In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

Book Review: Modern love, ’50s style

Published in BL Ink:

What was Hindi cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ all about? A new book wants us to take off our nation-focused spectacles and open our eyes to how the ’50s Bombay film world shaped the modern Indian idea of romance.

Film scholar Aarti Wani shows how the public conversation around star pairs shaped our response to their onscreen romances. Seen here are Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman, with colleagues Dev Anand and Raj Khosla
(The Hindu archives)

The Hindi cinema of the 1950s has received so much attention, both scholarly and popular, that it seems an over-ploughed field. But film scholar Aarti Wani has written a book that casts fresh light on this familiar terrain. Rather than looking again at the ways in which 1950s cinema spoke to — and of — India’s new nationhood, Wani examines the models it constructed of romance. In fact, she argues, “the category of the national”, while explicating several aspects of post-Independence Hindi cinema, such as the creation of a national geography through travel and landscape, or of a moral economy based on a certain portrait of tradition, has failed to “account for the 1950s films’ overarching investment in romantic love.”

Wani’s principal argument is that love and romance were Hindi cinema’s fantasy of the modern in the ’50s. She starts with an obvious but important point — while romance was the ubiquitous narrative content of ’50s cinema, there was very little space for romantic love in the lived experiences of most Indians who watched these films. Of course, such an imbalance has existed with regard to literary depictions of love long before cinema. Sudipta Kaviraj has suggested that novelistic depictions of love “create an impression of commonplaceness of such action and behaviour”, whereas in fact, love relationships continued to be extremely rare in the society that was being described in these novels.

This modernity was signalled, among other things, by the fact that in contrast to films from later decades, ’50s Hindi films were marked by the relative absence of family. Most ’50s heroes had no father or mother, that is, no parental family. And most ’50s heroines, Wani argues, either had non-oppositional, even supportive, families, or they were shown with villainous fathers/father-figures from whom they needed to be rescued. Films like Awaara, Devdas and Mughal-e-Azam are exceptions. Very few ’50s film protagonists lived in joint families — thus freed from the “crippling family ties that would thwart romantic aspirations in real life”.

This cinematic vision of romantic love, Wani’s argument continues, was entwined with the experience of urban modernity; the city functioning as a site of “unexpected meetings and romantic encounters between strangers”. In contrast to love affairs in rural settings, which often had tragic ends — Arzoo(1950), Deedar (1951) or Devdas (1955) — the urban fabric seemed to allow for young men and women to choose and court potential partners. The primary locale for these filmi encounters, of course, was Mumbai (though Calcutta did feature in films like Pyaasa and Howrah Bridge).

The urban modern was closely tied to spatial exploration. Pointing to the many romantic connections made aboard trains, in taxis and buses, and in garages, Wani makes a rather lovely point: that romance in the ’50s film did not need transportation to an exotic or foreign location — “the dream remained eminently quotidian”. Of course, women and men — even those on the silver screen — did not have equal access to these city spaces, especially in a host of films that played up a noirish iconography, in which gambling, bank heists, thefts, kidnapping and even murders were deployed as sources of excitement. Still, Wani analyses some very interesting films — like 1958’s Solva Saal, starring Waheeda Rehman, and 1957’s Gateway of India, featuring Madhubala — in which the frisson is produced by the female protagonist’s adventurous, even dangerous, brush with diverse spaces in the city.

The other female figure identified with the cosmopolitan spaces of the city is, of course, the club singer/dancer. Wani notes that the role of the vamp/gangster’s moll in ’50s films was not reserved for particular actresses as it later became. The actress singing in a club might be the leading lady of that film — think Madhubala in Howrah Bridge — Geeta Bali, Sheila Ramani and Shakila all had roles that spilled across these boundaries.

