Again and again and again

My Mirror column:

A plot-heavy romance uses time travel to look at love in the long term — which means the here and now.

Nitya Mehra's Baar Baar Dekho is the second Hindi film by a woman director to hit theatres in consecutive weeks - and it shows. Last week saw the release of Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, whose darkly comic provocations came lined with deep insight into how it feels to be human these days. This week's film is much more consciously 'mainstream' -- a love story between two good looking people with the predictably Punjabi Khatri names that Bollywood clings to with such tenacity. But the relationship between Diya Kapoor (Katrina Kaif) and Jai Varma (Sidharth Malhotra) is seen through a woman's eyes, and that makes it different from most relationships we've seen on the Hindi film screen.

There's a cool time-travel plot, which helps keeps things light. The future as a way to add visual interest -- Bahai-temple-shaped electric cremations and hologram-style projections of phone calls -- can sometimes seem lame, but it isn't too distracting. On a more emotional plane, Jai's recurring befuddlement at having been catapulted into some time he doesn't recognize makes sure that laughs are always around the corner. But make no mistake, this is a film with urgent, important things to say about love - not the sweep-you-off-your-feet, first-flush adoration that Hindi films have helped turn into our collective imagination, but the show-up-and-stay-around variety that seems to be as hard to find in life as it is on screen.

The characterisation isn't particularly subtle. So the cerebral man who wants to live his life 'logically' is represented by an actual mathematician-—frantically crunching numbers with his head even when it's his heart that's in danger. The absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he actually 'forgets' large chunks of the life he's lived. Another man, another problem: the fellow who constantly inflates his class status goes from needing to deny to his best friend that he's travelling Economy Class to having to deny to his wife that he's actually flipping burgers for a living. Meanwhile the rich businessman father-in-law's large-hearted offers of 'support' are an obvious way of showing down his son-in-law's more limited income.

But what Mehra's film maps with warmth and insight is a relationship dynamic most middle class Indian women are likely to recognize all too easily -- and let's face it, subtlety might not work too well if the idea is to get the men in the audience to see it too.

So it's probably strategic that Baar Baar Dekho hits us on the head with its portrait of the checked-out husband. The sweet-faced, mostly even-tempered Jai seems like the perfect catch -- except that he seems to spend most of his life behaving like he's trying to escape.

He's the man who's always so preoccupied with the 'big things' that every other part of the couple's life together becomes relegated to 'small stuff'-- which somehow makes it the woman's sole responsibility. I mean the man who wafts along, letting his partner take charge of all decisions about their everyday domestic arrangements and social life, because he really couldn't be bothered -- until he suddenly, angrily, is. You know, the man who all his work colleagues would agree is a nice guy, and hardworking too -- except he never seems to see that relationships at home need niceness and hard work, too.

Among the other things the film does with comic finesse is to highlight how wrong men get it when they try to define what being a good partner is. Even at the very last calamitous moment, when faced with the question 'What can I do to fix my marriage?' the always overwhelmed Jai can only come up with a negative injunction to himself: 'Don't have an affair'. Which isn't exactly wrong, Mehra's film seems to say -- but it's very far from being enough. Because being a good husband, as every woman who has ever beaten her head against her partner's incomprehension knows, can't just mean not being a 'bad' one. It isn't just about not beating up your wife, not cheating on her, or not endangering your children's lives. A healthy, happy, loving relationship needs positive words and actions—and not words and actions that are wrenched from you after seventeen reminders, but voluntary things that you do because you want to be in the relationship.

Being there for someone can't just be a theoretical thing in the back of your head, which you're sure you'll do when the time comes. Being there in a relationship means being there every day. Not just because that keeps it alive and well, but because once you stop doing it every day, you'll find you don't even notice when the time does come.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Sep 2016.

"I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy."-- An Interview with Margaret Atwood

I had the privilege of interviewing the writer Margaret Atwood during her recent visit to India.

The published interview, for Vantage, is here.

For anyone interested, a [much] longer version of the conversation is below.

