Shelf Life -- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Measuring Civilisation

Shelf Life is a monthly column I write on clothes in books.

In RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, clothing makes us human

Banner: Poster for a theatrical adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

When a literary character becomes part of the language, you know that the writer – that strange solitary creature delivering into print the outpourings of her mind – has caught something in the zeitgeist that needed expressing. 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', thought up by Robert Louis Stevenson when Longman's Magazine requested a ghost story for their 1885 Christmas Special, first gained popularity as a “shilling shocker” or “penny dreadful”, a novel of crime or violence sold cheaply. Soon it seemed the Victorian parable par excellence – the respectable Dr Jekyll whose secret sinful side walks the streets as the evil Mr. Hyde was a fitting fictional allegory for an era of repressed feeling. But the “Jekyll and Hyde” idea acquired much wider resonance, the temptation of immorality striking a chord with anyone who has ever hidden a part of themselves from society, or suppressed their transgressive desires.

Book covers of RL Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde over the years.

Stevenson's writing may seem long-winded to the 21st century reader, but it is spare, offering detailed descriptions only when necessary to his narrative – the feel of the neighbourhood in which Hyde is first seen, the spatial arrangements of Dr Jekyll's house. Since we never hear of Dr Jekyll's clothes, we assume they were appropriate for a Victorian gentleman of the sort Dr Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S. undoubtedly was. But when the book's narrator, the doctor's old friend and lawyer Mr Utterson, is called upon to break into his laboratory, the “still twitching” body he finds there is “dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness”. Another eyewitness account describes Hyde's clothes as being “of rich and sober fabric” but “enormously too large for him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders.” The effect, says Dr Lanyon, “would have made an ordinary person laughable” – but here the sense of evil makes laughter impossible.

Integral to Stevenson's tale is the idea of Dr Jekyll, described by his butler as “a tall, fine build of a man”, shrinking into a dwarf-like creature when he sheds his good qualities. The Jekyll and Hyde story influenced many future narratives of duality, the most popular of which might be the Incredible Hulk, a favourite Marvel Comics superhero. Writer-editor Stan Lee, who first created the Hulk in 1962, says he was inspired by Stevenson's story alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. Like the violent Mr. Hyde, the Hulk is an animalistic alter ego who takes shape when a respectable man of science – Jekyll, Bruce Banner – is overwhelmed by uncontrollable emotions. But instead of becoming smaller, the Hulk turns into a giant, his muscular green body ripping the mousy Banner's ordinary clothes to shreds.

Cover, The Incredible Hulk #1 Marvel Comics (May, 1962).

What is common to these visions of the hero's metamorphosis into something not quite human, though, is that his clothes no longer fit him. And shedding one's clothes is, in some ineffable way, to drop the veneer that keeps one human.

The writing of Jekyll and Hyde has been the subject of its own mythology. Stevenson wrote it while convalescing in the British seaside town of Bournemouth. In one version, it originated as a nightmare. Some have spoken of a first draft that Stevenson burnt after his wife Fanny said his story had “missed the allegory”, while his stepson Lloyd Osbourne has described him as coming downstairs in a fever to read half a first draft aloud. His later biographers have claimed he wrote it under the influence of cocaine, or a fungus called ergot.

Whatever the truth of these narratives, Stevenson certainly led an interesting life. Having fallen in love with Fanny – an American woman ten years older than him, with three children – in 1875, he travelled with her before and after their marriage in 1880. Stevenson and Fanny and their children travelled the South Seas for three years before settling down in 1890 on a plot of 400 acres he bought on a Samoan island, taking the native name Tusitala – 'Teller of Tales'. This was where he died in 1894. 

A book cover for the superbly inventive, deceptively simple Stevenson Under The Palm Trees.

The writer Alberto Manguel has crafted Stevenson's last Samoan years into a stunning little novella called Stevenson Under the Palm Trees (2002), mixing the known biographical facts with a disturbing reimagining that is perhaps a fitting tribute to Stevenson's own fevered mind – in particular, to Jekyll and Hyde. And here again, clothes come to the forefront. The nakedness of the Samoans is repeatedly contrasted to the buttoned-up world of Stevenson's Scottish childhood, his mother's stiff, lace-edged dresses to the sun-soaked softness of the Samoan matrons. Stevenson is well-loved in Samoa, his public persona perfectly at peace with the islanders' own comfort in their skin. But is it possible, asks Manguel's haunting story, that a lovely young girl's barely covered body arouses his basest instincts? Has the idea of nakedness seeped into our minds so deeply as 'uncivilised' that we dehumanise those without clothes? By making clothes the measure of civilisation, it is our gaze that reveals itself as bestial.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 17 Sep 2020

The ghosts among us

My Mumbai Mirror column:

A new anthology film about the supernatural is a mixed bag, but it does try to point Hindi film horror in consciously critical directions.

A still from Dibakar Banerjee's segment in the new anthology film Ghost Stories.

After first coming together to pay homage to the cinema in Bombay Talkies (2013), and the self-explanatorily titled Lust Stories (2018), the once-unlikely foursome of Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar are back with a new anthology film: Ghost Stories.

