Lingua fracas in Nayakan and Inglourious Basterds: movie characters confounded by language

One of last year's most popular feel-good films was Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish, with Sridevi as a diffident, middle-aged woman visiting America and barely knowing how to get by, given her limited knowledge of English. On arriving in New York, she is beset – both on the streets and in her sister’s house – by words spoken in incomprehensible accents, and generally disoriented by the pace of life around her. At one point the film’s music track expresses her state of mind through a melange of sounds coming at her from all directions; meanwhile the title song gently combines English with Hindi in ways that are familiar to most middle-class Indians. (“Badlaa nazaraa yun yun yun / Saara ka saara new new new.”)

I thought about the hegemony of language again recently while watching scenes in two very different films, scenes that showed how fluency or lack of fluency in a language can affect our perceptions of people: the powerful can seem like underdogs, good guys may appear ridiculous, bad guys almost admirable. The first was Mani Rathnam’s 1987 classic Nayakan, fuelled by Kamal Haasan’s stunning performance as Velu Nayakan, who becomes an underworld don and a godfather to the South Indian community in Bombay. I had a strange moment watching Nayakan: having become immersed in the story, and taken its “Tamil-ness” for granted (this was a clearly South Indian film, I had to read subtitles to understand it), I temporarily forgot that the setting was Bombay, and that people outside Velu’s immediate, enclosed environment speak in Hindi or Marathi.

This came home in a scene where Velu – already a well-respected don – has to interact with dons from other parts of the city. Suddenly traces of uncertainty, wariness, even vulnerability, appear on his face as he tries to size up these potential rivals or enemies, whose speech he can’t easily follow. As viewers, we have been thinking of Velu as a larger-than-life figure, firmly in control of his fiefdom, but now we see him in more human terms. There is also something moving about the suggestion that Velu, despite spending almost his entire life in Bombay, never properly learns the city’s majority languages – this gives his situation a nuance that differentiates it from the story of the young Vito Corleone in Little Italy in The Godfather Part II (a film that Nayakan has clear links with), slowly picking up English as he makes his way in the world, so that the transition from the Italian-speaking Vito (played by Robert de Niro) to the English-mumbling patriarch (Marlon Brando) seems wholly natural. Nayakan, on the other hand, gets much of its edge from Velu’s immutable foreignness. No wonder Mani Rathnam expressed dissatisfaction (in one of his interviews with Baradwaj Rangan) with the Hindi remake of the film, Feroz Khan’s Dayavan: the remake was about a Mumbaikar in Mumbai, where he is culturally and linguistically at home, which meant an important subtext about alienation was absent.

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The other scene is a comic one, but provides food for thought too. It is from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a wish-fulfilling alternate history in which Nazi hunters save the day during World War II. The villain here is Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz: he is terrifyingly smooth, sharp... and a polyglot, which gives him an edge over the good guys, the “Basterds” led by Aldo (Brad Pitt), all of whom are barely fluent in one language, English (more accurately American, spoken in a distinct Southern drawl). One of the film’s funniest scenes has Aldo and team disguised as Italians at a party, while Landa – well aware that they are imposters – toys with them like a cat slowly prying open a box of inauthentic but tasty pasta. (Earlier, when we heard Brad Pitt say “I can speak some Aye-talian” - in response to his German informer contemptuously asking if they know any language other than English - we could tell these boys would soon be treading on thin ice. And so it comes to pass.)

It’s an excellent comic premise, one that combines tension with laughs, and also invites the viewer to consider his own responses to the characters. Here are Aldo and company trying to save the world by infiltrating the dens of the Nazi top brass, and yet they barely understand a word of German. We are supposed to be rooting for them, but they look and behave like hicks – the Three Stooges handed a World War and unsure what to do with it – confirming every stereotype of the insular, ignorant American; in comparison the nasty Landa seems like a higher, more cultured species. We cringe when Aldo says “Bonjourno”, enunciating the word much too deliberately. Then we chuckle when Landa (who seems able to toss off any language as if he were born speaking it) turns out to be a fluent Italian speaker too, and when he deferentially asks the “Italians” if hispronunciation is right. (“Si si, correcto,” Aldo replies, before grunting “Arrividerci” - or "A river derchy" - in a ludicrously fake accent.)