Madhubala as a nightclub singer in Howrah Bridge (1958) was the film's heroine

Perhaps the most remarkable reworking of the split between the ‘heroine’ and the ‘other woman’ is in Pyaasa. Guru Dutt crafts a melancholic critique of the city as a calculating, inhospitable place based on the opposition between two female figures. But here the prostitute Gulabo (Rehman) is the true romantic, an appreciator of poetry, while the college-educated bourgeois woman (Mala Sinha’s Meena) is the faithless, money-minded one. (In a related aside, Wani points to the rising anxiety about women marrying for status rather than love, a fear expressed in mid-’50s films like Mr and Mrs 55 and Paying Guest.)

Wani’s next section, about the role of the song in the creation of a modern Indian romantic sensibility, is the book’s weakest. Several classic songs — ‘Yeh raat yeh chandni’ from Jaal, ‘Dum bhar jo udhar moonh phere’ from Awaara, ‘Do ghadi woh jo paas aa baithe’ from Gateway of India — are analysed in detail, and these analyses are usually interesting, if long-winded in a predictable academic way. Wani spends several pages, for example, on the framing of the Christian Maria in the Jaal song, and while I found fascinating the antecedents she claims for this character (in Ramamoorthy’s analysis of the interracial ’30s ‘Modern Girl’), I was often stopped in my tracks by sentences like “The spectacle of nature that frames the drama of this seduction marks Maria’s sexuality as natural” or “Maria’s performance, her expression, gestures and movement, along with the black and white mise-en-scene of the night saturated by the insistent sounds of the song give spatiality to desire that is cinematically spectacular and provides parallel moments of pleasure and identification”.

The rest of this section makes a shifting set of arguments about how space is used in the ’50s film song. Among Wani’s most specific claims is that duets were very rarely sung in a closed room (“which in fact offers a spatial setting for its possible consummation”). More broadly, she argues that romantic songs made for a fantasy in which the ‘public’ sphere could be occupied “for non-public, personal ends”. Moving onto songs of sorrow, she seeks to map songs sung by the heroine onto closed spaces and those by the hero onto open spaces — “a river bank, a sea shore, on a bench in a park, or on a rooftop”. I was less persuaded by Wani’s claims about how sound spills out of “the edges of the frame”, making songs in general a way of destabilising our perception and experience. Her conclusion seems particularly strange, using as it does a quotation on Hollywood “producing a new common sense about how love looked and what was required to overcome the manifold dangers that threatened it” to make her point about the film song. None of this is wrong, but it feels terribly unspecific. Perhaps the problem is songs are too slippery to stay put in neat analytic boxes — Wani herself goes from categorising the song as “a conduit of narrative meaning” to something that stakes claims “in excess of what the narrative allows”.

The final third of the book is where Wani abandons her laboured shot-by-shot analytic technique for a lively weaving together of film texts with journalistic and anecdotal texts about stars who had attained cinematic and public status as romantic pairs. Drawing on Neepa Majumdar’s pathbreaking work Wanted Cultured Ladies Only (2009), which locates the phenomenon of stardom in ’40s India within the context of a deep social ambivalence about cinema, Wani scrutinises how Bombay film stars in the ’50s were anointed as experts on love and romance — being asked to write articles and answer readers’ questions.

Returning to her framing argument about the rarity of love relationships in Indian society at the time, she suggests that stars began to be seen as authorities on the subject both because they performed love on screen and because they were among the very few people with any real-life experience of love affairs. Wani’s study of 1950s film journalism in English, Hindi and Marathi is attentive to detail, distinguishing between the different registers — sympathetic, gossipy, or judgemental — in which the stars’ love lives were produced as artefacts for public consumption.

Finally, Wani zooms in on the four legendary star-pairs of the decade — Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman, Nargis-Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand-Suraiya and Dilip Kumar-Madhubala. Her mapping of the contours of their real-life affairs onto some of their famous cinematic romances produces some of the most fascinating readings of these films. In moving beyond the official narrative on screen to the unofficial knowledge of stars’ lives which, without a doubt, informs the way we watch films, Wani offers an immensely productive lens with which to look at Hindi cinema. Work on Chiranjeevi and his fans, by SV Srinivas, offered a complex and thoughtful reading of film texts in the light of stardom and fan-expectations. Wani’s work is an allied but original project.

