‘The Lone Ranger’ isn’t memorable by any stretch – but given the state of our ‘action movies,’ it’s not a total write-off either.

I hate the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I hate them because they’re overstuffed, overlong, chaotic, loud. I hate them because they’re emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the summer blockbuster, whose aim, these days, is to keep throwing things at us and wear us down till we slump in our chairs, without the energy to even complain. Most of all, I hate them because they took an actor called Johnny Depp and transformed him into a shtick figure. Back in 2003, when the first Pirates movie was released, Depp’s biggest hit was Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sleepy Hollow, and even that was no sell-out job but a (marginal) work of vision. What a remarkable run of small, quirky, human-scale movies Depp had those days – Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Don Juan de Marco, Ed Wood… And then Pirates happened, and we’ve had to live with Dark Shadows and The Tourist. Money, truly, is the root of all evil.

It must be said in Depp’s defense that he couldn’t have anticipated how big the Pirates series would turn out to be, and when he appeared in the first one, it seemed just as risky a gig as any of his other films, filled with oddball makeup, weirder mannerisms. But since then, especially in his roles for Burton (Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), this obsession with makeup and mannerisms has become unbearable – and these eccentricities have rubbed off on his “normal” roles too. Even in Public Enemies, the sole highlight of Depp’s post-Pirates career, he played a criminal like a showboating Bollywood hero. I walked into The Lone Ranger expecting the worst. I’d seen his look – that dead crow on top of his head, that chalk-white makeup cracked like desert earth, those streaks of hammy black tears. And I’d heard the worst. The reviews have been terrible, the box office worse.

The film is essentially Pirates on land. It’s Jack Sparrow wears a Crow. But it’s mildly more watchable than those movies because of two great action sequences, both involving runaway trains, that bookend the narrative. The first one has a terrific sight gag. A lawman thinks he has the villains cornered – and then, the door slides open behind him to reveal more villains on horseback. There’s another great bit where Depp falls forward from the edge of a compartment, goes under the train and uncouples a jammed coupling link. Yet another great bit involves a villain who’s swung around from atop the train, and he crashes in through one window of a compartment and crashes out through the window on the other side. It’s giddy slapstick. And in the second sequence, at the end, a man on horseback is on a roof, and then he jumps on a train below, and then does things we can scarcely believe are happening. Had the movie consisted of just these two sequences, it would have been a swashbuckling classic.

Unfortunately, it has other things on its mind, and the long, long section between these two bouts of action is filled with the oddest of choices. The action sequences on the train are filled with cartoon violence. People get hurt, they die, and we laugh. But elsewhere in this story reaching back to the Old West (or just Once Upon a Time in the West) as the railways are making an appearance, Native Indians are massacred. The stakes are ridiculously real, as real as in The Searchers, with a man who’s in love with his sister-in-law roaming around John Ford vistas in search of his brother’s killer. And then, suddenly, we’re in a movie that’s attempting to be a mythopoetic legend, the Western equivalent of a birth-of-a-superhero saga. And then again, who knows how much of this is true, how much tongue-in-cheek subversion? The Lone Ranger is possibly the only summer blockbuster-wannabe that has submitted itself to the whims of an unreliable narrator. What a curious choice for a film that’s supposed to become a thumping success in every corner of the world. It’s like a Superman story that’s revealed to be Clark Kent’s dream.

And yet, the action sequences almost make the movie worthwhile – and throughout I kept wondering why our stunt stretches are so lazy in comparison, so unimaginative, so over-dependent on punches and flying henchmen. The easy answer is that we don’t have the money that Hollywood has, but I’m not talking about the graphics-heavy shots. There’s the bit where a man, chased by a mob, slides down the banister of a flight of stairs and hops on to his waiting horse, and another where an errant bullet ricochets off several points before snapping the support of a beam of wood, which lands splat on a couple of bad guys. (More cartoon violence.) The meticulous staging, the use of carefully picked locales, the imaginative choreography – they make it look like art. Even the villains are coloured fancifully, with one of them fond of women’s clothing. Hollywood may make as much crap as we do, but their crap is far more watchable than ours.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

There’s a reason there’s been so much talk about Dhanush recently, and it’s not just that he’s had back-to-back releases.

I know, I know, not another piece on Dhanush and Raanjhanaa and Maryan. But I feel compelled to put down some thoughts after a longtime reader, on my blog, wondered why I have discussed Dhanush’s performance in these films in such detail. He added, “Also it’s rare to see you praise a mainstream actor’s performance like that in back-to-back reviews. Maybe for Irrfan or Naseeruddin or somebody like that but not for somebody like Dhanush, that’s a rarity. That got me curious.”I suppose the question comes about because I rarely talk about acting aspects in a review, and there are two reasons for this: (1) I believe that the purpose of a review isn’t to make a laundry list of cast and crew and then talk about their individual contributions, but to discuss only those aspects that this cast/crew did well (Rishi Kapoor in Aurangzeb) or did badly (Rishi Kapoor in D-Day) or did puzzlingly (Abhishek Bachchan in Raavan). In all these cases, something stands out – and you need something to stand out if you’re to offer an opinion on it.

Or else, in the absence of specifics, you’re left searching for generalities, and I have no interest in offering an opinion on something that’s just competently done, neither elevating the film nor eroding it – unless it’s something like Farhan Akhtar’s performance in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. It is a competent performance, but it fills the film, and so I felt I had to acknowledge his effort – I used the qualifier “hardworking.” And reason (2): it is a fact that the performances usually worth talking about are usually found in the slightly offbeat films, the ones that feature, as the reader says, Irrfan or Naseeruddin. These films are more dependent on character than plot (no judgment this, just fact), and the actors who embody these characters have more to chew on, more to work with. Also, the directors of these films are usually more attuned to performance details. That’s why I found Farhan’s Akhtar’s performance in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara – with standout moments like his confrontation with Naseeruddin Shah, or his apology to Hrithik Roshan – far more interesting and worth discussing that the rather generic one in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag.

So why the recent reams about Dhanush? (1) The most obvious reason is that we don’t typically get two films with two strong central characters, played by the same actor, in such quick succession. Had Raanjhanaa been released in May and Maryan in December, I would have still talked about Dhanush’s performances in them – just that it wouldn’t have come across as some sort of borderline obsession. (2) In both films, fairly commonplace moments are treated differently by the directors, and so the performance automatically turns interesting. A declaration of love is a declaration of love, and we’ve seen this a thousand times – but when the director (Bharatbala, of Maryan) chooses to film this in close-ups, the dynamic of the actor’s performance changes. Each millimeter of the actor’s face presents itself for scrutiny, and what wouldn’t have registered in a medium shot or a wide shot suddenly reveals itself in microscopic detail.

(3) Few actors can hold these close-ups, especially the moments without dialogue. It’s fairly easy to make an impression when you have dialogue or when you’re hurling something at someone – when there’s something to speak or do – and the real test of an actor comes when there’s nothing to do. How does an actor conduct himself – how does he stand? How does he use his hands, his face? – when the other person is speaking and doing things? In other words, it’s not just about the acting but also the reacting, and Dhanush does this very well. This came as a bit of a surprise because not many of his earlier films allowed him the space to react. The typical tendency of a director is to fix the camera on the person doing the acting, and the person doing the reacting is rarely allowed to be seen. I suppose the issue is compounded when it’s a big star, whose fans may not take kindly to close-ups of him doing (what in their eyes may be) nothing. And these are valid considerations in commercial cinema.

(4) In many of his earlier films, Dhanush used to be a capital-A actor, in the look-ma-I’m-acting sense. This type of attention-grabbing acting is a function of the performer, the part, the director and the kind of audience the film is courting, and I doubt that his psycho in Kadhal Kondain would have been such hit if he’d underplayed the role. (He has one of those “acting” moments in Maryan too, when he’s imprisoned and mimes out a dream of being at home and having a hearty meal.) But he’s broken out of that mould now, and, at least on the evidence of Raanjhanaa and Maryan, his acting has become mellower, more confident. It’s as if we’re seeing a Phase Two of his career – and this is especially significant when you consider how risky these acting choices are in a cinema culture where less isn’t always seen as more. (Compare Kamal Haasan in Guna, for instance, with Kamal Haasan in Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu, and the general consensus will be that the acting was better in the earlier film – because it’s an obvious kind of acting, there’s no doubt that acting is taking place, the kind that wins awards.)

And (5): It’s such a happy surprise to see an established mainstream hero take part in such chancy films. In the early stages of a career, we may see an actor try various kinds of roles, but once they taste success, once they figure out what it is about them that people like, they stick to a formula, with excuses like “the market has grown and we need to recoup the budget” or “I have to satisfy the expectations of my fans.” And they do the same thing every time, with minor variations. But in Raanjhanaa, Dhanush gets slapped, spit on, spurned. And in Maryan, we see the somewhat arty treatment of a mainstream subject. An actor cannot act in a vacuum. The film he’s in plays a huge part in what he does, and Dhanush’s recent films have been exciting amalgamations of the arty and the commercial. As a result, his acting too has begun to cover the gamut. He roars. He whispers. He keeps you watching.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

On the prospect of missing the frenzy around the opening weekend of a film and watching it, quietly, later. Or not.

