In defence of the song sequence - an essay

[Enjoyed writing this essay for Himal magazine’s special issue on South Asian cinema. Wish I’d had twice the word length though, since there were so many other films and songs I would have liked to mention - including more mainstream ones. Hope to expand on this piece sometime soon]

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One of my most vivid memories of watching Hindi films in the 1980s – inevitably at home, on a video-cassette player – was that almost each time a song came on, someone would get up to press the “fast-forward” button. Or we would let the scene play out but it would be treated as a breather, allowing us to see to other things for five minutes: one of us might take a bathroom break, another would go and check on the food cooking on the stove.

I should add that this was a generally poor time for Hindi-film music, and the movies I mainly watched as a child were revenge-and-violence sagas where music played only a perfunctory role. Many of the songs were tuneless and their picturisation mostly uninspired. Our viewing habits did change a little when melody (some of it admittedly plagiarized) crept back into Hindi cinema in the late 1980s, with teen romances like Qayamat se Qayamat Tak and Maine Pyaar Kiya. But in general, songs were treated as fillers.

Thinking about it, perhaps this attitude wasn’t restricted to that period - perhaps it has always been part of the wider snobbery directed at popular Hindi cinema, even by viewers who enjoy watching it as a guilty pleasure. There is a telling scene in the 1974 film Rajnigandha, a gentle, thoughtful entry in the so-called Middle Cinema, which occupied a niche between the high-voltage drama of mainstream movies and the stark minimalism of “art films”. In the scene in question, the talkative Sanjay (Amol Palekar), having carelessly entered a movie hall long after the film started, wastes little time in getting up again for some fresh air when a song sequence begins on the screen in front of him. "Lo, gaana shuru ho gaya," he chuckles, "Main zara baahar ghoom kar aata hoon." ("Oh look, a song, I’ll go out and walk around for a bit.")

Given how cramped and squalid-looking the hall shown in that scene is – this being decades before the arrival in India of posh mall-multiplexes – you can almost sympathise with Sanjay’s desire to escape. (This was one reason why most of my early movie-watching was done in the comfort of home.) Yet there is an irony here: Rajnigandha itself made very delicate use of songs, which are integral to the story and to a psychological understanding of the principal character. The film is about a woman named Deepa (Vidya Sinha) who finds herself torn between her current romantic relationship – a happy but occasionally monotonous one– and the idealistic memory of an ex-boyfriend Naveen, with whom her path crosses again. Her inner state of mind, and the film’s central theme, finds beautiful expression in the song “Kai Baar Yun”, which includes the lyrics "Kai baar yun hi dekha hai / Yeh jo mann ki seema-rekha hai / Mann todne lagta hai / Anjanee pyaas ke peeche / Anjanee aas ke peeche / Mann daudne lagta hai..."  (“It often happens / that the mind breaks its own boundaries / and starts thirsting after the unknown…”.) The scene has Deepa and Naveen travelling through Bombay in a cab together: he is being polite and distanced, but she throws surreptitious glances his way, clearly wondering about what her life would have been like if they had stayed together. (The fact that the song is in the voice of a male singer adds a note of whimsy and allows us to wonder about the feelings of the otherwise inscrutable Naveen, a question that will again arise near the end of the film.) Any viewer who missed this sequence because they decided to step outside the hall - or fast-forward a video cassette - would have missed a vital part of the film.

It should be mentioned that this scene is – by the standards of the mainstream Hindi movie –a restrained one. There is no lip-synching by the actors, no dancing around trees; the song, which simply plays on the soundtrack while Deepa and Naveen ride together, serves as commentary and interior monologue. But anyone who has grown up watching Hindi films has seen hundreds of far more flamboyant song sequences. Music, and the way it is presented on the screen, are an integral part of this cinema.

And why not, for a great song – where rhythm, lyrics and singing combine to optimum effect – can reach emotional depths and express poetic truths in ways that conventional narrative cannot. Similarly, a well-filmed musical sequence can work within the context of a movie to deepen our attitudes to the characters and situations. In fact, it can be argued that the history of form in the popular Hindi film is inseparable from the history of the song sequence. Very often, directors and cinematographers have experimented with stylistic flourishes in musical sequences – perhaps because these scenes tend to be inherently non-realist – while holding themselves back when it comes to the more prosaic passages. Consequently, at times it is like the film has temporarily entered a magical realm, moving beyond the commonplace of routine, plot-oriented storytelling. To take just one among countless possible examples of such visual inventiveness, the 1968 film Aashirwad has a famous number, “Rail Gaadi”, sung by Ashok Kumar in a rapid-fire style that has often led the song to be categorised as proto-rap music. But equally effective is the use of super-fast zooms in the scene: during the quickest sections of the song, the camera goes from a medium shot of the actor to an extreme close up and back in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The visuals (which are very unusual for a Hindi movie of this vintage) are mimicking, or trying to keep pace with, the music, adding urgency to the moment, and enabling us to relate to and participate in the children's growing excitement.

