Sleaze and the unmanly man - notes on Miss Lovely

At one point in Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely, a soft-core sex scene is being shot for a horror-titillation movie – the sort of C-grade movie that the Duggal brothers Vicky (Anil George) and Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) specialise in. A bosomy starlet, writhing on a bed in bridal wear, is being given directions – “Tera mard na-mard hai” (“Your husband is impotent”) – and we get a vague sense of what the scene is about: the woman on the bed has her eyes closed or turned away (in the manner expected of a good Indian bride), and so she doesn’t realise that she is being necked not by her husband but by a scaly-headed monster.

The film being shot is a cheesy, low-budget thing that might make the work of the Ramsays seem refined in comparison, and the monster looks more comical than scary. But the contrast between a na-mard (which can be shorthand for a passive, hence “effeminate” man) and a rapacious, hyper-masculine bully is also at the heart of Miss Lovely’s own plot. Of the movie-making Duggals, the younger brother Sonu – our point of entry into the film, because we are privy to his inner thoughts and personal stirrings – is effete and dreamy-eyed, and seems to want to break away from this world. Vicky, on the other hand, is a ruffian who mockingly says “Bada mard bannta hai” when his brother tries to strike out for himself. He is the real fiend here, more of a threat than the badly made up monster in that sex scene could ever be, and he is presented in menacing terms: in one scene in a darkened disco, there is a striking shot of him looking down from a height, a red light next to him blinking away as if to signal Danger.

The brothers will fall out over a seemingly innocent girl named Pinky (Niharika Singh), who wants a break in films and who Sonu becomes besotted with. But that makes Miss Lovely sound more narrative-driven than it is. The idea here isn’t so much to tell “a story” (the plot, such as it is, could be scribbled on the palm of your hand, much like Pinky quickly writing her phone number down on Sonu’s hand during a stolen moment) but to create the mood of a particular world – the world of small-time moviemakers in the late 1980s, conducting shady deals, negotiating the chaos of a profession where things have to be done fast, in hurriedly improvised locations, with the knowledge that a police raid may always be around the corner.

Being abstract and often anti-narrative, this is a slow-moving film (I’ll confess my attention wandered at times) but it tries to do something very interesting: to admit us into this milieu, and the states of mind you might find in it, without over-explaining anything – letting the visuals, the art direction and the sound design do most of the work instead. Much of it is shot in the style of a handheld-camera documentary. There are relatively few outdoor scenes, the main impression is of oppressive interiors, rooms that are small and dimly lit and overcrowded, characters who are almost brushing up against the camera; there is a sense of drifting through shadowy places and hearing faraway voices as if through a tunnel. (I read that director Ahluwalia counts Seijun Suzuki among his influences. I don’t know Suzuki’s films apart from Branded to Kill, but parts of Miss Lovely reminded me of the work of another non-mainstream Japanese director of the 1960s, Nobuo Nagakawa, especially Jigoku, which offered a stylised vision of hell and its lost souls, looking for small salvations.) In fact, a viewer can get so steeped in this setting that it may come as a minor shock to hear – in one scene – the polished, anodyne voice of an English-speaking newsreader talking about exploitation movies and forced prostitution. These incidents seems like they belong to another world, the newsreader says in what sounds like a dispassionately patronising tone, and of course, from her perspective, they do.

But this is also an “other world” film in the sense of the past being a foreign country - it is a reminder that the late 80s and the early 90s were a time of transition, in India’s metropolises at least, and in the entertainment industry: the last years of the video-cassette culture, the shift to an era of multiple TV channels(!) and the greater possibilities they brought for home entertainment. We see Ambassadors and Fiats (and a few Maruti 800s) on the roads, black-and-white TV screens with pictures barely visible through static. Nataraj pencil ads play over transistors and little boys fight each other with makeshift maces, no doubt in imitation of the TV Mahabharata which would have been playing at the time. Even the film’s opening titles play like a homage to 1980s B-movies (or some 80s “A-movies” for that matter) – garish background colours, names like Biddu and Nazia Hassan improbably sharing space with Ilaiyaraaja. 

At the same time there is nothing dated about the contrast between the supposedly glamorous world of show-business (even in a C-movie universe) and behind-the-scene realities. A newspaper clipping places a photo of a starlet smiling out at the camera next to a picture of her muddy corpse found in a swamp. A mother tells a producer that her daughter will do anything and gets the approving response, “Bahut acchhe sanskaar deeye hain”. Throughout, one is aware of the divide between people who are motivated and single-minded enough to make a life for themselves in this world, and those who are unable to.

