Visual storytelling in The Lunchbox

When making simple distinctions between types of cinema, we often think of “character-driven” stories (vis-à-vis “action-driven” stories) as being filled with conversation or monologues. Just last week, I wrote about a relationship film – Shuddh Desi Romance – that was all about talking and analysing; explaining things to others, to yourself, to the viewer. But one of the surprises – and eventually, for me, one of the great pleasures – of Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox was that some of its most effective moments relied on visual storytelling (or as the cliché has it, “pure cinema”), requiring special engagement on the viewer’s part over and above what is being said by the characters. In some scenes I felt almost like I was watching the sort of quietly elegant human comedy that Tati or Keaton did so well.

A marker of that visual engagement is an object, introduced at the start of the film: a tiffin lunch nestled in a green-and-white cover, which makes its way – via Mumbai’s famous dabba-wallahs – from a home to an office. As the dabba-wallahs take countless lunch-boxes through rush-hour traffic, our attention remains fixed on the distinct green-and-white bag, the sunlight dappling on it through the train’s windows. Then, less than 10 minutes into the film, come two wordless scenes that tell us the “plot” is underway. A middle-aged man named Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) unzips the green-white cover and starts to open the tiffin, but we see that something is off. What began as an almost unconscious action – something he mechanically does at exactly this time each day – becomes more deliberate; we can tell that the container he is opening is not the sort of container he is accustomed to handling. (This is a man whose life has been built around routine – he has been in the same job, in an insurance firm’s claims department, for 35 years – but now, confronted with newness, his eyes click into focus.) In the next scene, the container has been returned to the doorstep of a woman named Ila (Nimrat Kaur), and her movements as she picks up the bag are just as mechanical as Fernandes’s were, but then she hesitates, weighs the tiffin in her hand, realises that it is empty – clearly not an everyday occurrence. A look of cautious pleasure crosses her face.

Not a word has been spoken in these two scenes, even the gestures aren’t especially pronounced, yet the attentive viewer can easily figure out what has happened. There has been a mistake in the delivery of a lunch box; Mr Fernandes has eaten the food meant for Ila’s husband; Ila, who is used to leftovers being sent back and noncommittal grunts of acknowledgement later in the evening, is happy that her cooking has been appreciated. These sequences are so fluid, so well constructed and performed, that we have no trouble accepting the basic premise (even given the widely circulated statistics about the efficiency of the dabba-wallahs) or what follows: Ila discovers the mix-up but sends Fernandes lunch again, along with a letter (“Thank you bannta hai na,” she tells her confidante, an old neighbour) – and then, in the email age, these two people who know nothing about each other begin an unlikely correspondence by dabba.

Understatement in cinema can be a tricky thing. Get it wrong and you’re in danger of not just making the film flat and uninvolving, but also appearing just as self-conscious and forced as the “over-doer”. (As Orson Welles once put it, “Ham actors are not all of them strutters and fretters, theatrical vocalizers – a lot of them are understaters, flashing winsome little smiles over the teacups, or scratching their T-shirts.”) The Lunchbox gets understatement and restraint exactly right, both in the outstanding lead performances by Khan and Kaur as the lonely-hearts and in Batra’s delicate screenplay, which makes expert use of the “show, don’t tell” principle. The viewer is constantly invited to participate in this story, to work things out as layers are slowly peeled away. When Fernandes goes to the little restaurant that sends him his lunch – to tell them he is retiring next month, he won’t need the dabbas any more – we can make out a blurred mass of familiar green-and-white container-bags in the window (they are visible but not obtrusive) and it helps us understand how the mix-up might have happened. Later, hearing about a woman who jumped off a building with her daughter, he fears it might be Ila, and we feel his tension in the subsequent scene where he is seated at his office desk around lunch hour and the dabba-wallah does the rounds in the background, apparently bypassing Fernandes’s desk and moving away (while Fernandes cranes his neck anxiously) before returning and setting down the comforting green-white package. Purposeful silences and long pauses in films can be gimmicky (and sometimes, a film that is celebrated for “requiring the viewer to be patient” is really a film that requires a viewer to be bored), but here the writing and the acting reveals character, facilitates full engagement and lets the viewer use the silences to figure out what is happening, what someone is thinking, what may be coming next.