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Unfortunately, the very use of the song in popular Hindi cinema – its disruption of narrative, its apparent lack of “logic” – often invites derision from those who have narrowly defined views about realism in art. The most literal-minded questions run along the lines: how have the actors’ voices magically changed to those of professional playback singers? Where has the background music come from if they are singing in a garden? But to ask such questions mockingly is to forget not just the origins of Hindi cinema – in the multilayered tropes of Parsi and Sanskrit theatre – but also the very nature of film as a medium grounded in artifice and stylisation, so closely associated with the magic show in its early years. (As the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid said to me once, there is something fundamentally irrational about walking into a darkened hall, sitting amongst hundreds of strangers and watching images flashing before your eyes at 24 frames per second.) In any case, there are many possible modes of cinematic expression. At one extreme is kitchen-sink realism – so spare that even a feature film can be made to look like a stark documentary – and at another extreme is great stylisation, or the expression of emotions through hyper-drama. Both modes, and the many others in between, are equally valid as artistic choices; what should concern the critic is not the mode itself but how well it is executed to realise the internal world of the film.

Popular Hindi cinema has derived its episodic, occasionally disjointed structures from a long tradition in theatre, literature and the other arts. In becoming obsessed with psychological realism and logical continuity, we sometimes forget that art has traditionally never been expected to conform to such parameters. Even someone of Shakespeare’s stature (to take an example of an artist who is universally respected today, even though he was anything but “highbrow” in his own time) inserted bawdy comic asides in his profoundest tragedies: consider the brief role of the porter, rambling on about urination as an effect of drinking too much, at a key point in Macbeth when the drama is about to reach its highest ebb (the murder of King Duncan just having been committed, the body about to be discovered). For the Elizabethan viewer, such passages must have served an important function as breathers – as brief, tension-alleviating changes of tone – but they also work at a literary level, as reminders of one of life’s most essential truths, that deep tragedy and absurdist comedy can exist in the same frame.

In a stylised film, it is entirely valid for a song sequence to be a stand-alone piece of performance art that punctuates two conventional narrative scenes. In such a case, the song itself may clearly be non-realist, being “sung” in an outdoor setting without any visible musical accompaniment, and in the voices of seasoned singers rather than the actors. But depending on the quality of its constituent elements – such as the music, lyrics, performance and cinematography, and how well they come together – such a sequence can work brilliantly on its own terms. There are also the sequences that are explicitly presented as dreams or fantasies – a famous example being a 10-minute-long dream scene in Raj Kapoor’s 1951 Awaara. This partly Dali-esque sequence – in which the film’s hero Raj confronts the key people in his life, his lover and his adopted father – is so well conceived and shot that only the most strait-laced viewer, blind to cinema’s qualities as a visual medium, would fast-forward it. But it also serves an important symbolic function, introducing lyricism into a prose work and subtly commenting on the larger themes within the film: as the writer and Hindi-film scholar Rachel Dwyer observed, “The sequence condenses the film’s themes into a dream about love, religion, women, motherhood, punishment, and crime, and shows how Hindi film enacts these in songs”. It is organic to the film.

One reason why the traditional Hindi-movie song sequence can do with some defending today is that there have been big shifts in Hindi cinema in recent years. Some of the most high-profile directors – such as Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee, whose films are critically praised but also reach good-sized audiences in multiplexes or through the DVD circuit – have been using music in increasingly varied ways. Thus, Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, or Kashyap’s Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur, have brilliant, pulsating soundtracks, but they are used as accompaniments and commentaries to the film’s action; they are not part of the narrative diagesis. In recent times there have also been stimulating examples of familiar old songs being reworked to subversive new ends: in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan, a trippy version of the beloved romantic song “Khoya Khoya Chand” plays out during a violent action sequence shot partly in slow motion. This is a conceit that might not have made sense on paper, but on screen it perfectly fits the film’s hallucinatory mood.

During a conversation last year, Banerjee told me he felt the modified international cut of his film Shanghai was better than the version released in India, because the song sequences in the former were more minimalistic. For instance, the Indian version has a rambunctious song titled “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, which features a group of street revelers singing and dancing, and one of the film’s protagonists Jaggu (Emraan Hashmi) joining them. In the sparer international cut, the full song does not unfold on screen, and more importantly Jaggu never joins in. The director was right about the stripped-down version being better, but that is largely because of the type of film Shanghai is. In its look and feel, it is very unlike the mainstream Hindi movie to begin with – it is cooler, more grounded in the contemporary Western sense. And given that the dance is actually happening within the narrative (it isn’t a fantasy), it would be out of character for Jaggu (presented as a somewhat diffident person) to participate in it.

