Learning of love

My Mirror column:

From Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, what propels so many writers and filmmakers to turn the child’s gaze upon adults in the throes of desire?

“Jouve’s sister was unbearably beautiful,” begins the voiceover of François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (The Brats), as Bernadette Lafont cycles through the historic streets of De Nimes – her slim, leggy frame suspended effortlessly over her bicycle, her skirt billowing in the breeze, such a vision of lightness that she seems barely to touch the ground. What we watch is five boys watching this young woman. The eponymous “brats” of the film’s title follow Bernadette everywhere, first with their eyes and then by actually stalking her, alone or with her lover Gerard.

 

Truffaut, a film critic who had made his first short Une Visite in 1954, thought of Les Mistons (1957) as his “first real film”. Certainly, it already contains many themes he would continue to explore over his cinematic career – women as objects of desire that seem to mystify men, a certain realist poetry of everyday life, the unexpected rupture presented by death. What interests me most, though, is the theme of adult behaviour – in particular, sexual passion or what Truffaut's narrator calls amour – as seen through the eyes of children. The boys in the film are arrested by this young woman’s beauty, transfixed by the stirrings of a desire they do not even understand, and irritated by the fact of the lovers without quite knowing why.
 
When she leaves her bicycle to swim in a shaded grove, they gather round to sniff it like little puppies, one of them even delivering a slow-motion kiss on the seat where her posterior has recently rested. Categorised only as “unbearable”, the one-sided attraction they feel mutates into something else: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”

 

The child on the cusp of adolescence becoming smitten for the first time has been the subject of many books and films over the years. In LP Hartley’s 1953 classic The Go-Between, which Joseph Losey made into a famous 1971 film starring Julie Christie, the young narrator Leo recalls the shaping summer of his childhood in which he first felt attraction. “My sister is very beautiful,” his friend Marcus tells him one day, and after that, “for a time my idea of [Marian] as a person was confused and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented.” Once Leo helps Marian dry her hair, and Hartley describes the immersiveness of the experience evocatively: “I was the bathing suit on which her hair was spread: I was her drying hair, I was the wind that dried it.”

When Marian embarks on a secret, torrid, socially unsuitable affair with a local farmer called Ted Burgess, Leo finds himself turned into their messenger. The child enables the adult relationship. But jealous, torn between his desire to please Marian and his own inarticulate feeling for her, and childishly blind to what is really at stake, he is also the one that brings it to its tragic end.

 

The Go-Between, with its sun-kissed sexual innocence and stark coming of age, is likely to have been among the inspirations for Atonement, Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel, which was adapted into the Joe Wright film. Like Leo, the 13-year-old Briony is responsible for the betrayal that drives apart the two adults she is close to, based on her childish misunderstanding of a charged sexual moment she witnesses between the socially transgressive lovers.
 
Paresh Kamdar’s under-watched, atmospheric film Khargosh (2009) has a very similar story to The Go-Between. The child protagonist Bantu becomes a go-between for his older friend Avneesh, and slowly finds himself enraptured by the girl Avneesh is besotted with, whom the film nicknames Mrityu (Death).
 
More recently, we have had Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, whose take on exploratory sexual urges is several shades darker, and perhaps more layered than any of these other films. For one, Haraamkhor contains two levels of watching and watchers. An adolescent schoolgirl (superbly played by Shweta Tripathi) in a dusty North Indian town becomes morbidly attracted to her maths tuition teacher (a scarily believable Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after she spies on him having sex with his wife. But the 15-year-old Sandhya has her own set of stalkers: two younger boys in the same tuition class, one of whom thinks he is in love with her. The film steers us between these different gazes, refusing to let us rest easy. One moment, we wait with baited breath with Sandhya in an abortion clinic – but then almost immediately find ourselves confronted by her childish exuberance as she licks an ice-cream and ribs her lover-teacher-exploiter about what he’s going to tell his wife. We begin by giggling as the two boys hatch plans for Sandhya to see Kamal naked, because if a man and a woman see each other naked, “toh unki shaadi pakki”. But as the film draws to its denouement, the dusty haze and windmills gather into a terrible, tragic downpour, childish naivete leading somehow inexorably into life-altering errors.

Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes the child’s-eye view so terrifying. Examined through the frank gazes of children, the lives of adults don’t seem that foolproof any more.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Dec 2019

Growing up is hard to do

My Mirror column:

Shlok Sharma's Haraamkhor makes you think about sex and seduction – and about the meaning of adulthood.

In November 2015, I wrote a column called 'The Age of Discovery' about two wonderful films, one British and the other American, in which teenage girls embark on relationships with much older men. I was struck then by the fact that Lone Scherfig's An Education (2009) and Marielle Heller's The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) were both directed by women, and based on real-life accounts. Scherfig drew on Lynn Barber's much-feted memoir, while Heller adapted Phoebe Gloeckner's autobiographical graphic novel.

These youthful female protagonists were remarkable because they were frank sexual beings: their desires launching them on journeys that were joyful and excited, confused and sad in equal measure. I had written of my desire to see Hindi cinema create such a character: “What would be truly remarkable would be to see the world through the eyes of a young girl (and not in the thoroughly exploitative manner of Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd).”

Shlok Sharma's marvellously assured debut Haraamkhor has fulfilled that wish of mine. Actress Shweta Tripathi, all sweetness and light as the lovely Shalu in Masaan, transforms herself into something much less sunny here. A 15-year-old schoolgirl in a dusty North Indian kasba, Tripathi's Sandhya is a tightly clenched bundle of contradictions, masking childish neediness with prickly displays of self-assurance.

The generalised loneliness of adolescence is deepened here by the absence of a mother (interestingly, Minnie in The Diary had an absent father). Here, Sandhya's father, a police officer who spends a lot of time away from home, guards secrets of his own – he is not forbidding, but he's not exactly a pillar of emotional support.

Rather than boring into his characters' minds to uncover every single thing that motivates them, Sharma chooses a glancing, sideways approach (the one time a character – Nilu Aunty – explains her motivations, the film falters). So Sandhya's immense vulnerability is not really apparent to us, or perhaps even to herself – until she acts. And even then it is not as if the objective facts (of her motherlessness, or her newness in town, or her father's distance) are marshalled to explain her attraction to her tuition teacher, a man who seems not particularly scintillating and often borderline sleazy.

This refusal to explain everything is what makes the film so rich and strange, because, of course, this is how things are in life. We may pretend that everything that happens is straightforward and explicable, but much of the time we have only the faintest idea why the people around us are doing what they're doing. Often that applies to our own behaviour as well.

This state of bafflement is amplified when you're young; the questions in your head are barely articulable. So the teenaged Sandhya's fascination with Shyam, like Minnie's with the 35-year-old Monroe, is at least partly a fascination with sex itself. The rapt gaze Sandhya turns upon Shyam making love to his wife is the radical moment of recognition, where both suddenly see each other as sexual beings. 

The naive child protagonist has been an evocative route into sex and romance, from Leo in LP Hartley's 1953 classic The Go-Between to the child who takes messages between adult lovers in Paresh Kamdar's dreamlike 2008 film Khargosh. But Haraamkhor does something exceptional: it fills the milieu round its central pair with little boys in whom that naivete is mixed in with the ribald humour that apparently stands in for sexuality in the Indian little boy psyche (some Indian men, sadly, never seem to discover another sexual register).