At 76, there are few genres Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has not worked in. Author of seventeen volumes of poetry, eight collections of short fiction, and fifteen novels, she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once for The Blind Assassin in 2000. Atwood was also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in both 2005 and 2007.

Her work ranges from incisive realist writing to speculative fiction. The writer and critic Trisha Gupta caught up with Atwood on 30 January, a few days after Atwood’s conversation with writer Patrick French at the India Habitat Centre, Delhi. Gupta and Atwood discussed genre, parental approval and the place of realistic fiction in the digital age.

Trisha Gupta: You have a longstanding interest in the environment. Where does it come from?
Margaret Atwood: I was what they call an early adopter. Because I did grow up in it. My dad was a biologist.

That last story in Moral Disorder, about the backwoods and this Indian gentleman arriving with his tennis racket is true. I think he thought he was going to the English countryside. I was very young at the time, but my mother and my aunts told me about this. And it was during the war, so he must have been from quite a well-to-do family, even to have such an education. He must have been at a Canadian university and spending summer at a research station up in the woods. And those research stations really were up in the woods. Far, far up: no electricity, no tennis court. [laughs]

TG: You've described some of that world in Surfacing, earlier.

MA: Yes. So my parents were conscious very early, of things like pesticides, DDT, things that affected biological populations. They were early Sierra Club, Federation of Ontario naturalists, conservationists, birdwatchers, back in the day when it was thought to be kind of nutty. My brother turned into a biologist…

So I know the plot… It made it easy for me to write a book like Oryx and Crake [the first in a post-apocalyptic trilogy that looks at rebuilding the world after a chemical fallout]. Because I can talk the talk. And I knew if I didn’t talk the talk correctly, I was going to get a critique from my brother. He said (switches to a voice lower than her own): “I think you did quite a good job on the sex. But I’m not so sure about the cats.” But science has borne me out since! Turns out that the purring of cats does have a neurologically soothing effect and is akin to the ultrasound that we use to heal bones.

TG: I believe your father wanted you to be a botanist.
MA: Yes, I was very good at botany. Better than at English, because in English they took half-marks off for spelling mistakes.

TG: Education—especially in India—divides the scientific and the literary or artistic into such starkly separate spheres.
MA: We divide things in order to teach them. But it’s a false division. People with creative minds are frequently creative across a range: Leonardo da Vinci was a wonderful painter but he was also trying to invent an airplane.

TG: But there seems more and more a sense that you must specialise.
MA: I think that was true in the twentieth century. We’re now seeing a movement back the other way.

Say, in medicine, once, if you were a toe doctor, toes was all you’d do. Now they’re trying to get back to looking at the whole person. And all of these things have a narrative component.“Tell me your medical history.” It’s a story: “First I felt this lump on my toe, then I got a terrible headache.” The eastern idea that parts of the body are connected with other parts is gaining a lot more credibility now.

TG: You were somewhat scathing about genres in your conversation with Patrick French.
MA: Genres are useful for bookstores. And for certain kinds of readers who want to read nothing but science fiction, or nothing but fantasy. They know exactly where to go in the bookstore—there’ll be something with a dragon on it, that’s for them. But just like in literary fiction, some books with dragons on them will be of higher quality than others. So you shouldn’t dismiss a book just because it has a dragon on it. Some will have a meditative, philosophical element in addition to the adventure—just like a classical Indian epic poem. But I’ve had people say to me, I never read books by men. Or I never read books by women. Or I never read sci-fi. Or anything that isn’t sci-fi. Why such insecurity? Why not expose yourself to something else? It may not be a good experience, but it’ll be different.

TG: You yourself began by writing poetry.

MA: Actually I began by writing comic books. At seven. Then I wrote a novel. About an ant. It had some narrative problems. But I was an early reader and writer. Nothing else to do in the woods. Also, my brother was a prolific writer at that age. He was older. So of course I imitated him. People say who was your earliest influence, I either say, 'My brother' or 'Beatrix Potter'. 

TG: Have your choices of form been determined by age?