However, it would be short-sighted to suggest that music should only be used in this minimalistic way. With Hindi cinema trying to break free from the shackles of the past and find new directions (a commendable pursuit in itself), there has been an increased self-consciousness about the “silliness” of the earlier type of song sequence, and a championing of the idea that music should always “carry the narrative forward”. But one should be open to the possibility that there are many ways of carrying a narrative forward: after all, even an apparently conventional romantic song sequence can enhance a story or take the place of dialogue scenes simply by recording the growing closeness between two lovers, by poetically indicating that their hearts and minds are becoming attuned to each other.

In fact, the song sequence (not just the song) in Hindi cinema can perform so many varied functions that one is in danger of running out of space trying to list them all. But perhaps the point will be partly served with two examples from the work of directors who are not associated with the most “commercial” cinema, but who still had a basic love for (and lack of self-consciousness about) the classic song sequence. In their work, one can see genuine thought and skill going into these scenes, to make them one of a piece with the film, and as commentaries on character and story.

A notable instance of songs performing a clear-cut narrative function occurs in the under-seen 1966 film Biwi aur Makaan, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, one of the most popular of the “Middle Cinema” filmmakers. This marvelously crafted musical-comedy didn’t do well at the box office, but it is historically important, being the first of many fruitful collaborations between Mukherjee and the poet-lyricist Gulzar (who would go on to become an important director himself). Biwi aur Makaan – about five friends looking for accommodation in the big city and eventually forced into a masquerade where two of them have to pretend to be women – has songs that often take the place of dialogue. Hemant Kumar’s music brings together conflicting idioms, notes and emotions in the same number – for instance, the song “Bas Mujkho Mohabbat Ho Gayi Hai” (“I have fallen in love”) has one of the friends, Shekhar, mooning over a girl while the others try to bring him to his senses. Thus, while Shekhar sings sorrowful, unrequited-lover lyrics, the others plead, scold and cajole; their chorus “Ab kya hoga, yaaron kya hoga” (“What will happen now?”) provides the counterpoint to his song so that we have a symphony of clashing moods.

This establishes a pleasing duality, helps us appreciate the personalities of all the friends, and also adds to the narrative tension. Though the genuineness of poor Shekhar’s feelings are never in question, we also know why his friends are so paranoid and what is at stake, and our own emotions vacillate with the ones being depicted on screen. In mainstream Hindi cinema one is used to seeing “dramatic” tracks alternating with “comic” tracks (a bit like the inebriated porter and the murdered king in Macbeth), but in this case both modes operate simultaneously, as if to acknowledge that one man’s tragedy can be another man’s comedy and the two things can flow together: the tone shifts effortlessly from the melancholy to the ridiculous to the hysterical, and even the two “cross-dressers” begin to acquire shades of the maternal/sisterly figures they are pretending to be. There is more nuance, insight into character, and artistic rigour in this apparently lightweight sequence in a “fun” movie than there is in many films that flaunt their seriousness of intent for everyone to marvel at.

There can also be subtler dimensions to a song sequence, dimensions that only someone who comes to a film with a willingness to appreciate the medium’s own language will grasp. Take the “Bachpan ke Din” (“Childhood Days”) sequence from the 1959 Bimal Roy film Sujata. If you simply listen to the song, you’ll think it is a happy, lilting number sung by two sisters as they recall their carefree childhood – and you wouldn’t be wrong. But watch the sequence as it plays out in the film, and new shades of meaning are revealed.

One sister, Rama, initiates the song by playing it on the piano, while the other, Sujata, hums along, and there are parallels in their movements and gestures: Rama spreads her dupatta playfully across her face, and a second later Sujata matches the gesture with the garments she is removing from a clothesline. But though the sisters’ voices merge and they are clearly tuned in to each other’s feelings, they never share the frame – Rama is indoors throughout while Sujata is on the terrace above the piano room. And this tells us some things about these characters and their story. The unusual composition is visual shorthand for the fact that there is an invisible line separating their lives and that Sujata isn’t, strictly speaking, part of the family. A low-caste “untouchable” by birth, she has been raised by Rama’s parents, whose affection for her has been tempered over the years by their consciousness of social mores and restraints, so that Sujata has grown up yearning to hear them call her “hamaari beti” (“she is our daughter”) rather than the more formal and defensive “hamaari beti jaisi” (“she is like a daughter to us”).