The films vary widely, not just in setting and tone, but in quality. Anurag Kashyap's contribution, starring an awkwardly gangly sari-clad Sobhita Dhulipala as a woman who is both an expectant mother and a surrogate maternal figure to her little nephew, didn't work for me at all (spoilers ahead) despite the effectiveness of the scowling child. The possibility of an uncanny relationship between external visual depictions and real-life transformations – think everything from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to MR James 1904 classic ghost story 'The Mezzotint' – has always fascinated me, and it is of course also the basis of certain long-held ideas of magic, such as voodoo. So Kashyap's use of the child's drawing, his repeated scratching-out, and his apparently innate sense of his own power, was for me the most gripping part of the story. But the film stirs in all sorts of other elements – nightmares, superstitions, silent men, shouting mothers, half-human states, crows' eggs, and a whole room full of creepy dolls. If all these ingredients were meant to be a recipe for chills, the dilution leaves us baffled and lukewarm.

Zoya Akhtar's film wins big by casting the brilliant Surekha Sikri as a bedridden old lady attended on by a lackadaisical young replacement nurse (Jahnvi Kapoor). As always with Akhtar's films (including her segment about a maid and her master in Lust Stories), there is an attentiveness to space: the multiple empty rooms that the youthful Sameera dashes through with a token agarbatti, the echoing sound of children's laughter from the stairwell when she answers the doorbell to find no-one there. It's a talent particularly useful in crafting fear, if Akhtar were interested. But she isn't, not really.

What she seems keen on is a juxtaposition of youth and age, sharpness and shutdown– and things aren't as simple as they seem. Sameera's briskness as she cleans up Mrs. Malik is matched by her frequent distractedness. Mrs. Malik, meanwhile, drifts in and out of consciousness, but recites from Wordsworth's apposite 'Intimations of Immortality' with tinny perfection: “Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night or day./ The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” And knows more about the fruitlessness of waiting for someone than Sameera can.

Genre fiction and film – especially of the scary variety – has long been a vehicle for social commentary. The man-made monster at the centre of the still-popular Frankenstein – a book first published anonymously by a ridiculously young Mary Shelley in 1818 – is an early (and eerily prescient) warning against technological intervention in human life. Twentieth century horror, especially the zombie movie, has been powerfully shaped by George Romero's cult classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of his triad of 'Dead' films: Dawn of the Dead, set in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead (1985). Romero onwards, the slow-moving, cannibalistic zombie – a creature whose bite turns the bitten person into a zombie herself -- has more often than not been a powerful metaphor for the horrific things that ail society: racial prejudice, consumerism, militarism, classism. That tradition continues down to Jordan Peele's Us (2019).

Karan Johar's film isn't scary, despite his newly-married heroine walking us endlessly through the candle-lit expanse of her husband's family mansion (going for a cross between K3G and Trikaal) in search of a ghostly grandmother. The only effective presence is that of the forbidding housekeeper Shanti, who guards Dadi's room in a manner clearly inspired by Mrs. Danvers' guarding of Rebecca's in the Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film). Johar has moments that invite critical examination: such as the friend who declares the family as “totally legit” based on “community mein izzat” and “thriving business”, forcing us to think about how such an aura of social legitimacy survives the violence pushed under the floorboards. (But you'd do better to watch Parasites.)

There is, happily, a zombie film in the quartet. It is Dibakar Banerjee's, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the sharpest of the four – politically, but also in filmmaking terms. Sukant Goel plays a bored, exhausted sarkari official who arrives in a remote village to report on a government school – to find a ravaged, half-burnt settlement where the only living humans appear to be two children. The zombies from the bigger village have eaten everyone from the smaller village, and will eat everyone except those who turn on their own kind. If you speak up, you attract the attention of the creatures. If you join the feasting, you will save your skin – but be blinded for life. Watch it -- and try not to be blind.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jan 2020.

A sympathetic spirit

My Mirror column:

Do the men haunted by a female ghost learn any lessons in Amar Kaushik’s affable small-town comedy?

One, don’t leave the house alone, especially after dark. Two, if you absolutely must go somewhere, find a group to go with: there might be some safety in numbers. Three, if you encounter an attractive personage of the opposite sex, assume the worst. The more charm the person displays, the more dulcet the tones in which they approach you, the more determined you must be to avoid their advances. Grit your teeth and keep walking — for if you so much as turn around and look at them, your very life is on the line.

These instructions, given to young men in the fictionalised town of Chanderi in the new horror comedy Stree, will seem powerfully familiar to young women in real towns across India. Only here, it is men who must lock themselves into their houses, bidding their wives goodbye as they leave for the sandhya aarti at the temple ghat with a plaintive, “Come back home early, I feel scared.” Director Amar Kaushik and scriptwriters Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK seem to thoroughly enjoy the role reversal. And so, I’ll wager, will most women — even though these instructions are only applicable for four days in the year, during the annual puja, when the town is said to be visited by a female spirit who preys exclusively on men.