Almost in spite of their tomfoolery here, the good guys do eventually get the job done. But when Aldo gets the better of Landa in the film’s last scene, he does it not by winning a verbal duel but by using a knife to carve an incriminating swastika on his adversary’s forehead. The caveman comes out on top because he knows how to use crude tools – and speech be damned.

[Did a version of this for Business Standard. An earlier post here on Tarantino's Django Unchained, in which Christoph Waltz plays another character who uses language so fluidly that everyone around him looks like they've just stumbled in from the Paleolithic]

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.

Heil harebrain: how comedy can make villains look ridiculous

I have written before about the Criterion Collection DVDs and their use of imaginative artwork to pay homage to great movies. Last week I learnt that the Satyajit Ray classics Charulata and Mahanagar will soon be out on Criterion, but equally pleasing was a glimpse of the cover design for Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be. The picture on the DVD package juxtaposes a famous image from Hamlet - the glum prince, primed for a soliloquy, holding Yorick’s skull in his hand - with a figure dressed in a smart Nazi uniform, so that the skull covers the Nazi's head. This image of fascism defeated, or made buffoonish, by theatre nicely catches the mood of a film about a Polish acting troupe outsmarting Hitler’s men. It also reminds me of what the critic David Thomson said: “If one side is making To Be or Not to Be in the middle of a war and the other is not – you know which side to root for.”

No intention of spoiling Lubitsch’s film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but just as an appetiser, its opening sequence involves the apparent appearance of Hitler – alone – at a market corner in 1939 Warsaw. As he hesitantly surveys the shops and residents gape at him, a breathless voiceover – resembling nothing so much as a baseball-match commentary – goes:

“He seems strangely unconcerned by all the excitement he's causing. Is he by any chance interested in Mr Maslowski’s delicatessen? That’s impossible! He’s a vegetarian. And yet, he doesn’t always stick to his diet. Sometimes he swallows whole countries. Does he want to eat up Poland too?” 

More digs at the leader follow in the next few minutes: an actor (the man who was pretending to be Hitler in that opening scene) responds to salutes with a “Heil Myself”, and a little boy speculates that if a brandy took the name Napoleon, perhaps Hitler “will end up as a piece of cheese”.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be was scarcely the only Hollywood film of its time to lampoon the Fuehrer. One of my favourite “Hitler cameos” occurs in Preston Sturges’s 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, about a small-town girl who gives birth to sextuplets, a national record. As news spreads across America and the world, we see the dictator's furious reaction and a headline from a German newspaper reads “Hitler Demands Recount!” Tangential though the scene is to the film, it links Hitler with terminology associated with voting and democracy, presented here as a symbol of America’s moral superiority over Nazi Germany.

Around the same time, the good folks in animation were making more direct propaganda films such as the pleasingly titled Herr Meets Hare (in which Bugs Bunny accidentally tunnels to Germany while trying to find Las Vegas, and speaks incomprehensible faux-German in a shrill, Hitler-like voice), Donald Duck in Nutzi Land (the peevish Donald finds himself working in a Nazi factory, which makes him even more ill-tempered than usual) and The Blitz Wolf, which begins with the assertion “The Wolf in this photoplay is NOT fictitious. Any similarity between this Wolf and that (*!!#%) Hitler is purely intentional.”

Not all these films draw positive responses today. People are often affronted by Nazism being treated lightly in a Hollywood movie (or cartoon!), especially one that was made at a time when the very real horrors of the concentration camps were underway far across the Atlantic. One argument goes that it amounts to trivialising the Holocaust, and some things, we are told, should simply not be joked about. Well, I disagree in a broader sense with that idea – I don’t think any subject, however ugly or distasteful, should lie outside the purview of humour – but in this case the nature of the comedy serves an obviously desirable function: it strips a pompous, self-important figure of his dignity.