There are so many other subtle touches, from a glimpse of a bathroom mirror that has rarely needed to be wiped clean, to the gamut of expressions on Ila’s face when she doesn’t see a letter in the tiffin but then finds it under a roti, or a scene where a phone is answered off-screen and we need to hear only a couple of words, spoken in a hurried, matter-of-fact tone, to gather that the speaker’s father has died and that she barely has time to sob a little to herself while preparing to leave for the crematorium. I also liked the way in which Fernandes’s first name is revealed to us more than halfway through the film, and how the construction of that sequence ties in with another theme – nostalgia for a distant past, felt by people who have aged without realising it. (This IS made explicit in the screenplay at one point, when Fernandes talks about why he suddenly felt the need to watch episodes of his deceased wife’s favourite old TV show, Yeh jo Hai Zindagi. But when Ila asks to play the songs of a romantic film from 20 years ago, one might guess that it is not just an expression of her current feelings but also a brief return to a childhood when her life was simpler and happier.)

This is a story about people connected in tenuous ways: by a dabba-wallah’s mistake, by shouted conversation across the walls of an old building, by a basket lowered outside the window of a flat to the one below. (Though one of the key characters, Ila’s old “aunty”, is never seen – she is just a disembodied voice – we feel we know her well.) There are visual links between the two protagonists too: one person’s voiceover seems to comment on the other’s actions, and there are echoing gestures, including mundane ones like waving flies away from food; reminders that many of the quotidian details of Ila's and Fernandes's lives are similar. They feel similarly isolated and “rocked back and forth by life” (as Fernandes puts it in a letter, while the visuals shows him sitting in a juddering local train), and they unrealistically dream of moving together to a land where gross national happiness is the stock in trade. But there is of course the possibility that they will remain ultimately cut off, like ships passing in the night, or like the two trains in the film's opening shot, moving towards each other slowly on parallel tracks, so near and yet so distant. And given these various possibilities, as well as the delicacy of the film’s structure, I thought the open-endedness of its conclusion was just right. As so much else is.

The bekaar in the big city: on Bimal Roy’s Naukri

Parts of Bimal Roy’s 1954 film Naukri reminded me of two great scenes from films made in the silent era’s last days: the opening sequence of King Vidor’s The Crowd, with people and vehicles thronging the streets of New York and the rapt camera gliding up the side of a skyscraper, then moving in to reveal countless worker ants at their desks (see video below); and the equally kinetic shot in F W Murnau’s Sunrise where two town-dwellers, the Man and the Wife, get their first view of the approaching city through the windows of their tram. The couple, sullen, distrustful and occupying separate spaces in the vehicle (understandable enough given that one of them has recently plotted to murder the other!), must now huddle together as they dodge traffic and find walking space on the footpaths: this new place is so overwhelming that it unites them.




As Naukri’s title credits end, the camera cranes up to gawk at a tall building, presumably with offices and employment opportunities in it – an apt image for a film about the big city as a place of opportunity and terror. In fact, the protagonist Ratan (Kishore Kumar) will make two long journeys over the course of the story: first from his village to Calcutta, and later to the much more distant Bombay, where he will have to contend with people speaking to him in unfamiliar tongues (Marathi, Parsi). His horizons broaden, but he also becomes more isolated (though the film has a deus ex machina in reserve for him).

Naukri contains many things we now think of as clichés of a cinematic past (whether they were clichés in 1954 is another question): the beloved sister suffering from TB, the widowed mother, the sanguine young man convinced that he will soon get a good job (he is BA Pass with distinction, after all) and overturn his family’s fortunes, the arrival of a letter bearing exam results, the arduous journey that begins with tearful farewells and a bullock-cart ride to the railway station. But these were understandable concerns of the “social” cinema of the post-Independence decade, when so many films were about young people from modest backgrounds entering a new world and taking the tide at its flood, or becoming corrupted or cynical.