MA: Okay, so when I started in high school, I wrote all the things I presently write, and more. I wrote a newsletter, I wrote fiction, non-fiction – essays, that's what we learnt to do in school – and poetry. In the early days in Canada, it was much easier to get the poetry published. First of all, there were little magazines devoted to it. Second, it was short. In fact, I hand-typeset my first book of poems on a flatbed press. I made the cover out of a lino-block. It was seven poems, we sold them for 50 cents. I wish I'd kept more of them. 

TG: You have some, though?

MA: One. 

TG: How old were you then?

MA: 21.

TG: Did you have a writing community?
MA: It was small. It was the fifties. You were supposed to be a doctor, a lawyer, in business.

TG: In many ways, we’re still in the fifties, here.
MA: No, we’re not. You have quite a lively art scene.

TG: But everyone is fighting their parents to get to that.
MA: That will always be universally true. When I announced at 16 that I was going to be a writer, you could see them blanch. Being them, they bit their tongues and tried to discourage me in indirect ways. My mother said, “If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better learn to spell.”

I said, others will do that for me. But what I really thought – and I really did think this – was you could make quite a lot of money by writing 'True Romance' stories, for 'True Romance' magazines -- with the tear coming out the girl's eye, and in the background, another girl embracing a young man. [Fakes a sniffle] You could tell what the plot was going to be.

My idea was, I’d write those to make a living, and in the evenings, I’d write my cross between Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway, with some Faulkner thrown in. I tried, but I wasn’t any good at them—you have to believe.

So I thought I’d go to journalism school. Then a second cousin, who was a journalist, said, if you’re a woman you’ll end up writing the fashion pages and the obituaries. I thought, I’ll go to university after all: teach in fall, winter and spring, and write my deathless masterpiece…

TG: …in the summer.
MA: Yes. After university in Toronto, I was going to run away to France: live in a garret, drink absinthe, be a waitress. I had those ideas. Existentialists, we were in those days. But my college advisor said, quite rightly, you’ll probably get more writing done as a graduate student. So I went to Harvard and became a nineteenth century specialist. You get to read a lot of utopias. They thought everything was going to get better and better. We didn’t get dystopias until the twentieth century.

TG: That’s fascinating. Does that connect to what you said recently, that now isn’t the time for realistic fiction?
MA: What I said was, it’s hard to write really realistic fiction, unless you pretend that nobody watches TV, or is on the internet. To make it plausible, people would have phones. Things get arranged differently. It’s not as easy as it was when reality was more static.

Even some of the realistic fiction of the past was set in the past – Vanity Fair, or A Tale of Two Cities. So you took a reality that wasn't going to change...

TG: One of my favourites of your books is Alias Grace [a novel about a woman who was jailed for murder, in 19th century Canada]. 

MA: The problem with writing a fiction like that is we know quite a lot, but some things are hard to find out: daily life that everybody took for granted. People tend not to write them in their diaries. 

TG: Do you think that has changed now, with our documenting everything we do?

MA: Except how are we documenting it? Digital information is unstable. You remember floppy discs. I have some, I can't read them. The first novel I wrote on them was The Robber Bride. Four chapters a disk.

Think of Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel, The Circle—is it predictive, or is it of the moment in which he wrote it? It has to be the latter, because there isn’t any “the future.” There’s an infinite number of possible futures, and we don’t know which one we’re going to get. So I say, write plausible fiction. The reader has to believe it.

TG: Is this the key difference between science fiction and speculative fiction?
MA: Yes, it’s the difference between something that could happen, and something that really couldn’t. Sci-fi, especially sci-fi fantasy—we know it’s not real. It’s another world, not without its excitements and adrenalin bursts, but it’s not going to happen to us tomorrow, or next year, or probably ever. It is a galaxy far, far away—though everybody looks like us, or Carrie Fisher [one of the stars of the Star Wars series of films].