Which brings us back to Sonu, for Miss Lovely also begs the question: what might happen when a man with a strong introspective impulse, given to philosophising and dreaming, finds himself born to the manor of a coarse, cut-throat world like this one? His voiceovers (which overlap sometimes with the dialogue in a scene) include lines like “Aadmi ka level hona chahiye – level nahin toh aadmi kya”. He is too idealistic and too meditative to join his brother in playing the “bada game”. And for me one problem was that I didn’t really feel like I had got to know him, or understand how he came to be working in this business for so long without having his heart in it. One shot in that disco scene has Sonu, left in the lurch, holding two glasses and looking confused as the smoke of the dance floor envelops him. This film has many intriguing things in it, but its protagonist – the person we want to relate to or at least empathise with – remains as distant and hazy as that shot suggests.

Bride of Frankenstein

Having lately discovered that Karna and Superman are the same person, I have now unearthed similarities between Draupadi and the Frankenstein monster. This is best illustrated with screen grabs from the Star Plus Mahabharat and old movie versions of the Mary Shelley story.

First, behold how the monster (in the 1910 film, that is) and Draupadi are each born of fire – though one emerges from a vat, the other from a sacrificial yagna:

(More about the fire scene in that old Frankenstein film here)

Next, mark ye, that both these hapless creatures (still coming to grips with the strangeness of the world around them) are surprised by their reflections in a mirror:

As they settle in, they each befriend a little girl and sit with her by the side of a pond, playing with flowers and such.

Much of the emotional impact of those scenes comes from the knowledge that the fire-princess and the monster have never experienced the joys and wonders of childhood. But grown-ups can have fun too. Here is Paanchali doing something that would get Boris Karloff lurching manfully towards her swayamvara:

[Coming up next: Bheema and Jughead Jones]

Emotional palettes: Vikram Chandra on mixed rasa in ancient literature and popular cinema

There are so many stimulating things in Vikram Chandra’s new book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code that I won’t try listing them all – or doing a consolidated review – but one passage that struck a chord was a reference from the Mahabharata’s Stree Parva, the book about the women on the post-war battlefield. In the original text, Gandhari’s extraordinary monologue includes a description of the slain warrior Bhurishravas’s wives finding his severed arm, then holding and caressing it. The imagery haunted me for a long time when I first read it (in the Kamala Subramanian version, I think; the more literal and dreary Kisara Mohan Ganguli translation is on this page) and I was reminded of it when I read Mirrored Mind. Chandra quotes a rendition by the ninth century scholar Anandavardhana wherein one of the wives, gently stroking the gory limb she has placed on her lap, says:

“This is the hand that took off my girdle,
That fondled my full breasts,
That caressed my navel, my thighs, my loins,
And loosened my skirt.”**

Here is, as Chandra points out, an example (one of countless in the Mahabharata) of the mixing of rasas. “The stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savouring of karuna-rasa, pathos.” In other words, the tone of an essentially tragic scene has been heightened by the introduction of a very different – some might even say inappropriate – mood.

Concepts like rasa (the aesthetic pleasure derived from tasting artificially induced emotions while watching a performance), dhvani (the resonance that poetry can create within a reader) and vyanjan (suggestion) have informed artistic expression in India for centuries, and Chandra writes about them at some length, drawing on the work of Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, and discussing the function of rasa and dhvani in old literature. But he also mentions a more modern medium.

The urge to savour is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song.

According to Anandavardhana: “While it is well known that larger works contain a variety of rasas, a poet who seeks the excellence [of his works] will make just one of them predominant… [But there is] no obstruction to a single rasa by its being mixed with others…Readers with a ready sense of discrimination, who are attentive and intelligent, will rather take a higher degree of pleasure in such a work.”

Chandra continues:

A song in an Indian film is an interlude which exists outside of story-logic and story-time, but within the emotional palette of the film; its function is to provide subsidiary rasas that will strengthen the predominant rasa of the whole.

****

I had a nice session with Chandra the other day (two sessions actually, a private conversation followed by a public one), and part of our discussion was about the often-uninformed, kneejerk denigrating of works that are deemed “unrealistic” or “melodramatic”. When I interviewed him in 2006, he had said:

I feel very strongly about this notion of what is "too filmi" as opposed to what is realistic. In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we've had an education that's trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the tradition of psychological realism. So when we see the other kind of representation – of mainline cinema – we deny its reality. But the idea that the novelistic/psychological-realism form can transparently give us what is "real" is very naïve. It's a distressing aspect of critical talk, and given the history of colonialism, we should be more suspicious of this idea.

