Good girls, bad ghosts and goddesses

My Mumbai Mirror column

Bulbbul reworks ideas from several Bengali film classics to craft a superhuman response to women's depressingly human troubles.

When Anvita Dutt's Bulbbul came out last July, several critics applauded producer Anushka Sharma and her brother Karnesh for their trilogy of films placing the ghost story in the service of feminist goals. The first of these, Anshai Lal's Phillauri (2017), featured Sharma as an early 20^th century ghost who haunts the present in the hope of being recognised as the author of Punjabi poems that everyone thought were written by her male lover. The second, Prosit Roy's Pari (2018), with a plot featuring the impregnation of women by spirits called ifrits, and the murder of the resultant half-demonic children by vigilantes, was an allegorical response to the violence of rape and forced abortion. Both were interesting ideas, but neither was executed to any real degree of competence.

Bulbbul, set in late 19^th century Bengal, might be the best realised of the three. The film is named for its protagonist, who is named for the chirpy, red-tufted bird (usually spelled bulbul, without the extra 'b'). It is no coincidence that Bulbbul is a child bride who metamorphoses from climbing trees to being the senior daughter-in-law of an oppressively grand zamindar family -- and then, in her magical afterlife, to climbing trees again.

Visually rich, almost to the point of excess, the film alternates between a glowing, blood-red enchanted forest (a bit foreign-looking, of which more later) and a gloomy, minimally styled zamindar mansion which Dutt chooses to keep underpopulated – no children, practically no servants.

While riding the global wave of 21^st century Gothic popular culture, the film is dense with Indian literary and cinematic references which are ultimately also sociological. For instance, the theme of the Indian wife's relationship with a young brother-in-law, often easier to talk to than an older, forbiddingly grave husband, has been with us long enough to be enshrined in our jokes and popular culture; a common consequence of the patriarchal system of adult men marrying virginal girls. That intimate devar-bhabhi dynamic was perhaps most vividly captured in Tagore's 1901 novella Nashto Nir (The Broken Nest), possibly based on Tagore's own early life, which Satyajit Ray transposed onto the screen in Charulata. The Soumitra Chatterjee-Madhabi Mukherjee relationship in Charulata is echoed here by Bulbbul and her brother-in-law Satya, going from hide and seek to writerly collaboration. What the sister-in-law Binodini tells Bulbbul's husband Indranil bitchily is not untrue: Bulbbul and Satya have grown up together, and are close in a way that Bulbbul and Indranil can never be. Meanwhile Binodini herself -- married off to Indranil's halfwit brother Mahendra, but in a sexual arrangement with Indranil -- is eventually widowed, in another Tagorean reference: The duplicitous, unfulfilled widow Binodini of Chokher Bali.

But Bulbbul also reminded me, complicatedly, of another Ray film. Devi (1960), adapted from Prabhat Mukhopadhyaya's story The Goddess, also centres on a child bride who may or may not have acquired power over life and death. The 17-year-old Doyamoyee (played by Sharmila Tagore under Ray's magisterial direction), beloved of her twenty-something college-going husband (Soumitra), but also a favourite of her deeply religious father-in-law, suddenly finds herself anointed as an avatar of Goddess Durga, after the father-in-law sees her thus in a dream.

 

 

Bulbbul, set in the same Shakta Bengali milieu, where female energy is worshipped as Durga and Kali, draws on that association. Mahendra's murder on Durga Puja explicitly suggests that Bulbbul's first effective use of her shakti is tied to the mother goddess. The film's iconography, too, partially echoes the familiar Durga-Kali one: Long, open tresses and an enigmatic smile. “Not a churail, but a devi,” says Dr Sudip, and the film's dead men had all been abusive, thus flipping our perception of Bulbbul's power from possible evil to a form of violent justice.

