Biases in movie-watching: two views of John Ford (and Kai Po Che)

[Did a version of this for my DNA column]

In an age of nonstop information and opinion-mongering, the cognitive bias called the hostile media effect probably plays a bigger role in our lives than we realise. Essentially, it suggests that if you feel strongly enough about an issue, you will tend to see a news report (or an article, or a film) about that issue as being biased in the opposite direction. It is a common enough phenomenon in sports journalism: a Tennis.com article about Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal can draw divergent reactions from the respective fan bases, each group claiming with equal conviction (and with an apparent need to feel aggrieved) that the writer hates their favourite player and loves his rival.

The HME often kicks in when films about incendiary subjects are being assessed. Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che! – about three Gujarati boys whose lives are changed by the 2002 communal riots – was an example from earlier this year. Even though I spent relatively little time discussing Kai Po Che! with anyone, I often heard two very contrary accounts of it. The first: this movie is an endorsement of the divisive politics of the Narendra Modi regime. By making a likable character – one of the film’s heroes – participate in anti-Muslim riots after his parents have been murdered in Godhra, it validates the post-Godhra killings and the simmering frustrations of the majority community. The second: this “pseudo-secular” film is unduly sympathetic to the Muslims. It glosses over Godhra (where Hindus were the targets), refusing to show details of the slaughter. But it dwells long and hard on the retaliatory terror unleashed by the Hindutva leaders. (In this context some expressed surprise that it got past the censors at all, despite presenting the riots as carefully planned – which runs contrary to the “official” version of events.)

Personally I thought Kai Po Che! was a clear-eyed view of a time and situation, and a layered coming-of-age film rather than one with an explicit political agenda. (I wrote a bit about it here, and also agree with what Trisha Gupta says here and here.) I’m not suggesting that my cosily “madhyam” view is anything like the final word, or that we should adopt a similar position on every controversial film by claiming that the reactions it draws have nothing to do with the work itself. But I do think this particular film became a test case in the affirmation/rationalisation of deep-rooted fears, and that the responses to it raise many old questions. For instance: should art necessarily set out to be corrective or prescriptive, or is it enough to dispassionately hold a mirror up to the world, even if it means coming across as amoral or nihilistic? And given cinema’s special power to stir emotions, does a well-intentioned filmmaker have a responsibility to make his position as clear as possible – to spell it out for people who need to be spoon-fed – rather than taking the Ivory Tower Artist’s stance that the viewer should be left to work things out for himself?

I don’t think such questions can have a context-free answer – everything depends on cultural vicissitudes, the nature and purpose of the film, the target audience, and so on – but I thought about them again recently while watching one of my favourite John Ford films, the 1948 Fort Apache. This is a movie that has roused very different feelings among critics – something that is also generally true of Ford’s status as the great American cinematic poet and myth-maker, a man who began his career as an extra playing a Ku Klux Klan member in The Birth of a Nation, and went on to construct a large body of work that expresses ambivalent, sometimes contradictory attitudes to subjects such as the treatment of Indians in the Old West.

Set shortly after the American Civil War, Fort Apache centres on the actions of the megalomaniacal Lieutenant Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda in one of his subtlest, most tight-lipped – and most effective – performances). Humourless, a stickler for discipline, clearly bigoted about the Indians, and also class- and hierarchy-conscious within his own society, Thursday repeatedly refuses to listen to the sensible advice of his second-in-command Captain York (John Wayne, also excellent in a role that requires plenty of quietly exasperated reacting). At the end, driven by hubris and lack of regard for the intelligence of others, he dishonours an agreement with the Indians and then drives himself and a band of his men to (a wholly unnecessary) doom.

Whereupon the familiar Fordian role as a consolidator of legends comes into effect. The film ends with York (who defied Thursday when the latter was alive) now doing everything he can to whitewash his former boss’s character for the benefit of visiting newsmen, encouraging them – and history – to remember Thursday as a valiant commander. York’s stance can be seen as a pre-echo of the famous line from a later Ford movie, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

That last scene raised the hackles of a writer I hold in high regard, David Thomson, who has been consistently critical of Ford since the mid-70s, when he published the first edition of A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson (who can be unforgiving when he feels a film is operating in its own hermetically sealed universe, refusing to engage with – or show a sense of responsibility to – the real world) sees the ending of Fort Apache as a sentimental and dangerous falsification. Writing about it, he evokes contemporary politics:

Let me make an analogy. It may yet emerge that at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, American forces used torture and other malpractices in interrogating suspects. If that is so, then the truth must come out. There is no kind of Rumsfeldian “code” worthy of being protected. In other words, it is not enough for the film to admit to Thursday’s mistakes quietly while holding to the legend of military duty.

