

The outlandish, cartoon violence of that final sequence – blood rendered shinily aesthetic, so that Ramadhir Singh’s ravaged corpse looks like it is studded with rubies – is a reminder that the film has stopped taking any of these killings seriously. Earlier, when the young widow Shama is shot dead in the Khan clan's house, the voiceover quickly tells us that this has come as a big shock to everyone because it’s the first time ever that a woman has been killed thus during the gang wars; cut to a very brief shot of Faisal sitting by himself, looking despondent, and then everyone gets back to the business of revenge and the business of business. A little while later, Faisal’s mother – a key character – is gunned down in the market, and this again is glossed over. And once you have heard faux-maudlin versions of Hindi-film songs like “Teri Meherbaniyan” being played alongside what are mean to be genuinely sad scenes (a family weeping over a young son’s body), it’s hard to take any of the emotions at face value. Gangs of Wasseypur encourages the viewer to chuckle at its violence and at the mourning that follows it, but also wants us to feel strongly enough about the main characters that there is a sense of genuine tragedy in the last act (and the last scene, which returns us to the plaintive “Ik Bagal”). Possibly this is my failing, but – much as I enjoyed many things about this epic film – I couldn’t muster both feelings at once.

Kite and kin: notes on Patang

At a film festival like Cinefan, some of the more poetic things get said after a screening is over, when the movie’s crew comes up on the stage to address the audience. Consider Aakash Maheriya, a non-professional actor from Ahmedabad, who played one of the main roles in Prashant Bhargava’s fine film Patang. Too many people choose to highlight the unpleasant things about his city’s recent history, Maheriya said – communal riots, for example. “Lekin Prashant ne kuay mein haath daalkar hamaari khushiyan nikaali aur aapko dikhayee.” (“But Prashant dipped his hand in the well, found the happier side of our lives and put it into this film.”)

Much of this khushi is expressed during Ahmedabad’s vibrant kite festival Uttarayan, the event around which the film pivots. Patang, which won the Special Jury Award at Cinefan earlier today, is one of the least plot-driven movies I’ve seen in a while (this isn’t meant as criticism). Its slice-of-life story takes place over two days: a middle-aged businessman named Jayesh (Mukkund Shukla) visits his hometown with his young daughter Priya (Sugandha Garg); they stay with Jayesh’s mother, his widowed bhabhi Sudha (the excellent Seema Biswas in one of her too-infrequent screen appearances) and his nephew Chakku (Nawazuddin Siddiqui in another of a continuing line of impressive performances), who sings in a wedding band. Not very much “happens” – kites are flown, the old city is explored, Sudha seems happy but a little guarded, the family engages in everyday talk, the uncle is patronising towards his nephew – but steadily, deftly, little details of character and circumstance are revealed.

Early on, with no explicit information provided about Jayesh’s current life (and given the knowledge that the film itself was made by non-resident Indians), I assumed that Jayesh and Priya had come from “abroad”. (Clearly I wasn’t the only one: someone brought it up during the post-screening Q-A.) But midway through the film it is disclosed that they live in Delhi, and one realises that this father and daughter are in some ways foreigners even though they are in the same country, a few hundred miles away; the gulf between the lives they lead in the capital and the lives of their lower-middle-class relatives in old Ahmedabad (for whom they bring such wondrous gifts as iPods and "scent") is nearly as wide as it would have been if they were in the US.

As the narrative progresses, one sees the calm but insistent hegemony exercised by the big-city man who wants to settle his mother in a posh colony that has everything he thinks she could want (“AC hai, gardens hain ... mandir bhi hai”), as well as the vulnerability of the old woman, keen to avoid offending her son. One realises that Chakku, his loud shirts and sunglasses aside, is an insecure young man, very possessive of his mother, bitter about the past and essentially childlike (indeed he spends much of his time with the poor local children, who have their own daily struggles). Another young man, Bobby – apparently smug and self-assured – finds himself out of his depth when faced with the sexual frankness of a big-city girl (and with her goggle-eyed, admiring reaction when she discovers he is a college dropout - though in truth he would have preferred to continue studying). And in Priya’s behaviour, there are hints of an unhappy, neglected childhood (her mother was too busy to come along, she hesitantly reveals, because she was “wine-tasting”).