Despite its sometimes meandering and repetitive prose, Fantasy of Modernity is a thoughtful and enjoyable book, which contains several careful readings of films and offers a persuasive way of looking at both ’50s cinema and 20th century Indian ideas of romance. The many typographical errors — misspelled proper names, like ‘Ashish Nandi’ instead of ‘Ashis Nandy’, or ‘Chidanand Dasgupta’ instead of ‘Chidananda’, recurring errors like “libratory”, and completely erratic Romanising of Hindi lyrics (what should be spelt ‘anbujh’ is instead spelt, on the same page, alternately as ‘anbooz’ and ‘anbhujh’) — are extremely unfortunate distractions from an otherwise rich and immersive read.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 11 June 2016.

Picture This: Remembering Rififi

My column for BL Ink this month:

Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) might or might not be the best film noir I have ever seen, but it’s likely the most subversive.

Exactly 60 years ago, on May 10, 1955, the eighth Cannes Film Festival awarded Best Director to Jules Dassin for the festival’s opening film Du Rififi Chez les Hommes, known in English as simply Rififi. Released in France in April 1955, Rififi had already snagged Dassin a two-part interview at the iconic magazine Cahiers du Cinema. The interviewers were Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, future giants of the French New Wave, both then in their early twenties. Truffaut, then forging a reputation as a notoriously unforgiving film critic, also gave Rififi a rave review: “[O]ut of the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen.”

The novel was by popular French writer Auguste le Breton, an orphan who frequented the low-life bars and gambling dens of Montmartre, that form Rififi’s atmospheric setting. Dassin wasn’t a fan; among other things, he thought it was racist (his screenplay did away with the dark-skinned Arab and North African rival gangsters). But he would have been a fool to refuse: despite having tasted success in Hollywood with Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves’ Highway (1949), he had been blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) while making Night and the City (1950) and hadn’t managed to make a film in five years despite a move to France.

So the Cannes award wasn’t just good for Dassin’s career, but also a French slap in the face of Hollywood. The jury that year had five Frenchmen, plus one man each from Spain, USA, UK, Italy, Switzerland and the USSR (no women, naturally), and despite his French-sounding name, Dassin was very much an American, born in Connecticut to Russian Jewish immigrants. Interestingly, Dassin shared his prize with Soviet director Sergei Vasilyev, for Heroes of Shipka, about the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

I haven’t seen Shipka, but I imagine it shares little with Rififi, which is a supremely stylish film about a gang of thieves. But then Cannes wasn’t awarding Dassin for subject; the cutting edge of the French film establishment was excited about a certain Expressionistically-lit, dark, urban cinema coming out of Hollywood, and this film was a sophisticated example of it — in French. A few months after Rififi, two French critics, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, came out with the first book-length attempt to define the style: A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-53.

The characteristics of noir remain legendarily hard to agree upon, though critic Roger Ebert made a rather fun list of criteria in 1995, including “#2 A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending” and “#4 Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, ‘On top of everything else, I’ve been assigned to get through three packs today.’” Rififi certainly ticks those boxes. At the film’s nervous, throbbing centre is a hood called Tony, whom we first meet losing the last of his money in a poker game, coughing as he lights yet another cigarette. The room is so dark that when Tony makes a phone call and we cut to the home of his protege Jo, it comes as a shock that it’s actually morning. The casting is perfect: Jean Servais, who plays Tony, has a pale, drawn face that makes perfect sense when you learn that he was a recovering alcoholic.

When Dassin’s characters aren’t huddled indoors in some basement or bar, they’re walking the wet Paris streets. The occasional neon-lit advertising is all for liquor brands: Cognac Martell, Haig Scotch Whiskey, Dubonnet. Only the final sequence swaps shadowy silences for a crazy, careening drive beyond the city, brilliantly juxtaposing a man’s desperate speeding with a child’s blithe enjoyment of it.