Much as I respect Thomson, I think this is an ungenerous view of Fort Apache. All other things being equal, if this were a contemporary movie that dealt with Abu Ghraib, this is what it would be doing: it would show its viewers the truth (e.g. there were malpractices in interrogation; there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the American invasion was built on deceit and ulterior motives) and then end with a key character proposing that this truth not be revealed because it would be bad for morale, or would go against the grain of patriotism, or whatever.

The thing to be asked then is: are we mature enough as viewers to reject that character’s final action as a prescription for our own attitudes, and to focus instead on what we have unflinchingly been shown in the preceding two hours? What carries greater weight: a closing sequence that appears to simplistically “sum up” the director’s own attitude, or the sensitively depicted series of events through the bulk of the film, where (in the case of Fort Apache) the person who is canonised at the end has been shown as hollow and unlikeable?

Again, these are difficult questions and don’t necessarily have clear answers, but they cut to the heart of the art-life relationship and how to view a film about a polarising subject. I think one can reasonably argue that as the man who put images on a big screen for millions of viewers to see, Ford himself hid nothing in Fort Apache. (As his defenders – the director-critic Peter Bogdanovich among them – have pointed out, although the mythologizing line “Print the legend” is so strongly associated with his cinema, the director himself did print “the truth” both here and in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.) In his book Searching for John Ford, which I’ve been reading on and off in recent weeks, Joseph McBride points to the fatalistic subtleties in Fort Apache’s construction, including the fact that at the end the benevolent York is in the same position that the power-mad Thursday was once in, and the framing and composition emphasise that the “ordinary” soldiers are casualties of conflict, pawns being manipulated by their superiors.

Here one should point out that even Ford detractors usually concede that Fort Apache was among the first Hollywood features to present Indians in a sympathetic light and to introspect about their treatment. It is a film of warmth, humanity and generosity of spirit, qualities that repeatedly show up the bullheaded coldness of Colonel Thursday: I love the many scenes that show the interrelationships in the army camp, including those between soldiers and their wives, mothers and sons. (His reputation as a “director of Westerns” notwithstanding, Ford was so good at doing a range of comedy scenes – from understated comedy of manners involving people who are trying hard to be “civilised”, to broad folk humour involving those who couldn’t give a rat’s arse.) And that humanity certainly does stretch to the “Other”. There are Ford films that are harder to take to one’s heart, films whose motives might be more validly questioned and critiqued. I don’t think Fort Apache is one of them. But then again, maybe I have a cognitive bias of my own here – I loved that film long before I thought seriously about its politics.

P.S. Just realised that the two film discussed here both end with “che”. Completely coincidental – this wasn’t intended as a crossed-connections post.

P.P.S. Speaking of contemporary politics, similar questions did of course arise around Zero Dark Thirty, which drew pro-torture allegations. More on that here.

Fox troth - a column about hidden senses

[Did a version of this piece for Kindle magazine’s anniversary issue about sensory experiences that sometimes remain hidden from us, or that we don’t open ourselves to. I hadn’t intended to write about Foxie for a while – not for official publication anyway – but this seemed to fit the subject, so I drew on some of the things I have written earlier. The magazine website is here, and the illustration on the left is by Soumik Lahiri]


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It was a magical moment, one I often relive and dwell on. One afternoon in July 2008, walking towards a rough lane behind our building to check on our water booster, I saw a litter of six tiny puppies sleeping together. Perhaps it’s relevant that I didn’t see them from a safe distance – they seemed to materialise right under my nose; I might have stepped on one of them if my eyes hadn’t been on the ground.

What I felt in those first few seconds was generic concern (I didn’t know yet that the pups’ mother was nearby, and that they were being looked after by two kindly watchmen) and perhaps the briefest tug of a heart-string. At this point I couldn’t even see them as individuals, just as a huddled-together mass of vulnerable, twitching life. Even over the next few days, as my mother, wife and I began visiting the lane, taking across milk and bread, helping the watchmen cope, I couldn’t have imagined that one of those little creatures would become mine in the truest, deepest sense of the word – not my “pet” but in nearly every way that mattered, my child – and that the next few months would see the opening up of senses and feelings that I didn’t know existed.