(Full interview here)

Related points are addressed in Mirrored Mind. In a chapter titled “Histories and Mythologies”, Chandra recounts how, as a young writer, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling (with their episodic structures, logical discontinuities and narratives nestled within narratives) and the cool, minimalist “realism” of modern American writing (in creative-writing workshops in the US, the model to aspire to was the spare prose of Raymond Carver). And he writes very eloquently about “the cult of modernity”: how imperialism required that colonisers cast the colonised as primitive, childish, undeveloped, and sentiment-driven; how entire modes of artistic expression get labelled inferior and “premodern” as a result; and what effect that has had on how we continue to view our art and culture even in post-colonial times. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s description of Africans making “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” in Heart of Darkness, he says:

The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble”, the frightening “throb of drums” that he refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into ‘tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours’ […]

These parts of Mirrored Mind particularly appealed to me because I can relate – to a degree – with Chandra’s ambivalence. My own informal “education” in cinema – taking the medium seriously, as something that could be analysed and written about – really began when I exited the world of Hindi films in my early teens, became obsessed with old American films, and began reading criticism by V F Perkins, Robin Wood and others; criticism that was very much rooted in the models of psychological realism, and in a limited worldview where an Indian director worthy of being held up as a major creative force would have to have the particular sensibility and method of a Satyajit Ray. 

It is only in the past few years that I have rediscovered the creative energies of the really good popular Hindi films, and attempted – as a viewer and writer – to understand their “language” and the assumptions underlying it. And so, even while I have written posts like this one in response to sweepingly condescending pieces about Indian cinema – or this one about Hindi-movie songs – there’s a tiny part of me that still feels a bit embarrassed about the tropes of our popular movies; still reluctant to fully embrace the best of them as art (as opposed to “enjoyable entertainment, but nothing more”). There is some irony here, because when it comes to old Hollywood, I have always found it easy to reject Pauline Kael’s simplistic Art vs Trash formulation. I have no trouble placing popular or genre films like Hawks’ Monkey Business in the same circle of artistic merit as more obviously serious-intentioned films. But it feels like a greater leap to put a popular Hindi movie – even one that is extremely well made and has a fully realised “emotional palette” – in that circle. It’s an aspect of my conditioning that I struggle with.

****

Like I said, there is much else of interest in Mirrored Mind, though it is a difficult book in places: an honest report of the reading experience might be “Stirred, then daunted, even stupefied, then stirred again”. It isn’t easy to get into it – if you know nothing about the world of code and computer programming, you might back gingerly away on seeing the first page with its List of Figures that goes “CIL for Hello, world! program in C#” and “Subtraction operator with inputs 4.2 and 2.2” and suchlike.

When I last encountered Chandra’s work, it was in the form of Sacred Games, that epic novel about cops and gangsters in Mumbai – a fast-paced, accessible thriller as well as a thoughtful look at human lives and destinies colliding in a dynamic city, with the reverberations of the distant past constantly running through those lives. So coming to Mirrored Mind, all this talk about algorithms and logic gates and computer programming was a bit scary. But a couple of things happened as I continued reading. First, Chandra’s writing made the world of code and software immediate and interesting. Second, the book morphed gradually into other things. It became a memoir of a reading life and a writing life – of Chandra’s coming of age as a writer, his parallel life in programming, and how the two pursuits have intersected, diverged, or complemented each other (“the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative”). And eventually, a wide-ranging history of Sanskrit grammar and theory.

That might seem a quirky range of topics for a single book, but they come together very well here, and there are all sorts of little ideas and revelations. For instance, it was news to me that good code can aspire not just to functionality but to elegance and beauty as well; that an ambitious programmer can be like a writer who wants to polish his sentences and express himself as well as possible, rather than simply relay information. At one point Chandra quotes Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, who was underwhelmed by a particular code: “It was plodding and excruciating to read, because it just didn’t possess any wit whatsoever. It got the job done, but its use of the computer was very disappointing.” 

Which almost suggests that a version of the form-and-content debate may exist even in this seemingly cold, mechanical world! Perhaps future editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival can have sessions with titles like “Visual Basic, C# and FORTRAN: three celebrated programming languages discuss what aesthetic transcendence means to them."

-------------------

** The Stree Parva excerpt above is from Luther Obrock’s English translation of Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka

Suchitra by candlelight

This isn't a high-quality screen grab (it's taken from a mediocre YouTube print), but I love this scene from the 1957 film Musafir where Suchitra Sen's face is revealed in candlelight.
 