Rififi is a superb example of why films noir are often the best city flicks: to plan on rupturing the urban order, you need to know it inside-out first. The gang’s prep involves noting what time of morning the salesgirl arrives at work, when the florist makes his deliveries, when the policeman does his rounds. In one great scene, Tony walks Jo along the avenue on which their targeted jewellery store stands — it’s Mappin & Webb — making him recite the details of the shop fronts they pass, without looking up.

But if this is noir, it subverts its own rules. The women may look like femme fatales (one of them, Mado, even gets involved with a rival gangster while Tony is in prison), but they aren’t scheming or duplicitous. The men come off much worse. They beat up their girlfriends and infantilise their wives. Tony’s violence towards Mado is extreme, another gang member Mario keeps shutting the door on his smiling partner, calling her ‘pet’ and telling her to ‘run along’ and go to bed, and the film’s denouement reiterates how the women suffer the consequences of something they had no part in planning.

The ubiquitous machismo of this noirish world is also, to my eyes, undercut by the manner in which Dassin presents the half-hour heist at the film’s centre. I have rarely seen a group of men on screen conduct themselves in so wonderfully silent, unobtrusive a fashion, for so long. Wordless, invisibilised labour is something that women are traditionally socialised into; men, only if they are servants or slaves.

Which leads us to the last thing that makes Rififi’s heist so remarkable. The delicate, unspoken synchronisation makes the heist feel performative, akin to a dance, or a circus act. But Dassin’s two aesthetic decisions, of silence and of slowness, making it feel like real time (of course, it isn’t really) changes what we know to be a theft, an undeserving short-cut to riches, into something profoundly like work. Rififi was banned in many places because the police said it was a demonstration to potential criminals. But it is this that makes it truly subversive.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

Prisoners of the Mind

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

The jail as a space holds an abiding interest for Badlapur's director Sriram Raghavan, serving as an instrument to analyse power relationships between the characters in his films.

Sriram Raghavan was a movie buff much before he became a director, and it's something he's always worn on his sleeve. In 2007's Johnny Gaddaar, his best-received film till date, Raghavan paid cinematic tribute to Vijay Anand's thriller Johnny Mera Naam, Stanley Kubrick's noir The Killing, and the celebrated murder sequence from the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Parwana - among many classics. His last outing, the rollicking (and unfairly panned) Agent Vinod, was a spy thriller: a James Bond homage served with an Indian flavour and a twinkle in the eye. In his latest, Badlapur, when the heist-and-murder-accused Laik arrives in jail for what is going to be a long stretch in captivity, the prisoners gather round a television on which Sholay is playing. "Bees baras jail mein rehne ke baad sab kucch bhool jaoge, Gabbar," announces Sanjeev's Kumar's Thakur to Amjad Khan's iconic dacoit. 

Unlike Gabbar, Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Laik completes most of his 15-year jail sentence. But as Raghavan makes clear, in Badlapur and in his gripping first feature, Ek Hasina Thi (2004), time in jail needn't wipe out memories of one's past. 

Badlapur comes a decade after Ek Hasina Thi, but the two films have much in common: The hardening of innocents, and the passage of time in expectation of revenge. In EHT, it was the trusting Sarika (Urmila Matondkar), jailed on a trumped-up charge of being the mistress of an underworld don, who went from wide-eyed child-woman to steely avenger. In Badlapur, it is Varun Dhawan's youthful family man Raghu who makes the transition to a man solely possessed by the idea of vengeance. Female revenge sagas seem to necessarily involve a physical transformation - think Khoon Bhari Maang for a classic Hindi movie example - and EHT was no exception. Matondkar's Sarika went from long crinkly locks, bell sleeves and ultra-feminine gathered skirts to a more practical crop and fitted trousers. Raghu, too, goes from wholesome and clean-shaven to stubbly and then bearded in his grief-stricken avatar. 