Thus, in the song that introduces the grown-up versions of the sisters (this is the first time we see Sujata and Rama as adults), the real daughter is firmly ensconced inside the house, clearly at ease with her setting, while Sujata – whose demeanour is more reticent – is in an open space, underlining her outsider status. The scene also provides our first view of something that runs through the film: the association of Sujata with the natural world, or the outdoors. Much of her time is spent in the garden and the greenhouse, tending to plants, and we are reminded that she is a child of nature, her true origins unknown, rather than an unqualified, legitimate member of the household (in the “Bachpan ke Din” sequence she literally has no roof over her head, but for the sky). This expert use of space and framing is as important to this film’s mise-en-scene (and the creation of its world) as any of the dramatic scenes.

On the face of it, the two scenes mentioned above – along with hundreds of others – might appear to be merely enjoyable interludes – the sort of distraction that may easily be shrugged aside by the viewer hankering after “serious” cinema. Observed more closely, they are vital and narrative-enriching, and important cogs in the unique storytelling engine that is the mainstream Hindi film.

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[A related post: the Lavani dance sequence in Aashirwad]

Short notes from the Mumbai festival: Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain

“I’m sure it’s the right address,” the woman says, “No other house looks like this one.” She is searching for her sister who, she has been told, hid in this beachside villa two nights ago. But the door has now been opened by a stout, middle-aged man (the director Jafar Panahi, playing Jafar Panahi) who knows nothing about the missing girl.

This is a scene late in Panahi’s new meta-film Closed Curtain, a work that might puzzle anyone who doesn't know the Iranian director’s back-story: the ban on his movie-making, the house arrest, his continuing fugitive attempts to practice his art, and to do so by making films that explicitly comment on his own situation. His last movie – with its poignantly ironical title This is Not a Film – was shot partly on iPhone and featured him talking to the camera about the projects he has in his head, projects he is no longer permitted to bring to cinematic life. Closed Curtain, by contrast, begins by appearing to be a narrative film (about a screenwriter and his impossibly cute dog) – for a few scenes it is as if Panahi has succeeded in realising one of the visions he discussed in This is Not a Film.

But around the halfway point we are reminded again that nothing in this director’s life and work fall within the bounds of “normalcy” any longer. The narrative is interrupted, the fourth wall is, almost literally, torn down: Panahi enters the house that has been the scene of the action so far; he takes down curtains, revealing wall-posters of his own previous films; the effect is a little reminiscent of the ruptures and interruptions in Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna. The characters we saw in the conventional-narrative section of the film – the screenwriter, his dog, two people seeking shelter from the authorities – stop functioning as elements of a coherent story and begin to move in and out of our line of vision, seeming less like real people and more like phantoms (perhaps ghostly manifestations of half-structured ideas in the mind of a writer-director who lives in chains). Other people come in and interact with Panahi, but again we are unsure whether they are “real” or visitations from another half-imagined story.

These intersecting narratives touch on similar matters: being in hiding with the things that are most important to you, trying to get your work done, or simply living your life, with the constant threat of someone bursting in and taking everything away. The writer in the “regular” narrative must cover all his windows with black curtains, because dogs are considered unclean by the regime he lives under; the writer-director Panahi in the meta-narrative doesn't have the freedom or resources to tell his story properly, or to engage with the world while telling it, which means there are metaphorical black curtains around his mind.

As Panahi and his fictional characters move in orbit around each other, other questions arise too. We often romanticise highbrow art as an essentially closed process – being principally about the relationship between the artist and his creations, like the literary writer who says “I write primarily for myself” – but does art have any value, or purpose, if it cannot (at least to a limited degree) be shared? And then, if it does reach the outside world, can the relationship be strictly one-sided? What happens when the world begins to intrude on it, deconstruct it, or even demand that it conforms to certain standards, values or rules?

All of which means that Closed Curtain is a self-conscious, self-referential film, but given its context it is also a deeply moving self-conscious film, an artist's cry of defiance. In terms of form, it is an abstract and "difficult" work, but it is also a plea for greater openness - for doors to be unbarred, for curtains to be removed. And the woman in that scene mentioned above is dead right on one front: if this secluded villa is a metaphor for Panahi’s current cinema (or for the mind striving to produce that cinema), it is true that no other house looks anything like it.

MAMI diary: Partition and partitions in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost

At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should I stick around for the Q&A sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions – with their back-stories and insights into the creative process – can be invigorating, or at least useful at the level of information-gathering; but as a critic who hasn’t yet had enough time to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, it can be a little problematic hearing the director and crew speak about what they were trying to do. It can create white noise, or even sway one’s feelings. (In my early days in literary journalism, it sometimes happened that I read and disliked a book, then met the author and not only found him extremely likable but also, through conversation, came to understand and even empathise with what he had been trying to do. At the end of such a meeting, even if I retained my basic view of the book, I might easily feel guilty for having been over-harsh in the review.)