Spec-fic is this world, this planet; it could happen, we’re thinking of it now. [The writer George Orwell’s] 1984, it had already happened. [The writer Aldous Huxley’s] Brave New World, it was happening. My rule for The Handmaid’s Tale [a dystopian novel set in a United States that has become totalitarian Christian theocracy, where women have lost their rights], was that I would not put anything into it that we had not already done.“People say, you’ve got such a twisted, dark imagination.” Actually, it’s not my imagination.

TG: I noticed that you like to use voice as performance. Have you ever been attracted to oral storytelling, being an actor?

MA: Absolutely. One of my first businesses, because I was an entrepreneurial little child, was a puppet show for 5-year-olds' birthday parties. We were 14, 15, 16. We ended up with an agent, we were pretty good! We did the voices, we made the hand-puppets. We did the classics: Hansel and Gretel, The Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood. You'll notice that they all involve what little children at that age are fascinated by, which is cannibalism.

I've written a play. I've written an opera libretto. You can go online and see my hockey goalee video. In the seventies, I did a lot of film scripts.

TG: Does the spoken word give you more control than the written word?

MA: Not more. A different kind of control. You can read more about what is it that makes writing different from the other arts in my book called Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

TG: Is the way we live now making writing and reading very different from what it used to be?

MA: There are different platforms. For instance, Wattpad. Young kids, but also other people, are using it to story-share, and disguise their real identities. 

TG: You seem to enjoy Twitter. 

MA: I enjoy it. The rules for Twitter are the same as being the host of a radio station -- or conversation at a party. Some authors are told by their publishers to use Twitter to promote themselves. No, wrong idea: you can use twitter to promote other people. You can invite guests. You can retweet. You can share information. There's humour. 

TG: Is there anything about Twitter that annoys you?

MA: I think other people's experience of Twitter is not the same as mine. It's self-selecting. You attract people interested in your radio station. And they know by now that if they're rude, I'll block them. 

TG: But though you like it, I believe you limit your tweeting time to ten minutes a day. 

MA: That's my story [grins].

TG: So it's not true?

MA: Tweeting time, yes, but the internet is very handy for things that are well-known within a culture. Like I'm reading this [fishes out a copy of Mahasweta Devi's After Kurukshetra, set after the battle of the Mahabharata] – and I had to look up the back story, so I could understand what she was retelling. 

TG: But you don't think the internet has changed us?

MA: The platform does alter how we perceive, but only alters how we perceive within that window. It alters how we narrate. So before the jumpcut in film, you would have to have a paragraph of explanation every time you change the scene. In the 19th century novel, it'd be: 'While Oliver was learning to pick pockets, in another part of the city...'

TG: We assume simultaneity now. 

MA: Yes. It's the meanwhile part. It's what I did with the MaddAddam Trilogy. I have Oryx and Crake and then simultaneously, The Year of the Flood. Then I connect them in the third book. 

TG: Starting out, did you find it difficult to get published because you were a woman?
MA: No, because I was Canadian. (laughs) There were only a couple of Canadian publishing companies in the 60s. There was also Oxford Canada, and Macmillan Canada, but your chances with them were slim. You could move to the United States and become pseudo-American, or to London. It was a post-colonial time. So we had men and women writers working together on the problem of being Canadian. Young writers started their own publishing companies, some of which are still going, and quite respectable. I was working in publishing, too, the way we did, basically unpaid: looking at each others’ manuscripts, sitting on the board, looking at the slush pile.

TG: Does the Indian publishing industry look different from your last visit, 27 years ago?
MA: There’s a lot more of it now. The landscape you see now didn’t exist. There weren’t any literary festivals. A lot of new publications have sprung up.

TG: Do you enjoy literature festivals?
MA: I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy.

TG: How was the Jaipur Literature Festival?
MA: Extremely filled with people! I think it was a third of a million attendance this time. They have to be congratulated on handling that, they've got a system which more or less works. 
Everybody was extremely pleasant. I think it’s because you’re supposed to be nice to old people. If I were younger, I’d get more aggressive questions. 

TG: And you didn't at JLF?
MA: I got one by a guy that said, well, the women's movement has been a failure. So I said, think of all these things that were once hotly debated, such as are women human beings, should they be allowed to attend university, have jobs. I think we're in the third wave, where the hot button issues are violence, rape and murder. 
 