But Raghavan's journey from EHT to Badlapur involves much more than a simple change in the gender of his protagonist. He's playing with the same concerns - tragedy, revenge, innocence, evil - but the game feels quite different. For one, unlike in EHT, it isn't the clean-cut middle class young person (Dhawan) who is thrown into prison. It is the bad apple, the petty thief who's never done anything right, the guy who we've just seen shooting two innocents for no fault of their own. 

So, logically we ought to spend the film feeling glad: The bad guy's in prison, isn't he? But Raghavan pushes the knife in, and then turns it slowly -- Siddiqui's unforgettable portrayal of Laik makes him powerfully, unmistakeably human. He may lie in court and ogle girls on the street, but he is also a man who truly loves -- and is loved back by -- at least one woman. What is truly appealing is his zest for life. His longing for chicken korma and Thai massage remains undimmed by years in the wilderness of jail. 

Jail itself is clearly of interest to Raghavan. In EHT, it was a women's prison, a place of madness and misery, as places of female incarceration have been in films from Bimal Roy's Bandini to Bruno Dumont's affecting Camille (2013), about the real-life sculptress Camille Claudel. For the gentle Sarika, the cruel truth of her lover's betrayal only sinks in alongside the horror of what she must endure because of it. The rats in her prison cell and the terrible food are not the worst of it. It is the casual humiliations, the mindless fights, the power games and the bullying that come to make jail seem, in her mind and ours, a microcosm of the world outside. If you learn to survive this, Raghavan seems to suggest, you're equipped for anything the outside world can throw at you. 

And yet there are also those for whom jail is a refuge of sorts: The half-crazed Dolly, with whom Sarika shares her cell, declares quite seriously that prison food is delicious, while Pratima Kazmi's impressive Pramila, playing the widow of a mafia don, stays in prison voluntarily because it is a safe haven, away from both the police and gangs. 

The depiction of jail in Badlapur is quite different from that in EHT. There is the occasional bout of violence here, too. But unlike the wild, unsupervised cat-fights and the free-for-all sense of the women's prison he created in 2007, Raghavan paints Badlapur's jail as a Foucauldian space: beds in straight lines, a place of discipline and punishment. Laiq even inhabits it as a space of labour: he learns to make chairs, which will earn him money. And eventually it is the medicalisation of jail as a space, its recognition of his diseased body, which allows him to gain a few months of physical freedom. 

Meanwhile we have Raghu, who immerses himself in his grief, churning it deeper and deeper until it curdles into violence. He is physically free, but mentally incarcerated. If the relentless passage of the years, without being able to move on with one's life, is prison's real punishment, then Raghu has done as the film says: imprisoned himself in his own jail. He has made time stand still. 

Badlapur's eventual take on revenge seems to me more ambitious than film noir in the traditional sense. It reverses our ideas about what justice might mean, but also our idea of who is deserving of it.

Film Review: BA Pass

My review of BA Pass. An edited version of this review is up on Firstpost.

Ajay Bahl’s debut film is a treat. Bahl has taken Mohan Sikka’s spare, salacious short story from the 2009 anthology Delhi Noir and filled out its silences just so, creating a film that somehow fulfills our expectations from noir – shadowy urban spaces, a femme fatale whose allure is tied to a deliberate air of mystery, a doomed male protagonist entwined in an ever-tightening plot – while also taking us beyond them.

The tale of how the orphaned, college-going Mukesh (Shadaab Kamal, making an absolutely stellar debut) is entrapped by sultry older woman Sarika (Shilpa Shukla, brazenly sexual in a deliberately stylised performance) is most certainly noir, but it showcases none of the regular Bollywood pitstops on the urban darkness tour.