By the time you read this, I will hopefully be in Thimphu – hopefully because I’ve been told that the descent into the nearby Paro airport is quite scary, and that only a handful of pilots in the world are qualified to make the landing. Maybe that’s why we’ve been told, repeatedly, to ask for a seat on the left, because of the view of the Himalayas. Maybe that will distract us from the terror lurking below. Anyway, this means that by the time I return, both Shah Rukh Khan’s Chennai Express and Vijay’s Thalaivaa will be old news. That’s the bummer about being a film critic in this era. Miss the first weekend, and you might as well be writing a review of Shree 420. As I write this, an article titled “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Buys ‘The Washington Post’ for $250 Million” is making the social-network rounds. And below, a snarky commenter has this to say: “That’s a lot of money paid for a paper that sells yesterday’s news!”

It is not for me to wonder about the bigger implications of today’s pace of life for the newspaper business – not in this column, anyway. But it does seem somewhat pertinent to point out that reviews, appearing a day or two after the film’s release, are yesterday’s news. And their function has changed. Earlier, when films were released in a handful of theatres, not everyone got tickets during the opening weekend (or even the opening week). Also – let me stick to Chennai, but I’m sure this was true of other cities across the country – new releases were confined to the big screens, the prestige theatres. You had to go all the way to Mount Road, which was and is more of a commercial district than a residential area – to catch the new Rajini or Kamal film. So people waited for the new releases to become old, when they’d start appearing in the local theatres, closer to home.

In these days of new films being released on hundreds of screens across the state, and right by your home (and with the prospect of the film showing up on TV in a couple of months even if you missed seeing it on screen), it’s impossible to imagine what the wait meant. I still remember this boy, not much older than I, rushing past me one afternoon I was walking down a street in Mandaveli. He’d barely entered the house I’d just passed, when he announced, breathlessly, “Amma… Kapali-la Padikkadhavan.” He was telling his mother that Rajinikanth’s remake of Khuddaar, which had been declared a big hit in the Mount Road theatres, had finally come to a theatre that was at a walking distance from their home. (The theatre no longer exists. A residential complex has sprung up in its place.) I wonder, sometimes, about that obviously film-crazy (or at least Rajini-crazy) kid. Is he making films, acting in them perhaps, or is he bound to a desk in an IT firm?

Anyway, flashbacks apart, in that era (what a word, era, though it’s just a few decades ago, the 1980s), a review was about the only thing that – even if it appeared a week after the film’s release – told you about the film. That was its function. Films weren’t promoted as aggressively as they are today, and not many knew about what was in them. As few people had watched the film, there wasn’t much scope for word-of-mouth information either. You heard snatches of songs from the film on radio. You saw the actors on the posters and on the large Mount Road banners. That was about it. So reviews helped, even if they did little more than summarise the plot and talk about this actor and that one. Today, of course, everything’s different, and that kid would be Twittering his opinion about the film after watching it on the first show of the first day, like thousands of others who write their own “reviews” long before the critics, the establishment, gets around to it.

It’s not that I long for those days, though I do think I’d have liked it better if I had been a critic at a time there were few who wrote about films, whose voice mattered because there were no other voices. But that bit of selfishness apart, I do enjoy the option of watching the film in this theatre if that one becomes full. What irks me, though, is the promotion, which plays out at such deafening levels that short of crawling under a rock and staying there there’s little you can do to watch a film without being affected by the hype. The prospect of walking into a film with a clean slate seems so quaint now. But at least, this time, I’ll miss the weekend frenzy. I’ll miss the voices around that tell me I have to watch Chennai Express soon or that I shouldn’t watch it at all. And when I finally get around to it, I’ll hopefully see it as just a movie. Then again, I wonder if Bollywood films are released in Thimphu.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Among the great pleasures of pop culture is the viewing of cinema through the skewed eyes of someone else.

Bill Condon, the director of Gods and Monsters, Kinsey and Dreamgirls remembers his reaction to certain scenes in Bonnie and Clyde. “There was something about [the film] that I think I connected to at a very, very basic level… There’s a whole sexual tension there that I think was speaking to me in some way I didn’t even understand… Like the shock of Warren Beatty, when Faye Dunaway was trying to go down on him, of him turning over so he just basically smothers her and this look on her face of rage and betrayal and frustration. It’s unbelievable, and as you’re entering puberty and worried about that, to see that kind of thing. I still think it is powerful filmmaking that you don’t see much in movies. You never think of these things consciously, but looking at it the other day, it is interesting – Warren Beatty and his reputation as a ladies’ man and then playing this person.”

Condon saw the film for the first time when he “probably had just turned twelve,” and it spoke to him, primarily, at a sexual level. And look at how his personal and intense and passionate reactions – the way he sees not just rage and frustration in Dunaway’s face but also betrayal – reshape the film, this scene, in our eyes. Condon’s revelation is part of a most enjoyable book, The Film that Changed my Life: 30 Directors on their Epiphanies in the Dark, and we have epiphanies of our own hearing these filmmakers talk about how they perceived a film, sometimes the same way the general public did, sometimes in ways completely different. The book is a reminder that film is not a static medium, where one critic’s star ratings can dictate someone else’s experience of a movie, and that even the “worst” of films, the films that no one in their right mind can seemingly approve of, can have their passionate champions.

In a book where Peter Bogdanovich talks about Citizen Kane, Atom Egoyan about Persona, Frank Oz about Touch of Evil, and Danny Boyle about Apocalypse Now, it’s surprising to find John Landis choose The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as his “epiphany in the dark.” He was eight when he saw the film, and “it transported me. I was on that beach running from that dragon, fighting that Cyclops. It just really dazzled me and I bought it completely.” This is just a memory, and childhood memories are the rosiest of all, but the truly fantastic part comes when Landis justifies his reaction. “Everything about a movie, and I mean this sincerely, is who you are and where you are when you saw it. Because it’s hard just to say, ‘This movie is a piece of shit,’ because depending on who you were and where you saw it, it can be a great and important thing.”

I think the conveying of one’s personal impressions of a film is great and important thing too. Like any art, cinema too is often subjected to the “greatness” debate. We’re often asked to opine on the best films of all time, for instance, and this “best of” list is expected to be an objective and ironclad set of films that oozes greatness from every pore. But as much as some kind of canonical enshrining is useful – I’d rather say “useful” than “necessary,” for while these lists can help a newcomer get up to speed, they’re never the last word, because the people who made these lists aren’t the same people as you or I – it’s far more worthwhile to register one’s personal (and therefore, necessarily idiosyncratic) views, which can help take the reader down unexpected and rewarding paths. The point, as is often stated, isn’t to agree or disagree, but to discover and delight in a new way of looking at the film in question.

Finally, here’s Gurinder Chadha looking at Purab aur Pachhim through the prism of an Indian girl who grew up in London. “I think everyone in England was very entertained by it because it was so far from the truth. It was such an exaggerated version of our lives in England. As a young girl with two long plaits, with a mother who refused to let us cut our hair or anything, [Saira Banu] was supposed to be like us, with long blond hair and cigarettes and miniskirts. We were like, ‘God, that would be great! But we’re not allowed to be like that.’ I think it was the incongruity of what [director Manoj Kumar] perceived people like us growing up in Britain to be like, and what we were actually like. That incongruity – that was bizarre.” The Indian audience, of course, had no such reference points, no such issues. The film was a blockbuster.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Some thoughts on cricket and baseball and the movies we send out for Best Foreign Film consideration.

So the powers that be chose The Good Road over The Lunchbox, and Twitter exploded. I thought, first, that this was an overreaction. (Then again, what’s Twitter for if not overreacting?) After all, isn’t this the same system that decided, one year, that Jeans stood a chance? (Even if the politically correct musical-chairs system were at work that year, wherein it was Tamil cinema’s turn to come up with the nominee, wasn’t Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist a better choice?) I looked up the Wikipedia entry that lists our submissions over the year, expecting many more such gaffes – but I was pleasantly surprised. It isn’t an altogether terrible list. The first five Indian films sent to the Oscars were Mother India, Madhumati, Apur Sansar, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam and Mahanagar. They’re all good films, well-regarded films, made with passion and conviction. Some of them even show up in the “Best Films of All Time” lists that Indian magazines are so fond of publishing. An Indian jury would have no problem voting for any of them.

The question, though, is whether they’re good films in the eyes of the Oscar voting committee, which is a little like asking a nation of baseball players to officiate a cricket match. They may vaguely know the rules. They may be able to see that the play is somewhat similar, involving a bat, a ball, and lots of running. But push aside these surface similarities and there’s not much in common. The language that our films speak – not the language that the characters speak, but our filmic language – is cricket to the rest-of-the-world’s baseball. So if we are to compete in a baseball-playing nation for a prize that’s routinely given to baseball players, then we should learn to play baseball. Because there are no cricket scouts out there – only baseball scouts, ever on the lookout for new baseball players, local or foreign, and if you don’t catch their eye, you don’t stand a chance of getting into the big leagues.

From that list of films, only Apur Sansar and Mahanagar – both by Satyajit Ray – are “baseball movies,” speaking a universal filmic language (or at least, a language familiar to American viewers and Oscar voters). These are films that can play anywhere in the world, with very little that’s lost in translation. And the saris and the bindis and the dhotis and the quaint traditions only end up enhancing the appeal of these films – they speak a universal language, and yet, these specifics root them in a particular culture. They’re global enough to be understood by art-house audiences everywhere, yet they’re “foreign” enough – they can turn out to be contenders in the Best Foreign Film category, alongside films from Japan and Argentina and Russia. And we’ve sent quite a few of these films over the years: Garm Hava, Manthan, Shatranj Ke Khilari, Salaam Bombay! (which won a nomination), Bandit Queen, Earth, Hey Ram, Shwaas, Harishchandrachi Factory, Peepli (Live) and Adaminte Makan Abu.