Ratan’s fantasy (expressed in the film’s first song “Chhota sa Ghar Hoga”) of having a small house under the clouds, with his sister sitting on a silver chair and his mother on a golden throne, turns out to be nearly as unworkable as little Sujata’s dream – in one of Roy’s best films – of visiting a magical kingdom. Arriving in Calcutta, he is disappointed because the job he thought was his has gone to someone else. Things are far from dire at this point – more chances will presumably come along soon, and meanwhile he is boarding in a small hotel with a genial group of other young men – and yet, for all his optimism, we are warned: past the twilight hour, the “Bekaari block” he is living in resembles a perdition where men who have been unemployed for months play cards, bicker, gossip, vent frustrations late into the night. One of them, clearly a terrible singer, does his riyaaz, and though the scene can be viewed in comic terms it has a dark side – the man is like a ghoul shrieking into the void.

I was intrigued by the way Naukri moved between documentary-like neo-realism and the more dramatic tropes of mainstream storytelling: this is very much a scripted, incident-driven story (with some nice use of songs - I especially like this one, with the young Iftekhar singing "Main collector na banu aur na banunga officer...apna babu hi bana lo mukhe, bekaar hoon main"), but there is also plenty of location shooting, including shots of Kishore Kumar clinging to crowded buses and negotiating the madness of south Bombay during rush hour – scenes that have a slice-of-life quality to them. For all these points of interest though, this is a patchy film. It's easy to engage with at a basic level: that is more or less assured by Kumar’s likeable presence in nearly every scene, and the fluid storytelling abilities of Roy and his talented crew (Nabendu Ghosh, Salil Choudhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Asit Sen among them). But I was often unsure what mood it was reaching for. 

Ratan is determinedly cheery to begin with (his philosophy of life is that he must keep smiling and hoping, because if he looks at his predicament too closely he might sink into permanent despair) – so much so that when a genuine tragedy occurs relatively early in the film, it is glossed over, to jarring effect. He recovers too quickly, gets back to his jovial ways and begins a romance with a girl (Sheila Ramani) in the “saamne waali khidki”. (A parallel is established between the young man’s search for “naukri” and “ladki”– it is clear that he needs a job if he is ever to become a householder, or even a responsible boyfriend.) But then, in film’s the final section, since a dramatic climax has to somehow be reached, misfortune atop misfortune piles up to the point where there seems no option other than a suicide attempt at the railway tracks.

This creates structural unevenness, and a related problem is that it requires the story to keep manufacturing hurdles for Ratan, which is sometimes done in ham-handed ways. At one point he writes a letter to his girlfriend, telling her he has to go to Bombay for a job, and foolishly attaches his appointment letter with it, without making a copy or even bothering to memorise or note down the company name and address. Of course, the letter falls into the hands of the girl’s irate father, who feeds it to the kitchen stove after giving it barely a glance. The intention here is to make us feel concerned about Ratan’s fate, but instead one feels like smacking him and saying “You idiot, what were you thinking?” (Given his pride about having passed with distinction, I was reminded of the Peter Medawar quote about the spread of secondary and tertiary education creating a population of people “who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought”.) The situation also leads to an incongruous bit of slapstick comedy where Ratan has to work out what the long and convoluted name of the company is.

The stories that Bimal Roy used for his more reformist cinema lent themselves to a certain degree of didacticism anyway, but here a facile tone in some of the early scenes makes way for an excessively solemn one towards the end, and that mix didn’t really work for me. Other Roy films in a similar socially conscious vein – Sujata and Parakh, notably – do a better job of establishing a pitch and sticking with it. Naukri is still an engaging movie, but by the time we arrive at the solemn voiceover at the end, beseeching the viewer (apparently) to provide jobs to deserving young men, one can’t help feeling that Ratan’s misfortunes stem more from his own incompetence than from societal unfairness. I have read approving comments about Kishore Kumar playing a "serious role for once" in this film, compared to the "buffoons" he played elsewhere – but I think some of those intentionally comic characters would have handled certain situations more efficiently than poor Ratan does.

[Here's an earlier post about another film that combines documentary-like footage with dramatic storytelling, Jules Dassin's The Naked City]

13 and 6 (some thoughts after Rafael Nadal’s US Open win)

[Statutory warning: indulging myself with a tennis post – the sort I would happily write two or three times each week, if I had the time and was doing it professionally. Did a version of this for Business Standard Weekend. Ignore if you haven’t followed men’s tennis in the past decade]

One hazard of being both a fixated tennis-watcher and innately interested in numbers is that odd combinations of match scores and player statistics swirl about in your head, keeping you awake nights. For example: in my long, eventful fandom of Rafael Nadal, there have been two key occasions – both on the eve of a Slam final – when I have dwelled upon the formula “12 versus 6”, expecting it to become “12-7” the next day but secretly hoping it would be “13-6”. In both cases, the hope was pleasingly and unexpectedly realised.