Recently there was a comparable scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, where a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, the white-supremacist group, turns into farce when the members find that they can’t see properly through the little slits in their white hoods; and these are the very costumes that they think make them look so awe-inspiring! The scene drags on too long, but one can’t fault its intention: undermining evil by making it banal, then ridiculous, so that by the end the group is more klutz than klux. (Incidentally, the real history of the KKK has an equivalent for this. In the 1940s, the author William Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the group and passed on its code-words for use in a children’s radio programme about Superman; as little children – including the children of mortified Klan members – began using the “secret words” in their games, the group’s air of mystery was diluted.)

It is useful to have good satirical depictions of this sort in cinema, because there have already been films – powerful and influential and superbly made films – that have depicted evil in grand terms. Two that readily come to mind are Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will – a document of Nazi rallies that begins with a stirring scene where Hitler is framed as a deity surveying his land from his plane before descending to make his speeches – and D W Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the KKK almost as knights in shining white armour. The movies served different functions: Riefenstahl’s was explicit propaganda, made for the National Socialist Party, while Griffith – a Southerner who grew up with assumptions that we would consider very illiberal today – was possibly making an honest effort to capture the realities of a particular time. But their ability to sway audiences, to make violence and intolerance seem appealing, can’t be denied; think of Birth of a Nation audiences in 1915 watching new techniques such as fast-paced cross-cutting, which made the climactic action more rousing.

What films like To Be or Not to Be do is to provide a counterpoint by puncturing that balloon, and I’m thankful for them every time I see how fashionable it is for a certain demographic of Indian youngster (this includes a lot of management students, incidentally) to posture and claim fondness for Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a book that has long been a bestseller in India – or to express admiration for his “leadership qualities”.

That said, good comedy can have morally ambiguous consequences too, as can be seen in the viral popularity of the “Downfall spoofs” on the internet. Using a scene from the 2004 film Downfall – a serious treatment of Hitler’s final days – where the dictator becomes unhinged as he realises defeat is at hand, these videos rewrite the English subtitles to make it seem like Hitler is ranting about sundry inconveniences and oddities of the modern world: thus, “Hitler finds out that Twitter is down again” and “Hitler discovers that Oasis have split up”. Many of the results are hysterically funny, but you might wonder about the implications: what does it say about us when a mass-murderer becomes a fellow pilgrim in expressing rage at relatively minor things? Empathy can be a tricky thing: these videos make Hitler one of us, and remind me of another exchange in To Be or Not to Be, when the director of the play expresses doubt about the effectiveness of the actor playing the dictator: “It’s not convincing. To me he’s just a man with a little moustache.” The actor replies: “But so is Hitler.”
 

[Did a version of this for my DNA column]

From dusk till yawn - why Django Unchained was a bit of a grind-horse

What happens to your relationship with a Quentin Tarantino film when you start to find it... boring? If you aren’t seduced by the kinetic energy of a Tarantino movie, by a nonstop flow of razor-sharp dialogues and terrifically paced action sequences, is there anything worth sticking around for? (This is a serious question. Weigh in, QT fans.) I ask because I went into Django Unchained without the reservations that so many people have about Tarantino’s work – that it is shallow or derivative (as long as it’s good shallow and good derivative, I don’t mind) – and yet, much as I wanted to love it, my attention wandered as the film plodded on and on.

Even those who don’t think too highly of Tarantino give him credit for certain things, such as his limitless enthusiasm for cinema, his imaginative use of references and tributes, and the hip, ironic writing – the love of flamboyant dialogue for its own sake – which achieves a poetic force in his best work. Watching a Tarantino film with prior experience of his work, we anticipate the interplay between the long wordy scenes and the sudden bursts of violence, the former leading up to the latter; we brace ourselves for the eruptions.

The first few scenes in Django Unchained have this quality, most of it courtesy the erudite bounty hunter King Schultz (an author-backed part, perfectly played by Christoph Waltz), who uses words like “acolyte” and “parley” with the same ease as he draws his gun. English is not his native language, but lines like “If you can keep your caterwauling down to a minimum, I’d like to finish my line of enquiry” and “On the off-chance there are any astronomy aficionados among you, the North Star is that one” trip off his tongue. You don't take the character, and the way he speaks, at face value, but all this is just as enjoyable as the incongruously sophisticated banter between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction.
 
