A Punjab state of mind

My Mirror column, on the film you must watch in theatres this week:

Chauthi Koot unfolds as an atmospheric, deliberately elliptical journey into 1984 Punjab. But it keeps you on edge.

There are few parts of India so powerfully embedded in the popular cinematic imagination as Punjab. This mythical Bollywood Punjab is all mustard fields and aloo parathas, brimming with bubbly girls whose hands in marriage must be won by boring a heart-shaped hole through some Punjabi patriarch's rough-and-tough exterior.

In recent years, there have been occasional departures from this image: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012) unpicked the smooth surface of the rural Punjabi family to reveal something charmingly bumpy and dysfunctional; earlier this year Udta Punjab produced a nerve-jangling portrait of the prosperous state as wracked by drug addiction. Outside the mainstream Hindi cinema context, Anup Singh's beautifully shot Qissa (2015) offered an unsettling window into Punjabi masculinity, potentially tying it to the trauma of Partition.

Men on the train: a still from Chauthi Koot

Another vision of Punjab can be seen in theatres this week, in Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction). Having premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year and won the National Award for Best Punjabi Film, Chauthi Koot is the second feature film directed by Gurvinder Singh, whose bleak but atmospheric portrait of rural Punjab, Anhey Ghore Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse, 2011), won awards internationally as well as in India. Based on a novel by the famous Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh, Anhe Ghore followed the fortunes of a lower-caste family of landless farm workers in a Punjab that had reached the fag-end of the Nehruvian era with many of its inhabitants left out of the state's fabled progress into modernity. Chauthi Koot also draws on the work of a well-known Punjabi writer, Waryam Singh Sandhu, combining two of his short stories to craft a tense, absorbing take on the Punjab of the 1980s, when the Sikh militant movement for a separate state of Khalistan was at its peak.

Singh's exceptionally assured filmmaking makes no attempt to take on the violence head-on, instead circling around the horrific moment of crisis in 1984 when militants holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar were gunned down by the army, bringing the confrontation between Indira Gandhi's government and the militancy to a head. The closest we get to Operation Bluestar is a BBC radio broadcast ("Rama Pandey se Hindi mein samachar suniye"). Yet so carefully calibrated is the film's feeling of constriction that right from the start, when we see two men on a bus, waiting to get off, we are drawn into their anxiety.

They walk at a frenetic pace through a crowded gali lined with shops, almost run through a wedding procession, and climb the stairs to a railway station, but as soon as they look out over the platform, we know that they are too late. They wait. They watch as uniformed men walk around the station, getting their boots polished till they gleam. They watch as the train trundles in, and men draped in shawls get off, bundles in their hands. And we watch with them, on tenterhooks, having absorbed the slow menace in the air.

The genius of Singh's film is that we don't actually know what we're waiting for. But it doesn't matter, because we're hooked, watching. And watching this film, unlike the process of watching Hollywood-style suspense, does not involve speed. So we have time, somehow, to look at the poster of Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh selling glucose biscuits, or the Campa Cola sign that glows dully in red and white, the same colours as the station's plaster arch. And yet the pace does not slack. With every unexplained urgent request, every unannotated new presence, we push our imaginations to work: who are these men? Why are they in such a rush? Who are the strangers already sitting in the compartment? Why did the guard let them in and not these two?

Let me not, however, make it seem that watching Chauthi Koot is like watching some detective story. Because Singh's cinematic technique, redolent as it is of mystery, has little interest in resolutions of the sort we are used to. One of the most striking ways in which he demonstrates this is when halfway through the first narrative, he decides to introduce another. It is framed as what we might ordinarily call a flashback: one of the men on the train remembers something that happened a few months ago. But Singh refuses to stick the narrative rules of cinema -- one man's memory leads us into another man's life, producing an elliptical account that might puzzle viewers who are adamant on knowing how we know what we know.

In the courtyard: a still from Chauthi Koot

The second narrative, involving a family who find themselves endangered by their dog's natural instincts, brings us face to face with both militants and police. But again, the tensest moments are not those in which either militant or police violence seems imminent. The film reaches its acme in the relationship between man and dog, forcing us to complicate any easy notions of innocence and victimhood.

But a simple moral resolution is not Singh's style. There are no villains, no heroes. In collaboration with Satya Rai Nagpaul's arresting cinematography and Susmit Bob Nath's brilliant sound design, he makes every lined and unlined face on screen form part of this Punjab that but for him, we would never see. And yet, for me the film's most transporting sequence was a storm — during which 'nothing' happens. In an interview, Singh told me that while filming, he replaced a crucial bit of drama in the script with the storm. This is pure cinematic magic, where images and sounds that have no obvious connection come together to create the film — in our minds.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7th August 2016. 