The female ghost (or she-demon) who lures men in with her seductive charm only to reveal her true horrific form later, is a ubiquitous figure in sex-segregated societies that are also profoundly patriarchal. The cupboard of Indian folk belief is crammed unsurprisingly full of monstrous female creatures with highly specific attributes: the chudail, the rakshasi, the petni, the shakhchunni, the pishachini, the yakshi, to name just a few. At least some of the sharpness of Stree is that it takes this premise, so familiar to us as to be completely unremarkable, and turns it — partially — on its head.

The film is based on a clever but simple idea, and its viewing pleasures are simple, too. The first of them is that the particular ghost of Amar Kaushik’s film bears the generic name ‘Stree’: The Woman. This stroke of genius enables some of the best lines in the film, because all references to the scary lady in question can also be heard as statements about women in general. So that Pankaj Tripathi — in top form as Rudra Bhaiya, the town’s bookish authority on all things — has plenty of occasion to advise his quaking townsmen on “Asli stree se bachne ke asal upaay (Real ways to escape the real woman)”. No man, Rudra Bhaiya tells our ‘unspoilt’ bachelor heroes in one hilarious scene, can resist the voice of The Woman — by which he also implies any woman — calling out his name more than twice in a row, in a “swapnasundari” sort of voice. “‘Lag ja gale ki phir yeh haseen raat ho na ho’ waala bhaav aayega,” he warns them, in a nice little in-joke about the 1967 ghostly mystery film Woh Kaun Thi in which that song is sung.


But while never denying this world’s predictable gendered norms (“Suhaag raat ke baad hi fight shuru hoti hai”), Stree tries to stretch its audience in directions empathetic to women. One of these involves the ghost’s reasons for ghosting: she was a tawaif robbed of her one chance at love, on her suhaag raat.

There is something quite charming about the fact that the film’s hero Vicky (played with his usual flair by the brilliant Rajkummar Rao) is a tailor. He may believe that he hasn’t been put on earth to loosen blouses and shorten petticoats, but he has magic in his hands — his father, watching him at the sewing machine, sees in him nothing less than the perfection of Shiv Bhagwan. But it is significant, too, that Vicky is a ladies’ tailor — and a self-proclaimed ‘modern’ one. In the one scene in which we see Vicky interact with an older woman customer, he encourages her, with just the right touch of flirtatious appreciation, to get a slightly deeper neck for her sari blouse. (We have had another tailor-as-sensitive-hero for the modern Indian woman in the recent Hindi film past: Irffan Khan’s character in the Delhi-set Hindi Medium, who managed to marry ‘up’ into the somewhat English-speaking classes by virtue of his open-mindedness about women’s clothes — and thus, bodies and minds.)


Unlike its ghostly star attraction, however, this is not a film interested in floating several inches above the ground —it wants to remain rooted in its milieu. It is keen to suggest that the vrats and pujas on one hand, and all manner of black magic on the other, can happily co-exist in the same world with ‘azaad’ women — and azaad views about women. They may still be suspicious of the girls that rupture their bromances, and puzzle over whether “friendship” is code for sex — but in Amar Kaushik’s affectionately hopeful vision, the boys of Chanderi are on their way to a brave new world — and not just by means of the Ludo apps on their mobile phones.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Sep 2018.

Inside, Outside

My Mirror column on Phobia:

Pawan Kripalani's smart new horror movie goes the psychological route, but stops a bit short of its political possibilities.

Pawan Kripalani's new film, Phobia, casts the talented Radhika Apte as a young woman who develops a psychological condition called agoraphobia, finding it harder and harder to leave the confines of her home. 

When we first meet Apte's character, an artist called Mehak, she is the centre of attention. A show of her art work has just opened at a gallery, and she is surrounded by friends and acquaintances, chatting and telling ghost stories and generally being the cynosure of all eyes. Within the blink of an eye, though, the mood has changed. Mehak looks into the distance, thinks she sees something strange, then realizes what she 'saw' is no longer there. She is disoriented enough to leave her own opening night abruptly. But worse is to come. 

After having dropped off her friend and admirer Shaan (Satyajit Mishra), she dozes off in the cab, and (in a clear reference to the Uber rape case of December 2014), comes to only to find the taxi driver in the back seat, trying to force himself on her. The film does not dwell on the incident, except to make clear that this attempted rape forms the trigger for Mehak's ailment: her increasingly irrational fear of the outside world. 

A female character's descent into madness has been the subject of a lot of powerful films, from Gaslight to Repulsion to Black Swan, to John Cassavetes' astounding A Woman Under the Influence and Todd Haynes' disturbing Safe. Like several of these films, Phobia suggests that its protagonist's affliction has something of a sexual undertow. But for some reason, Kripalani doesn't put this aspect of things in the spotlight. 

What we get instead is a true-blue scary movie, which has the tropes of a traditional horror flick -- spooky spiders, eerily silent cats, bathtubs and broken mirrors, lamps that crackle and drains that make strange sounds. Phobia is an effective piece of apartment horror. 