I could write a book, or five, on the years that followed, but here’s a summary. We got a couple of the pups adopted, three others succumbed to infection and to the wheels of careless or callous drivers, and we took in the last remaining one, who became our Foxie. Though a strong and hugely energetic dog at first, she spent the second half of her short life afflicted by an intestinal condition that necessitated monitoring her diet carefully, providing medicines with each meal, cleaning up after her six or seven times a day, and watching the accumulation of side-effects: she became ill-tempered during the bad phases, suffered from pain in her hind legs, was so emaciated that most of her ribs showed, and when I took her for a walk downstairs she spent her time not running around after a ball as she once had but sniffing around for the sort of food we had to deny her at home. Then, just when it seemed her condition had stabilised and she was regaining the old spirit, she passed away on the doctor’s table last year, aged barely four.

It was the most devastating thing I have ever faced (and even that is such an understatement, it feels almost indecent to write the sentence). Yet her short life had opened new doors of perception and feeling for me. Back in 2008, if asked, I would casually have called myself an animal lover; today I realise how misleading that would have been, and how much I still had to learn. Ever since childhood, with my mother's encouragement, I had a basic interest in other life forms, at least the ones that humans find it easy to relate to – asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply “a vet”. But the only animals I had been genuinely close to earlier had been cats, who are relatively distanced and independent, and perhaps this was a reflection of my own personality.

Fox was introverted too, by dog standards that is, but my years with her provided another dimension of experience. They taught me in the most immediate terms what it meant to be in communion with another, emotionally demonstrative being – to pick up on aspects of personality and feeling – even when verbal communication is out of the equation. And there was a practical component to the relationship that made it especially deep. Working out of home, I was around her most of the time during the long months of her illness, and my daily routine centered around her needs. I was a more hands-on, invested parent than most of the fathers of human children I know – and even some of the mothers.

I should stress that the intensity of this relationship was very much an individual thing: it hasn’t translated into comparably strong feelings for other dogs. More than a year after she went, the grieving process is still very much on. I still feel incomplete and numb, struck by panic each time I think of those last moments in the vet’s clinic; I have regular nightmares about being on a narrow ledge at a great height with her in my arms, being unsure I can hold on to her and maintain my balance at the same time. And I don’t think I can take on another such responsibility, or make such a strong emotional commitment, in the near future. But my time with her did, in a more abstract sense, heighten my sensitivity towards non-human life. The experience has been one of empathy-creation – the sort of feeling where I might see an emaciated dog with a scared, hunted look in its eyes scavenging for food on the streets and think to myself with a shudder, “That could so easily have been my Foxishka, if I had never seen that litter in the lane, or if we had been a little less concerned or more casual.” Such a notion is unthinkable, but I think it all the time.

Since Fox had a somewhat unusual, elongated body structure and because she stretched out in odd positions, we used to joke that she was many animals in one. When she nibbled on leaves with her ears down, she resembled a goat. Lying on the floor with her arms spread out ahead and her legs on the side, she could seem reptilian: lizard-like or dinosaur-like. There was an odd, camel-like undulation in her movement at other times, and she was a race-horse when she galloped in circles around the park in those precious, much-too-brief early months. When I watched news coverage of the “psychic” octopus Paul, I could imagine a skilled cartoonist drawing a picture of an octopus with a round Foxie head, the eyebrows raised dolefully. I haven’t come close to bonding with any of these creatures, but thanks to her I feel like I know them all a little better.

All that said, I don’t want to get over-sentimental about the idea of dogs as creatures whose inner lives are exactly comparable to ours. It’s natural enough for animal-lovers to project their own thoughts and emotions onto their pets, and in principle this can be a good thing: an extreme version of the empathy that allows us to relate to the experiences of a human being from another gender, class, religion or colour (and therefore linked to the concept of “speciesism” as a form of discrimination along the same continuum as racism or sexism). At the same time there is always a danger of carrying identification too far and seeing the animal purely in human terms, according to our limited sense of what emotion or self-consciousness is. And that is probably not good for an inter-species relationship.