Sharma's non-judgemental approach seems especially important in the case of a character like Shyam, who could so easily have been slotted as pure evil -- the seducing villain, the duplicitous married man, the adult who preys on one someone who is not. Because, of course, he is these things: a person exploiting the power of adulthood. But Haraamkhor insists on showing us his weaknesses, too: his childlike excitement at driving a Luna, his fear of Sandhya's policeman father combined with his unquestioning admiration of his social status, his vacillation in the face of choices he knows to be mistaken.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui's performance alternately elicits laughter and disdain (it is a two-step dance he has done before, for example as the convict Liak in Badlapur). It is a marvellous rendition of masculinity as the constantly fluctuating thing it has to be: boosted by admiration, tempted by lust, cowering in the face of power, lashing out in helpless anger when faced with the possibility of a public shaming -- and sometimes stepping back from selfish instrumentalism to some inner reserve of tenderness. Perhaps in truth the malaise runs wider than masculinity – adulthood, as some wise internet writer recently said, is itself a constant performance, in which we are found wanting more often than we would like.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Jan 2017.

Rabbit In Wonderland: Paresh Kamdar's Khargosh

Paresh Kamdar’s stunningly evocative film Khargosh (2008) is set in what seems like the perfect small town, all quiet sloping streets, serene riverside idylls and fields of golden wheat. As if in a painting, the bleached whites and dull browns of a dusty north Indian summer are set off by accents of red: crimson flags flutter atop a crumbling stone temple, a rusty lamp juts out from a wall, a scarlet dupatta floats down into a whitewashed school building. But Kamdar is quick to dispel any illusions one might have about accessing some picture-perfect slice of Indian reality. “The school and the ghat are in Maheshwar, on the Narmada; the house is in Vidisha, 45 km from Bhopal; the forest is Borivili National Park – and the dark staircase? That’s a set!” he says gleefully.

The 52-year-old Kamdar has always enjoyed subverting expectations. As the eldest child of a Gujarati family that had lived in Kolkata for five generations, it was assumed he would do a B.Com and join the khandani business. Instead, the teenaged Kamdar accompanied his Bengali landlord, a cameraman, to the sets of Uttam Kumar films. Starting out by holding the star’s cigarettes while he shot his scenes, he grew increasingly fascinated with the world of cinema. “The elevated status of art in Kolkata, especially for a Gujju with none of this in his background, gave it an aspirational quality,” says Kamdar. Bored with college and out to irritate his father, he joined a German class. He was soon part of a young arty circle, doing plays and dreaming of cinema. It was in the Max Mueller Bhavan canteen that he heard of the Film and Television Institute (FTII), and joined to study editing in 1983. “Kitabein toh padh hi rakhi thi, about editing being about sculpting time and all that,” grins Kamdar. “Plus I thought haath ka kaam hai, at least I won’t go hungry.”

After FTII, Kamdar worked as an editor with filmmakers like Nandan Kudhyadi and Kumar Shahani (he won the 1994 National Award for editing Kudhyadi’s Rasayatra, about vocalist Mallikarjun Mansur). He made “unexciting” documentaries for three years, so as to travel in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. His first film, Tunnu ki Tina (1996), a black comedy about a lower middle class Mumbai family “trapped between entrenched orthodoxies and new consumerist fantasies”, was funded by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). “But NFDC wouldn’t screen it, so I made a VHS copy and started showing it to critics,” says Kamdar. A screening at Delhi’s India International Centre led Cinemaya editor Aruna Vasudev to push for a premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

Tunnu’s black humour was continued in Sirf Tumhari (1998), a short about the fantastic secret escapades of a middle class housewife. A long funding crunch, interspersed with teaching, ended with Johnny Johnny Yes Papa (2008), a neorealist film about an unworldly father and a worldly son. But it is with Khargosh that Kamdar has finally been able to make the film he wanted to make, where the narrative – a 10-year-old boy becoming a go-between for two lovers – is secondary. “I wanted to achieve a certain rhythm, a certain sound, an imagery that would create a particular cinematic experience,” says Kamdar. “It’s not realist. It’s subjectively unreal. But I was sure it had an audience.”

Of the three awards Kamdar walked away with at Osian’s Cinefan, it’s the Audience Award he treasures most. This is just a start.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 45 Dated November 14, 2009