Who's that on the phone?

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Director Anurag Kashyap's thought-provoking new thriller, Ugly, paints a chilling picture of the world we live in, and technology is the throbbing, ticking time-bomb at its heart.

The prize scene in Anurag Kashyap's Ugly -- the scene people were still discussing as they walked out of the theatre, despite all the harrowing things that came after -- is a conversation about mobile phones. A posse of Mumbai policemen are grilling two men because a third man (whom they were chasing on foot) came in front of a car and died. The first man explains that they were looking for a little girl who had disappeared from a parked car. The other man says, "I went in the other direction, and I was asking this guy if he'd seen her when his phone began to ring, and my friend's face started flashing on the screen, with the words 'Papa calling'..." 

"'Papa calling!'" the inspector interjects scornfully. How is it possible for a phone to show a picture of the caller, he wants to know. He is disbelieving and caustic, and when the harried men try to humour him by explaining as painstakingly and clearly as possible, he is insulted. Do they think he doesn't know that mobile phones have cameras, huh? 

Girish Kulkarni's watchful, fine-grained performance as the cop who switches constantly between performing high status and low, between kowtowing to his boss and rubbing his suspects' noses in the dust, will hopefully establish the actor -- the pivot of such superb, distinctive Marathi films as Deool and Masala -- in Hindi cinema, too. 

Director Anurag Kashyap gets Kulkarni to play the scene for laughs. But it's the kind of nervous giggle that emerges when you're holding your body taut on the edge of your seat: we know we can't afford to laugh at a cop, no matter how technologically illiterate he may seem. Meanwhile, the repeated phrase 'Papa calling' achieves a kind of talismanic power: you can see how it might seem ridiculous to Kulkarni's sort of cop, imbued with the luxuries of class privilege in terms of both technology and language, and yet, in the context of a kidnapping, it has a desperate urgency. 

What Kashyap does with the smart phone here is nothing short of masterful: he makes technology the focus not just of this scene, but of the film as a whole. If there is a recurring motif in Ugly, it is the phone call. 

Kabeer Kaushik's under-watched Sehar, released a decade ago in 2005, was perhaps the first Hindi crime drama to place the mobile phone squarely at its centre. Kaushik's tightly-scripted tale of the Lucknow police's effort to hit out at organised crime was set in the mid-90s, and actually narrated in the voice of the cellular expert they hired to help them conquer the newly-arrived technology that the gangs they were tracking had already acquired. The cell phone expert in mid-90s Lucknow was a mild-mannered college professor with a salt and pepper beard, played memorably as always by Pankaj Kapur. 

Ten years down the line, Tiwariji has been replaced -- the technology expert is now in-house, and a young woman rather than an older man. Policewoman Upadhyay wears the corporate-professional uniform of collared pinstripe shirt tucked into trousers, her hair in a neat bun and her eyes behind black-rimmed spectacles. (This shift of gender is particularly interesting, given that in Sehar, Tiwariji's aversion to the guns that surrounded him when he started working with the police was incorporated into the film's dominant narrative about masculinity). 
But the technology itself has changed much more than the figure of the expert. Ugly's world is the thoroughly wired one we now live in: a tangled web of I-phones, phone-tapping, recording devices, cyber cafes, credit card numbers and internet-based calling devices. 
Unlike in Sehar, where the technology was an artefact for narrative and historical use, in Ugly it is both that and something more profound. It is a marker of class. It is a part of one's identity. And yet it is also an enabler of anonymity. Everyone can be traced to his or her device, but not every transaction can be traced to a person. 
The cell phone, that appears so frequently now in the discourse of safety as an invincibility shield, is so quickly separated from the kidnapped child that you have to wonder how we believe it to be some sort of prosthetic limb. A man can call his friend from the ether of the internet, and use a recorded voice to be someone else. Husbands can track their wives' phone calls. A brother can blackmail his sister, so long as he can disguise his voice. 

We think we use these devices to speak to each other, Kashyap seems to suggest, and yet these devices stand between us as much as they bring us together. It is a powerfully unsettling thought.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Picture This: The Marathi Renaissance

My BL Ink column:
Exciting work is emerging once again from the land of Prabhat Studios: films with close ties to the social and cultural ground from which they spring.

A still from Nagraj Manjule's superb first feature, Fandry (2013)

I am no expert on Marathi cinema: I live in Delhi and have never seen a Marathi film in the theatre. I don’t even speak the language (though I love the sharply articulated sound of it). But over the last six years or so, I have seen so many interesting Marathi films at festival screenings that I have no hesitation in agreeing with pronouncements of a renaissance. What seems to me truly wonderful is the variety of films being made, and how close their ties are to the social and cultural ground from which they rise. 