But even if you accept that one can never really know what is going on in another creature’s mind (isn’t that also applicable to other humans?), there are strong indications for anyone who cares to look closely. Dogs who are well-loved come to acquire a very particular set of characteristics: there’s a softness in the eyes that suggests a sense of security, a feeling that nothing really bad can happen in their little world; it’s understood that frenetic tail-wagging is the correct response to the sight of any new human. At the other extreme, there is the perpetual wariness, the suggestion of fear hardened into aggression, on the face of the stray who knows he’s liable to be kicked or have a stone thrown at him. And somewhere in between, in some ways worst of all, is the cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and water and look after him in a detached sort of way, but where affection is in very short supply: a dog who isn’t allowed anywhere near the beds or sofas, who spends most of the day tied up on a short leash and who was quite possibly smacked hard the first time he chewed on a chair leg.

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In an essay about the self-absorption of human beings, our smug, anthropic inability to really “see” other creatures, the speculative-fiction writer Vandana Singh pointed out that urban development is geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it is based on the hubris that we are exalted creatures, capable of leading autonomous lives in our concrete bubbles, never mind the consequences for the ecology and for our own health. During my time with Foxie I got a firsthand sense of the determination with which some people cut themselves off from other life forms. There were fights with residents who don’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs. The small but devoted group of animal-lovers in our colony – people who have taken responsibility for vaccinations, sterilisations and food – constantly face the ire of the vast majority of households.

There is a tendency, among those who don’t like animals, to get bleeding-heart about “the many human beings who are in an equally bad state – shouldn’t we do something to help them first?” There are obvious logical flaws in this argument: is this a zero-sum game? Is human welfare unrelated to that of other life? Do we need to completely eradicate all human suffering from the planet – as if that is ever possible – before we turn our attention to non-human animals? But beyond that I find this self-serving argument funny because in my experience, many of the people who use it are just as apathetic to other human beings – the ones they don’t count among family and friends, or as “equals”, or the ones they don’t expect to benefit from. True compassion isn’t a quality that can neatly be rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group).

And so, maybe I should end on a somewhat upbeat note by mentioning an old woman who leads a hand-to-mouth existence but can still see and feel things that many far more privileged people can’t. Pratima Devi – “Amma” to everyone who knows her – lives in a small shack next to south Delhi’s PVR Saket multiplex, five minutes from where I stay. For nearly three decades now, though earning a meager livelihood as a ragpicker, she has been looking after dozens of street dogs in the vicinity: feeding them, getting them neutered, maintaining relations with a local vet and animal-welfare organizations. But she is very far from the cliché of the socially inept recluse who is cut off from other human beings: her warmth and openness touches everyone who comes to know her. I discovered that quality for the first time a few days after Foxie died, when, driven by a need to reach out to someone who might understand, I went across to meet her. Since then, she has been a constant reminder of what open-heartedness is, and what seeing and feeling can really mean.

[Related posts: Foxie, a remembrance; An old woman and her dogs; Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation]

Death and the heroine: Vinod Mehta does Meena Kumari

Two years ago, an excerpt from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of Meena Kumari appeared in the anthology The Greatest Show on Earth. Reading it without context, I assumed Mehta’s book was a very personal project, which he was compulsively driven to write after years of fawning over Meena Kumari as a young man. His proprietary use of “my heroine” and “my tragedienne” to describe the then-recently deceased actress suggested this, as did the terms in which he celebrated her Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam performance: “Beautiful. How beautiful she appeared. For once the camera captured my heroine and did justice to a face that was now at its zenith […] Biting her man’s ear, ruffling his hair, caressing his neck, running her hands over his kurta, she created an environment of pulsating, titillating and mouth-watering sexuality.”

Now, reading Meena Kumari (republished more than 40 years after it first came out) in its entirety, the bench-posts shifted for me as a reader. It turns out the book was a commissioned project, and the repeated use of “my heroine” isn’t so much a marker of personal affection as a tic inspired by the New Journalism of Norman Mailer and others, which had so captured the young Mehta’s imagination. He is honest about this: it might even be said he takes introspection to showy extremes, repeatedly wondering about his own qualifications to write this biography; noting that having been away from India between 1962 and 1969, he was cut off from the Bombay film world for that period (though he had watched Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam just before leaving); and even admitting that his initial interest in the actress came via a larger fascination for another tragic, non-Indian movie star:

The source of my interest in Meena Kumari, I must point out, was not direct; rather it was nourished through another woman (white, naturally) who in my juvenile fantasy years exercised an erotic and emotional influence which I will not even begin to analyse. The woman was Marilyn Monroe and though my heroine and this woman performed thousands of miles apart, there were several parallels. Publically they had little in common; behind the scenes they were sisters. The same legendary physical powers, the same unfulfilled relationships, the same consuming irresistible wistfulness, the same self-destructive urges.