The point, here, isn’t whether these are great films, but whether these are films made in a way that won’t put off the typical Oscar voter, who is American, and who will be flooded with thousands of DVDs during Oscar season, and who just won’t have the time or the inclination to learn the rules of a new game. The films that defeat this line of reasoning are Mother India and Lagaan (a “cricket movie” if there ever was one), both of which found a place in the final five in the Best Foreign Film category. Both are very long films, filled with songs and very Indian melodramatic constructs, and you’d think that a baseball player just wouldn’t bother with them. But maybe there was something universal in them after all. Mother India wasn’t all that far removed from The Good Earth, and Lagaan, boiled to its essence, is a rousing David-Goliath story.

And films that do not have these universal elements – simple entertainers like Jeans or the Sivaji Ganesan tearjerker Deiva Magan (which, incredibly enough, was nominated in 1969) or Devdas or Paheli or the Vyjayanthimala dance-epic Amrapali – don’t stand a chance. But even these universal elements aren’t always enough. It’s naïve to think that the Oscars are just about quality, about how good (however subjective that qualifier is) a film is. They’re about taking out expensive “For Your Consideration” ads in trade publications in the months leading to the announcement of the nominations. They’re about lobbying and convincing voters to watch the film and vote for it. They’re about recognizing realities like, say, a film by a big-name director (like Ray, who was championed by major American critics) will stand a better chance of cutting through the Oscar-season clutter. I will be thrilled if The Good Road scores a home run, but I also wonder what chance this little movie has of American viewers watching it when most Indian viewers haven’t.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

‘Madras Café’ may not be a perfect film, but it deserves praise for doing what it does in our cinematic climate.

I finally caught up with Madras Café, which begins with this snatch of background information: “In the mid-1980s, Sri Lanka was facing its most dreadful ethnic crisis. According to various estimates, thousands of ethnic Tamils had been killed.” This could be the prelude to a gung-ho action thriller. After all, Star Wars got going with an equally sobering prelude, a scrolling text that told us about a civil war a long time ago, with rebels and secret plans and the quest for a free home. But Madras Café isn’t a comforting fantasy. Its only closure comes from the bookending text at the end: “In the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted for 27 years, over 40,000 civilians, 30,000 Tamil militants, 21,000 Sri Lankan security forces and 1200 Indian soldiers lost their lives. And thousands of Tamils still remain displaced… In May 2009, the civil war came to an end with the defeat of the Tamil rebels in the most brutal assault by the Sri Lankan military forces.”

It would have been so easy to make that Star Wars-like movie. A complete fantasy. It could have been any country, any war, any Prime Minister-type figure who’s being targeted for assassination by a human bomb. Except, the hero goes in and gets the bad guys in time. But the director Shoojit Sircar takes the tougher path. He names the country. He names, as closely as possible, the various organizations, people and governments involved. (LTTE, for instance, becomes LTF – Liberation of Tamils Front – also known as Tigers.) And he gives us those brutal statistics, culled from reports in real life. He sets out to make that most difficult of things, a fictional film based on factual events – and he doesn’t want to do what, say, Mani Ratnam did with Kannathil Muthamittal (which was also set against the Sri Lankan civil war) or Steven Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan (which was set against World War II).

In those films, the war is a backdrop against which a humanistic story unf0lds. The sense of the war is a general one – the actual details are irrelevant, and we don’t watch these films because of how accurate they are in terms of places and peoples and events. We treat these films as pure fiction. This doesn’t mean they’re easy (or easier) to make – just that the director has a lot of creative license, the kind that Sircar doesn’t have. He is straitjacketed by the fact that he is dramatizing real-life events, real-life people, real-life places. The narrator who takes us through this story, an army man (played by John Abraham) responsible for RAW’s covert operations in Jaffna, may be fictional, but his journey is cobbled with fact. It’s the journey of any Indian operative who got wind of the fact that Rajiv Gandhi was going to be assassinated and did his damnedest to prevent it.

The film could have been called The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi because there’s no suspense there. It happened. We were there when this young, charismatic leader was killed – this was our frozen-in-time they-shot-Kennedy moment. To a lot of us, therefore, the huge stretches of scene-setting, with expositional voiceovers, are unnecessary (and they rob the drama of urgency) – but you can see why this information is important to someone who hasn’t been through these events. And you have to respect Sircar for taking the time to contextualize his race-against-time thriller, and also for crafting a narrative with no songs, no romance, no wins. The last mainstream Indian film that felt this bleak was probably Drohkaal (and its remake Kurudhipunal). These films know that it’s impossible – and futile, and hugely disrespectful to how things really work – to fashion a triumphal narrative around these subjects. The hero is not going to win. The audience is not going to go home on a high.

The enemy is always two steps ahead. There are hydra-headed foreign-funded organizations with vested interests, and they are so powerful that a single hero can do very little. There are no clear-cut good guys or bad guys, either, than he can affiliate himself with. Early on, we think the Sinhalese forces are the villains. They halt a bus filled with Tamils, shoot down men, women and children (a little girl who tries to flee is mowed down hideously), and set the bus on fire. But when the Tamils form forces of their own and when they get a leader, they commit brutalities as well. The lines are not clear, as in most of our movies, and in this murk, people fight internal wars over what’s right and what’s wrong. The journalist in this film, for instance, isn’t the kind of cardboard cutout we find in Madhur Bhandarkar and Prakash Jha films, but someone who has to decide between naming a source (and going against the ethics of her profession) and aiding an investigation.

There’s a lot in Madras Café that could have been better, the actress who plays that journalist for one. Watching Nargis Fakhri embodying the cliché of a writer hammering away at a typewriter with a cigarette stuck between her lips is a visual joke for the ages. The Tamil spoken in the film isn’t Sri Lankan Tamil but the language you hear on the streets of Chennai – an odd gaffe for a film filled with so much research. And there’s only so much you can do to dramatise exposition, some of which is inevitably dumbed down for the sake of a larger audience. But once the plot to kill Gandhi (who’s known by another name here) gets going, the film finds its footing. Sircar could have simply made this thriller, without all the attendant fact. But by opting to root these thrills in fact, by opting not to rely entirely on the conventions of that genre, he proves to be a conscientious mainstream filmmaker. And you can’t have enough of those.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Thoughts on the background score in the movies, and the difficulty in writing about them.

One kind of response you get used to as a critic is the but-how-could-you-not-mention… This usually comes from aggrieved fans of an actor who is not mentioned in the review (or mentioned only in passing, in a pair of parentheses beside his or her screen name), or from those who think that the review should always carry a few lines about the dramatics on display. Sometimes, it could come from fans of a cinematographer or a music director as well. The general principle behind this response is that a review is like a report card that rates a student on the basis of how well he or she did in Chemistry, Geography, Mathematics… A report card wouldn’t be complete without a mention of all subjects, and a review, too, is assumed to be lacking if it didn’t cover all aspects of filmmaking (or at least the major aspects; forget to mention the hairdresser and you won’t be getting a but-how-could-you-not-mention…)

I got a few of these responses to my review of the terrific new Mysskin thriller Onaayum Aattukuttiyum, in which I mentioned the name of the composer Ilayaraja without going into detail about his background score (which was publicized heavily, and which, in the film’s opening credits, is hailed as the “foreground score”). The latter, in my opinion, is just marketing hype. It has nothing to do with the actual quality of the score. If a score that’s meant to run in the background of a scene, gently clueing us to the emotions, jumps out and assumes ferocious shape in the “foreground,” then that’s actually a problem – unless we are talking about some kind of avant-garde production whose mission is to subvert all the well-regarded conventions of moviemaking. In theory, a background score – at least while watching a film for the first time, when the average audience member’s primary concern is what happens (rather than how) – should manipulate us without calling attention to itself.

But of course, this isn’t always possible – and Ilayaraja himself has composed many great scores that manipulate us (which is an unconscious process) even while (consciously) alerting us to their pinpoint precision, their beauty, their form and functionality. As we evolve as movie audiences, we get used to “seeing” the movie through multiple eyes, so to speak. We can follow the plot and see what the lighting is like in that corner and hear how the percussion is being used to make this point and take in aspects of the performance… And if this takes away some of the older joy in watching movies, where everything was smooshed together in one amorphous gob of entertainment, our enjoyment comes in other ways – and one of these ways is to see the various elements come together. (Or not.) We may not know the “process” to the extent that the technicians do, but even our limited understanding can enrich our experience of the film.

And yet, talking about the score is one of the more daunting aspects of a review – and not just because I don’t subscribe to the report-card model of reviewing. (I write about what strikes me, what impacts me consciously, and if the score doesn’t do that, then there’s nothing to write about. There’s really no point saying something as generic as “… and so-and-so did an effective job with the score.”) The main reason is that, as is often quoted, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It is the most difficult thing to do without trivializing the work of the composer. It’s easy to talk about a cascade of violins being used here and some counterpoint being used there, because – whether in songs or in the score – these are but the most outward manifestations, while what’s really important is the inner world, the meaning, behind this cascade of violins and that counterpoint.