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I had an unusually satisfying experience with Anup Singh’s Punjabi film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row and having to crane my neck and strain my eyes. Second, the post-screening chat – which featured the director as well as the actors Tilottama Shome (excellent in a pivotal role), Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal – was intelligent and engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about (in response to audience questions) touched on and confirmed my own fragmented thoughts. 

For instance, I was unsurprised to learn that Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak’s entire body of work, Qissa is deeply invested not just in Partition – the sundering of a nation in 1947, creating paranoias, ghosts and demons that have haunted thousands of families over the decades – but in partitions more generally: the many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of “others”. (As Singh pointed out, Ghatak once asked “Who is not a refugee?”)

[A very minor alert here. Strictly speaking, what follows isn’t a spoiler, since it is revealed within the first 15-20 minutes of the film – and if you’re attentive, you might guess it even during the opening credits, which have photos of the main characters. But part of the effect of the film for me was the subtle way in which things play out and come into clearer relief in these early scenes.]

The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber (Irrfan Khan) and his family, whose lives change when he marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber – dismayed by a proliferation of female children – decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy. 
 
“Decides” may be the wrong word, actually: it is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens: that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife Meher (Chopra) is unhappy, but the family mostly carries on as if nothing is amiss. Other people – distant relatives, elders in the community, a teacher who instructs the “boy” in manly things like kasrat – seem either not to know about the child’s real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on. (One scene in particular, when the 12-year-old Kanwar tells her father that she is bleeding, and Umber responds by hugging her and exclaiming “My son is growing up so fast!”, is chilling.) Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good son – but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl and Umber’s patriarchal fervour takes an even uglier turn, the conflicts escalate.

Qissa begins with the spectre of Partition, but its canvas widens to encompass the gender divide, the line between the human and the spirit worlds, between sanity and insanity (I thought of Bishan in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, lying under the barbed wire at the India-Pakistan border, and the question of whether he is madder than the world around him). This dilution of themes may be problematic for some viewers (an audience member told Anup Singh that he thought it was two different films in one) and the film undeniably has many balls in the air, but I think there are important links between these themes too. Many people who suffered the worst of Partition became living ghosts in the sense that they were petrified in the past, unable to let go or to look ahead. And for someone like Umber Singh – a proud alpha-male who sees himself as the king of his crumbling castle – this situation is made even more complicated because he can view the future only in terms of having a male child who can carry his line forward; each successive birth of a girl is like a slap on the face for a man who needs some sense of permanent identity and rootedness. As his frustrations and insecurities grow, the political becomes personal, and his family is affected in many overlapping ways.

This is a stately, well paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes (the lyrics are by Madan Gopal Singh, who also helped translate the original, English dialogues into Punjabi). There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert (sitting with the screen just above me, I often had to turn my head a full 90 degrees to look at one thing, then another, and was reminded that even this awkward experience is preferable to the one of watching a good-looking film for the first time on a small YouTube screen) – but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh’s house, where the very air is thick and oppressive; you can almost feel what might be going on in this man’s tormented, fixated mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters. 

For all the vividness of these images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, a haziness that has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, with remembrances of things experienced by relatives or friends, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination, which may be the only way to deal with such grim matters. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject, and for me its allegorical and magic realist elements worked just fine.

The lead performances are excellent too, and I thought there was something to be said about the casting; you might not think of Tisca Chopra and Tilottama Shome as being a convincing mother and daughter, but watching them here I couldn’t help seeing a distinct facial resemblance. In fact, Shome mentioned during the discussion that she thought Singh was making a big mistake by casting her, a short-statured Bengali woman, as a Punjabi girl who has to live her life as a man. “I came to the role with my usual stereotypes of what masculinity should be,” she said, “but Anup told me, don’t worry about being ‘a man’, just focus on being a good son to Umber.” She also said Singh had asked her to watch the old Dilip Kumar films Tarana and Aan for cues on how to play the role. It took her some time to figure out what her director wanted her to discover in those performances (“at first I thought it was because Dilip-saab had these very deliberate gestures, and I wondered if there was something specifically masculine about that”) but later she realised that Singh wanted her to “find” Kumar’s way of smiling – even in difficult situations – in those films. In the larger picture, Kanwar’s story may be a sad, grim one (when she is liberated from the pretence, she finds she doesn’t like wearing women’s clothes because they have become like “scorpions” for her), but that didn’t mean the actor playing her had to look sullen.