In this light, another of Mehta’s confessions is revealing. “The woman whose portrait I had been asked to sketch,” he writes, “interested me immensely – not while she was alive but once she was dead. I suppose this sounds callous, but it is true. In the timing and manner of her death my heroine assumed heroic dimensions.”

Which suggests a mild form of necrophilia underlying the relationship between the biographer and his subject. If that sounds morbid, there is something apt about it: consider how even Meena Kumari's defining role as Chhoti Bahu (which paralleled and foreshadowed aspects of her real life) involved her casting a spell of sorts on the film’s leading man from beyond her unmarked grave. When Mehta describes going to the actress’s grave shortly after her death and being shocked at how unkempt the Shia cemetery was, I thought of Chhoti Bahu’s sad fate – a melodramatic response perhaps, but an inevitable one when the line between a movie star and an iconic role becomes so blurred. And he is probably right that Meena Kumari would have seemed a less interesting figure to us today if she had lived to a ripe old age, not fully undone by melancholia and alcoholism but half-heartedly doing underwritten mother roles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Once you move past the disappointment of realising that this book is not a product of intense, no-holds-barred fandom, there are two things that work very well for Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography (as it has been re-titled). First, Mehta clearly worked hard on it as a journalist, researching meticulously, speaking to nearly all the key figures in his heroine’s life (a notable exception being Dharmendra, who granted him no audience despite repeated tries) and then trying to reconcile their often-contradictory stories into something resembling a narrative. The re-printing makes sense too: such an endeavour is arguably more useful today than it was immediately after the actress's death, when fans and voyeurs had easy access to many in-depth stories and interviews in film magazines.

Second, the author is a palpable presence in this book. Back in 1972, this apparently did not appeal to many readers and critics – in his new Introduction, he recalls some of the initial response: “I had produced an over-sentimental, maudlin life story compromised by the gratuitous insertion of my own personality into the narrative.” Today it should stand a better chance, partly because authorial presence in narrative non-fiction is more widely accepted and partly because Mehta himself – as one of the country’s leading magazine editors – is a person of greater interest now than he was then.

And given the way this book is written, that is no small matter, for his voice – a distinct, opinionated one, sometimes acerbic, often bombastic, mixing sympathy with snark – comes through on nearly every page. Even on the ones dealing with dry biographical facts: a section about Meena Kumari’s (or Mahjabeen Bano’s) early years as a child artiste includes the aside “Purely on a personal level, I find my heroine’s film name nondescript, sterile and flavourless [...] She deserved something better. I think we could all spend an intriguing evening finding substitutes for ‘Meena Kumari’.” Offering a sociological summary of the year in which she was born, he notes: “You could get nicely drunk for 84 paise (a bottle of beer costing 28), buy a kilo of sugar for 3 paise, smoke a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes for 10 paise, get a woollen suit stitched for Rs 3, find a decent whore for Rs 4. This then was the scenario.” And after quoting from her account of how helpful her much senior co-star Ashok Kumar was during the Parineeta shoot, he can’t resist throwing in a “Like me, you are probably wondering where the director was while these lessons were going on.”

The book’s first section, which takes up 140 pages, is mostly linear and contains the biographical meat: the early years in penury, the first dalliances with the movie camera in films by Vijay Bhatt and Homi Wadia, the rise to stardom as an adult with Baiju Bawra, the tempestuous relationship with her husband Kamal Amrohi, the anecdote about a dacoit-fan who asked her to autograph his hand with his knife, the years of alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour – all of it leading up to a bleak portrait of Room 26 in the nursing home where she had her “deedaar” (last audience), and rounded off by an anecdote about the non-payment of medical bills, which brought a depressingly farcical quality to the last act of her life.

Having got the chronological stuff out of the way, Mehta then moves on to more abstract things in Section Two, commenting on his own feelings about his subject (which, one assumes, must have deepened during the writing of this book) and then assessing her as an actress and as a person. I don’t myself agree that Meena Kumari was miles ahead of her contemporaries, including Nutan and Waheeda Rehman, but there is little faulting his ability to make and sustain an argument. If the book’s first section was sprinkled with very superficial analysis that suggested Mehta had not closely watched or re-watched many of Meena Kumari’s films (“the music was good, the direction showed promise and my heroine was magnificent”), here at last we get something deeper and more thoughtful. He notes some of her special qualities such as a respect for phonetics and the cadences of speech (“too many of our present-day stars speak from the area of the mouth; my heroine went down a little and from some mysterious inner reserve produced the sounds of music”). And again, he gets personal in a good way. (“I find nuances of sadness on a woman’s face fatally irresistible.”)