 

Watching Devi again, though, I was struck by how deeply Ray investigates the power of belief, especially the young woman's own conflicted sense of self. Perhaps the most complex scene in this regard is the one where Doya refuses to run away when she has a chance, because she has half-begun to believe in the divinity thrust upon her. And yet, even in this belief, her primary response is fear – any power she has is not in her control. “Ebhaabe choley gele tomaar jyano omongol hoye? [What if leaving this way brings you bad luck?],” she asks her husband, terrified.

 

The husband understands and takes her back, raging later to his professor in Calcutta, that “she is only 17”. He is a sympathetic character, and yet – he is an adult married to a teenager who just happens to have come of age sexually. In one of Devi's most moving moments, Doya clings to her little nephew when he is placed in her lap after ages – she accepts the task of curing him as a young woman who misses a child, but she is judged as a goddess.

 

I recently re-watched Pedro Almodovar's 2006 masterpiece Volver, also about women, male sexual violence and the possibility of a female ghost returning to finish incomplete business on earth (‘Volver’ means 'return' in Spanish). But Volver's sensibility is very different from Devi or Bulbbul; some of its magnificent easy charm lies in the idea of a ghost who bakes, helps out who hairdressing and cares for the sick and aged – as women do. 

 

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding one horrible man's dead body when another man spies an incriminating spot of blood on her neck. “Oh, women's troubles,” she says, waving him away. As long as men are the prime cause of women's troubles, I thought to myself, there will be blood.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Feb 2021

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding on

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DJs, poets, dramatic desi loves

My Mirror column:

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil falls flat when it aims for high romance. So do any of our old languages of love survive?

In many ways, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a fairly standard-issue Karan Johar movie. First, it is a soppy romance about people who’re confused between love and friendship (and trying hard to sacrifice their feelings for the blissfully unknowing beloved) -- think back to Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and SRK in Kal Ho Na Ho. Second, it contains that classic K-Jo cocktail of oblivious upper-class-ness and self-conscious Indian-ness that emerges in full measure only when the protagonists are ‘abroad’. The first purpose served by this is in the aesthetic-emotional register: supremely well-off, well-dressed desis get to play out their overheated romances in picturesque cold countries. The second purpose is what we might as well call political: it is no accident that Johar has been among Bollywood’s pioneers of desi coolth, given his originary adeptness at turning not just firang locations but firangs themselves into mere backdrops for our Empire-writes-back moments.

Nowadays, Johar seems to have stopped enjoying making British characters stand for the Indian national anthem, and no longer even seems to get off having rude Hindi remarks made in front of foreigners who can’t understand them (admittedly, Kajol managed to make this reverse racism seem very funny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). What ADHM offers instead, is a breezy world-is-our-oyster feel, in which South Asians on private jet vacations can bump into [also South Asian] ex-boyfriends DJ-ing at French discotheques (And just in case you were wondering about such prosaic things as visas, the film throws in two separate mentions of characters having British passports.) The resultant air of bonhomie is aided by the Empire choosing, whenever in doubt, to sing back: the oddly patriotic pleasure of watching white people sway to Hindi/Punjabi songs is amplified particularly in ADHM by having Parisians galvanised by the corny energy of Mohammad Rafi’s 1967 chartbuster An Evening in Paris.

Most of Johar’s romantic messaging is pretty spelt out in the film: such as Alizeh’s rather programmatic declaration, “Pyaar mein junoon hai, dosti mein sukoon hai (Love has madness, friendship has peace)”or her insistent idea (pretty much taken from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar) that only a broken heart can produce good art. Or the film’s avowed thesis, that unrequited love can be more powerful than a relationship: “you have full control over it... because you don’t have to share it with anyone”. How much any of these statements affects you depends partly on your mood at the moment you watch it spoken on screen, partly on who speaks it (Ranbir does best), and partly on your general propensity for dramebaaz mohabbat.