Mehak's growing irrational behaviour starts to create problems for her family, and she temporarily shifts out of the house she shares with her sister and little nephew into a Malad apartment owned by Shaan's friend. The place is furnished but empty, since the tenant, a girl called Jiah, has seemingly skipped town, leaving all her belongings behind. In classic horror movie fashion, Mehak starts to see and hear things in the flat, while reading Jiah's (conveniently detailed) diary and gradually becoming convinced that Jiah is dead and her unhappy spirit is wandering around. The agoraphobia now becomes merely a plot device to keep Mehak indoors. 

Having started off in an art gallery, Phobia then shifts to the interior of a moving taxi, followed by an open road, and finally the interiors of two successive houses, from which Mehak's (and the film's) only forays into the outside are virtual. 'Agora' is the Greek term for marketplace, and agoraphobia means 'fear of public spaces'. 

But it was fascinating to me that the 'virtual therapy' device through which a therapist twice tries to get a panic-stricken Mehak to 'pretend-travel' beyond the four walls of her house takes her, both times, into a virtual mall—as if shopping is necessarily therapeutic for women. Of course, the mall is also an increasingly popular setting for horror films (Kripalani's own previous outing was called Darr at the Mall). The director--whose first film was Ragini MMS — also expertly uses CCTV footage to add to the ever-present question: did it happen or did she imagine it? 

Phobia does many interesting things, and does most of them well. The camerawork and editing keep you on your toes, and the actors -- not just Apte, but also Satyadeep Mishra and Yashaswini Dayama as Mehak's cheeky young neighbour Nikki -- are very good. But as I started looking up agoraphobia, I began to wonder why a film that had decided to take this as its premise didn't do more with it. Because it turns out, the ailment affects many more women than men. 

In the United States, 90% of those with severe agoraphobia are women, and 70% of those with mild symptoms are women, too. Women agoraphobes are twice as likely to experience general anxiety, and three times as likely to have panic attacks. The figures are similar for other countries. Feminist approaches to agoraphobia suggest that the disease needs to be seen in a social context: the fact that women are socialised to think of public spaces as threatening, and often learn to police their own behaviour in public, placing restrictions on their own mobility out of a fear of men. 

The converse of a fear of the outdoors is, of course, a greater attachment to and identification with the home than displayed by most men. The scholars Gelfond (1991) and Fodor (1992) have argued that it might be worthwhile to look at agoraphobic women as representing one end of a continuum -- i.e., as sharing many forms of behaviour with large sections of the adult female population. In being unable to claim her rightful place in public space, Seidenberg and De Crow (1983) have suggested, the agoraphobic woman is a "living and acting metaphor, making a statement, registering a protest, effecting a sit-in strike". 

Phobia could certainly have been a more chilling indictment.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 May 2016

Highway to Hell: Thoughts on NH10

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Navdeep Singh's NH10 takes the road out of Gurgaon to a chilling, edge-of-your-seat conclusion you wouldn't foresee. But that isn't the only reason you should take the ride.

NH10 has very little dialogue. By Hindi movie standards, it's really quite minimalist. But there's one extended monologue -- placed appropriately enough in the mouth of a Haryanvi cop -- that's the single-most powerful pointer to the film's worldview. "Have you read Manu? He was a very wise man. Like Ambedkar, who wrote our constitution," asks the policeman, in what initially seems a bizarre analogy. "Now, since Ambedkar said we should drive our cars on the left hand side of the road, we all do it, right?" As Anushka Sharma's Meera looks on, flummoxed yet watchful, the cop makes it clear why his analogy isn't so bizarre after all. Where Gurgaon's last mall ends, he says categorically, so does the power of the constitution. After that, he implies, the law of the land is not Ambedkar's, but the Manusmriti's.

That dichotomy might not be one that would stand up in an academic article, or even in a newspaper op-ed. But everyone who watches NH10 will know exactly what he means. So does Meera. Which is why she interrupts what seems like his ostensibly innocuous, Uncle-style, rambling lecture with the kind of act that no Uncle-style rambler anticipates.

But then Navdeep Singh's film is an exceptionally rare creature - certainly for Hindi cinema, but arguably for any cinema anywhere in the world. I'd like to call it a feminist thriller. This is a horror film in which the scary creatures are two-legged: A band of men. And it's a horror film in which the Final Girl - the last woman who survives, and manages to defeat the killer/ghost in the Hollywood tradition of slasher/horror/thriller films - isn't burdened with the weight of being virtuous and virginal.

NH10 isn't the first time a commercial Hindi film has tried to show us non-metropolitan India through the eyes of a metropolitan young woman. Last year's Highway, directed by Imtiaz Ali, picked up Alia Bhatt's cosseted PYT and turned her out into the badlands of North India, also using the highway out of the National Capital Region as a motif. But where Highway sought to turn its heroine's vulnerability into her strength, and the road into both a route to and metaphor for self-discovery, NH10's highway is a highway to hell.