But the final segment – about “the woman” – is possibly the weakest, because Mehta is placed in the bothersome journalistic position of providing a summary, of neatly tying together a life’s strands into a Narrative (even though he has spent a large part of the book protesting that this cannot be done). What emerges here is a casual sentimentalism that is at odds with much of the rest of the writing. Take this contradiction at the very end: the line “I do not ask you to worship Meena Kumari” is followed immediately by “if you have [understood her], you must join me in proclaiming that she was not only a great actress but a great human being”. Sounds like a case of proselytising to me! The book is at its strongest when Mehta is tentatively exploring, conjecturing, wondering out loud – telling the reader it was impossible to collect even one “undisputed” fact about this woman, or decode her mystery – and at its weakest when he is pronouncing judgements as if from a position of objectivity.

As for the actual writing, it is uneven – fluid and spontaneous at times, self-conscious at other times; showiness and grammatical awkwardness run together in sentences like “She set foot on this earth, head first, in the early hours of 1 August 1932”. (When Mehta writes “I was coming in a taxi a few nights ago”, one hopes it IS a case of grammatical slackness!) But the honest curiosity, the willingness to go off on an entertaining tangent every now and again, make up for the flaws in the prose. More problematic is the condescending tone of passages like the following, which Mehta himself – four decades older and wiser now – must now be embarrassed about: “All right, she was a third-rate poet. But does Raakhee write poetry? Does Hema Malini write poetry? Does Sharmila Tagore write poetry? Did Vyjayanthimala write poetry? Meena Kumari was not only the greatest actress of the last 20 years, she was also the most literate.”

Still, there is something refreshingly contrapuntal about a book on the Great Tragic Hindi Film Heroine being written in a humorous (but also affectionate and probing) tone by a UK-returned 30-year-old hung up on Gonzo Journalism. Still among the most unusual entries in the sparse body of accessible writing on Hindi cinema, Meena Kumari is whimsical in its range of references: Mehta brings up foreign films (from the work of the comedian WC Fields to Anouk Aimee in A Man and a Woman) and literature (the Dharmendra-Meena Kumari relationship is likened to the one between Lady Chatterley and Mellors in D H Lawrence’s novel!). And this naturally means it is show-offish in places. But I’ll take a biography like this – however esoteric or indulgent it might get at times – over a dry, prosaic, impersonal one. We already have too much of that sort of film writing.

[A somewhat related post: a long review of Lois Banner’s biography of Marilyn Monroe]

The bureaucrat in his jungle – on Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome

In this piece I wrote for The Big Indian Picture, I mentioned the importance of 1973 in Hindi cinema. Another key year for modern Indian film was 1969, sometimes regarded as the first drum-roll for the approaching New Wave: with the Film Finance Corporation encouraging fresh directions in moviemaking, the offbeat or relatively avant-garde films of that year included Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti, Basu Chatterjee’s Sara Akash and Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome.

I watched Bhuvan Shome recently. In terms of content it is a fairly simplistic allegory about a man who, late in life, steps out to see the world and discovers things about himself in the process. In the same year that Satyajit Ray was making Aranyer Din Ratri – about a group of city-dwellers traveling into the jungle – Sen’s film had Mr Shome (Utpal Dutt), a senior employee in the railways department, heading off on a hunting trip and undergoing a minor transformation after meeting a village girl. Shome has lived outside Bengal for years, a narrator’s voice tells us near the film's beginning, but his “Bangaali-pan” is intact. “Shonar Bangaal. Mahaan Bangaal. Vichitra Bangaal,” we hear, over images of Vivekananda, Tagore, Ray, Ravi Shankar, and student protests on the streets of Calcutta. One might add “Darpok Bangaal” to this litany, for Mr Shome is a fearful man. When he decides to go hunting, we see a montage of images of once-fierce creatures now rendered harmless – a stuffed tiger, a buffalo’s head on a wall – but Shome opts for the pursuit of birds. His self-importance is punctured by the line “Phir ek din woh apni chidiya-maar abhiyan pe nikal pade” (“Then one day he set off on his bird-killing expedition”), with its cute juxtaposing of “chidiya” and the grand-sounding “abhiyan”.