The film was Hrishikesh Mukherjee's first as a director, made when he was still very much part of the Bimal Roy camp; the DoP is Kamal Bose, who shot most of Roy's work (this was the only time he worked for Mukherjee), and there are clear visual references to Roy's films. 

For instance, in Devdas, made a few years earlier, Suchitra Sen as Paro got to light the candle that would give us our first view of the grown-up Devdas - Dilip Kumar, making his star entrance into a darkened room. In Musafir, the light (so to speak) has been passed on, and Suchitra is the one who gets that star privilege. She deserved it. I haven't seen enough of her work (and almost none of the Bengali films) to say informed things about her, but I thought her Paro was one of the great Hindi-film performances, pitch-perfect in its depiction of love, concern and despair, expressed jointly as well as in fragments, within the restrictions of a particular social setting. The quiet sadness of the character is such a fine counterpoint to Devdas's more showy masochism, and the role needed an actress who was up to it. If Suchitra had done no other film, it would be legacy enough.

[More on Musafir some other time, hopefully - it's a film that should be better known]

Backstage Lords – a documentary about Hindi cinema’s neglected musicians

In the Introduction to his book Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios, Gregory D Booth evokes two men named Anthony Gonsalves: the hugely popular fictional character played by Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony, and the real-life Gonsalves, an arranger and composer who worked prolifically in Bombay’s film-music industry between the 1940s and the 1960s but was little known outside those circles.

“This dual identity of Anthony Gonsalves is at the heart of this book,” Booth writes. “As a film persona [jumping out of a large Easter egg and launching into song] he embodies the enormous cultural presence of both the Hindi cinema and its music. As a real but almost unknown music performer, composer, and arranger, he embodies the anonymity of his profession and his many colleagues.” He quotes the real Anthony Golsalves as saying, “We were always hidden, always playing behind the curtain. No one knew.” Hence the book’s title (which, in a little coincidence - and coincidences are integral to the Manmohan Desai universe - translates to “Parde ke Peecche”, part of a lyric from another Amar Akbar Anthony song).

Behind the Curtain emphasises the role of the neglected foot-soldiers of Hindi-film music: the people who played the instruments, arranged scores and in many cases made as vital a contribution to the final product as the music directors did, without getting a fraction of the recognition. Booth covers the transition from the studio system of the 1930s to the independent-producer system, and the concurrent shift from salaried orchestras to freelance orchestras, so often made up of musicians who had enjoyed prior careers in jazz bands (among them Cawas Lord, who played a big role in introducing Latin beats to Hindi film songs such as “Gore gore o banke chhore” and “Shola jo bhadke”). He also casts a sympathetic but practical look at the changes wrought by new technology – synthesizers, computer-based recording – in the 1990s, which made recording and arranging a much more impersonal process and led to a generation of old-school musicians being swept away by the winds of change.

Now we have Rudradeep Bhattacharjee’s moving documentary The Human Factor, which was inspired by Booth’s book (and features him as a talking head), but narrows its focus to the Lord family – the late Cawas, referred to here as the “Bheeshma Pitamah of film music”, and his two sons Kersi Lord and Buji Lord – with only a few brief sound-bytes from other musicians such as Enoch Daniels and Homi Mullan. This approach could have made the film a limited-scope project, but it works – first, because the Lords were important figures in the music industry for over four decades, and second, because this particular family is used to shine light on a larger universe. Scenes like the one where Kersi’s daughters crack up while recalling his sudden decision to get a Mr T hair-cut - a mid-life crisis if there ever was one - might seem self-indulgent if you view this film as a straight chronicle of the music industry. But what it is doing is presenting real people with their families, personal histories, whimsies, disappointments - and by extension letting us see that there were hundreds of others like them, working in those studios in difficult conditions in the pre-synthesiser world. (When singers and musicians recorded a song in unison in the same space, a small mistake made by a single member of the orchestra would be mortifying; the whole recording had to be started again, doubling the work for dozens of artistes, apart from adding to the producers’ costs. The flip side was the enormous job satisfaction that came with getting things right. “That period of five or six minutes where no one makes a mistake,” says Enoch Daniels with visible pride, “the unity achieved in that period is what creates the soul of a song.”)