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I found the Dilip Kumar anecdote interesting, because it suggested a director who could make unusual connections and leaps of imagination, draw inspiration from a variety of sources. When I spoke with Singh afterwards, he told me that he watched all kinds of films enthusiastically. “I am a big fan of Guru Dutt and Kenji Mizoguchi,” he said (and here I thought of the lonely ghosts in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu).

During the Q&A session, in defence of his film’s structure and its supernatural elements, he had mentioned that Indian storytelling had always adopted very different methods from the cool, psychological realism of contemporary Western narratives: in traditional Indian storytelling, there have been tales within tales, the idea of closure has not been very important, there is room for whimsy, for one mood blending into another. I asked him later if his interest in such narrative methods extended to the forms used in popular Indian cinema. “I love mainstream Hindi cinema, it has been so much a part of my growing up,” he replied. “But I have a caveat. I feel popular cinema has played with Indian storytelling traditions but also misused them at times. We have many hierarchies as a society – in terms of class, gender and so on – and transgressions have always been important in our storytelling, going back centuries. There have always been narratives that critique the prevailing traditions and assumptions. However, when storytelling is used simply to reaffirm the status quo – which is what popular cinema often does – I think that’s a problem.”

Examining the status quo – and how lives are affected when change occurs – is a central concern for him. “I have lived a life of fragments myself,” he said, “I felt much within me was scattered, and Ghatak’s cinema gave me an insight into my own scattering. I have also been interested in the making of new ‘refugees’ in our times, notions about nationhood, about families and genders: what is a man, what is a woman? And how our views of such things are proscribed and limited, leading to immense inner violence and unnecessary separations.

"When our old traditions are being challenged, we tend to hold on to the past and we take out our frustrations on those who are closest to us, as Umber does in the film. In the opening scene, his first words are 'Listen to my story'. And by the end, the man has realised his culpability, realised how his actions have ruined so many lives. It is very much a story about a changing world, where new ways of thinking and living exist, and where people who are set in the old ways have to deal with this."


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[Qissa, which has been co-produced by NFDC, should get a commercial release next year, and will be out on DVD soon after that]

P.S. And returning to the question with which I began this post: this boy, with whom I saw Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, would have answered with a very firm “No”. As soon as the film ended and the director walked up on stage, our venerable critic gathered his notes, leapt out of his seat and made a mad scramble for the exit. That’s purity of purpose for you.

Heroism on an intimate scale – about Hansal Mehta’s Shahid

“Mr Shahid, you have to let it go,” a judge tells Shahid Azmi (Rajkumar Yadav) in the new biopic about the lawyer and human rights activist who was murdered in 2010. Other people say much the same thing over the course of this film, but “letting go” doesn't come easily to Shahid. He might – in an attempt to break the ice with a new client – crack a lame joke about lawyers’ ethical codes, but he is dead serious about his work and goes about it with quiet, unshowy determination.

As Shahid shows us, though, it wasn’t always that way – this is a story about personal growth, about finding your place in the world. When we first see Azmi in Hansal Mehta’s film, his face is a blur, then his features come slowly into focus. The shot anticipates a narrative arc where a confused young man will grow in stature and confidence, his personality becoming more sharply defined as time passes. If you watch the early scenes in Shahid without knowing much about the real Shahid Azmi’s life, you might be unsure what he’s about, what his motivations and impulses are, what he is going to do next (and he is probably just as uncertain himself at this point, vacillating between the company of a militant and an intellectual activist during a prison stint). But by the end, he has become an unlikely hero.

Actually, “hero”, with its many filmi connotations, might seem an inappropriate word given the type of film this is. Shahid is subdued and un-dramatic, which is strange since one of its very first scenes (set during the 1992-93 Bombay riots) has the young Shahid recoiling in shock as a burning man lurches towards him. This is followed by vignettes from Shahid’s early life: his brief time in a militant training camp in Kashmir, his efforts to educate himself and transcend the disadvantages of a poor background, his seven years in jail after a stage-managed arrest under TADA. When he is released, he sets about working for voiceless innocents who might find themselves in similar situations: lower-class Muslims who are being railroaded because they are soft targets.

This is not material that lends itself to understated treatment, especially in our communally fervid times. Yet Shahid somehow manages not to be an overtly political film, full of large, bird’s-eye-view narratives about discrimination and injustice. Apart from a couple of short monologues – delivered without flourish – it isn’t much concerned with the sweeping historical view of things. Instead, like its protagonist, it stays in the here and now: it makes its points by operating at ground level, showing the daily functioning of the judiciary, the lack of transparency in the workings of bodies that all of us depend on - in the process suggesting how systemic flaws and prejudice can spread across levels (starting with foul-mouthed, inadequately sensitised policemen), how well-intentioned people can become cogs, and how underprivileged people can find the cards stacked against them.