And it’s just not possible to grasp all of this while paying attention to plot and performance, the two aspects of a film that grab you the most while watching it for the first time. Well, scratch that. Sometimes, it is possible. Sometimes a score is so particular, so attuned to the characters that it’s impossible to miss – like Dario Marianelli’s score for Atonement. It’s a story about a writer and the percussion, in the score, comes from the tapping of a typewriter. (This sort of gimmicky music is what you’d really call a “foreground score.”) Or sometimes a portion of the score becomes a leitmotif that’s used so frequently that we register it over the course of the movie – which was the case, recently, with Amit Trivedi’s “fragrance theme” in Aiyyaa. Or sometimes the score is so different from what we hear usually that we take note of it at once – like in Mumbai Xpress. (I wrote then: “Ilayaraja’s dynamic score… draws on jazz elements, for the movie itself is structured like an elaborate jazz composition. It has masterful slapstick riffs, it has what appear to be spur-of-the-moment improvisations, and if a few of the notes it hits are off-puttingly self-indulgent, it always manages to draw you back in with its maniacally free-flowing rhythms.)

But the score for Onaayum Aattukuttiyum is a little more difficult to pin down because it’s in the traditional symphonic mould – and as any teacher of western classical music will tell you, you need to listen, really listen, to a piece four or five times before knowing what it’s about and how it achieves its emotive effects. The score was available online earlier, and some people watched the film after listening to it – which means that, in a way, they went in looking to see how the score would be used (consciously) rather than how I went in, unprepared, and was thus able to see (after one viewing) simply that the film was “underscored by equal parts silence and a score,” which is how it usually is in Mysskin’s films. (You really should see his films if you haven’t. They’re one-of-a-kind.) And that sort of generic observation about the score was what brought on the but-how-could-you-not-mention… Scoring for the movies is a vast topic, and I am very ambivalent about the concept itself at times – but this column must end now. And because you’ve been patient with all this heavy-duty hand-wringing, I’ll leave you with a laugh. When Hitchcock was making Lifeboat, a film set entirely on a… lifeboat, he was reluctant to include a score. “But where is the music supposed to come from out in the middle of the ocean?” The composer David Raksin replied, wherever the cameras came from.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

On Clooney. On Jackman. On heroes not playing heroes. On how much money is enough. On fans.

Different people like George Clooney for different reasons. My affection for the actor comes from the fact that, at least in terms of his career, he has his head screwed on straight. After his TV-show earnings and the truckload of dollars he got for playing the caped crusader in Batman & Robin, he declared that money was no longer the driving force in his choice of films – and he has lived up to his word. Just look at the projects he’s been in since then. There have been blockbusters, of course, like The Perfect Storm and the Ocean’s Eleven movies. But Clooney, more often, has been seen in projects that have challenged him as an actor, projects that have teamed him with quality filmmakers, projects like The Thin Red Line and Three Kings and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Solaris and Syriana and The American and The Descendants. Some have worked, some haven’t, but Clooney has always worked in them. In him, we see an actor who isn’t afraid to be an actor. He isn’t afraid of letting the grey show. He isn’t afraid to bomb. He likes his work and it shows.

You cannot imagine too many other actors – big-name actors, world-famous stars – do what Clooney does in Alfonso Cuarón’s outer-space saga Gravity, where he plays second fiddle to the superb special effects and Sandra Bullock, in that order. (The point isn’t that he still stands to make more money from this film than most of us will see in a lifetime. The point is that he was okay being off screen for large stretches and handing over the reins to the heroine, modestly calling himself “just a bus driver.”) A few words about the film itself, which I first thought was Cast Away set in space, with a heroine (instead of a hero) having to make her peace with a strange environment (with no one, mostly, to talk to) and make her way back home. But gradually, I began to see the title as referring to the “gravity” of Bullock’s situation, not just because she’s stranded in space but because she’s been crippled by a tragedy back home and needs to learn to, well, walk again.

The film seemed to me the world’s most expensive therapy session. Bullock’s depression is not explicitly mentioned, but we recognise the symptoms when she’s found balled up in the foetal position and when she talks about driving around with the radio on, not wanting to think about anything. She’s numb, she’s cut off from everyone else (the film literalises this), she’s spinning in a vacuum (again, the film literalises this), and she needs to be grounded – she needs to learn to stand upright again. And Clooney is her shrink. He uses therapeutic lingo like “let go” and he talks her through a really rough patch. At least, that’s how the film played out for me – and it’s amazing to see Clooney take on a role that, in a therapy-intense drama like Ordinary People, would have automatically been a “supporting part.” But as the cliché goes, there are no small parts, only small actors – and Clooney, over the years (and despite his limitations as a performer), has proved that he is among the biggest of actors, the kind who cares not about screen time or close-ups or being upstaged, but about the quality of the script and the director and the excitement of being part of something that could be a game-changer.

In a smaller way, Hugh Jackman does something similar in Prisoners. This, too, is a “silent movie,” if not literally then in its opting for quietness over noise. There could have been a lot of sound and fury in this hunt-for-missing-children thriller, but the material only sounds like a thriller – it’s really a drama, and in the most general sense it is about how you can be ready for hurricanes and floods and every disaster imaginable but life will still find a curve ball to throw at you (which is something that could be said about Gravity too). Except for stray experiments like The Fountain, Jackman doesn’t quite have the body of “different” work that Clooney has – so his taking up something like Prisoners is possibly even more of a risk. What will Wolverine fans make of this arty narrative that cuts away from scenes just as they seem to be building towards a meaty finish? The thought doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind.

If you want to be uncharitable, you could say that this is Jackman’s Oscar-bait effort, and while this may be true, it doesn’t change the fact that this big international star is in this really small movie about a dark subject that not many from his core fan-group are likely to want to see. That’s the excuse we usually hear from our big-name actors whenever they are asked why they don’t do something different, something smaller in scale, why they don’t act their age. And we’ll be told that they have to cater to their fans, who expect certain things from them, and then they’ll bring in market economics to justify why these films aren’t possible. But why not take a pay cut or a back-end deal that eases the budget? Why not sneak in a film like this between the big films? Why not play a juicy supporting part in someone else’s film? Once you’ve made your money, once you’ve made those investments, why still treat acting as a profession and not as art?

I was talking about this with a filmmaker, and he said that these fears aren’t completely unjustified. He took the example of Kuselan, where Rajinikanth was seen in a guest appearance. But despite the actor (and the people behind the film) making this amply clear, the film was sold – down the chain that involves distributors and the people who buy the film from these distributors and the people that they, in turn, sell the movie to – as a “Rajinikanth movie,” which meant that its selling price went through the roof. (Every distributor, after all, wants to make a profit. Why would he sell a film as “one where Rajinikanth is in just a guest role” when he can sell it for more as a Rajinikanth movie?) The film was released. The fans felt cheated. The film flopped. And this, the filmmaker I spoke to said, is why our actors don’t take too many risks after they become big, whereas Hollywood actors don’t have this problem because the studios take care of distribution. Apparently, our stars are grounded by stronger forces of gravitation.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Movies for everyone versus movies for a few. Notes from the recently concluded Mumbai International Film Festival.

Why do people laugh in the movies? The obvious answer is that they find something funny,  and mainstream cinema – even given that rarely do two people respond to a movie the same way – sometimes manages to work over audiences as one. We cry as one, we laugh as one. But what could be funny about a little boy who, while being bathed by his father, is wondering about an employee who was asked to leave the father’s dry-cleaning business? Do people laugh because the kid asks this cutely, with little understanding of the adult happenings that led to this turn of events? Do they laugh because they welcome any opportunity for relief in the midst of a grim movie, such as this other scene where an older man advises a younger man to get far away from the problems surrounding the younger man’s ex? “Cut if off,” says the older man, making a scissoring motion in the air. The scene is dead serious. And yet, there the laughs were.

These are scenes from Asghar Farhadi’s Le Passé (The Past), the first film I saw at this year’s Mumbai International Film Festival. The film, in many ways, takes off from where Farhadi’s earlier film, the masterful A Separation, left us. Le Passé begins with a separation (a man and woman on either side of a glass wall) and ends with a separation (a man and woman who may as well be on either side of a wall), and here too, we have a contentious couple and the central figure of an adolescent daughter, who’s begun to question things, do things. This film, too, is an emotional procedural, in the sense that it’s a step-by-step investigation of emotions and the actions that result from these emotions. Here, too, we have a scene with the law, the prelude to divorce proceedings. The difference is that A Separation, for all its strife, was a gentler film, while Le Passé, at times, is imbued with the kind of cruelty we associate with Michael Haneke.

Leaving Le Passé, I felt it wasn’t as good as A Separation – a couple of contrivances left me cold – but that’s just because the bar set by the earlier film is so high. (It was one of the rare films that lived up to every word of its awesome buzz, and deserved every award it picked up.) The applause awarded to Farhadi, before and after the screening, was well-earned. Introducing the film, he spoke, rather unexpectedly, about the uniqueness of Indian cinema. He praised the “new generation” filmmakers, but he sounded worried that our cinema would lose its uniqueness and become like American cinema. He implied that our cinema was some sort of great unifier, drawing people from “all classes,” whereas in other countries – he was probably referring to his home country, Iran – only a certain class of people watched movies. In other words, he was making the case that it isn’t altogether wrong for cinema to be homogenous.

Peter van Hoof, on the other hand, made a case for a very different kind of homogeneity. van Hoof is a programmer for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and he agreed to a quick interview when I ran into him at the lobby of the hotel we were staying in. His job is to get, for the festival, interesting films from South Asia, and he was here mainly to watch Indian films. Last year, he said he chose Miss Lovely, Ship of Theseus, Celluloid Man, I.D. and Shanghai (he said that, in a festival of 200 films, there’s usually space for only four or five films from one country), and this year, the only film that’s excited him is the Punjabi drama Kissa, which features Irrfan Khan. When I asked what he looks for in a film, he said he “searches for the very few Indian films that communicate to international audiences, not Bollywood films but films that are closer in feel to the films from other parts of the world.” He was after the kind of Indian films that Farhadi appeared apprehensive about.