There is no lowlife dance bar, no small-time gambling den, no grimy brothel reeking of desperation. Instead it reserves much of its screen-time for seemingly innocuous spaces: the faded ennui of Delhi’s government quarters, their musty drawing rooms and leaky service lanes now filled with an uncanny sense of foreboding. Even when we do enter classic noir terrain – Bahl shot on location in the grimy, neon-lit, cheap tourist hub of Paharganj – that dark, gaping maw of the under-city is not pressed upon us. Instead, Bahl’s film is most effective as a ghoulish rendition of middle class fears of that nightmarish underworld into which a single misstep can catapult the careless — an open sewer, waiting to swallow you up. Almost until the very end, the film works by hinting at the existence of that under-city, growing gradually more sinister, until the middle class home seems to dangle over the precipice, its attempts at wholesomeness crumbling before our eyes.

What makes BA Pass remarkable is that is full of stock characters who could easily have been the stuff of porn – the bored housewife; the neglectful, violent husband; the young man seduced from timidity into addiction – but the dense web it weaves around them is rich and resonant enough to capture our imaginations completely.

Ritesh Shah’s screenplay takes Sikka’s original bare-bones narrative and adds the requisite flesh, rounding out characters and situations to fullest potential. Mukesh’s suspicious, penny-pinching aunt Pammi Buaji (beautifully underplayed by Geeta Agarwal Sharma), for instance, acquires a makkhan-demanding, sly son (Amit Sharma) who grudges his poor cousin every meal he eats and is quick to cotton on to a locked drawer. His helpless younger sisters transition from the relative safety of their grandfather’s house to the menacing half-light of a girls’ ‘home’, where they are left to the wheedling mercies of a corrupt female warden. The character of Sarika’s husband (the always consummate Rajesh Sharma) transforms from “Mr Khanna” to the far more resonant “Khannaji”: from merely angry cuckold who “will make trouble” to a senior official who has real power over Pammi’s husband’s job.

Shah and Bahl also supplement the original story with new twists: one that provides a nice little cameo for Deepti Naval, another that conjures up the horrors of the Delhi streets — prefaced with a remark of devastating irony by a hijra: “Mard ko bhi dard hota hai”.

The dialogue, in fact, is near-perfect. Sikka’s original English lines acquire richness in Ritesh Shah’s precise Delhi Hindi — “Ghane hain. Ladkiyon jaise. Theek se comb kiya karo, nahi toh katwa lo” contains a quiet taunt to Mukesh’s masculinity that rings louder in Hindi. The senile Beeji sounds much more convincing warning Mukesh off her daughter-in-law in Punjabi Hindi than she did in English – daayan just rolls more easily off the tongue than “demon’s daughter”. Mukesh’s sole friend, the cemetery caretaker Johnny (played by the always dependable Dibyendu Bhattacharya) gets a whole bunch of new one-liners – some he delivers in annoyingly mannered fashion, but others seem so terrifyingly apposite that one wants to adopt them for life: “Dopeher mein sona hai kismat pe rona”.

Sarika’s stagey sexuality may seem excessive to some, but it seemed to me exactly right for a woman self-consciously playing a part. Sarika is the quintessential femme fatale – all Chinese silk robes and many coloured bras, she leavens the film’s fatalistic mood with provocative banter in classic noir fashion. Bahl even has her first appear smoking a cigarette. Her treatment of Mukesh is meant to leave him – and us – in no doubt about who’s in control. And yet the film consistently underlines Sarika’s own sense of trappedness. “Pati hai tu mera jo bahane se naraazgi dikhaungi?” she sneers at the younger man, that single line managing to convey that she would have to use excuses with her husband. Even the cigarette so nonchalantly snuffed out is a performance only for Mukesh's eyes – she can smoke as stylishly as she likes in the secrecy of Pammi's bathroom, but not in the drawing room where the railway colony ladies are cooing annoyingly at Mukesh over their tea and samosas. Perhaps, in the end, BA Pass’s most singular achievement is its acute grasp of Sarika’s fate – the uncomplicated possibility of vampishness vanishes into a knotted skein of defiance and compulsion.