In an opening sequence that hooks you right in, we drive past Gurgaon's glittering malls and high-rises, the darkness a velvety cocoon for the flirtatious conversation between Meera and her husband Arjun (we only hear them, not see) but also exuding a sense of the unknown. The choice of Gurgaon as locale is perfect, allowing Singh to sketch his characters with ease, while also serving as shorthand for the sense of siege that women like Meera - women like us, I who am writing this column and you, who are reading it - so often experience in our own country. The bright lights encased by the surrounding darkness offer an analogy so simple as to be simplistic, but there is no getting away from the film's frightening picture of India's big cities as citadels, where a new and unrecognisable form of civilisation retains its tenuous grip, in a country otherwise full of barbarians.

There are so many interesting things going on in the film that I'm only going to manage to gesture to a few. The first thing that struck me was that Singh begins the film with the threat of sexual danger, but then turns that sense of menace into something much wider, something that encompasses not just women who aren't toeing the line, but also men who are foolish enough to support them. The second is that the film is almost programmatic in the clarity with which it places itself (and therefore the viewer) on the side of the young DINK couple, and cuts no slack for the gang of rurban Haryanvi men, presenting them as villainous brutes. They're hardly likely to spare anyone else, you think, if they don't even spare their own sisters. And yet, Singh does offer the necessary moments of recognition that these men can show tenderness when it isn't prohibited by the codes they live by: Like when they weep for the death of a defenceless younger brother, or safeguard the life of a (male) child.

There is also the quiet but brilliant use of objects, flashy consumer goods, as a kind of bait held out by the citadel of desire to the surrounding empire of the deprived. But it is only children - or the childlike - who are swayed by these objects: The keys to a grand big car, or a shiny watch that seems full of gizmos. The analogy used by another policemen earlier in the film makes threatening use of the child metaphor: "Yeh sheher badhta bachcha hai, madam," he says when told of a late night attack by men on motorcycles, "Chhalaang toh lagayega hi."

What's great about NH10 is that it tells a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat; it lays out a view of the world, convincingly and without apology; and it offers no reassuring solutions. It is the chilling war cry of the besieged metropolitan woman. This battle may have been lost, but the war has just begun.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Film Review: Raaz 3

Oh, Raaz 3 had so much going for it. A plotline about an older actress threatened by the rise of a younger one seems even more contemporary now than it did in 1950, when All About Eve first came out. And a spoilt, self-obsessed, uber-ambitious Bipasha Basu as reigning Bollywood heroine Shanaya Shekhar (look, people, this is fiction); a puppydog-eyed Emraan Hashmi as her secret squeeze; and a nubile nymphet who’s stealing Bipasha’s awards (and boyfriend) from under her nose – what could be a better setting for a steamy saga of professional and sexual jealousy? It’s almost a tale meant for black magic.

Read the whole review here on Firstpost:

Film review: Tim Burton's Dark Shadows

In 1979, a student at the California Institute of the Arts made a pencil-drawn short animation film called Stalk of the Celery Monster, featuring a monstrous dentist called Dr Maxwell Payne who preyed on female patients. The short got so much attention that the student was offered an animator’s apprenticeship at the Walt Disney studio. Tim Burton, as he was called, didn’t last long at Disney, but his long career in the macabre had been launched. Dark Shadows is the latest offering from that boy who started making horror films at 13 with a group of friends and a Super 8 camera (a bit like the kids in 2011's Spielberg production, Super 8).

Based on a hugely popular supernatural-themed daily soap that ran on American TV from 1966 to 1971, Dark Shadows is a fantasy-comedy whose utterly camp vampires, witches and werewolves populate the Burtonian-Gothic universe of a 1970s New England town. Casting long-time collaborator Johnny Depp as an imprisoned 18th century aristocrat-vampire called Barnabas Collins who awakens to 1972 America. Dark Shadows is the latest example of Burton’s long-standing attraction to the weird and horrific – so long as it’s in fairy tale form. It seems a revealing sort of coincidence that his first two forays into television were episodes he directed for two long-running shows in genres that couldn’t be outwardly more different: a revitalised 1980s version of the horror series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Shelly Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, which in the late 1980s was even a Sunday morning show on Doordarshan.

The other running theme of Burton’s filmic career is his interest in re-imaginings of popular characters, often drawing on dark, quirky texts that are officially ‘children’s books’ but often feel like rather more grown-up fare, such as his interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (2010). His adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and his melancholic 1990 film Edward Scissorhands both feature clever, sensitive children unhappy in a cruel adult world.

The vampire hero of Dark Shadows is not a child, but Johnny Depp manages to mix Barnabas Collins’ courteous hauteur with the childlike curiosity of a man trying to make sense of a strange world 200 years after his time. To his 18th century gaze, a glowing McDonalds sign is an apparition of Mephistopheles, approaching car headlights on a dark road are Satan’s eyes and a lava lamp looks like it’s full of blood clots. The jokes can be a trifle silly – like having Barnabas read and quote from Erich Segal’s Love Story – but Depp’s performance is pitch-perfect. His exaggeratedly mannered politeness always has a threatening edge, a dark interior which is only sometimes acted upon – as in his meeting with a group of doped-out hippies who are thoroughly impressed with his 200-year-trip and tell him sweetly that wooing his beloved doesn’t need to involve giving her father money or sheep.