But it is more interesting to read Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for the things it does not spell out. Many of those filter through to us via language. The film seems, for instance, an expression of Johar’s desire to unite two very different landscapes of romance that I will go out on a limb and suggest he personally inhabits: the thumping rhythms of smoky nightclubs on the one hand, and the mellifluous Urdu that was for years the language of high romance in Hindi films. The film’s dialogue (by Johar and his long-time collaborator Niranjan Iyengar) moves constantly between a conversational Hindi peppered with English words — eg. “Tum mujhe seriously nahi le rahi, lekin yeh mera God’s gift hai” — and a high-faluting Urdu/Hindustani that is largely expressed in dubious ‘philosophical’ statements that neither Anushka Sharma nor Aishwarya Rai can carry off.

Rai, in particular, is saddled with the impossible task of playing what Johar in all seriousness calls a ‘shaaira’. The Urdu word for poetess is one I last heard in the 1994 film Muhafiz, in which too it was used as a self-descriptor – but it came accompanied by the devastating force of Shabana Azmi’s hauteur and pronunciation, and the context was mid-twentieth century Delhi. Having Rai, in a white airport lounge somewhere between London and Vienna, introduce herself as “Main shaaira hoon” elicits a hilarious but apt response from Kapoor’s Ayaan, who assumes that Shaaira is her name. “Main shaaira hoon, mera naam Saba hai,” says Rai, her eyes glinting dangerously.

The moment is, sadly, one of the very few in which the film takes on board the hilarious unbelievability of this uber-posh, uber-glamorous Vienna-based character being an Urdu poet. But at least Saba is meant to be a poet. For Alizeh, a hyperactive London-based dilettante recovering from her break-up with a Sufiyana DJ, the Urdu she speaks makes even less sense. The only way we can make sense of Alizeh’s language (and her 80s film obsession and her kurta-clad entry into clubs) is if we replace her supposed Lucknow origins with Lahore. Given just how much political fracas has been caused by the mere presence of a Pakistani actor (Fawad Khan in a thankless role as the DJ), I suppose it is not surprising that Johar decided to keep Alizeh’s real origins — like her legs —covered up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th Oct 2016.

Wrestling with shadows

My Mirror column:

Sultan is a vehicle crafted for the Salman Khan persona. Our responses to it will be inescapably shaped by that.

A still from Sultan, starring Anushka Sharma and Salman Khan

There's a moment in Sultan when Salman Khan, as the film's eponymous prize wrestler Sultan Ali Khan, after a series of spectacularly bare-faced product-placements doubling up as fictional advertisements, faces the camera and pronounces that he's done enough: “Pehelwan hoon, actor nahi. [I'm a wrestler, not an actor]” It's a scene only Salman Khan can pull off – highlighting his brawny image in the guise of self-deprecation; cocking a snook at critics who might dare suggest that acting isn't his strongest suit, while laughing all the way to the bank.

Ali Abbas Zafar's film about a celebrated wrestler's fall and rise has provided Khan with yet another opportunity to play a variation on his own myth. Given the “bachcha hai, maaf kar do” remarks that greet the 50-year-old superstar's every real-life crime and misdemeanour, the film's presentation of Salman's character -- as hot-headed but pure of heart, eminently fallible but eventually forgiveable, channelling emotion into violence -- feels rather too close for comfort.

Sultan is the prototype of the childish man, whom we must not just absolve but actually applaud for his childishness: “Mera pyaar pakka hai, jaise tera bachpana saccha hai (My love is strong, just as your childishness is true),” says Sultan's estranged wife Aarfa (an impressive Anushka Sharma) as she accepts him back.

Aarfa, on paper, is a textbook 'women's empowerment' character: a sharp talker with impressive wrestling moves and more impressive ambitions. The only daughter of the village pehelwan (Kumud Mishra), Aarfa gets an education in Delhi, but returns to carry on her father's legacy, to represent his Jaanbaaz Akhara to the world. And even as Sultan remains stuck at the standard-issue combination of stalking and relentless hopefulness that is apparently to be accepted as the Indian male's repertoire of wooing tactics, Aarfa departs from the Hindi film heroine's usual imagined response. No coy surrender for her. What we get instead is an impassioned speech about how falling in love with someone is based on admiring them in some way -- and Sultan's clowning doesn't quite cut it. There is a subtext here about love between equals. And yet the film steers clear of making its man-wrestling heroine ever wrestle its hero.