Many intriguing things happen in this story about the adventures of Schultz and the freshly liberated slave Django (Jamie Foxx). The triumphal, wish-fulfilling aspect of Tarantino’s cinema has been on full display in his two most recent films (Inglourious Basterds being the one before this), which present alternate-universe versions of slavery and the Holocaust in terms that a good-hearted little boy with an appetite for fast talk, gore and contemporary music might want to see them presented. (If Woodrow Wilson, or whoever, said of The Birth of a Nation nearly a hundred years ago that it was “history written in lightning”, Basterds and Django are history rewritten in celluloid, by someone who is more interested in cinema’s past than in the real-world past.) But the idea of the underdog who must prevail – through the magical power of film – was there in the earlier, non-period works too. For instance, Kill Bill played like a long psycho-dream of vengeance achieved against impossible odds; if we suspend our disbelief enough to buy that The Bride can singlehandedly overpower dozens of Yakuza fighters, it is largely thanks to the power of choreography and editing. And even Pulp Fiction (still for my money Tarantino’s best film, however unfashionable that view might be) used its sinuous, non-linear structure to provide the illusion of a happy ending, by “resurrecting” one of its most likable characters after we have seen him die midway through the film. It showed a new dimension of cinema’s capacity for supplying the feel-good moment.

In reaching for its own happy conclusion, Django Unchained moves between two meters: there is an apparently serious effort to depict the moral codes and assumptions of a long-past age (the American South in the 1850s), to show people being confronted with new possibilities that can upend their established way of life and are therefore threatening. “Why come into my town and start troubling? These are nice people,” a sheriff asks Schultz (the “nice people” being townsfolk who have been shaken up by the mere sight of a black man riding a horse as if he was one of them). But this being Tarantino, the social commentary goes hand in hand with cartoon violence, nods to B-movies and slapstick comedy: how could he possibly resist a broad comic skit about the unfeasibility of the white hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan? So here is a film that revels in gratuitously “funny” bloodletting as well as super-fast zoom-ins and zoom-outs during dramatic encounters (in imitation of low-budget spaghetti westerns full of “HUH?!” and “OUCH!” moments) – but also attempts the self-consciously languid pace of a Sergio Leone film, and provides over-sentimental moments such as the one where Django fancies he sees his lovely wife everywhere he goes. (Incidentally, for most of the film, Django himself is less a hero and more a foil, being humourless and relatively inarticulate – and remember, in the Tarantino universe, inarticulacy is a character flaw.)

For me, these clashing tones didn’t work as well as they did in the earlier Tarantino movies; the first 40 minutes or so were terrific, but the lack of energy in the film’s second half was surprising. After a point, the pauses and silences, instead of being exercises in anticipation – the lull before the explosion – become merely...pauses and silences. The dialogue is not as crackling as it could have been, the pacing is dreary (the scene where the Leonardo Dicaprio character gets phrenological could have been so much smarter, but I got the impression that Tarantino was content with setting up the sight gag of the skull on the dining table) and the performances, though good, aren’t enough to cover the holes. (In his early scenes, Samuel L Jackson is brilliantly hysterical as the old slave who is just as keen to maintain the status quo as his white masters are; but after half an hour or so, I wanted him to shut up and stop doddering around.) Even the Ku Klux Klan setpiece – which is funny in a Monty Pythonish way, and makes a practical point in addition to exposing the banality of Evil – goes on for longer than it needed to.

Late in the film, in a casting decision that typically combines self-indulgence with self-deprecation, Tarantino appears in a short role as an Australian slave-driver. The character gets a spectacular, explosive end, much the same way as the film eventually does – but he also looks as flabby and distracted as Django Unchained so often is. And his accent is way off.

[Did a version of this for Business Standard Weekend]

Imitations of life

It took some hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the “play” button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined – and not just because Psycho is enormously dear to my heart, or because one likes to think that the world in which that film was made was necessarily a black-and-white world, or because I admire Stephen Rebello’s book on which this new movie is (very loosely) based. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades – not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.