This ground-level view is reflected in the film’s form, which is more that of the handheld-camera docu-drama than of a dramatic feature. The shots of Azmi in court, bickering with prosecution lawyers and judges, have the spare, naturalistic feel of Cinéma vérité. What we see here is not the grand courtroom of mainstream Hindi film and drama – the stylised, allegorical place where injustice and justice are meted out in turn, where lies and truth are in timeless conflict – but a much more mundane setting, and the lawyers are not suave show-offs but hassled, sweat-soaked people, speaking legalese almost mechanically, worn out from going through the same routine day after day. Of course, important things ARE happening here, life-changing decisions are being made, but the image of the court as a theatre – or a purgatory for souls whose fate lies in Justice’s scales – is thoroughly de-glamorized. Even the dubious witnesses (such as the man who claims to have seen something important during a holiday in Nepal, and recites key-words like “momos”, but can’t remember other basic details about his trip) aren’t smug or slimy character types invested in ruining innocent lives; they are nervous people who may have reasons for doing what they are doing. (Perhaps they believe the people they are fingering are definitely guilty, and the law simply needs their help to get a conviction.)

And amidst this bedlam, here is Shahid Azmi doing whatever he can do, fighting the good fight not as a superhero crusader but as an ordinary, flesh-and-blood man who can’t always look his wife in the eye when she asks him, what about your responsibilities to your family? This is heroism on an intimate, prosaic meter. Even when a prosecution lawyer makes an insinuation about Azmi having served time in jail and been in Kashmir with militants, Shahid’s reaction is a poignant mix of outrage and defensiveness (“I was never a terrorist OR a radical,” he says). There are no hyper-dramatic speeches, no grandstanding, and this is why Rajkumar Yadav (who is consistently excellent in unglamorous parts, and even more unlikely than Nawazuddin Siddiqui to develop actorly tics or become associated with a particular character type) is perfect for this sort of film. It is a cliché to say of a good performance that you forget about the actor and only register the character (and it isn’t a cliché I think much of, because I usually manage to appreciate great acting while being perfectly aware that it IS acting), but Yadav comes very close to that ideal here.

The other performances – such as by Vipin Sharma as a prosecuting lawyer and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as Shahid's brother Arif – are very good too, bringing integrity to scenes that might otherwise have become trite. And while the emphasis on verisimilitude (right down to shooting some scenes in the real Shahid Azmi’s office) works well, there are also some effective dramatic touches, such as a scene where Shahid and his wife Mariam (Prabhleen Sandhu) argue near the kitchen, she brushes her hand in frustration against some of the utensils, and the resultant clattering of a steel lid continues for a good 10 or 15 seconds on the soundtrack, a tinny accompaniment to their continuing conversation.

I liked the economy of the storytelling too: everything isn’t spelled out, the viewer is allowed to fill in the gaps, make leaps and connections. In the early scenes particularly, we get snapshots from Shahid’s life – appropriate perhaps for a story about a man whose life was cut short much too soon, who never got a chance to realise his full potential or do everything he wanted to do. There are small parts here – cameos, really – for Kay Kay Menon and Tigmanshu Dhulia as people Shahid meets on the course of his journey from naif to potential jihadi to believing that you can only change the system by being part of it. Watching the film, I kept getting the impression that a longer (more flabby, more didactic) cut exists; that (for example) Menon and Dhulia may have had larger roles, and that the director and editor showed discernment in paring the film down to its current length. In one scene, Shahid proposes to Mariam – who is his client at the time, and a divorcee – and she seems outraged and walks out on him; but then there is an immediate cut to them exiting a courthouse together after their low-key wedding. Apart from leaving out details that aren’t relevant to the film’s immediate purpose, this sudden cut is a reminder of Shahid’s persistence, and it also lets us conjecture what may have happened: perhaps Mariam – because of the conservative assumptions of the milieu she grew up in –was so taken aback by Shahid’s proposal that she simply didn’t know how to respond, and took some time to come around.

In any case, the world of the lower-class Indian Muslim – under-educated, vulnerable to fear and paranoia, exploited by politicians as well as religious heads – is very much in the background of this film, even though the script doesn’t emphasise it. We never forget the social milieu Shahid hails from, and there are glimpses of cultural conflicts and inner turmoil, as in the scene where he takes his wife to meet his family for the first time and she is appalled that he is asking her to do something she has never done, to wear a burkha (“just this once, never again” he pleads, but in the desperation he shows, one can see where the “just this once” might lead in the future). Scenes like this make Shahid’s personal growth and self-actualisation even more creditable, because we are reminded of the many things he had to overcome, the many small battles he had to win. This isn’t a man to whom heroism comes naturally, he has to grow into it. And by the end, this intense, low-key film has us believing in him.

