Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

The dreamlife of angels

My Mirror column:

On the eve of the Hindi writer Mannu Bhandari’s 87th birthday on April 3, a look at two films on which she collaborated with director Basu Chatterjee: Rajnigandha (1974) and Swami (1977).

Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha (1974) was one of my favourite Hindi films long before I learnt that it was based on a famous 1960 short story by Mannu Bhandari, one of Hindi’s most well-known modern writers and an important participant in the Nayi Kahani literary movement of the 1960s. The short story, ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, has also been wonderfully translated into English by Ruth Vanita as ‘This is the Truth’, published as part of Vanita’s 2013 anthology ‘Alone Together’.

Even though it came into the world first, reading ‘Yahi Sach Hai’ for me involved working backwards from the 1974 romantic film I had grown up on. As always when a film colonises one’s imagination first, it is difficult to populate the literary work with people different from those that have impressed themselves on screen. My mind kept wanting to turn the Deepa of Bhandari’s story into the doe-eyed Vidya Sinha, and her Sanjay into the ever-smiling Amol Palekar. The imperative is strong because the cinematic adaptation really seems to ‘get’ Bhandari’s characters, deepening and broadening what we know about them and their context in ways that seem exactly right.

The film makes three fundamental changes. One, Sanjay gets a meatier role, with gossipy colleagues, office politics and a backstory for his wooing of Deepa. Two, Deepa’s old flame Nishith is renamed Naveen, with his “long hair like a poet” becoming “hippie jaise baal” in the case of the film’s Dinesh Thakur. Third, crucially, Deepa’s journey from Kanpur to Calcutta is brilliantly transformed into a Delhi-Bombay trip, with Delhi — and Sanjay — playing charming provincials to Bombay’s — and Naveen’s — sophisticated urbanity. Beyond these, however, Chatterjee remains faithful to the story, presenting us with what remains a rare Hindi film portrayal of a woman choosing between two romantic prospects.

When we meet Deepa, she is awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend Sanjay: a nice, chatty, predictable man who can turn even a romantic gesture like bringing flowers into a ritual: “Once I happened to mention that I like tuberoses very much, so he has made it a rule to bring a whole lot of them every fourth day...” She is totally convinced that Sanjay is her real love and that her teenage attachment to Nishith (Naveen) was an illusion — until she meets him again. The film takes Bhandari’s diary-like structure and transforms it into something breezily cinematic, with long shots of Deepa and Naveen enjoying the freedom of Bombay interspersed with close-ups of Deepa’s luminous face. “Proximity, distance and loneliness work to bring to the fore different emotions as the young female narrator convinces herself she is in love with one or the other man,” writes Vanita in her introduction. “Throughout the story Bhandari uses variants of the words sach, sachmuch (true, truly) as Deepa insists on the lasting truth and reality of states of mind that the reader increasingly perceives as fleeting.”

Recently, I watched another Basu Chatterjee film in which Mannu Bhandari had had an important role to play: 1977’s Swami, starring Shabana Azmi and Girish Karnad. Rajnigandha won a Filmfare award for Best Picture, Swami won it for Best Director, Best Actress and Best Story. The credit for the film’s story went to the long-departed and legendary Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. But as I watched a youthful, rather frisky Shabana Azmi — Saudamini, better known as Mini — forced to forego a long-time romantic attachment to her childhood acquaintance Naren (Vikram) in favour of marriage to the stable widower Ghanshyam (Girish Karnad), I was suddenly reminded of Rajnigandha. I haven’t read the Sarat Chandra story, but it seemed to me quite remarkable how much the clean-scrubbed smiling face of Sanjay in Rajnigandha resembled the always-radiant, patient Ghanshyam (Karnad) in Swami.

If we stay with that train of thought, then both films turn out to have parallels that go beyond two masculine types —and that seem to me possibly informed by Bhandari’s own particular concerns. The context in which Swami unfolds is very different from Rajnigandha — 19th century Bengal. But Mini, like Deepa, has had the privilege of an education and Naren, as the philosophical interlocutor of her youth, holds out the possibility of freedom to pursue her intellectual interests — just like Naveen and the job he helps her get in Bombay.

In Swami, too, the moment of truth is propelled by the arrival of the heroine’s previous lover, and in a moment of passion, she abandons the gentle stability of the husband she has been trying to accept as love for a remembered excitement that she once defined love as.

In Bhandari’s ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, Deepa gets the job of teaching in a Bombay college, but the letter Nishith writes to inform her of this makes none of the revived romantic overtures she is now expecting. The story ends with Sanjay’s arrival, who, looking at her distraught face, assumes that she hasn’t got the job. She falls into his arms gratefully, not telling him that she in fact has.

But this is more open-ended than the film version, where Deepa declares she doesn’t want the job and Sanjay’s promotion will ensure that her life is the one he creates for her — not the one she might have created for herself. As in Swami, the instability of romantic love and mental companionship is traded for the calm security of marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1st April 2018.