The film’s opening 15 minutes provide the 18th century context: the Collins family arrives in Maine from England, creating a fishery business that makes them the richest folk in town. Barnabas, young heir to the Collins fortune, has a brief and lustful affair with the maid Angelique but spurns her for his “true love” Josette. The angered Angelique resorts to witchcraft, cursing poor Josette to jump to her death, and turning Barnabas into a vampire and imprisoning him in a box – until a chance construction dig releases him 200 years later.

The Collins household in which the returning Barnabas takes his place is somewhat dysfunctional and extremely entertaining. Headed by Elizabeth (the marvelous Michelle Pfeiffer), it also contains Elizabeth’s useless brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), her 15-year-old sexed-up daughter Caroline (Chloe Moretz, superb), Roger’s 10-year-old ghost-seeing son David (Gulliver McGrath) and two non-family members: Helena Bonham Carter as Dr Julia Hoffman, a live-in psychiatrist ostensibly there to help David and Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, David’s newly arrived governess, a reincarnation of the virginal Josette: a girl who in Caroline’s immortal words, “likes to pretend she’s rock’n’roll but she’s a Carpenters kind of chick for sure”. There’s also Angelique the witch (Eva Green) – who, like Barnabas, survives unchanged into the 20thcentury, her Angie Bay Fishery having long superseded the Collins business, and whose marvelously crazed love-hate battle with Barnabas gives the film its central plot.

As with all Tim Burton films, Dark Shadows is a visually arresting spectacle from the word go. The smoky skies and ominous cliffs of the early part are replaced by a carefully created 1970s world in which only the Collins mansion stands out, an almost-too-perfect Gothic remnant whose serpentine staircases and carved wooden nymphs come literally to life in a special effects-laden climax.

The pleasure of watching such a film is largely in the detail, such things as Angelique strutting angrily down a row of portraits of the Bouchard women down the ages who are all, of course, Angelique herself. Unless one decides to take Barnabas’ repeated incantations about blood being thicker than water and family coming first as a moral message, I’m not sure there’s a larger point to Dark Shadows. But it is certainly fun.

Cinemascope: Aarakshan; Phhir

Critical issue lost under Big B’s aura

AARAKSHAN
 
Director: Prakash Jha 

Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan, Manoj Bajpayee, Deepika Padukone, Prateik

**1/2

God knows we could do with a film about reservation; a film that explores the far-reaching impact of the policy of caste-based affirmative action in government-run educational institutions. Aarakshan, however, is not that film.

Prakash Jha sets the scene effectively enough, establishing the depth of caste-based bias with a couple of early scenes. A Dalit candidate called Deepak Kumar (an earnest but sorely unconvincing Saif Ali Khan) is interviewed for a teaching job by a smarmy panel that insists on asking him about his 'real' surname and his parents' occupations, implying that his lack of 'cultural background' made him unfit to teach mathematics at their university – which they declare, in a chuckleworthy aside typical of Jha, to be "like a finishing school". There is also Deepak's confrontation with villainous Mithilesh Singh (Manoj Bajpayee), who casts aspersions on the hard-workingness of Dalits and receives a hard-hitting speech about manual labour in return. So when the film announces the 2008 moment when the Supreme Court announced 27% reservation for OBCs (over and above the existing SC/ST reservation), one expects the battle to begin in earnest. After all, the characters are all there: the principled principal (Amitabh Bachchan) and the unscrupulous vice-principal (Bajpayee),the fiery young educated Dalit (Saif), the disgruntled upper caste boy who hasn't got his Jamia Mass Comm seat (Prateik).

But instead of pulling his characters into a full-blooded engagement with the politics of reservation, Jha cuts them loose to deal with arbitrary personal demons. And before we know it, the film has turned into another Amitabh Bachchan vehicle, where everyone else is a cardboard cutout, and the reservation debate has been muffled by a feel-good fable against the commercialisation of education.

Again, we could do with a film about the crisis of education: the ubiquitous 'coaching classes' that supersede regular school, the impossibility of getting a seat in a "good college" because the good colleges are so few, the mushrooming of fly-by-night private colleges. But Aarakshan is not that film either. All it gives us is a highly unlikely hero who wins a highly unlikely battle. It brings us no closer to understanding the war which continues to rage all around us.


Horror show that lacks thrill


PHHIR
 
Director: Girish Dhamija
Starring: Rajneesh Duggal, Adah Sharma, Roshni Chopra, Mohan Agashe 

**

The latest offering from the Vikram Bhatt stable is a fairly unscary film about reincarnation, with a few this-worldly theatrics thrown in. It opens, strangely, in a sepia-toned “Manchester, a long time ago…”, with a sadhu-like figure in white robes (veteran actor Mohan Agashe) pronouncing the mystifying opening words: “Chandramohan, tum jao.” Agashe then tells a man in dark clothing (whose face we can’t see) that he can’t atone for his sins in this life, and aforementioned man shoots himself, very quickly, so that we can be taken to “Newcastle, now”, in colour, where a young man with floppy hair is apologising ever-so-sweetly to his fetching young wife for being late again.