The next day, I met Bruce Beresford, the filmmaker best known for Driving Miss Daisy and the head of the international competition jury. With Farhadi and van Hoof expressing such different views about movies and audiences – “all classes” versus “niche viewers” – I wanted to know what someone who’s worked in the Hollywood system felt about this. He said, “If it’s a big commercial film, and if people are entertained by it, if they enjoy it, then I think it’s great.” But he also said that the way a lot of these films are perceived has to do with the marketing. In other words, the marketing can decide whether a film is for “all audiences” or for “niche viewers,” and he drove home this point by saying how a film as small, as intimate as Driving Miss Daisy walked away with four Academy Awards (from nine nominations) and a worldwide box-office take of $ 150 million (in 1989-90; it was among the top ten earners at the US box office.)

How did this film, the kind of film that a van Hoof might have picked for the Rotterdam festival, turn into the kind of film that attracted all classes of audiences? (Or to put it in Indian terms, how did this “class movie” morph into a “mass” hit?) Beresford told me that Warner Brothers, who had the distribution rights, didn’t even see the film. They decided to release it in just one art-house cinema in San Francisco. Their big Christmas-time release was In Country, starring Bruce Willis. But when that film bombed (grossing a mere $3.5 million), Warner Brothers had nothing else for the holiday season, and they made a frantic call to Beresford, asking him if he could bring over a print of “that film with the black man and the old lady.” They saw it. They liked it. They marketed the hell out of it. “They made it a popular film,” Beresford said. “If In Country had become a hit, no one in the world would have seen Driving Miss Daisy.”

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Six-pack? Eight-pack? Or make it a round dozen – twelve-pack? How fit do we want our heroes to be?

When Aamir Khan acquired a six-pack (or eight-pack or whatever) for Ghajini, it was still a novelty, It was the first time a serious actor, as opposed to, say, Salman Khan, took to such obsessive body-sculpting – and it turned into a great publicity gimmick. Suddenly, we were hearing all about this exercise or that one, this diet schedule or that one – it was the same with Kareena Kapoor, when she went size zero – and the film was constantly in the news. But what did the washboard abs do for Aamir Khan’s character, who suffered from memory loss? You could argue that his fanatical exercise regimen gave him something to do while he blanked out, that it was a reassuring routine, but did we ever see him at the gym? Besides, given that memory loss, how would he remember what exercises to do, how many reps, or even where his gym was? Wouldn’t we have accepted him even without this chiselled form? This is, after all, a film about the mind.

And this craze – maybe we should call it madness – is now everywhere. Every hero is expected to bare his torso in front of the camera, from newcomers like Arjun Kapoor in Ishaqzaade to established stars like Shah Rukh Khan in Om Shanti Om. (And of course, Hrithik Roshan in Krrish 3, which is the reason behind this piece.) You could argue that there are reasons for these bodily enhancements – that the Ishaqzaade character is a small-town boy who perhaps worships Salman Khan and therefore hits the gym reverently, that the Om Shanti Om character is perhaps spoofing this muscle mania, that the Krrish 3 character is a superhero and therefore deserves those super muscles. But, as in the case of Ghajini, would these characters have lost anything if they’d been normally built? Did all that ab-flashing – for just a few minutes – change the way we looked at the rest of the story? I’d say no.

When Hollywood stars get all testosteroney, there’s usually a purpose. In all-action movies, we want to see mountains of muscle like Schwarzenegger or Stallone or Dolph Lundgren. Stallone was a boxer in the Rocky films, and those painfully sculpted muscles made sense. Schwarzenegger was an unstoppable killing machine in the Terminator movies, and that almost-alien physique made sense. Lundgren played He-Man in Masters of the Universe, and it makes sense that he’d have those he-man muscles. You can make a case for James Bond or Ethan Hunt (from the Mission:Impossible movies) to have that kind of body – they are spies, after all, and they need to be in peak condition. You can argue that Sunny Deol or Dharmendra, too, could have used some extra definition in their bodies in the films where they uprooted hand pumps from the earth with their bare hands.

But why take all the trouble to beef yourself up for Krrish 3, when you’re just going to open a door and stand in profile so the audience can see your abs, and, later, walk around shirtless during a song sequence? It’s this use of one’s abs as a super-cool accessory, this metrosexualisation of muscle, that’s annoying. There’s no narrative context for today’s heroes to look this way. It’s just a glamorous selling point on posters and glossy magazine covers, and the actors get to add a bit of “credibility” to their process by saying things like “I gave up gulab jamuns and gnawed on a strip of chicken for eight months, and also woke up at 5 a.m. and spent five hours at the gym” – what’s left unsaid is “so please, please like me, and like my performance.” Perhaps there’s some subtext here. Perhaps, in the absence of a solid character, these actors seek solidity in other, superficial ways.

It’s gotten to a point where we’re hearing about Kareena Kapoor building a six-pack for her upcoming film with the director Karan Malhotra. A tabloidy news item posed this breathless question: “If Kareena has been asked to build a six-pack, how many packs has Karan asked of Hrithik. Any guesses?” From proudly flaunting curves to proudly flaunting the lack of them, the Indian heroine has sure come a long way, baby. That’s why it’s refreshing, sometimes, to turn to Tamil cinema. When we see a big hero like Ajith (in the Diwali release Arrambam) show up with a slight paunch and greying hair, we sense a solid man, someone who fills up the screen in more ways than one. Even better is the hulking Sharath Lohithaswa, who plays the villain in Paandiya Naadu (another Diwali release). When the villain looms this large, it’s all the more satisfying when he falls. If you asked them about six-packs, they’d probably head to the refrigerator.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

In which we perform the duties of the devil’s advocate and look at why movies, most times, are the way they are.

James Gray made his filmmaking debut with Little Odessa, and then he made four consecutive films with Joaquin Phoenix – The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, and The Immigrant, the last of which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. I haven’t seen The Immigrant, but the rest of Gray’s work is a reflection of where we are today as movie-watchers. In the 1970s, these grimy, low-key crime dramas (except Two Lovers, which is a downbeat romance, based on Dostoyevsky’s short story White Nights) would have been somewhat mainstream fare, and some of these films would have featured counterculture stars like Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson or Gene Hackman. But now, these are viewed as indie-films, art films. They’re too bleak to break through to a large audience, and when – by chance, on a blog called The Playlist – I stumbled into an interview with Gray, the auteur (and he is certainly one) had some interesting things to say.

He said, “I think I’m a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies, the American mainstream left me. Really what I’m doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore, Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved. Because really American film was that! An American commitment to narrative with an interest in the creation of atmosphere that came probably from Japan or Asian cinema, with a commitment to thematic depth that comes from Europe… We lost that.” But he doesn’t blame the audience. He blames the studios, instead, for creating this audience that doesn’t want to see his kind of cinema. “If you give somebody a Big Mac every day, and then you give them salmon sushi, their first inclination is… to say, ‘That’s weird and I don’t like it.’ And it’s very hard to get them back.”

But do studios have the responsibility to serve salmon sushi? Gray said, “They do… even if [the films] are not huge hits they do… You need [everyone] to do two or three of them a year in order to maintain a broad-based interest in the product. It’s like when American car companies in the early ’70s stopped making convertibles. They were losing a few dollars making convertibles and so they said, ‘Let’s not do it.’ And all of a sudden other people were making convertibles and American car companies stopped seeming to have a broad-based product line. Even looking at it purely in capitalistic, corporatist terms, I think if they made two or three of these kinds of pictures every year, then people like my dad and my brother – college-educated people either in their 30s, 40s or 70s, would have a movie to go to. And it would maintain the broad-based relevance of movies.”

There is almost nothing to argue with here, when looked at purely from the “creative” viewpoint, where we say the most important person involved in the making of a movie is the director. But there’s also the commercial viewpoint, which says that this director wouldn’t have a movie to make if there was no producer, and that producer, in order to raise funds, needs to look at certain avenues, like local distributors and satellite channels and foreign markets, and this sometimes leads to movies that have to work in the mainstream. It becomes more complicated when you consider Indian cinema, because – apart from a handful in Bollywood – we don’t have studios, and most movies are independent productions (though not “indie” productions, the way that term is used today). So if this producer knows that the audience will buy a Big Mac, then who can fault him for turning into a fast-food manufacturer? It’s a business, after all. It’s his money on the line, after all.

But what about making “art,” you say? The thing is, no other art form is quite as expensive. You can sign an author and get a piece of award-winning literary fiction for a few lakhs, which could also fetch you a happening band for an evening’s entertainment. But with the movies, we’re talking about crores, and this could make one pause before committing fully to art. As I said, this is the devil’s argument. But is there a case to be made that unless we change as an audience, unless we endorse films like the ones Gray makes –not downloading and watching them on a laptop, but paying theatre rates and contributing to profits – we cannot expect too much “uncompromised art” from the movies? How can we expect anything free to be good? If Hollywood, with all its money and global might, hasn’t been able to crack this conundrum, then what hope is there for the Indian equivalents of Gray?

This isn’t about ultra-low-budget filmmaking, but filmmaking with vision made on a certain scale. Gray said, “Raging Bull could not be a low-budget movie, it just couldn’t, there’s a certain scale that’s involved in making it, and no one would make Raging Bull today. The last example of the industry doing this middle movie that I’m talking about, to me would be Michael Mann’s film The Insider, which I really like. That has scale and also a bit of truth.” There have always been intelligent filmmakers who keep costs low and get away with doing what they want to do (more or less), but what about the go-for-broke visionaries? What about those who, for instance, want to shoot on film stock (which is more expensive than going digital) because they want a certain texture, a certain look for their film? Thanks to technology, it’s become easier than ever to make movies, but the old question remains. At what cost art?