Bringing out the Bubbly - II

My Mumbai Mirror column for Jan 17, 2016.

Last Monday's column listed 4 of my favourite Indian films from 2015. Here are 6 others to make up my top ten.

Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost - The primary premise of Anup Singh's film is a man's desperate desire for a son, and the lengths to which he will go to fulfil it. This memorable plot - about a girl raised as a boy, and what happens when this 'boy' is married off to another girl - shares much with a Vijaydan Detha folktale called 'Dohri Zindagi', which Singh sadly does not credit. But Qissa goes far beyond this, linking the strange, tragic tale of one family with an oblique, haunting vision of the effects of Partition. Cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid captures Singh's deliberately dreamlike world of portents and symbols in images of startling beauty. With outstanding turns from Irrfan Khan, Tisca Chopra, Rasika Dugal and Tilottama Shome, and a stellar Punjabi soundtrack from Madan Gopal Singh, this is one of the year's most unforgettable films. 

NH10 -- The director-screenwriter team of Navdeep Singh and Sudip Sharma pull off a tremendous feat: creating a nail-biting genre thriller where the horror turns on caste, class and gender dynamics in India today. Anushka Sharma - who also stepped in as co-producer - gives an exhilarating performance as one half of a Gurgaon couple who step out of their upper-middle-class lakshman rekha and find themselves more vulnerable than they could have imagined: as a cop tells Sharma's Meera, where Gurgaon's last mall ends, so does the power of the Constitution. A gruelling but ultimately cathartic cinematic experience, NH10 is unmissable for anyone with an interest in contemporary India. 

Killa - The latest in a growing sub-genre of Marathi cinema which takes a child's-eye view of the world, Avinash Arun's stellar debut is set in a lovely Konkan town dominated by palm-fringed beaches and the ruined fort of the film's title. What Killa does with consummate ease is conjure up both the wonder and the pain that the smallest of experiences can elicit at that age: a gift, a letter, a promise, a visit. It is a coming-of-age narrative full of understated beauty and quietly affecting acting, especially from Archit Deodhar as the eleven year old Chinmay and the always marvellous Amruta Subhash as his mother. 

Hunterrr -- Harshvardhan Kulkarni's refreshing debut also draws on the experience of growing up in Maharashtrian small towns, except it's made in Hindi, and allows its young protagonists to be sexual beings. Kulkarni's remembered boyhood world of juvenile pissing contests and morning shows give its rather gray hero Mandar Ponkshe (Gulshan Devaiah, superb) a warmly believable history (though the film does end up with a few too many flashbacks and cinematic sleights of hand). Many slotted Hunterrr as a Masti-type sex comedy, which it is far from. It has its flaws, but it's as hilarious and honest a portrayal as we have of the lustful Indian man we all know. It made me hope that we will soon have a film about the lustful Indian woman we also all know. 

Badlapur -- Sriram Raghavan's newest noir shares less with his well-loved Johnny Gaddaar than with the almost-a-decade old Ek Haseena Thi. In both Ek Haseena Thi and Badlapur, Raghavan's interest is in the hardening of innocents, and how long people can spend possessed by the idea of vengeance. The other commonality between the two films is the director's continued interest in the experience of prison - as a microcosm of the world at its worst, but also as a refuge from the world. 

But what makes Badlapur really stand out for me as Raghavan's most sophisticated work is how cleverly he subverts our deepest assumptions about good and evil, justice and injustice. And he extracts brilliantly nuanced performances from his actors to this end. Huma Qureishi and Nawazuddin Siddiqui play off each other with such freshness that you can barely remember they have been paired before (in Gangs of Wasseypur 2), while Varun Dhawan's role extends the young actor in several unexpected directions, and yet never stretches him too thin. The minor characters are also a pleasure - I particularly enjoyed watching Ashwini Khalsekar and Radhika Apte. This is deeply satisfying noir - and yet it adds up to much more than the sum of its twists. 

Court -- The courtroom has long been a staple site of Hindi film melodrama, a place where ostensibly legal battles are fought in terms of good and evil. Chaitanya Tamhane, however, follows in the wake of such recent films as Jolly LLB (2013), Dekh Tamasha Dekh (2014) and Shahid (2013), which have all pointed to the absurdity of what passes for adjudication in contemporary India. But Jolly LLB and Dekh Tamasha Dekh took the satirical route, while Hansal Mehta's wonderful Shahid - a biopic of the real-life lawyer Shahid Azmi - was searingly realist. Court does something a little more oblique. By taking something that ought to be ridiculous - a folk singer, lok shahir, being charged with abetment to suicide for singing a song - and showing us how the court treats it with perfect seriousness, Court produces an effect more devastating than satire. Tamhane's style - and his entire team, including sound and camera - draws on the documentary filmmaking tradition, producing a superbly crafted fiction that has the observational ring of truth. Judgement is left to us, the viewers. Court announces an indisputably original new voice in Indian filmmaking.