Musical interlude over, we learn that Floppy Hair (Rajneesh Duggal) is a doctor called Kabir Malhotra, much in love with his wife Sia (Roshni Chopra), who’s just finished her law degree. Sia gets a job, and the couple make a date for a celebratory dinner. But when Kabir gets to the restaurant, two hours after the appointed time, there’s no Sia in sight (Moral: Don’t be late for a date with the love of your life; she might get kidnapped).

The rest of the film deals with the investigation into Sia’s disappearance, conveniently conducted in Hindustani by a British Pakistani police officer called Sheikh, who seems largely useless except when being instructed by a guitar-playing psychic called Disha (yes, of course she’s Indian too). So the police team spends much time tearing around car parks, deserted farmhouses and echoing old mansions while our dreamy-eyed psychic (Adah Sharma) stands wraith-like in corners, her hair artfully dishevelled. Kabir doesn’t believe in Disha’s powers at first, but comes round soon enough, especially when accosted by evidence of his past life.

Like in Haunted, the Bhatts fall back on a handwritten letter and a photograph (discovered in the company of a skeleton that can apparently still make people hold their noses some 50 years after) to link past and present. But Phhir is a milder film than Haunted. There are no dramatic battles, no shapeshifting evil spirits, not even a time travelling rescue-operation: just a janam-janam ki accounting to make life’s misfortunes add up.


Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Cinemascope: Pyaar ka Punchnama; 404.

My Sunday Guardian film review column, 22nd May 2011.

Dose of unapologetic Delhi humour
Pyaar ka Punchnama
Director: Luv Ranjan
Starring: Kartikeya Tiwari, Raayo Bhakhirta, Divyendu Sharma, Sonalli Sehgal
**1/2

Three young men looking for love, a bachelor pad full of overflowing ashtrays, the streets of Delhi – once upon a time, these were ingredients that led to Chashme Buddoor: a film full of joie de vivre, as memorable for the charming encounter between tentative salesgirl Deepti Naval and bashful bachelor Farooq Shaikh as for the fun moments where hopeful layabouts Rakesh Bedi and Ravi Basvani are told where to get off by potential love interests. But that was 1981.

Thirty years later, the same ingredients have produced Pyaar ka Punchnama. The changes in set-up are revealing: the three young men are not starving DU students any more. They're just out of college, but they've got (boring) jobs that pay. So they live not in a tiny barsaati with a couple of mattresses, but in a well-appointed flat complete with open kitchen, black leather couch and guitar. And none of them – not the guitar-playing stud (Raayo), not the sweet boy (Kartikeya Tiwari), not even the argumentative nerd (Divyendu Sharma, nicknamed Liquid "kyonki woh phailta zyada hai") – are anywhere near as clueless about wooing women as their cinematic predecessors. And this when none of them has ever been in a relationship before.

So the wooing goes well enough: one affair is kindled by a karaoke night that turns competitive (maybe authentic but bloody awful), the second kicks off in a party, while the third is an office romance that seems constantly on the verge of happening. It's what happens after that the boys can't deal with. Whether it's the loving girlfriend (Nusrat Bharucha) who is first clingy, then control-freak, and finally manipulative, or the she-knows-she's-hot exhibitionista (Sonalli) who swings like a pendulum between new lover and old, or the office 'best friend' (Ishita Sharma) who seems the most harmless but turns out to be the most exploitative of the lot, the women in this film are every man's worst nightmare. I would recommend this film for its well-etched performances and unapologetic Delhi humour, but I find it deeply disturbing that the director seems to think men are emotional victims, with no role in the breakdown of their relationships.

Carefully woven psychological thriller
404
Director: Prawaal Raman
Starring: Rajwir Aroraa, Imaad Shah, Satish Kaushik, Tisca Chopra and Nishikanth Kamat
**1/2


404 opens well: a grand old medical college somewhere in the hills, a sincere new batch of students, a bunch of seniors who insist on ragging even though it's forbidden. Unlike recent depictions of ragging – eg. Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal – 404 involves little physical violence. An early scene involves the taking-off of clothes, but the sense of sexual and bodily violation is kept at arm's length: instead we have a stripping episode that's almost matter-of-fact; things only turn serious when the warden (a wonderfully wry Satish Kaushik) appears and new boy Abhimanyu (impressive Rajvir Aroraa) decides to tell on the raggers. Keen to prove a point to his oppressors, and encouraged by a star professor he admires, Abhimanyu insists on a hostel room that's seen as haunted since a student killed himself there three years ago.