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

An excerpt from my profile of Vikram for Caravan’s December issue. The full text will be available online soon at this link:

IT WAS THE BEST NIGHT of Kenny’s life. It was the worst night of Kenny’s life. And it began on the pitch-black stage of the open-air auditorium at IIT-Madras.

At first the audience at the annual inter-collegiate festival thought that there was a technical glitch: they could hear the actors but not see them. They began to fidget. They began to boo. Then, about 15 minutes in, some of the viewers began to shush the others. They got what was happening: the play—Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, in which Kenny had the lead role—began in darkness but, eventually, the lights would come on. The shushing gradually overwhelmed the booing and the fidgeting. There was silence, then laughs. When the curtains came down, there was a standing ovation. Among the audience that October night in 1986 was Shailaja Balakrishnan, who knew that she would marry Kenny even though he was barely aware of her existence. She watched him get the Best Actor award, beating candidates from all the other colleges. Later she would say drishti pattuduchu—someone had cast the evil eye.

When the book first came out, a lot of people asked me if there would be a Tamil translation. Thanks to Badri Seshadri and his team at Kizhakku Pathippagam, this is now a reality. Thanks to all, especially to the translator, Aravind Satchidanandam.

Here’s a link about this translation from Badri Seshadri’s blog:

http://www.badriseshadri.in/2013/12/blog-post_13.html

And here’s the cover:

In a country as diverse as ours, how do we prevent the ghettoisation of the regional film industries? Subtitles could be a start…

When an Elizabeth Taylor or a Paul Newman dies, all of America grieves. One reason, of course, is that these stars belonged to a time when we had to go to the movies, like devotees seeking a darshan. They could only be glimpsed on big screens in big theatres. Had these stars been today’s stars – when the movies have come to us, on our laptops and on tiny TV sets screwed to the back of airline seats – their mystery might have been eroded by the time they reached the end of their careers, and they may have been remembered merely as entertainers, not as screen gods and goddesses. But there’s another reason these stars were mourned by all of America – not just by the people in Kansas or Nevada or Florida – and that’s because they acted in films made in the language the whole country spoke and understood.

We lost two stars from that larger-than-life era recently – Suchitra Sen and Akkineni Nageswara Rao – and the outpourings of grief have come mainly from West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. Only the people who spoke Bengali and Telugu (or those who follow these languages and watch films in these languages) really knew what these stars were all about. The rest of us experience a general sense of sadness, the kind that descends on us whenever an achiever passes away, but these feelings don’t become really personal. And how could they, given that we’ve seen a bare handful of their films? When asked to write obituaries, non-Bengalis keep referring to Sen’s popular Hindi films like Devdas and Aandhi and Mamta and Bambai Ka Baboo, while non-Telugus settle for discussing the small number of Tamil films that Nageswara Rao starred in, and as songs are recalled more easily than films, we end up lingering over Thunbam nergayil, the most famous of Nageswara Rao’s songs in Tamil (from the film Or Iravu), even if he was mostly just a spectator to the singing.

We could go online and order DVDs of the films made by these stars, but the prints are almost guaranteed to be grainy and patchy, and they won’t come with subtitles. About the former, nothing can be done. We don’t have the kind of film culture that actively preserves older films, and even the works of Satyajit Ray were restored only due to the championing of, among others, the Merchant-Ivory duo and Martin Scorsese. But that happened because Ray was an internationally renowned filmmaker. Who’s going to undertake similar efforts – expensive and time-consuming – to refurbish the films of stars largely known and loved only in specific states?

But bad prints we can still live with – if they came with subtitles. I have spoken about this many, many times, and that’s because it cannot be said enough: If we want to prevent the ghettoisation of our regional film industries, we must insist on subtitles. We don’t live in the Doordarshan era anymore, where on sleepy Sunday afternoons, we could still tune into an old Assamese or Marathi film, which we followed through the subtitles. (And many of those prints were terrible, but did we complain?) We don’t have a Chitramala anymore, where, at least for a half-hour every Monday, we’d be exposed to songs from long-ago films made in other Indian states and languages. We live in an age that celebrates only the new, and where the likes of Ilayaraja and RD Burman are consigned to the “classics” section on the FM channels. (I wonder how those RJs would label the music of a G Ramanathan or a Naushad. Palaeolithic?) How, then, can someone like me, from Chennai, hope to get at least a glimpse of what stars like Suchitra Sen or Akkineni Nageswara Rao were like in their prime – and in their best films, made in their own tongues?

But if subtitling older films is too much effort, if there are no funds, if there is no interest, then let’s look at subtitling the new ones – not just the “classy” movies, the ones that win National Awards, but also the commercial love stories and the masala movies, so that if a Gujarati speaker who’s just moved to Chennai wants to check out a Vijay movie or an Ajith movie (just to see what the fuss is about), then he needn’t be intimidated by the prospect of not understanding these films (even if you could make the argument that there’s not much in these films to understand, in the first place). Why is this important? Because regional films reflect regional sensibilities and by watching these films, we open ourselves to tiny transfusions of culture. We see not just what kind of stories our neighbours from other states like to watch but also what kind of lives they lead, what they do for work and play – and in a country as diverse as ours, the importance of this cannot be emphasised enough.

And there’s no major cost involved. The arty films are subtitled in any case, for screenings at film festivals and for National Award jury panels. As for the commercial films, the expense involved wouldn’t be a fraction of the heroine’s wardrobe. All films, in other words, must ideally be subtitled, so that anyone, anywhere can watch any movie. It’s a terrible situation when we can slip into one of the various International Film Festivals across the country and see and understand films from France and Korea and Romania, but the new and much-lauded Mohanlal movie Drishyam is being shown (in Chennai) without subtitles. I was told that all I needed “was a working knowledge of Malayalam,” but what if that’s not there? Besides, who wants to see films and get just a general idea about the goings on, without cottoning on to the specific undertones that define and describe every culture?

There’s still a problem. I’m only talking about English-language subtitles, so a large number of Indians who don’t read English (or who don’t read, period) aren’t going to benefit from subtitles unless the text is in a local language. (Maybe dubbing is an option, in this case. Hollywood films are routinely dubbed in European languages, and now even in Telugu and Tamil.) Nor does the addition of subtitles automatically broaden a film’s appeal to a large audience. Many viewers are happy seeing films in their language – the opening of a brand-new pizzeria isn’t a guarantee that patrons of the local Udupi restaurant are going to switch loyalties. But it’s worthwhile even if it’s only for a small set of people. It’s at least a start, a way to know what’s happening in cinema around India, cinema that is not from Bollywood. We keep reading about how great this film is from this country and that film is from that one, and how we don’t make anything like this in our own country. But maybe we are making good films. It’s just that the people who don’t speak the language don’t know anything about them.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Vairamuthu’s Padma Bhushan honour is a reminder (if any were needed) that the lyrics written for films are sometimes on par with the best poetry.

We all read prose, some of us write prose, but when it comes to poetry, we excuse ourselves from the table, suddenly remembering something more important. I don’t think it’s because we dislike poetry. And I don’t think it’s because we don’t (or won’t) get it. Many of us enjoy poetry when we encounter it in school, simple poetry, laid out in evenly measured lines and with easy rhymes, and we even learn to quote a few stanzas, pausing carefully at the punctuation marks – but as the years go by and we realise that only maths and the sciences are going to get us jobs, these poems recede further and further in the mind, into the attic-like space cluttered with the date of birth of Akbar and the major crops of Madhya Pradesh and the names of the countries that are permanent members of the security council. And one day, all grown up, we find that we’ve forgotten how to read poetry, which we now see as sideward skyscrapers, staggered lines of words piercing a lot of white space.

And if it weren’t for our film music, poetry would be out of our lives for good – especially, in my case, Tamil and Hindi poetry. Most of my reading and web browsing consists of English-language content, and save for the short poems in Tamil periodicals I don’t get to read much poetry in other languages at all – but thanks to film songs, I do get to listen to a lot of poetry, and when I heard that Vairamuthu, the great lyricist and writer, was one of the recipients of the Padma Bhushan this year, I had a flashback of sorts, to the time I began listening to “poetry” on the radio, through the lyrics of the film songs that played on the Vividh Bharati programmes.

With songs, it’s always the music that gets you first. We’re drawn to the flight of the tune, the drive of the percussion – and if the music is good, we don’t really need the words, in the sense that it is possible to experience an emotional reaction to a song even if we don’t know the language the lyrics are in. But there’s an altogether higher kind of pleasure in listening to a song in a language you know, where the music flows around the lyrics and the lyrics lock into the music. And when you know the language, a well-composed song with bad lyrics is a little like a gold-plated objet d’art – there’s always the embarrassment of something being compromised, of not being all that it could have been.

But are lyrics really poetry? The great Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim, in his near-autobiographical collection of lyrics, Finishing the Hat – you must read it (and its sequel Look, I Made a Hat) if you’re interested in writing, in music, in songs, and in the way they shape the thoughts of a character in a musical (a lot of which applies to our films too) – draws a clear line between poetry and lyrics: “Lyrics, even poetic ones, are not poems. Poems are written to be read, silently or aloud, not sung… Poetry is an art of concision, lyrics of expansion. Poems depend on packed images, on resonance and juxtaposition, on density. Every reader absorbs a poem at his own pace, inflecting it with his own rhythms, stresses and tone…”

All of which is certainly true, but the best lyrics, when written down, can produce similar effects. Besides, how do definitions matter when you can feel that something is poetry – if not in the textbook definition of the word, then in the sense of freeing us, for brief moments, from this prosaic world? Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That’s as good a definition as any for poetry, and the best lyrics can make us feel that way, through mood and image and a voice from beyond that’s like an X-ray of your soul, surprising you by revealing everything about something you thought only you knew about.