Because this is a film that has carefully calibrated how far it wants to travel up this path. So Aarfa's perfectly justified pronouncement is treated by Sultan as an insult -- and a challenge. It is what incites him to become a wrestler. But while his unprecedented success earns him Aarfa's admiration and love, his return gift to her is an unplanned pregnancy which puts an end to her World Championship dreams. Hindi film viewers have seen pregnancy come in the way of a female athlete's career before, in the biopic Mary Kom. But unlike there, or the recent Ki and Ka, flawed as both films were, Ali Abbas Zafar's narrative has no interest in its heroine's response. So caught up is it with Sultan's point of view that Aarfa isn't given even a single line through which we might imagine how it might feel to crush her ambitions underfoot on her husband's victory march. It is to Anushka Sharma's credit that she manages to make her teary smile (as she watches her husband celebrate the impending arrival) radiate something more complicated than joy.

And of course, it can't be motherhood that she has any ambivalence about, so the film creates a way for her to be the stubborn match to Sultan while also displaying her womanliness. It is not that Aarfa isn't a believable character, sadly, she is. So I suppose my frustration must be explained by Sultan's response to a journalist who asks why his wife left him: “Lugaiyan paida hi ladaai karne ke liye hoti hain.”

The second half of Sultan, which drops the inane gags for a succession of dramatic wrestling matches, is much more watchable than the first, though it does lay on the Salman body-building and sacrifice stuff a bit thick. But then that's true of the film as a whole. For instance, the recurring trope of Sultan as turning himself into a saand, a bull who cannot be broken. Those words are actually used to describe him by his coach (a believably cynical Randeep Hooda). The theme is underlined by the portrayal of Sultan as a man who achieves the impossible twice, out of stubbornness – or to put it exactly, bull-headedness. But what's interesting is how the visual imagery reiterates this idea of Sultan as a bull: not wild, but a strong beast of burden. Sultan's first attempt to train himself involves strapping himself to a wooden plough and dragging it through the fields; later he pulls a tractor, and a cart.

There's some heavily-underlined dialogue about the kisaan and the pehelwaan to add to this. And a dose of present-day patriotism is thrown in, with Parikshit Sahni's mild criticism of his English-speaking son's generation for thinking everything imported is cool. The son-of-the-soil as the underdog who trumps the firangs (white and black, though the final defending champion is of course, white) is a crowdpleasing theme if ever there was one – though of course his desi wrestling style only becomes a buzzword when he's forced to abandon its rules for a televised freestyle contest. As Zafar manages to make his Haryanvi Muslim protagonist say at a moment when he seems at a loss for words: 'Bharat mata ki jai'.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 July 2016.

All That Glitters

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

As flamboyant and luxurious as the Art Deco era it's set in, Bombay Velvet ends up being all shine and little soul.

A little boy comes to Bombay, his mother earns a living as a sex worker, he becomes a small-time crook. Then his mother runs away with his ill-begotten stroke of luck (gold biscuits, no less), and he decides to become a big-time crook. The steep rise of the local hoodlum unfolds against the backdrop of the spectacular growth of the city itself, and is clearly meant to echo it. Like Ranbir Kapoor's Johnny Balraj, we're shown a Bombay that thinks it can do better -- be larger, get grander, become what The Roaring Twenties (the James Cagney film referenced here) would call a "big shot". 

With Bombay Velvet, director Anurag Kashyap, too, has made the big filmi film he wanted to make, complete with old-movie childhoods for the hero, heroine and hero's best friend. But sadly, neither this, nor the spectacular visual recreation of 60s Bombay (on an immaculate set in Sri Lanka), nor the sensational jazzy soundtrack, can make this film the epic it wants to be. 