1 ) nearly five years ago, before the 2009 Australian Open final between Rafa and his great rival Roger Federer, the head-to-head between the two players was 12-6 in Rafa’s favour. I’m not one of those Nadal fans who point to the lopsided H2H as evidence that Rafa is “better” than Roger, but I admit to getting some satisfaction from it, thinking of it as part of his overall legacy. And in January 2009, I had resigned myself to Federer winning that final. The counter in my head had already ticked over: “The head-to-head is going to be 12-7 now,” I told myself. “C’est la vie.” Well, as any tennis follower knows, that didn’t happen. 13-6 happened instead.

2 ) last weekend, when Nadal and his greatest current rival, Novak Djokovic, won their US Open semi-finals and prepared to play each other for the trophy, a different sort of head-to-head comparison came into play. Nadal had 12 Slam titles, Djokovic had 6. Which meant that at the end of the match, the comparative Slam-count would be either 13-6 or 12-7. Midway through the match, I was convinced Djokovic had the thing wrapped up. Always dangerous against Rafa, he had raised shot execution to the level of intent, and some of the rallies were resembling highlight reels from their meetings in 2011, when Djokovic beat Nadal six straight times. But again, Nadal found a way and 13-6 it was.

Yes, this coincidence of numbers is an obscure thing to go on about, but I'm using it to make a couple of points. First, these matches were against Nadal's most important opponents, the two other top male players of the past decade (but more on that later). Second, it could be argued that he had no business winning either of those matches. Two days before that Australian Open final against Federer, he had played an intense, debilitating five-hour semi-final against Fernando Verdasco, and he would later write in his memoir that he never thought he would recover in time for the final. (I believe him: in Chennai the year earlier, Nadal played a marathon three-set semi against Carlos Moya, and then, depleted, mustered just one game in the final the next day.) Meanwhile, Federer had been stunningly imperious – even by his own standards – in his quarter-final and semi-final, and had had an extra day’s rest. Even given the nature of the match-up, which favoured Rafa, there was no reason to think he could win his very first hard-court Slam final against one of the finest hard-court players of all time.

Watching him pull that off – and then watching him, earlier this week, finding a way to meet Djokovic’s flashes of un-playable-ness with his own solidity and counter-aggression – have been just two in a long line of happy surprises that have come with being a longtime Nadal follower.

Constantly being surprised – that is what Rafa fandom has been like, at least for a diffident, forever-hoping-for-the-worst fan like me. The goal-posts for what is possible, what can realistically be achieved, have kept changing. Back in 2006, I was surprised when he beat Federer at the French Open final (it was the first time Rampaging Roger had ever lost a title match at a Slam) because I thought it was pre-destined that Federer would complete his Career Slam that year. Then I was surprised when Rafa won his first major off clay, at the historic 2008 Wimbledon final.

I was surprised when he won a hard-court major, surprised when he made a brilliant comeback in 2010, following a disappointing few months affected by injury. And now, in the second half of his career, at a point where he should rightly be starting his decline (a player who first became a Slam-winner nine seasons ago can usually be expected to be past his peak), I have been astonished both by his comeback this year (10 titles in 13 tournament appearances, a 17-1 record against top 10 players) after another injury break, and by the fact that he has been able to win important hard-court matches against Djokovic.

But then Nadal often seems surprised by himself too: as he said of Djokovic after the USO final, “Sometimes I really don’t know how I am able to beat him.” I have written elsewhere about the sandbagging – or the public lowering of expectations – that he is often accused of (“I have to play my very best to have a chance to win,” he often says in interviews before facing an opponent ranked several dozen spots below him). It’s an attitude I personally relate to, but more to the point, it is an understandable one given the many physical struggles he has had - notably with congenital foot and knee issues - over his career, and the fact that he has frequently had to play catch-up on surfaces other than his favourite clay.