And I return to my flashback, to the Vairamuthu lyrics that took the top of my head off, many many years ago – from the song Vizhiyil vizhundhu, in the film Alaigal Oyvadhillai. I haven’t heard or read a better encapsulation of the feverishness of adolescent infatuation, which is a strange mixture of the sacred and the profane, as much love as lust, and this all-raw-nerve-endings excess of emotion can truly be represented only by one colour: the colour purple. And that’s what Vairamuthu does, throwing caution and restraint and taste and decorum to the winds, and writing the song as if he were a teenager with a burning temperarature. (The song takes these feelings a notch higher by using a female voice for sentiments that ought to be expressed by a male – another “strange mixture”.)

Everywhere you turn in these lyrics, in this – yes – poem, there’s a startling physicality. There is, first, a description of the physical process through which one falls in love. The usual way to do this is to say that “one’s eyes fell on a certain someone,” but here Vairamuthu says that “a certain someone fell on one’s eyes,” then entered the heart and then merged with the soul. Love has struck. And thereon, the cosmos and its contents are slave to this love – the mere sound of your silver anklets will open every window in the street; your laughter will cause moons to rise in every direction; if you place jasmine flowers on your hair then the spurned rose will catch a fever; if you wear silks, silkworms will attain salvation. Even the skies are touched by this physicality, with the twilight hour resulting from the “rubbing together” of day and night. It’s some sort of celestial frottage.

In these lines, we find – to borrow Sondheim’s words – density and packed images, and if these lines were to be written down, the reader can read it like he does a poem, inflecting it with his own rhythms, stresses and tone. But even if you reject these “academic” criteria, something inside those of us felled by these words tells us that these are, without doubt, not just “lyrics,” in the sense of simple, rhyming constructions fitted into a tune so that the singer will have something to sing. Lines that produce this kind of raw feeling – what else can they be but poetry? And someone who captures this level of intensity with mere words – what else can he be but a poet?

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Balu Mahendra, who died yesterday of cardiac arrest, was one of the handful of filmmakers who, in the 1970s, changed the face of Tamil cinema. He was also one of the handful who could be termed an auteur. Every film he made was distinctly his. Part of this was, of course, due to his roots in cinematography, his first passion. A single frame from Chattakari (1974), Mullum Malarum (1978) or Sankarabharanam (1980) is enough to announce that the film was shot by Balu Mahendra. You could sense this from the exterior shots, from the colour of the leaves as sunlight streamed through them. That translucent green had rarely been seen on the Tamil screen, though we’d seen it around us – this wasn’t colour obtained through heavy processing in a laboratory, but the colour of life around us. The interiors were equally lifelike, bathed in light that flowed through doors and windows or perhaps a lamp at a corner, leaving the room in a twilit state. As for the actors, they were revealed as if for the first time. Finally, we were seeing faces stripped of pancake and sheathed in skin.

This naturalism was Mahendra’s signature. You could find it in the way he shot his songs, forsaking choreography for speechless conversations. You could find it in the dusky actresses – most prominently, his muse Shoba – he repeatedly worked with, once he turned director with the Kannada film Kokila (1977). You could find it in the stories (either of his own devising or derived from works by others) that interested him, stories about ordinary men and women who found themselves in situations that didn’t require them to declaim – they simply spoke. You could find it in the steady pace of his films, and in the silences that filled them. Barring a brief period in the mid-1980s when Mahendra went “mainstream” with a vengeance – Neengal Kettavai, Un Kannil Neer Vazhindal (though even this was quite restrained for a Rajinikanth starrer) – his films strove to infuse a certain kind of lyricism into commercial cinema, whether heavy (Olangal, Vanna Vanna Pookkal) or light (Rettai Vaal Kuruvi, Sathi Leelavathi).

The apotheosis of his art is Moondram Pirai (1982). As a “package,” the film was as commercial as they came – huge star-actors in the form of Kamal Haasan and Sridevi, a chartbusting score from Ilayaraja, the biggest music director of the time, and a story that, on the surface, seemed ripped from a throat-grabbing pulp paperback. (Amnesia! Prostitutes! Extramarital lust! A rape attempt! Thwarted love!) But the film that resulted would not have been recognised by someone who’d heard the outline – so muted was Mahendra’s handling of this material. This is what he did time and again, making the most outrageous contrivances seem so… natural.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Balu Mahendra’s demise is another reminder that a certain kind of “artistic” commercial film has vanished from our screens.

In the tribute I wrote in this paper for Balu Mahendra, I’d contended that Moondram Pirai was the “apotheosis of his art,” and that didn’t go down well with some readers. They felt that this was too “commercial” a film, with its ‘Silk’ Smitha item number and all, and that Mahendra’s art should be evaluated on the basis of films like Veedu or Sandhya Raagam. This, to me, basically reinforces the whole art-commerce divide that Mahendra fought against for most of his career. With a handful of exceptions, his films were “commercial films,” meant for large audiences – and that’s why it seemed appropriate to celebrate Moondram Pirai, a superb example of how the presence of a commercially viable plot and the participation of commercially viable actors and technicians can result in art. Can you imagine a similar situation today, where a young hero at the peak of his powers and a top heroine (who can actually act) agree to star in something that we’ll be talking about thirty years from now? No? That’s what I’m saying.

The Balu Mahendra kind of films are gone. Today’s commercial films are something else, and that’s because today’s audiences are something else. The people who came to theatres to see Moondram Pirai don’t come to theatres anymore, and even if they do, certainly not in sufficient numbers to make a hit out of something like Maryan – a flawed film, yes, but the closest that present-day Tamil cinema came to capturing the Balu Mahendra ethos, the Moondram Pirai ethos, with good actors and a top-ranked music director and a minimalistic storyline that the director at least attempted to narrate in a quasi-art-house fashion. The demise of these films is the demise of a certain kind of culture, where leisurely paced “art” could be snuck into popular cinema.

That kind of rhythm, that kind of pace has vanished from our screens. Watch the early films of Balu Mahendra and his contemporaries like Mahendran (Udhiri Pookkal, Nenjathai Killathey), and you’re astounded by how… slow and silent they are (in relative terms, compared to the films of today), and how, despite this slowness, this quietness, they found enough audiences to sustain them for 25-week runs in theatres. Of course, that was a time before DVDs and downloads and “special screenings” on television on a festival day that’s no longer spent visiting friends and relatives, so if you wanted to see a film a second time, you had to go to the theatre. Today’s films, therefore, cannot hope for such staying power in theatres. But though the metrics by which we determine hits may have changed – 25-week runs versus opening-weekend gross, or whatever – a hit is still a hit. And those slow, silent films were hits.

To make intensely personal films and still make them appealing to large audiences – that’s a near-lost art, today, and it’s in that context that I was celebrating Moondram Pirai. Is it the most uncompromised film Mahendra made (if that’s how you want to evaluate art)? Certainly not – and taken that way, Sandhya Raagam is probably a “better” film. There are so many opportunities for cheap melodramatic compromises in this story about an old man who, after the death of his wife, comes to Madras to stay with his nephew, but Mahendra opts, always, for the high road. The man’s loneliness isn’t milked for pathos. It just is. We think the nephew’s wife will turn out to be a shrill shrew, resenting this unwanted visitor’s claims on their already meagre possessions. But no, she’s kind and observant, and the only time she screams at him is when he (inadvertently) harms her daughter. At one point, she is unable to return a small sum she owes her landlady – the old man repays this loan without telling her. We think this turn of events will result in major emotion – maybe, she’ll feel guilty when she finds out and fall at his feet in repentance, or maybe she’ll scream at him, again, for poking his nose in her affairs – but the way this plot point is resolved is exquisitely understated.

And this is the point I was making with Moondram Pirai. In some ways, the understatement is even more remarkable here, because this film, unlike Sandhya Raagam, is an overtly commercial proposition. Events that could have resulted in major melodrama – and there’s nothing wrong with that style of cinema, provided done well – are presented in such a matter-of-fact manner that seeing the film, today, we wonder at how the audiences were then, and how they are now, hooting their derision at the slightest “lag” in the narrative. The film’s slyest trick is that the drama is always present, thanks to the underlying sexual tension and Ilayaraja’s score. After a small prologue (that details the heroine’s accident), the opening credits appear over an intense burst of violins – the same burst of violins that will be heard as a bookend towards the end, when the heroine and her parents enter the railway station and the devastated hero, far behind, is racing to meet her. So we’re already primed, subliminally, for this intensity of emotion – except that Mahendra takes his own sweet time getting to that point. As much as the themes in this complex film can be studied, the filmmaking, too, is worth putting under a microscope. Of how many commercial films today can you say this?

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

A slim compilation of B Nagi Reddi’s memories is a welcome addition to the increasing number of books on Indian cinema.