Incidentally that sarcastic narration is by someone credited as “Amitabh” in the titles, a young actor who had, that same year, made his debut in front of the camera in KA Abbas’s Saat Hindustani. In these early, introductory scenes, the recitation alternates with Shome’s own voiceover, which gives us something of his inner life (accompanied by shots of his contemplative eyes framed in a smaller screen). For instance, the narrator mentions that Shome is such a martinet that he sacked his own son, and then we hear Shome asking “What else could I have done?” so that it becomes a sort of abstract conversation between two thought processes.

As you’d guess then, this is a formally intriguing film with a few nods to other filmic movements of the time, such as the Czech New Wave. Much of its interest value today lies in those stylistic qualities, beginning with the opening shots of railway tracks, taken from the front of the train in which Shome is travelling, and set to classical music. The images and the music herald the arrival of someone Very Important (and Shome’s subordinates at the railway station speak of him in hushed tones), but they are echoed a while later in shots taken from the perspective of the bullock-cart driver taking Shome through the forest; the driver is singing a song from the film Junglee, and by this point Shome looks much less imposing and out of his comfort zone.

Throughout the film, generous use is made of freeze frames, and there are other flourishes like the repetition of gestures (as in Shome’s double-takes in the scene where he first sees a group of village girls walk past). The many picturesque outdoor shots, including the ones in the desert, were taken almost entirely with natural light (the cinematographer, K K Mahajan, who also shot both Uski Roti and Sara Akash, discusses some of his work on these projects here) but there are also animation scenes of Bhuvan’s office life: a phone, the rumbling sounds of “Hello, Hello”, a dangling cigar, files stacking up first on one side of the desk and then the other as he signs each of them. Notably, the man himself is invisible in the cartoons, suggesting a mechanical existence that could easily be summed up by the pen, the files, the phone, the office door with “Bhuvan Shome” printed on it.

The Shome we see in the live-action scenes cuts a comic figure, a bit like a Punch caricature of pompous bureaucracy. He is characterised by the shots of him lolling on the cart smoking a cigar, panicking when the driver goes a little too fast for his liking, or aiming the wrong end of his gun at a belligerent buffalo named Sheetal (!). The contrast between this man and Suhasini Mulay’s village girl Gauri – knowing, quietly intelligent, with a disarming wide smile – couldn’t be more pronounced. And it is emphasized by a mildly detached, Brechtian quality to the acting where one sees the characters not so much as fully-fleshed-out people but as representatives of ideas. (Brecht was quite popular among many non-mainstream Indian filmmakers of the time, incidentally. See Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav and Shyam Benegal’s Charandas Chor for examples.)

But as the story progresses, Shome gradually changes from a buffoon to a more recognizably human presence. There is also an incremental physical transformation: he goes from wearing an office suit to a safari suit to village garb complete with turban (because otherwise the birds will distrust him, Gauri says). Eventually he even disguises himself as a tree – the ultimate sign of being absorbed into this natural landscape – though it doesn’t help him achieve what he came here for.

In this interview, Sen says those who thought Bhuvan Shome was about the humanising of a hard-hearted man were mistaken: “On the contrary, our intention was to ‘corrupt’ a bureaucrat suffering from Victorian morality.” But perhaps one can suggest that in this case, humanising is synonymous with “corrupting” in a desirable sense of the word – in the sense of becoming less rigid, accepting the importance of compromise. (Ten years before his role as Bhavani Shankar in Gol Maal, losing his stiff upper lip along with his moustache, here is Utpal Dutt playing another character who has to learn how to relax.) Not that Shome’s transformation makes the world, or his own life, any better: at the end, we see that his act of grace allows one of his bribe-taking subordinates a transfer to a setting that is even more conducive to unearned profit. It’s a bittersweet conclusion, and perhaps one that points the way to the more barbed, more overtly political films that Mrinal Sen made in the 1970s.