A two-minute trailer is limited evidence to base a judgement on, but Anthony Hopkins’s performance in the Hitchcock role looked like mimickry to my eyes, as opposed to the considered acting that involves building a character from the inside out. The attempt to make his features approximate Hitchcock’s – such as the quadruple chin and the studied downward curve of the lips – made me cringe a little (it isn't as blatant as the use of prosthetics to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt resemble Bruce Willis in Looper, but still). In any case there is a touch of contrivance to the casting of Hopkins (such a well-known actor, now almost as closely associated with the playing of diverse real-life figures as Charles Laughton was in an earlier time) in this part - one wonders if the motive was the creation of a lucrative casting coup with the equally respected Helen Mirren, who plays Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville.

In 1992, Robert Downey Jr played the title role in the biopic Chaplin, but - though Charles Chaplin was among the few movie personalities who was even more recognisable worldwide than Alfred Hitchcock - there was an essential difference in effect. The Chaplin on view in most of that film was not the iconic Little Tramp but the real-life person, whom very few viewers had any direct association with. Which meant Downey Jr had some space to work out his own interpretation of the character, to not be shoehorned into familiar tics and mannerisms. Hitchcock, on the other hand, always appeared in trailers, interviews and TV introductions as “himself” – he performed the same droll gestures (standing about stiffly, saying outrageous things in the most deadpan manner) in the same starched three-piece suit that was presumably attached to his body when he emerged into the world, much like Karna’s kavacha. And this is the figure that Hopkins has been called upon to play. Saddled with such a character – someone who is a vital part of our recent pop-cultural mythology – even a fine actor can be reduced to a pawn.** (The real Hitchcock, who believed actors should be treated like cattle or chess pieces, may have enjoyed this.)

Watching Hopkins as Hitch – or Meryl Streep accumulating a bundle of carefully observed tics and presenting them as “performance” in her imitation of another imposing real-life figure, Margaret Thatcher – one sees signs of things to come. Film history is at a point where we can expect an increasing number of biopics about people who lived recently enough that we have video evidence – and strong memories – of their real selves. And if these biopics are to be made as box office-friendly as possible, one can expect broad simplifications in scripts and shortcuts in portrayals.

A related component is that with important anniversaries looming around every corner, there will soon be no getting away from films about our cinematic past. Consider just the very near future: in 2014 the movie world will celebrate 75 years of Gone with the Wind (75 years, in fact, of that cinematic annus mirabilis 1939), and personally I’d be astonished if a high-profile project about the making of GWTW has not already germinated in the mind of a screenwriter or producer. (What back-stories! What drama! Who could resist the possibilities of the real-life scene – as compelling as anything in Gone with the Wind itself – where David Selznick first laid eyes on his Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, her face lit up by the flames from the burning Atlanta set, at a point when production was already well underway?) 

Two years after that, Citizen Kane will celebrate its diamond jubilee year, and so it will go. Critics often complain about excessive meta-referencing in contemporary cinema – that Quentin Tarantino, for instance, only makes films that are about his film-love – but it is entirely possible that 30 or 40 years from now we will have a film about Tarantino’s life: in other words, a movie about a boy who watched lots and lots of movies and then made movies that paid tribute to those movies. By that time mainstream filmmaking may be closed into a self-referential loop, with little room for anything external.

Yes, of course I’m being cheerfully alarmist. And yes, trailers can be misleading – it’s possible that the complete Hitchcock will reveal a more shaded performance with Hopkins reaching for a poetic truth about the director’s personality, as opposed to caricature. But given that this is a commercial project meant for relatively painless consumption, I doubt it. I will watch the film, but with my fingers splayed over my face and violins shrieking in my head, much the same way that unprepared audiences first experienced Psycho in 1960. In the age of meta-cinema, it is appropriate that a film about the making of a scary film should be... scary.

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** No wonder Ranbir Kapoor said in an interview that he wanted to wait a while before taking on the daunting role of Kishore Kumar in a film. Who can blame him?

 [Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]