Djokovic has long been an important part of this story. In 2008, when he first emerged as an A-plus-level player, seriously challenging Rafa’s hold on the number 2 spot behind Federer, I read a long, thoughtful comment on a tennis website suggesting that Rafa was destined to be a brief interlude between the Federer Era and the Djokovic Era, a clay-court champ whose short career would be sandwiched between those of two all-time greats of the sport; at best, perhaps, he would achieve something akin to Lleyton Hewitt, who honourably commandeered the ATP fort for a season and a half between Pete Sampras’s decline and Federer’s rise. And this view seemed reasonable enough: Nadal hadn’t won a Slam off clay yet, and Djokovic (who Pete Bodo had described as “the perfect player” as early as 2007) seemed a more complete, all-round, all-surface champion.

What has actually transpired over the years is – again from the viewpoint of a perpetually pessimistic fan – quite wondrous. Nadal has continued to be not merely relevant but often dominant in his individual rivalries against Federer and Djokovic, weathering storms when each of these players were in prime, world-conquering form. And while being a game-spoiler for both of them to varying degrees (they would both have had even more impressive records if the Spaniard had not existed), he has also presented them with new challenges and made this entire tennis era seem a little more charged up and intriguing than it may otherwise have been. As a sandbagging fan, I’m only just starting to deal with the idea that there might actually have been such a thing as the Rafael Nadal Era, and that we may have been in it for the past six or seven years (and this is said with no disrespect to Federer – who I still regard the better overall player – or to Djokovic). 


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About something more specific: there has been some talk recently about Nadal’s shift to a more attacking style of play on hard courts, a style tailored to make his game more efficient and help protect creaky limbs on a playing surface he has never been particularly fond of. This change, I think, is also showing in his demeanor on court, in displays of relaxedness that are different from the way he normally is in the heat of competition.

For instance, in the fourth set of the USO final, when Rafa was up 3-1, serving at 30-15, he sent down a first serve that was called out, then decided to challenge the call (asking for a replay on the Hawkeye system) – but he was simultaneously shrugging to himself and getting back into his serving position as if to say “I know it probably was wide, but might as well check.” This casualness was atypical, I thought. After all, the match was by no means over. He was only one break up, against a dangerous, unpredictable player famous for making comebacks; there had already been breaks of serve in games where the server had initially seemed in control; and if the challenge was wrong (as Rafa seemed to know it was), it would mean that he had interrupted his own playing rhythm just before a crucial second serve. But all that didn’t seem to matter: it felt like he knew he essentially had things in hand. Shortly afterward, still a few points away from the win, he was trotting about the court looking more laidback – even smiling a little – than I can ever recall seeing him in a similar situation.

Perhaps this comes out of having been out of the game for several months, not knowing if he would be able to come back or play at a high level again – and consequently just being grateful for whatever chances he gets. Whatever the case, if that’s the attitude we see in the next few months, I’ll take it – with fingers crossed, of course, that the knees can keep pace with the extraordinary mental strength.

[Some earlier tennis pieces: on rivalries and fan narratives; the war within Rafa; a review of Nadal's memoir]

Game of thrones: scattered notes on Shuddh Desi Romance

Maneesh Sharma’s new film Shuddh Desi Romance places societal double-standards against individual hedonism and the reluctance to take on responsibility. It features young, relatively un-rooted people who have freedoms that you don’t usually associate with small-town Indians, but who may not yet have developed the emotional resources to use those freedoms well. And it is an affectionate depiction of a world where people are constantly slipping and sliding in matters of the heart; or “phisal gayo re”, as the song lyrics – set to images of unsteady monkeys and pigeons – have it.

- It is also a film about talking and analysing and counter-analysing, one that opens with a monologue by Raghu (Sushant Singh Rajput) about Indian society’s many hypocrisies when it comes to love and marriage: why can’t two people be left alone to work out their own romantic issues, without everyone else jumping on their back like Betaal did to Vikram? How ironical it is to constantly be told to “settle down” despite the fact that the country itself hasn’t been able to settle its larger issues with its sibling-neighbour since 1947! These are reasonable points, but already one might suspect Raghu of being a little self-serving, a little reluctant to face the real implications of being in a relationship; we pick up on his likeability and sincerity, but also his callowness. And we will understand these qualities better as the story progresses.