There are different personality types within the Lord family. Here is Kersi, almost consistently jovial, ending his sentences with a distinct, musical little “na”, chattering away openly, yet also showing how seriously he took his work: at one point he wonders if it would be acceptable for a retired surgeon to be asked – during a party – to perform an impromptu operation just to show off his skills. Buji, on the other hand, is a man whose professional experiences left him somewhat embittered. Old photos and video footage show a dashing youngster on drums, touring the Caribbean with Mohammed Rafi and getting newspaper headlines to himself (“Buji Lord Steals Limelight”), but in the present day one sees an old man who has put his past behind him, to the extent that even his little granddaughter (nicely used as a refrain in the film) doesn’t know that her granddad once used to play for movies. 
 
Despite Kersi’s charm, Buji is the most interesting figure in this documentary, the necessary counterpoint to romantic notions about how beloved films and songs come into existence. Though polite throughout while answering questions or talking about his work, there is a clear reserve: he is sad about the lack of recognition given to the behind-the-curtain musicians (no mention in the film’s credit titles: “producers would tell us, what is the problem, you are getting ready cash – as if the others who worked on the film didn’t get cash”) and about the underhandedness in industry dealings. And he makes it a point to say – in a defensive tone – that he didn’t derive joy from his work; it was nothing more than bread and butter (“and maybe jam”) for him.

The most obviously poignant scenes involve their father Cawas: fragments of interviews from 2004, when the grand old man was nearly 90, looking confused and vulnerable, and unsure about why these people want to ask him so many things. Did he participate in the scoring for India’s first sound film Alam Ara? He can’t be sure – he worked on the second sound film, he knows that. Did he enjoy his work? We enjoyed it while we were playing, he says, but he appears to know or care little about the final product – he wasn’t the sort who went to movie halls to see the songs. In fact, as Naresh Fernandes – author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot – points out in the documentary, many of these musicians didn’t even know which song would be appearing in which film. Their experience as creators and performers was at a vast remove from the experience of millions of Indian movie-lovers who have been enthralled by this music for decades; viewers who, when they hear “Maang ke saath tumhara”, think reflexively of Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala on the horse-cart instead of wondering who played the instrument that simulated the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves.

Those who love Hindi film songs usually think of their favourite numbers in terms of the contributions of the music director, the playback singer and the lyricist. But watching The Human Factor, I was reminded that hierarchies exist even in the ranks of the overlooked. A talking point during my recent conversation with Akshay Manwani about his book Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet was that lyricists have tended to get short shrift compared to composers, singers, or the actor performing the sequence on the screen. For instance, most viewers associate the classic “Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya” with Dev Anand’s upbeat, twinkling star persona (which is fair enough: the song and the sequence were designed with that persona in mind) – relatively few would think of it predominantly as “a Sahir Ludhianvi song”. And yet, Sahir was a celebrated, high-profile name compared to the musicians who brought that song to life on their instruments. 

Try to imagine its effect without the mood-setting opening bars that were played by Kersi Lord on a Glockenspiel freshly imported to India. And then watch Kersi in this film – an extroverted, unruffled man at most times– saying he felt flustered when he had to go up on a stage recently to collect an award, because he had never experienced live applause during his working days.

P.S. via The Human Factor’s Facebook page, here is a short video from a 1976 concert where R D Burman and his orchestra play the magnificent opening-title track of Sholay. You can see Kersi Lord in the background around the 1.30 to 1.50 mark, and Buji Lord on drums around 2.20-2.25.



On this page, you can see some of the videos referenced in Booth's book, including interviews with musicians.

And my piece on the use of the song in Hindi cinema, done for Himal.

Maa ka apmaan – on Nirupa Roy’s varicose veins and bandaged torso

Spent some time at the National Film Archive library in Pune this week, and wish I had stayed longer – especially because, in my last hour there, I came across old 1950s issues of the magazine Film India, edited by the famously snarky Baburao Patel.

Couldn’t go through as many issues as I would have liked, but there was time enough to note that Mr Patel really did seem to enjoy mocking poor Nirupa Roy in the mid-50s (she was a couple of decades away from her iconic “mother” roles, but was well known for playing homely bhabhis in family dramas, or pious characters in mythological films). When I fondly called her a land mammal in this essay, I feared it might be considered disrespectful, but Baburao Patel was in on the act decades earlier: I saw at least eight photos of Ms Roy with sarcastic captions. Here are just two (both from the same issue of the magazine):

(Click pics to enlarge)

And as a bonus, the opening page (with headline and intro) of Film India’s review of the just-released Pyaasa:

P.S. an earlier post that serendipitously begins with references to both Nirupa Roy and Pyaasa is here.