Picture This: Dark waters

My BL Ink column:

Bhaskar Hazarika’s striking directorial debut, Kothanodi, turns the magic realism of the Assamese folk tale into something ominous

A man buries newborn babies in a dark forest. A woman gives birth to a vegetable, and is driven out of her village. A young girl called Tejimola is tortured by her evil stepmother. A captured python is welcomed as a bridegroom for a young woman.

Bhaskar Hazarika’s debut feature Kothanodi (River of Stories), just back from Busan and London for its Indian premiere at Mumbai’s Jio MAMI festival, weaves elements of four Assamese folk tales into a weird, unsettling tapestry. In its matter-of-fact melding of the supernatural with the everyday, Hazarika’s film follows in the footsteps of previous attempts to translate folktales to the Indian screen. Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), though not itself a folktale, was based on a folk-style story about a pair of tone-deaf musicians, by Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore Raychaudhury, who was famed for his retellings of Bangla folk tales. Ray’s adaptation struck a cheerfully irreverent note, giving his ghosts a caste system, and making the Bhooter Raja, the King of Ghosts, speak in Ray’s own voice, with a layer of metallic vibration akin to the sound of a fast-forwarded audio cassette.

The late Vijaydan Detha’s retellings of Rajasthani folktales have been the other big source of folktale adaptations in Indian cinema. The least watched of these are Shyam Benegal’s Charandas Chor (1975) — in which Smita Patil made her debut — and Prakash Jha’s terrifying moral fable, Parinati (The Inevitable, 1989). Another of Dan Detha’s tales forms the basis of two films that couldn’t be more different from each other. Mani Kaul’s Duvidha (1973) is a classic of the Indian New Wave, where the dazzling white light of the Rajasthani sun alternates with dark shadows and quivering silences. Amol Palekar’s Paheli, which took on the same story in 2005, is a rather too-well-appointed mainstream drama, but Rani Mukerji and Shah Rukh Khan managed to imbue the relationship between young bride and shapeshifting ghost with affecting chemistry (despite the distractions of too much Tanishq jewellery). A ghost was also crucial to Anup Singh’s beautifully crafted Qissa (2015), whose disturbing plot about a girl raised as a boy by her stubborn father shares much with another Dan Detha tale, 'Dohri Zindagi' (A Double Life).

But where all of these films deal with the supernatural either bouncily or in a haunting, melancholy register, Hazarika’s chosen rasa is bhayaanaka. Shot in the Assamese island of Majuli, Kothanodi immerses us in a watery world of bamboo forest and river, its brilliant greens set off by the scarlet of women’s sindoor-filled partings and paan-stained mouths. The sunlit lushness of this world does not, however, preclude the possibility of dark things lurking beneath the surface. In one long early sequence, as a solitary woman makes her way across the verdant Assamese landscape, crossing field and water and forest, a vegetable rolls along behind her. It is an ou tenga, an elephant-apple, a staple of Assamese cuisine. What could be more innocuous than a vegetable? And yet, as the ou tenga manages to find its way across marsh and river, even persistently rolling up the bamboo stilts of the Mishing-style house in which the woman lives, it fills us with a sense of foreboding. On the soundscape, too, the chirping of birds is overlaid by jeering children; lapping water by the threatening creak of bamboo.

Unlike in the Western horror film trope of something external disturbing the placidity of a rural idyll, here the sources of danger are concealed within the everyday. In the true magic realist tradition of the folk tale, anyone and everything might be magic. Vegetables might contain spirits, a snake might be a god — and conversely, children might be devils, or women witches. Sometimes the protagonists misidentify one for the other. Sometimes the film plays on our fearfulness: our inability to tell whether something is simply what it seems to be, or a magical creature yet to reveal its true form. Sometimes this feeling is twisted into another sort of chilling statement, such as when a mother tells her daughter, “Can one be scared of one’s own husband?”

Hazarika adapted the stories from Laxminath Bezbaroa’s Buri ai’r Xadhu (Grandmother’s Tales); shortening some, altering others and emphasising their macabre qualities. Some tales work better than others. Perhaps the least effective is the one about the buried babies, partly because its climactic sequences suddenly expose the film’s low budget. The tale of the python’s wedding was for me the most powerful, aided by a bone-chilling performance from the ever-stellar Seema Biswas. The other well-known actor in the film is Adil Hussain (English Vinglish, Life of Pi, Umrika) who bridges two tales — he is both the father of the tortured Tejimola, and the curious merchant who becomes interested in the mysterious ou tenga.