Most of this is not spelled out, it emerges through throwaway conversations. And though I understand what Maheriya meant in his quote about Ahmedabad ki khushi, it would be simplistic to describe this as a “happy” film. Seemingly commonplace early scenes – such as one where the old mother is asked to sign a document – come to suggest darker possibilities later; fractures appear in relationships. The most conventionally dramatic scene is a confrontation between Chakku and his uncle, but tension has already been building for a while, and the film’s pacing reflects this. When the kite-fliers take to the rooftops for friendly competition, the cuts become shorter and more urgent, the music more conspicuous, and though everyone is laughing and joking the event soon acquires a primal, ritualistic intensity. On the screen is a manic dance of hands (some of them bandaged) pulling at strings with increasing fervour; faces become tighter, more focused. Here is the spirit of festivity turned into the survival of the fittest (and this is, in more than one sense, a story about undercutting) – it’s possible, for a while at least, to believe that these people, nominally friends, will do anything to bring a rival kite down. These edgy scenes are later offset by quieter, more graceful night-time shots of kites with paper lanterns tied on their strings, but a point about human nature – and about sibling rivalries and class conflict – has already been made.

Patang combines a few well-chosen stylistic flourishes (such as hazy, dreamlike imagery when Jayesh recalls his childhood flying kites alongside his elder brother) with elements of cinéma vérité, including the casting of non-actors and the use of unobtrusive camerawork. Though based in Chicago, Prashant Bhargava spent months at a time living in Ahmedabad’s old city, observing the pulse of daily life, getting to know everyone from the chai-wallahs to the local gangsters. Later, during the shoot, he encouraged his crew to do the same. “In the first week we did nothing but hang out,” Sugandha Garg said after the screening, while Seema Biswas added that the camera was often left on for three or four hours until the actors became less conscious of it.

This brings a nice spontaneity to many shots, which must then have been painstakingly assembled in the editing room - the final film contains many close-ups of faces and hands, people caught in half-gestures and half-glances, and most of it works very well for this story. There are a few heavy-handed touches: the use of titles in the first 10 minutes to identify the major characters and their relationships to each other (this was presumably done to make things simpler for a non-Indian audience); a trite, over-expository conversation between Priya and Bobby during a romantic moment. But for most of its running time, Patang is a pleasingly intimate observation of small-town India (or rather, "old-city India") and of the many little complications attending family life.

Nizamuddin cats and Mani Ratnam

Two close friends, who are also two of my favourite writers (and the fandom preceded the friendship), have books coming out very soon. Presenting:

The Wildings, by Nilanjana S Roy (some information and an excerpt here; available for pre-order on Flipkart)

and

Conversations with Mani Ratnam, by Baradwaj Rangan

I haven’t read Nilanjana’s book yet but hope to soon – more on it in a later post. I have read most of Baradwaj’s manuscript, and instead of gushing on mindlessly as I’m prone to doing, I’ll say just this: it holds up extremely well in comparison with the two best conversations-with-directors books I have read: Bogdanovich on Orson Welles and Truffaut-Hitchcock. When Baradwaj first told me the book was going to be almost entirely in the Q&A format, I had...not misgivings but a tinge of regret, because I’m such a fan of his flowing writing. But he’s achieved something very special here: he has got Mani Ratnam to open up about a lot of things, moderated a series of fascinating conversations (and these ARE conversations between two people who are very knowledgeable about film – not standard-issue “interviews” where Serf asks Celebrity a line of vapid questions) - and most tricky of all, he has structured those sessions in such a way that a reader gets a sense of drama as well as chronology. I was riveted even by the discussions about the early Ratnam films that I haven’t seen.

(Okay, so I did gush on mindlessly. Won’t apologise for it though. Do keep an eye out for both books.)