In any case, we soon get a firsthand view of the hypocrisies he speaks of: on the eve of his own arranged marriage, he finds himself in a romantic situation with a girl who has been hired to play the role of his sister in a fake baaraat. The over-eager Raghu and the curt Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra) go together like chalk and cheese (or maybe, as the film suggests in a later scene, like coffee and gulab jamun), but there is something very believable about the scene where they (literally) spend the night together while traveling in the baaraatiyon waali bus. It begins with him telling her “Please be comfortable”, but there is also a quick and inappropriate “I don’t mind” – said in the croaky voice of an oversized teen – when she sarcastically wonders if he plans to marry her. And then, an apparently spontaneous peck on Gayatri’s cheek leads to an awkward bout of lip-locking, or at least lip-grazing, while other mercenary baaraatis snore away in the background. Jaideep Sahni’s writing and the fine performances of Chopra and Rajput make all this work, even though it may not have seemed very convincing on paper.

- What follows is an improbable romance, but also the intellectualising of romance: the two of them – Gayatri especially – spend a lot of time dissecting what they are doing, rather than staying in the moment; they struggle to find a balance between giving free rein to their feelings, and trying to work out what is good for everyone in the long run. Some of this is in the tradition of romantic talkathons like Before Sunrise, or even a Woody Allen film where characters directly address the viewer, self-consciously investigating their own motivations and actions to a point where you wonder if they will ever actually get anything done. Even the song lyrics comment on the “silliness” of “hamaari love life”, and concede that the lovers talk a great deal – “lambi lambi baatein hain”.

– Of course, this motif of Talk, Talk, Talk, Analyse, Analyse, Analyse is at the other extreme from the workings of the traditional Indian arranged marriage, which is built on the idea of not thinking too much but accepting, going with the flow and hoping for the best. But it is also a funny counterpoint to a more conventional, less overtly cerebral type of movie romance represented by older Yash Raj Films productions like Kabhi Kabhie and Chandni, tunes from which occasionally play on the soundtrack of Shuddh Desi Romance. Both those films starred a much earlier avatar of Rishi Kapoor, who has a grand old time here as the jovial head of Goyal Caterers, willing to lend a sympathetic ear when required but also bewildered by the attitude of today’s youngsters to love and marriage. Goyal, a saltier, less refined version of the enterprising wedding planners in Sharma’s first film Band Baaja Baaraat, worries that the institution of marriage may have no future – not because he has ultra-conservative views on the subject (he benignly waves two adulterous lovers into the next room when he needs the space for a discussion with Raghu), but because it will affect his business.

– Part of the song “Tere Mere Beech Mein” is shot in a bathroom, as Raghu and Gayatri soak clothes together in a bucket. This is a cosy view of the everyday side of their live-in relationship, but in a couple of shots you can see the toilet seat in the background too. Such framing might be unusual in most romantic films, but toilets are crucial things in the Shuddh Desi Romance universe. A character takes a bathroom break so she can smoke a cigarette (and uses the opportunity to talk to us about what’s going on in her mind). The repeated theme of people using the bathroom excuse when they want to flee their own weddings is used for broad comedy (there is a funny moment involving garish shaadi lights twinkling merrily in the background when the discovery of such an escape is made), but it also has a clear symbolic function in a story where people are constantly trying to “purge” themselves of emotional commitment. As the narrative twists and turns, and the main characters try to work out what they really want, a giant bog (sorry!) of paranoia and recrimination builds up, and it must be got rid of for progress to occur. (Think of the dual meanings of catharsis.) I may have become obsessed with the toilet theme, because in a late scene I was looking at the ornate seats for the bride and the groom at a wedding function and thinking of the slangish use of “throne”. Chalte Phirte Shauchalya (a dramatic translation of “Mobile Toilets”, seen in one shot) might have been an alternate title for this film.

– Throughout, there is a deliberate repetition of situations, and even specific dialogue – from relatively mundane things (such as Raghu massaging the guilt of American tourists by selling them garments made by “orphans of the Iraqi war”) to the more central events involving the three protagonists. (Vaani Kapooor plays the girl who Raghu dumps at the altar.) This repetition emphasises the circularity of these characters’ lives, and suggests that to grow in life and love, they need to get out of the little traps they have set for themselves. As the writer, Sahni will fittingly get much of the credit for the script and how it is structured, but it’s hard not to see a link with Maneesh Sharma’s earlier work. I haven’t seen The Ladies vs Ricky Behl, but the excellent Band Baajaa Baaraat was a similar examination of commitment-phobia, coming of age and an almost accidental liaison deepening into something more profound.