I found it striking that Kothanodi’s makers went out of their way to produce what they conceive of as a timeless Assamese landscape. Populated by beautiful wooden almirahs, carved canoes and hand-drawn grindstones, this pre-technological idyll seems clearly datable to the 19th century. There are no telephones, no cars, no buses, or even bicycles. The greatest treasures are gold jewellery and woven textile, for which women are ready to die — and to kill. This is a seemingly pristine world, unspoilt by modernity — and yet not untainted by evil.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 24th Oct 2015.

Through a glass, darkly: a view of Qissa

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday: 

Yes, it's in Punjabi and you'll probably need the English subtitles, but Anup Singh's striking, stately film might just be the most original thing you'll see in Indian cinemas this year.

Kanwar's father teaches him all the important things about being a boy: how to shoot wild bears, how to drive a truck, how to look away when your sisters are being beaten up. 

Except Kanwar isn't a boy. She's a girl. 

After having sired three daughters, Umber Singh decides that his fourth child will be a son. And so when the baby is born, he refuses to countenance the truth. Kanwar's truth will henceforth be what Umber Singh says it is. And yet, can fate be so simply undone? 

Anup Singh's Qissa, which finally releases in theatres, online and on DVD this week after having been completed in 2013, is a brilliant, haunting film: one that will continue to unfurl in your mind's eye long after it has finished playing out on the screen. For one, it contains images of startling beauty -- a group of women delivering a baby out in the open, in the otherworldly glow of several small fires; a child being hoisted down into the depths of a well; a village gathered in clapping, raucous joy round a Lohri bonfire; a child watching a mother bathe, spellbound by the loveliness of her long hair descending wetly down her naked back. (For these we should thank the film's German cinematographer, Sebastian Edschmid). 

But the film also stays with you because of unforgettable performances from its actors (Irffan Khan, Tisca Chopra, Rasika Dugal and Tilottama Shome), who bring many layers to the tragic predicament of its characters: a whole family of women embalmed in a web of deceit by the chilling, desperate desire of a single man. 

While placing itself squarely in the historic setting of Partition, Qissa staunchly refuses a prosaic realism for something vaster and more affecting, something mythic. And even as a Partition tale, the film has none of the frenetic pace we have come to expect from the genre: even as the whole village hides out in the fields at night, or piles into bullock carts with makeshift gathris of their belongings, there is a slow, dreamlike deliberation to the proceedings. 

The most celebrated depictions of sub-continental 1947 violence have tended to make the madness seem nasty, brutish and short, a la Manto. There is, of course, something to be said for that view of things, but what Qissa is interested in is a longue duree view of Partition. In Anup Singh's haunting, oblique vision, Partition is not so much an eventful upheaval in people's physical lives as it is a terrible, long-term process of mental attrition. 

But what, you might ask, is the connection between Partition and Umber Singh's strange, dreadful decision to bring up his youngest daughter as his "put"? Is there one? This is too subtle a film to state anything overtly, and while some viewers might prefer their arguments to be hammered home, for me the film's power lay (at least partially) in its open-endedness. It is a quality that only a story can have; because a tale can feel true in ways that an argument could never manage to. 

Yet there are hints of the paths along which the film's makers might wish us to walk. Uprooted from everything he knew by an accident of history, a man makes up his mind that he will be the master of the rest of his fate. But what he wants from fate is a son to continue his line. So when fate deals him what he thinks is the wrong hand, he decides to try and cheat fate. He takes the poor child from the embrace of her mother (Tisca Chopra in a heartbreaking role), makes her bind her chest and do kasrat, and believe herself superior to her sisters. 

The film pits one man's indomitable will against the collective strength of his wife and daughters and daughter-in-law, and it would seem that the women come out the losers. But neither does Umber Singh win. 

What afflicts Umber Singh is a desire that most men in the subcontinent have been brought up to consider quite normal. By presenting that 'normal' desperation for a son as the madness it is, Qissa does something powerful to our sense of normality. The film challenges the normal in other ways, too: by setting up a convincing teenage flirtation between the tightly-coiled Kanwar (Shome) and the carefree gypsy girl Neeli (Dugal). The initial frisson between them has at least something to do with Neeli's 'low-caste' status as a kanjar, which would make her an 'inappropriate' mate for Umbar Singh's son - but it is what happens after Neeli discovers the truth that makes Qissa so remarkable. 

This is a film full of portents and symbols, objects that seem to suggest more than what they are. The poisoned well, the smoky mirror, the abandoned house and the newly-inhabited one, these are all lenses through which to view the tragedy that Qissa wishes us to see. But what refuses to be laid to rest is the ghost of our unfulfilled desires. Perhaps what we need is to dream new dreams.