The primary problem is that the characters do not compute. When we first see our hero, he's a cute little boy with an uncanny resemblance to Ranbir Kapoor, shyly, slyly watching another little boy do the dirty: deliberately bumping into a rich man walking past, so as to swipe his wallet. By the time we see them next, roles seem to have been reversed - shy little Balraj has become the mop-haired, ambitious, stop-at-nothing Ranbir Kapoor, while the expert pickpocket Chiman has become his silent sidekick. We never learn quite why Chiman has lost his panache and signed it over to Balraj. The heroine, meanwhile, makes her entry as a little Goan girl with a golden voice. We skate too smoothly over Rosie's journey from singing in church to sleeping in a rich man's bed, and even more quickly over her escape to Bombay, where she works glumly in a beauty parlour by day and sings Geeta Dutt songs -- even more glumly -- in a bar by night. 

And then everything changes again, faster and more inexplicably than before: Balraj fails at a robbery and acquires an unexpected Parsi benefactor, a man called Kaizad Khambatta who is a bootlegger, real estate shark and tabloid editor rolled into one -- Karan Johar, playing himself with a fake touch of evil. Balraj is quite literally picked up from the Bombay streets and thrown up to an enviable position at the city's Art Deco acme. Anointed Johnny, he becomes the manager of a nightclub that is the emblematic centre of everything that 60s Bombay is: Bombay Velvet, a stunningly re-imagined version of the city's real-life Eros Cinema. Meanwhile our nightingale has acquired a Parsi benefactor, too. Jamshed Mistry is Khambatta's oldest rival, and he, too, runs a newspaper. And sure enough, Rosie, too, gets a position as singer at Bombay Velvet. 

So our hero and heroine are ostensibly all grown up, the stage is set for their epic love story - but they seem like they're just play-acting. Other than a single song picturisation ("Dhadaam-dhadaam"), Anushka Sharma's performance as Rosie has neither oomph nor dard nor Goan-ness. There is more 60s sexiness in Raveena Tandon's minute-long appearance as Rosie's nightclub replacement than there is in Sharma's acres of silken costumes. 

As for Ranbir, he imbues Johnny with hotheaded angst, but we never quite get why Johnny's so angry, either with the world or with Khambatta. We're told he willingly gets his face beaten in every night in the boxing ring, even when he's got a job managing the fanciest club in town. But we never really see why. This is a hitman with many murders to his name, pathologically violent - and yet his fights with his girlfriend are almost childish, with none of the brute force one imagines. And to paint this character as a victim, as the film wants to, would take much more doing. Sharma and Kapoor are talented actors, but they clearly don't yet have it in them to transcend themselves. Satyadeep Mishra, playing Chiman, is perhaps the one actor with a major role to convincingly inhabit it. 

But if the depth of the performances is too little, the spread of the canvas is too wide. Like Dibakar Banerjee in the recent Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, Kashyap and his team of writers (including the historian Gyan Prakash, whose non-fiction book Mumbai Fables is the seedbed of this film) clearly have no dearth of detail. This is Prohibition-era Bombay, where Indians can't get a drink unless they're with a foreigner. It is also Art Deco Bombay, when the young and chic (like Rosie) are moving into multi-storeyed buildings that line the city's seafront. It's the last stage of Back Bay Reclamation, new commercial buildings are being planned, the government is in cahoots with builders and tabloid magnates against mill-workers and union leaders. The film is punctuated with fake tabloid headlines interspersed with real news, and what plot there is revolves around photographs - a 'revealing' advertisement, a blackmail photo that stays secret, and another that gets splashed on the front page. But in trying to capture multiple urban worlds - leisure, commerce, media, politics, crime - the film loses its grip on all of them. 

Bombay Velvet could have been a big shot. But it misfired.