– Based on what I’ve seen so far, I like Sharma’s direction of young actors. The performances of the three leads here, and those of Anushka Sharma and Ranveer Singh in Band Baajaa Baaraat, reminded me of what Naseeruddin Shah said to me in this conversation, about a more relaxed, less mannered acting style coming into American film in the 1950s because of the influence of television – “Something like that is happening in India now. Besides, actors of today are photographed almost from the moment they are born. The camera is no longer an object of terror for them, the way it used to be for us.” Of course, that also depends on the film in question: the casual, naturalistic dialogue in Shuddh Desi Romance plays a big part in facilitating a specific type of performance. (This film doesn’t use hand-held cameras to the degree that Band Baajaa Baaraat did, but one feels like it easily could have.)

- And to end with the least interesting part of any such write-up: did I like the film as a whole? Yes, though the repetition and the talkiness became excessive in the second half, and the final 20 minutes or so didn’t sustain my interest. Like so many other recent Hindi films, this one doesn’t quite know how or when to end, but it still has plenty of charming moments, and some good bathrooms.

Camille Paglia on Hitchcock, misogyny and the male gaze

Watched Hitchcock’s Notorious for the umpteenth time the other day, captivated as always by its almost flawless construction, unmatched elegance and fluidity, and the stunning performances by the three leads. Noting again how the film’s sympathies rest with the Ingrid Bergman character Alicia vis-à-vis the manipulative men in her life (this has always seemed very obvious to me, though I know people who disagree), I was reminded of the many allegations of misogyny in Hitchcock’s work. And this super interview of Camille Paglia, who rambles magnificently about Hitch and his artistic impulses.

I love her passion for the subject, even when I disagree with little specifics. This bit is notable, and I think it cuts to the heart of a major divide in “film reading” and how we tend to make up their minds about whether a movie is misogynistic (or racist, or whatever):

I’ve been very vocal about my opposition to the simplistic theory of ‘the male gaze’ that is associated with Laura Mulvey (and that she herself has moved somewhat away from) and that has taken over feminist film studies to a vampiric degree in the last 25 years. The idea that a man looking at or a director filming a beautiful woman makes her an object, makes her passive beneath the male gaze which seeks control over woman by turning her into mere matter, into “meat” – I think this was utter nonsense from the start. It was formulated by people who knew nothing about the history of painting or sculpture, the history of the fine arts […]

Hitchcock obviously had a complex and ambivalent attitude toward women. […] Any artist is driven by strange forces. The whole impulse in art-making is to untangle your dark emotions. There is some huge conflict and inner war in every major artist. And yes, the sexual battlefield is where those things were going on in Hitchcock. But look at his own life: From what people have been able to conclude, his actual sexual practice was fairly limited. He remained a virgin until he was 27, when he married, and he did produce a daughter. There’s some suggestion that perhaps his marriage was not particularly physical. He was almost a kind of priest or monk. The Jesuit-trained Catholic impulse in him was very strong. And if his film eroticism was voyeuristic, well, that’s what we want, for heaven’s sake, in a painter or a filmmaker! We want someone who lives through the eye.

The full interview is here. I also recommend Marian Keane’s piece “A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcock and Vertigo”, a riposte to Laura Mulvey’s thesis that the camera in Vertigo represents an active, controlling male gaze (which in turn implied that the film is “on the side of” the James Stewart character Scottie). A large part of Keane's essay can be found here, on Google Books.

Incidentally Paglia made related observations in an interview for this book on screen violence. An excerpt below:

Interviewer: I agree he was a great director, but he was nakedly misogynistic...

Paglia: I don’t accept this. That is an absurd argument. We’re talking about a man who made films in which are some of the most beautiful and magnetic images of women that have ever been created. I mean, for heaven’s sake, to call that misogynistic, when we think of Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, when we think how fabulous Janet Leigh is in that shower scene, we think of Kim Novak in Vertigo [...] what I’m saying about all of the great artists from Michelangelo to Botticelli to everyone else is that in the fascination with these goddess-like figures of women there is an ambivalence, a push-pull in it, a complexity of response, but to stress the negative in Hitchcock...? I think you need far more complex terminology to deal with people who achieve at the level Hitchcock did. The women he created, for heaven’s sake, have absolutely dominated the imagination of late twentieth-century cinema. Everyone’s imitating it, everywhere, to this day.