Astu, which I saw last week, is named for a Sanskrit word that translates to ‘so be it’. Directed by the long-time director duo Sunil Sukhtankar and Sumitra Bhave, Astu centres on the transformation of a man’s relationship with the world as a result of Alzheimer’s. Mohan Agashe plays a retired Sanskrit professor who goes from being a sagacious old man to an overgrown child. As he loses his memory, his elder daughter Ira (Irawati Harshe) must deal with a father who no longer behaves like a father. But to find the strength to do so, she must first forgive him. Astu offers a quietly terrifying vision of ageing and life: if the growing defencelessness of the old is a regression to childhood, children’s transition to adulthood seems to make them more brutal.

The film might have worked purely as a fraught family portrait. But Bhave and Sukhtankar are interested in something more ambitious. Against the educated upper- middle-class Marathi family with its intellectualised responses and complex dynamics, they pit a poor Telugu-speaking migrant woman who seems instinctively to know what is needed. If she worries, it is only about how to feed another mouth. The veteran Agashe is great at depicting the professor’s increasingly childlike dependence on the goodness of others — and the immensely talented Amruta Subhash won a National Award as the embodiment of that goodness. The filmmakers also make evocative use of an elephant (which Agashe becomes obsessed with) to move the film into a more mythical register, charging the beast with the symbolic heft of his move from culture to nature.

Despite all these things working for it, the film is not flawless. It feels a little flabby, and its father-daughter conversations about philosophy — Zen or Mahabharat — sound pretentious rather than thought-provoking. The final irritant is harder to articulate: there is something deeply Brahminical about the milieu, the characters and their concerns. Nothing wrong with that — a Brahmin subculture is as legitimate as any other, you might say. But there’s something annoying about the film’s almost ideological equation of Sanskrit with the highest form of knowledge, with god-like-ness. And the fact that Brahmin-ness is constantly played on, but never overtly invoked.

That’s the thing about caste at the upper end of the hierarchy — it is made invisible: we’re all supposed to pretend it doesn’t matter. At the lower end of the hierarchy, no one has the luxury of that pretence. So I’m glad that Marathi cinema is beginning to make room for films that speak of — and from — that predicament, too. Baboo Band Baja, made in 2010, centred on a young boy from a community of bandwalas. The film flagged the question of whether the boy could go to school and hope to move out of the system, or be forced to continue in the family profession. Rajesh Pinjani’s decision to embody the two points of view in the mother and father was effective, if a bit ham-handed.

Nagaraj Manjule’s semi-autobiographical Fandry, released in 2013, deals much more frontally with the caste question, interestingly also via a young boy in a rural setting trying to deal with the conflicting imperatives of his home and school milieus. Sanskrit appears in this film, too, though from a very different angle: Jabya’s classmate Vedant Kulkarni, the studious good boy to whom he and his friends go for notes, has (like the adult Ira in Astu) a Sanskrit teacher for a father. Jabya’s own father, in contrast, cannot even read his son’s secret love letter when he stumbles upon it. Caste is a plain fact of life here, and Manjule doesn’t beat around the bush about it. Early in the film we hear Jabya’s mother say how he’d throw even more tantrums if he were fair-skinned — and she’s not joking. When Jabya gets besotted with his classmate Shalu, it’s apparent her fair-skinned Brahmin-ness is crucial to his desire.

Colour is important to Manjule’s film in other ways. It is beautifully shot, with a palette that echoes his theme. The desiccated landscape of rocks and spiny bushes is bleached of all colour, as drab as the lives Jabya and his family live. Jabya’s desire for bright things — and his fruitless search for a mythical bird — shows his world in aching relief.

Other recent Marathi films that have gotten noticed at the National Awards include Gabhricha Paus (The Damned Rain, 2009) about farmer suicides in Vidarbha; Umesh Kulkarni’s Valu, Vihir and 2012’s Deool (the latter is among the more powerful films I’ve seen about the commercialisation of faith), Sujay Dahake’s 2011 paean to school life, Shala; Paresh Mokashi’s Dadasaheb Phalke biopic Harishchandrachi Factory (2009) and Sandesh Kulkarni’s Masala (2012), inspired by the Chordias, a couple who grew from nothing to become owners of a masala empire. Masala is a Guru without the gloss: unlike that glorification of Dhirubhai Ambani’s questionable tactics, Masala makes business seem both honest and admirable.

A lot of Marathi cinema emerges out of a cross-fertilisation with theatre. One can see the difference from Bollywood in the substantial scripts, the use of actors rather than stars, and an attention to locations. Yes, sometimes the films can be verbose, and when they try to cater to the commercial side of things by adding item songs, they can be tacky as well. But on the whole, this is a world well worth trying to enter.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.