In the introduction to Many Shades Make a Rainbow: Reminiscences of B Nagi Reddi, the publisher (and Nagi Reddi’s son), Viswam, lays out what the book is about. He says that his father’s birth centenary year (1912-1913) coincided with the centenary of Indian cinema. “Father’s recollection of several veterans of that world – of artists, as well as entrepreneurs – is a tribute to them.” The book is also a tribute to Reddi. In the preface, Prof. Manoj Das describes how, on the eve of India stepping into “the light of freedom,” Reddi and his friend Chakrapani, “based in the city of Madras (now Chennai), were thinking about the future, to be more precise, the future of the present-day children of India as well as of the children of tomorrow. Ours was a nation with a difference. We were so many States with so many cultures and languages, but most certainly bound by and united at a sublime plane – our common heritage. The children must be made aware of it.”

The two friends decided to bring out a magazine that would speak to the children of India in the children’s own mother tongues and reveal to them the glories of their motherland, in the form of stories, pictorial serialisation of the epics, and the treasures of the Panchatantra (the world’s first collection of fables), the Katha-sarit-sagara (the first collection of fiction), and the Jatakas (the world’s first collection of parables and didactic tales). The monthly publication began in three languages and slowly expanded to twelve and, for a while, even more – including Sanskrit and Braille. It became Asia’s largest circulated children’s magazine. It was called Chandamama.

That, in itself, would warrant a full-length book on Reddi, but he also founded Vijaya Vauhini, which was, at one point, Southeast Asia’s largest film studio. And he established the Vijaya Medical & Educational Trust, which runs the Vijaya group of hospitals and health centres. Das writes, “There is no dearth of entrepreneurs; there were and are so many commercially far more successful persons than Reddi-ji. The subtle difference between such a successful entrepreneur and Reddi-ji is that whatever the latter launched had a purpose above commerce. Chandamama was for uniting the young readers of the nation under a common umbrella; each of the films he produced had a sound social message; then there was the Vijaya group of hospitals with the obvious ideal of welfare.”

Hearing about a book on Reddi, therefore, one would expect an encyclopaedic tome. But Many Shades Make a Rainbow is a slim volume, what Das calls a “tiny work of Reddi’s reminiscences,” a combination of what Reddi casually narrated and what he said on being prodded by those close to him. This is, in some ways, not the kind of book you’d get from a major publisher, one that would be stocked on the shelves of major bookstores throughout the country. It’s more like something produced for a small group of intimates – family and friends. (There’s even a family tree.) I don’t know if Viswam tried approaching a major publisher, but even if he had, he may not have found much encouragement. He may have been told, “This book won’t sell.”

I tried pitching a book about K Balachander once, after he won Indian cinema’s highest honour, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, for the year 2010. This was the man who launched Rajinikanth’s career and shepherded a child actor named Kamal Haasan into adult roles. He was probably Tamil cinema’s first auteur, leaving his unmistakable stamp all over his creations. In the first five minutes, you could see that this was “a K Balachander film.” I felt he deserved documenting. But publishers felt differently. They said that not many, up north, have heard of him, and as the population that reads is less than the population that watches non-Hindi cinema, the book was simply not viable. I pointed out that mainstream publishers had brought out excellent books on Helen and Leela Naidu, who were not exactly household names in the South. So why the hesitation when it came to books about those who may not be household names in the North? There were no clear answers.

So in the something-is-better-than-nothing tradition, a slim compilation of Reddi’s memories is a welcome addition to the increasing number of books on Indian cinema. The early chapters paint a quiet picture of life in a village in pre-Independence India and of Reddi’s participation in the freedom movement. “By now, I decided to wear only khadi clothes… Like Gandhiji, I began walking barefoot. Small wonder, the villagers began to call me ‘Little Gandhi’.” Then we move to the publications – Andhra Jyothi, Chandamama –and then to the films. Reddi remembers Enga Veettu Pillai and its success, and, later, MGR telling him that he wanted to make a film to find out how people would react to his entry into politics. Reddi suggested remaking the Telugu hit, Kathanayakudu, which featured NT Rama Rao. MGR agreed. Nam Naadu was made.

“When it was released, we both went to Mekala Theatre to watch the reaction of the viewers. Except for the manager, no one was aware of our presence. It was a pleasant evening and the doors had been kept wide open. MGR stood leaning on one side of the door and I was leaning on the other. There was a scene in which Jayalalitha, the heroine of the movie, appeared singing the song Vaangaiya Vaathiyaraiah while welcoming MGR after his victory in the elections. The audience rose as one man, cheering, clapping, whistling. There were cries: ‘We want to see the scene again! Repeat the scene!’ We advised the manager to oblige the audience. The reel was rewound and the sequence was shown again. I turned to MGR. His eyes were filled with tears of joy. He hugged me. ‘O Reddiar! I have received the people’s acceptance.’ ”  What reader would not ask for more?

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Some thoughts on the fondness some of us have for film-related trivia.

How do you know so much about cinema and how do you remember so much? Every time I am asked this question – which is not all that often, but frequently enough to serve as the opening for a piece such as this one – I give some version of the same answer. Do you know those sports commentators who, the instant a batsman pulls off a reverse-sweep six, can rattle off all the earlier instances of this shot, with the year and perhaps even the name of the stadium? Do you know those political columnists who, the instant a budget is unveiled, can produce a comparative analysis that references budgets from two decades ago? Do you know the sexagenarian listener at Music Academy who can listen to the first phrase of a raga delineation and tell you what composition is going to be sung? It’s something like that. The mind, I guess, holds on to what it wants, and depending on what your mind decides to hold on to (or not), you end up working in a cubicle or writing this column.

My mind holds on to all kinds of movie memories – not just what happened in this film or that one, but the name of the theatre where I saw, say, Janbaaz. (If you want to know, it was a matinee at Santham.) It’s crazy. I don’t want to remember this crap – but I do. And the stuff I want to remember – like the fundamentals of Euclidian geometry – keeps falling out of my head, as if through an idiot sieve. And this leads to embarrassing situations at times. When PhD-wielding friends are arguing fiercely, you’re likely to feel less stupid when butting in with the fundamentals of Euclidian geometry than disclosing where and when you saw Japanil Kalyanaraman. (Night show. Sathyam.)

And this fondness for movie-related trivia – or, depending on the way you see it, this pathological inability to forget things about the movies – results in the oddest of side-effects, like the warm glow that spreads through your system when you chance upon a newspaper from the past and see the now-showing ads. Some time back, I’d remarked on my blog that I was unable to recall the name of the film critic who used to write for The Indian Express in the 1980s/90s, the one who reviewed, upon release, Mani Ratnam films like Anjali and Agni Natchatiram. I remembered this critic’s reviews because, unlike the other reviewers of the time, he didn’t go about making an itemised list, evaluating the various aspects of the film. Instead, he focused on the parts of the film that grabbed him, that moved him enough to make a remark. He wasn’t a dour gavel banger who pronounced verdicts on cinema, but an impressionistic portrait painter, alive to his responses. He summed up Agni Natchatiram by saying “there is more light than heat,” an assessment I don’t agree with but am still impressed by – because he said what he wanted to say with style.

And one reader of my blog took it upon himself to scour the Internet and send me links of the reviews – by, as I eventually found out, N Krishnaswamy. (Thank you, blog reader. The Tennessee Williams phrase “the kindness of strangers” comes to mind.) And these links opened into e-copies of the whole newspaper, one of which was dated Friday, July 13, 1990. What joy there was in seeing the movie ads. Dil was playing 4 shows in its fourth “Public ka dil kho gaya” week at Subham. (“Music is the soul! Story is the body!! Love is DIL!!!”) Ghayal, playing at Melody, was celebrating its 25th day. (“Only a woman could tame his tempers.”) And at Sathyam, in its “thrilling thunderous third week,” License to Kill was keeping the Bond franchise alive. Why these sightings should cause such a happy buzz in the brain is a question best left to philosophers and neurologists. (It’s all some form of nostalgia, in any case.) The thrill isn’t in the knowledge but in the experience – akin to the feeling of stumbling into a record store that hoards LPs of old soundtracks. Entertainment photography is so much more sophisticated today, with the stars being fussed over by so many specialists – who decide the attire, the makeup, the locations, the angles, the props – and yet, these super-professional images are cold and clinical, while the casual and tacky stills on those LP sleeves make us grin fondly. It’s the same fond grin we have while leafing through albums with silly old family photos.

But chasing memories can sometimes have serious consequences. You may be led to wonder: Why do people who do visible work – film stars, musicians, sportsmen –come to feel like family? Why do we have such pleasant memories about them, as if the mere fact of our watching one of their movies at a certain age has bound us forever to them? And why do we experience such sadness when they die? I am not just talking about the big stars. I am talking about someone like Nisha, the pretty actress who featured in a clutch of mostly forgettable films in the 1980s. I was on a YouTube binge one night, doing my usual check of whether videos of early Ilayaraja hits had been uploaded – say, the one for Poonthottam from Nadhiyai Thedi Vandha Kadal, a music video I’ve never been able to find. These were songs we heard on the radio, but unless we went and saw the films we didn’t know how they were picturised. And now, thanks to YouTube – and again, the kindness of strangers – we know, and despite the inevitability that most of these songs are horribly shot and staged, there’s something about seeing a time-capsule version of this actor or that Chennai location that makes the exercise worthwhile. And so I found myself watching Nisha in Dhaagam edukkira neram – a staggeringly gorgeous number whose asymmetrical melody lines are filled with beautiful lyrics – and wondering where she was these days, and this led to a Google search. Imagine my horror when I chanced upon some sites that said she had died of AIDS-related complications. There were pictures of Nisha as a shrivelled wreck – she looked like a mummy. The then-versus-now contrast was too much to take. The reports said that she died in 2007, and all I could think of was that, thanks to this song, she had left behind at least one immortal memory.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.