The Sholay opening scene, revisited

As part of a class on film criticism recently, I showed the Sholay opening-credits scene (which I have written about before in this post) and was reminded again of what a fine establishing sequence it is. Very rewarding to show in a class too, being a relatively under-analysed segment of an otherwise hugely familiar and well-loved film. I enjoyed the way the students responded, pointing out little things that hadn't occurred to me. There was even a short discussion of the use of lengthy takes – in the early shots of the two riders moving across the screen from left to right – and the compression of time and space. And naturally there was much appreciation of R D Burman’s superb score, which moves from a guitar-dominated motif to a more recognisably Indian one when the village of Ramgarh appears on screen.

Some talking points, further to what is in the earlier post:

– Aspects of the sound design, such as the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves being incorporated into the musical theme just as it begins. The hoof-sound is vivid and percussive and has a clear echo; you wouldn’t call it an authentic aural representation of galloping horses, but it is very effective, and reminded me of the sound designer Resul Pookutty’s notes about "manufactured reality" in his memoir Sounding Off. Here is an example of sound design that makes a scene more poetic and emotionally resonant – for a few seconds – without being “realistic” in the narrowly defined sense.

- The striking visual contrast between the harsh outdoors and the warm, communal setting of the village can be said to parallel the divide between primitive and civilised ways of life in the classic American Western. At its core, the Western as a genre is heavily allegorical as it deals with the good-evil confrontation, often setting the barbaric Old West against the coming of a more genteel, more “civilised” world, represented by the railroad, the cattle farms and lawmakers. (It’s another matter that some of the best works in the genre allow us to question these distinctions.) The symbolic nature of Sholay’s mise-en-scene is made obvious in this opening scene, with its contrast between the swathes of rough, barren landscape (where the dakus presumably run rampant) and the village of Ramgarh, where people live together in a community, leading ordered lives, but constantly in danger from the evil that lies beyond. 

Into this setting come two men who have no roots, who have never had a family or a community, and who will, over the course of the story, learn about taking on responsibility and becoming part of this larger world - when they might so easily have slipped into Gabbar's world instead. (Dibakar Banerjee’s one-line summary of Sholay, from my conversations with him last year, had nothing to do with what we usually think of as the film’s plot, or the Thakur-Gabbar face-off. It was simply: “Anaath bacchon ko family mili.” Two orphans find a home.)

- The huge boulders here are just as arresting as the vistas of John Ford’s Monument Valley (and in fact part of the sequence reminds me of the opening-credits scene of Fort Apache), but they are also reminders that Gabbar and his men live in the nooks and cracks of these natural structures, in places where the law, literally and otherwise, has no hands.

– During the class, when I made the point about the artful use of music in the scene, one of the students, well-versed in classical music, corrected me: “That’s the mridangam, not the tabla,” he said.

I was fairly certain there was a shehnai in there somewhere too, but I didn’t want to put my own hoof in my mouth – later, I turned to this passage from Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal’s excellent book on R D Burman:

Vibrant guitar chords, the French horn and percussion, including a tabla tarang, accentuate the two horsemen’s ride from the railway station towards Ramgarh in the opening scene. As they canter past open fields and villages [...] the chords and the beat of the music alter to a very folksy and rustic tone, ending with Dakshina Mohan Tagore’s taar shehnai before it cuts back to the initial chords on the acoustic guitar and the French horn in the final lap as the horsemen reach their destination at Thakur Baldev Singh’s bungalow.

There is a certain twang in the acoustic notes that is reminiscent of the Wild West. The hollow sound of the horn is ominous - a sense of the impending war in the gorges of central India. The French horn, nicknamed 'jalebi' by sound recordist B N Sharma because of its unique shape, has been used sparingly in Hindi movies, and never really to this effect.

(That book is a must-read for any serious fan of Hindi-movie music, by the way, and an honest and extremely well-researched addition to our film literature. Meanwhile, I'm stopping the Sholay talk here for now, though I'm sure I'll remember something new immediately after clicking the "Publish" button.)