Paharganj made a glamorous debut in Bombay cinema with Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, but Ajay Bahl – a cinematographer making his directorial debut here – has an eye for the seemingly dissimilar worlds that live cheek-by-jowl in Delhi neighbourhoods like this one. The shadowy blues of train stations, desolate by night, coexist with the tawdry hubbub of the street outside; Johnny’s dank, dark cell of a room is surreally lit by the crimson glow of Paharganj hotel hoardings. The neighbourly banter and gruffly genial landladies who populate a whole recent parade of cinematic homages to Delhi Punjabi life are allowed to make an appearance, but the film successfully conspires to make nothing seem harmless. I will never look again at one of those photocopied ‘Home Tutor’ signs that dot the city’s walls without imagining a backstory for it.

Shadaab Kamal’s pitch-perfect combination of vulnerability and hopeful slyness is put to marvelous use by Bahl. There is the occasional filmic device here that might seem obvious — Mukesh’s chess games with Johnny juxtaposed with the sex games he plays with Sarika – but Bahl keeps it from being heavy-handed, even as he lets his dialogue writer enjoy himself with a throwaway innuendo or two (“Saali kanwaari, raand ban gayi haan?” Johnny says to Mukesh as his chess prowess grows). The film’s title, too, plays with brittle irony on the image of the eager but naive pupil – stuck in Delhi University’s dead-end “khichdi” course, desperate to propel himself out of the tunnel by learning whatever tricks anyone will teach him. When Mukesh is pronounced “First class first”, we know endgame is coming.

Film Review: ‘The Last Act’ tries to be more than some of its parts

The best thing about The Last Act is its unpredictability. It’s rare enough to sit down to a film – especially a film that’s coming out of the Bombay film industry – and have little idea what to expect. If you go in with the expectation of an “Anurag Kashyap film”, you might be disappointed.

By handing over its 12 segments over to 12 young directors, the film manages to keep us from ever quite settling in. Just as we start to get used to a particular style or mood or pace, the film is up an running, transporting us to a different place, in the hands of a different guide.

The film’s 12 directors were chosen via an all-India contest by Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra and Chakri Toleti, and asked to make 10 minute short films that would be part of a larger story, whose plot was written by Anurag Kashyap.

That original plot is a simple one. A corpse is discovered on the road, so badly disfigured that it cannot be identified. Twelve clues are discovered on or near the body, each leading to a different place. So we begin in Mumbai, where the ‘clue’ leads to a theatre troupe led by Saurabh Shukla. Then we move to Ghaziabad, where the trail leads to an English coaching centre. Then comes Calcutta, where the clue leads to a crumbling old house; Delhi, where a man seems to have disappeared; Kalyan, where it’s a woman who is missing, and so on until all 12 cities have been covered and we return to Mumbai for the last act.

It’s not a bad idea, though the “clues” being solved in different cities make the film seem even more like a puzzle than murder mysteries already do...

(Review continues)

Read the whole review here, on Firstpost.

Film Review: Talaash captures the right shade of Bombay noir

There’s a great scene in Talaash where the laconic Inspector Surjan Singh Shekhawat (Aamir Khan) gets a phone call from a Times of India reporter, probing for details of the high-profile case he’s working on: the death of a Bollywood star in a mysterious accident on Mumbai’s Seaface Road. Shekhawat bangs the phone down in irritation, goes out and asks his staff who has good connections with the media, and promptly confiscates the cellphones of all those who put their hands up. Nothing about this case should get out in the public domain, he says sternly – not until the mystery is solved.

The scene could well be a nice little in-joke cracked by the film’s makers—substitute ‘case’ with ‘plot’ and you have before you the problem of reviewing Talaash. Reema Kagti’s second directorial outing (after 2007’s delightfully quirky Honeymoon Travels) is a film whose effect depends heavily on plot. And because I think you should all have the pleasure of that plot unfolding, slowly but surely, on screen as well as in your head, I am going to try and write the impossible: a review that tells you everything you need to know, but gives away nothing.

(Review continues)

Read the whole review here.