[Some photos of K K Mahajan working with Mrinal Sen in this post]

The strange case of Deepak Dobriyal and an unsavoury samosa

Why does Deepak Dobriyal not have a higher profile? Having been a fan ever since I saw his dialogue-less performance as a Mumbai commuter in the Kundan Shah short “Hero”, I often wonder what keeps this skilled actor – who was so impressive in small parts in films like Omkara, Delhi-6, Gulaal and Tanu Weds Manu – from doing more fleshed-out parts in good movies. Especially at a time when it is possible to be a leading man in Hindi cinema without fitting the image of the tall, strapping, urbane hero; when strong roles are being written both for the sweet boy-next-door types and the sort of performer who would have been viewed as too rustic a decade ago; and when a gamut of actors ranging from Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Raj Kumar Yadav to Ranvir Sheorey and Ayushmann Khurana are finding success in specific niches.

Speaking of Nawazuddin, pleasing and well-deserved though his stardom is, it has had an annoying by-product: the consolidation of the tritely inspirational narrative “If you have the talent and do the hard work, you WILL make it.” As if one Siddiqui has transformed the film industry into a paradise of meritocracy. As if there still aren’t thousands of strugglers who, with all the talent and drive in the world, won’t get anywhere near where they hope to be.

Dobriyal doesn’t fall in that group of strugglers, of course: he is far from anonymous, is respected among those who know their cinema well, has worked with people like Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap and Ram Gopal Varma (I haven’t seen Not a Love Story yet, but I’ve heard he was good in it) and has plenty of time to build his résumé. But it was depressing to see him in the recent Chor Chor Super Chor, a film that began on a promising note and degenerated so completely, I thought I had tripped into the wrong hall after the interval.

He plays Satbir, a small-time crook making an effort to go straight while also heading for a tentative romance with an "innocent-jaisi" girl named Neena (Priya Bathija), who may have hidden depths. (“Bhoot savaar ho gaya hai pyaar aur imaandaari ka” says one of his former associates disapprovingly.) Satbir is one of the lower-class aspirers that recent Hindi cinema has given us so many of, a less cocky version of Lucky in Oye Lucky! Lucky! Oye, a bit out of his depth at times but enterprising enough to be able to impress a potential boss during an interview by grabbing the phone and fixing a meeting with a client. Dobriyal is very engaging in the role, but it becomes painful to see his earnestness at the service of an increasingly unworthy script - to see him trying to explore the possibilities of his character when the film itself has little interest in character development, tonal evenness or credibility.

Not that Chor Chor Super Chor begins that way. There are interesting things in the first 40-45 minutes, starting with the avuncular, unremarkable-looking Shukla-ji who runs a small photo studio as a front for a group of young offenders. Shukla, I kept thinking, might be the older, corrupted version of Vinod or Sudhir from Jaane bhi do Yaaro, teaching his wards how to be “kaamyaab” in a world built on hierarchies of crookedness rather than on idealism. And in these early scenes, the film emphasizes the contrast between the posturing of the youngsters and their unglamorous background. (One nice shot has Satbir preening in front of a mirror, but the setting is a public toilet and while he occupies the left half of the screen, the right half is filled by three urinals. It has the effect of turning him into a comic figure rather than the hero he is trying to be.) There are sweet little touches too: the opening credits play out in the old-world animation style of The Pink Panther (the “sound design” credit is accompanied by text that says “Add to torrents” – perhaps a reminder of illegal downloads, and of how many different types of “chori” there are in a world where Satbir and gang are small fry) and a cutesy but effective sight gag involves a giant samosa costume used as promotion for a mall kiosk.

But what begins as a quietly humorous story with a sense of place and sub-culture, and a basic affection for its people, retains none of these qualities. The second half, which involves an attempt by Satbir and his friends to play a counter-con on a TV news channel, is spectacularly poor. The lazy caricaturing, the leaps in logic and plausibility, were more pronounced than any I have seen on screen recently. (If you were a TV producer with a tape of a huge story that will make your channel famous in a few days, would you fail to recognize the protagonist of that story when you encountered him on the street?) And as my friend Uday points out here, one scene where a girl is cornered and harassed (or as the filmmakers might have it, “teased”) on a bus should have been very easy to rethink and quickly discard.

Through all this, Dobriyal’s integrity doesn’t waver. His performance, constructed from the inside out, convinced me that Satbir was a worldly-wise creature of his milieu (and probably a very efficient pickpocket in the past) but also that his efforts to pull himself into a more "respectable" world were sincere. If it were possible to view a film in such a way that you could fix your attention on just one figure on the screen, Chor Chor Super Chor may have been worth watching. I hope it represents only a minor blip in decision-making for its lead actor, rather than a sign of things to come.