Director Prawaal Raman's decision to keep the physical drama turned down a notch may have been a deliberate one in this film, which concentrates its energies on mindgames. Despite Raman's previous experience – Darna Zaroori Hai (2006) and one segment of Darna Mana Hai (2003) – he chooses not to milk the standard horror movie staples here: there are no creaking doors, no hands reaching out where there shouldn't be any, no gross creepie-crawlies. Admittedly, there is a banging door with no-one there, a ringing telephone and reflections in the mirror: but these are all carefully woven into a psychological thriller where what you're thinking matters more than whether you're jumping out of your skin.

It's unfortunate then, that Raman's research seems not to have included the very basic difference between bipolar disorder – the disease that 404 revolves around – and schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder, in which periods of unnaturally elevated mood (mania) alternate with stretches of depression, does not involve hallucinations; it is schizophrenia in which people are unable to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences. Still, there are real reasons to watch 404: a carefully nonchalant Imaad Shah, Mumbai Meri Jaan director Nishikant Kamath as the professor who goes from cocksure to jittery and back again – and the requisite twist in the tale.

Cinemascope: Ragini MMS; Stanley ka Dabba

A clever film, despite the ghost who talks

Ragini MMS
Director: Pawan Kripalani
Starring: Kainaz Motivala and Raj Kumar

***

The superbly titled Ragini MMS is a clever attempt to cash in on the undeniable fear factor of the "true story". Not only is the film shot entirely on digicam – sometimes shaky and handheld, at other times stable but odd-angled – it also arrives filtered through a useful haze of news: the "real Ragini" – apparently a Delhi University student called Deepika – not being allowed to see the film before release, reports about paranormal events taking place during the shoot, not to mention pictures of Ekta Kapoor praying "for Ragini MMS" at a Hanuman temple. And through the opening credits we hear the Hanuman Chalisa, including the hopeful words: "bhoot pishaach nikat nahin aave, Mahaavir jab naam sunavai". But more of that later.

The film stars the rather charming Kainaz Motivala as the dreamy-eyed Ragini, and the brilliant Raj Kumar Yadav from Love Sex Aur Dhokha as her boyfriend Uday. The masterstroke is the continuity of Yadav's character from LSD to here, as the boy trying to make a sex tape with a girl who doesn't suspect a thing. But also as in LSD, the real hero of the film is the camera. Right from the opening scene, when it barges into the sleeping Ragini's room without her knowledge, it is an intrusive, unsettling presence, a lens through which we see everything. Sometimes things no-one wants us to see, and sometimes things we'd rather not see ourselves. If Ragini MMS does nothing else, it understands and opens up our increasingly addictive, complicatedly love-hate relationship with the camera. So the form is well thought-out, the dialogue spot-on and the actors extremely good: if Motiwala convincingly runs the gamut from gentle and placatory to coyly horny, sulky, angry and then petrified, Yadav is stunning as the irreverent, rough-edged boyfriend always on the verge of a tantrum. His transformation from bluster to fear, when it happens, is outstanding. The problem, then, is the bhoot: a Marathi-speaking churail who keeps saying the same thing just doesn't cut it. As a friend said while watching the titling, "Jab itna dar lag raha thha toh picture banayi hi kyun?"


Gentle exploration of sharing and greed
Stanley Ka Dabba

Director: Amole Gupte
Starring: Amole Gupte, Partho, Divya Dutta, Divya Jagdale, Rahul Singh

***1/2

Every morning, on his way to school, Stanley walks past a huge golden statue of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He always stops and gazes at the Holy Family for a little while. School passes by in a blur of classes – mostly unremarkable classes taught by unremarkable teachers (barring everyone's favourite Rosy Miss) – and riotous shouting in-between. Until lunchtime. Lunch is when everyone's tiffin boxes come out: dabbas of all shapes and sizes, packed with food of all kinds. But Stanley doesn't have a dabba. He says his mother was busy, and gave him a two rupee coin instead, to buy a vada pao. But his friends – and he has many – are quite happy to share their dabbas with him. But then there's Varma, the Hindi teacher, also known as Khadoos. He sniffs the food right out of everyone's lunchboxes – teacher or student. And makes sure he gets a share. Khadoos doesn't like Stanley. What he really doesn't like is that Stanley doesn't have a dabba...

Amole Gupte has made a quiet film, almost fable-like in the clarity of its characters. The dynamic between Varma – the adult-as-bully, the pile-on in the staffroom, the guy who doesn't bring any food himself and shamelessly tucks into everyone else's, all the while pronouncing judgement on its quality – and Stanley, the child who can't answer him back: this is what forms the film's core. The genius of the script lies in making Varma's dabba-less-ness run parallel to Stanley's – and then use precisely that parallel to reveal how different they in fact are. Stanley's joyful acceptance of food as a gift seems far removed from Varma's graceless snatching of it as a right: the film gestures to the fact that Varma understands that, and is shamed. Gupte plays the tragicomic Varma with aplomb, while his son Partho is superb as Stanley – winsome and vulnerable by turns, his flights of fancy alternating with wordlessness. The child actors are uniformly marvellous, though their unrelenting niceness (and that of Rosy Miss) seems faintly unreal. As does the film's too-soppy denouement. But these are mere trifles in a film made with so much love.