Smoke screens and jasmine blues

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

I have mixed feelings about the anti-smoking ads that precede the main feature in movie halls. Mainly, they annoy me because they add to the already-considerable list of distractions before a movie begins: the line of trailers, Vinay Pathak swanning about in a bright red coat as he extols a bank’s interest rates. If you're punctual to a fault, and impatient to boot, these things can be exasperating. On the other hand, my sadistic side delights in the sound of pampered brats, insulated from the world beyond their velvety multiplex seats, groaning when the grislier ads play - the thought of people being faced with such images just before the glossy movie they have come to watch (and just as they are dipping into their gold-plated caramel-popcorn buckets) is a pleasing one.

I am clearer though about the idiocy of signs scrolling across the bottom of the screen while a film is playing. And as you probably know, the decision to turn every movie experience into a public-service advertisement hasn’t pleased Woody Allen either. His long association with absurdist comedy notwithstanding, the veteran director doesn’t see the funny side of “Cigarette smoking is injurious to health” signs besmirching his creations. Which means Indian viewers won’t see his new film Blue Jasmine on the big screen.

Allen’s stand – and the equally firm one by the censor board to not make an exception for him – has revived old arguments about societal welfare versus the self-centred impulses of the ivory-tower artist. (The conversation has already headed off into predictable tangents too: on message-boards, people are pointing out that Allen – given the many controversies around his personal life – is not exactly an exemplar of public morality; so why should anyone listen to his whining about such things?) Central to such discussions is the stated purpose and obligation of art. As Orson Welles (or was it Alfred Hitchcock, or Shah Rukh Khan, or Lassie?) said once, “If I want to send a message, I’ll go to the post office.” That line sounds facetious, but the implication isn’t that films shouldn’t convey anything positive or affirming – it is that a “message” or “idea” can be delicately embedded within a narrative rather than ladled out for quick consumption; the viewer might be required to do some thinking of his own. 

Of course, pedantry can sometimes serve a purpose too, especially in a society where a large number of people are under-educated and things occasionally need to be spelled out. But these anti-smoking tickers are context-free and indiscriminate, showing up with every glimpse of a cigarette (or bidi, or cigar). It doesn’t matter, for instance, that the sort of viewer who spends Rs 400 on Blue Jasmine is likely to be someone who already knows about the dangers of smoking (and possibly doesn’t care).

At times the ads are not just distracting or superfluous, but farcical. On two recent occasions I involuntarily snorted out loud when anti-cigarette warnings appeared on the screen. One was during Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, a film in which slaves undergo various forms of mistreatment (a few stolen moments with a pipe might be the closest some of these people come to achieving peace or grace) and pretty much every character is in danger of having his head blown off at any given point; arguably, rifles are a more pressing threat in this universe than cigarettes. Then there was the recent re-release of Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay, a story about lives lived on the edge of the abyss, or on the edge of the railway tracks, with the junkie Chillum (Raghuvir Yadav) constantly on the verge of throwing himself in front of an approaching train. He is an addict (and he is leading the film’s protagonist down a similar path) but the real drug here, the thing that is most “injurious” to the characters’ health, is poverty and circumstance.

Given this, there was something morbidly funny about watching Salaam Bombay in the company of a privileged audience, with anti-tobacco riders playing almost throughout. But then good intentions and common sense don’t always go together. If a Marx Brothers film were ever shown in our halls, there would be a permanent warning at the bottom of the screen, given the cigar attached to Groucho’s lower lip. A Jaane bhi do Yaaro re-release would have a similar ticker with the scene where Ahuja sticks a cigarette between the (stone-cold-dead) DeMello’s lips. Perhaps Woody Allen – whose recent films have doubled as tourism guides to the major cities of the world – could make a Mumbai-based movie about all this, and call it Shadows and Smog.

P.S. Anyway, as long as we insist on sticking messages on our big screens, why stop at tobacco? I propose the addition of the text “Feeding strangers may be injurious to emotional health” on prints of The Lunchbox.

The film-book series contd: Mughal-e-Azam, Pakeezah, Amar Akbar Anthony

A shout-out for enthusiasts of film literature: the Harper Collins series of books about iconic Hindi films (which began in 2010 with these three titles, including my book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro) is in its second innings. Now in stores: Sidharth Bhatia’s Amar Akbar Anthony: Masala, Madness and Manmohan Desai, Anil Zankar’s Mughal-e-Azam: Legend as Epic, and Meghnad Desai’s Pakeezah: An Ode to a Bygone Era. The authors are all knowledgeable movie buffs, so there should be many good things within these pages. I’ll try to do a review once I have read the books.