In the early days, people would say things like: “What makes you think you can write?” Or the radio guy would start off with “I haven’t read your book and I’m not going to. But tell me, in 25 words or less, what’s it about?”
One of my favourites was: “So, The Handmaid’s Tale is autobiography.” I said, “No, it’s not. It’s set in the future.” He said, “That’s no excuse.”

TG: Do you think there is resistance from men to reading books written by women?
MA: Books by young women? Yes. You don’t want a girl that’s smarter than you, if you’re thinking of her as somebody you might date. Middle-aged women? It’s your mom: run away. But Granny? Granny always gave you that cookie nobody else would give you. There’s a lot of pushback in sci-fi and online gaming: those guys are afraid women will come in and tell them they can’t have rape scenes in their video games. I seem to have a pretty large younger male readership for the MaddAddam trilogy. Less for the realistic fiction, but not none. Because I cover quite a large range, my readership has always been wide. Any age, any gender, any country.

TG: The idea that continues to plague us is that the things that women write about most often are seen as “domestic”—which is apparently not universal.
MA: If a man writes a domestic novel about changing a baby: “Hero!!” If a woman writes it: “Why do we have read this shit, baby-diapers-crap?” But a lot more younger men are a lot more participatory in their families. And they seem to enjoy it. You never would have seen that in the 50s.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

My column for Mumbai Mirror, Dec 21, 2014:

With PK, Rajkumar Hirani has pulled off his most remarkable feat yet: a mainstream Hindi film that takes on the question of religion, and is neither abrasive nor apologetic.

There's a great scene in Rajkumar Hirani's new film where a shopkeeper outside a big temple (the wonderful Brijendra Kala in a far-too-brief appearance) sells the eponymous PK (Aamir Khan) an earthen idol of a Hindu deity. PK, a green-eyed alien on whose planet there's no such thing as God, wants to know whether there's any difference between the larger, more expensive statues and the smaller, less pricey ones. Having been told there's none, PK buys the smallest and cheapest murti in the shop, and is overjoyed when his first prayer -- for something to quell his hunger -- appears to be met instantaneously: a samosa drops into his hand. When his second prayer doesn't meet with such an immediate response, PK returns to the shopkeeper, and demands that he either recharge the idol's batteries, or give him another one. "This God isn't working!" he says. 

We laugh, as we are meant to, at his frustration and confusion. But we're also laughing at ourselves, because aren't those people lining up to put money in the divine donation box hoping for exactly such efficacy? 

Our idea of the divine isn't quite working -- and that is the properly serious concern at the heart of PK. Like all Hirani's previous films, this one, too, wraps up an all-too-real problem in a frothy fable perfectly engineered to win over audiences unlikely to spend their evening (and their money) on a 'serious movie'. Here, Hirani and his co-writer Abhijat Joshi create a cleverly repurposed version of that hoary old trope, man's search for God. 

What makes this oft-repeated premise funny rather than serious here is that PK isn't looking for God for the usual human reasons -- because he's tired of the world, feels cheated by his fellowmen, or needs an emotional anchor that won't fail him. He's just looking for him because he's lost his interplanetary transmitter, and every time he asks anyone where it might be, they say, Bhagwan jaane. 

Like Umesh Shukla's OMG: Oh My God, (2012), Hirani's film seems to start by challenging the very idea of belief. But like in OMG, by the time the climax rolls around, it's clear that the filmmakers have changed their minds. The basic question of whether God is real, and thus whether any appeal to him can ever be efficacious, has been set aside in favour of a strongly-worded critique of those who have set themselves up as his earthly managers -- masterfully embodied in PK by Saurabh Shukla as the large and unctuous figure of Tapasvi. 

But unlike OMG, where Paresh Rawal's atheist Kanjibhai had to swallow his cynicism when God himself (Akshay Kumar as Krishna on a motorcycle-chariot) came to his aid in the worldly battle against His self-appointed representatives, Hirani doesn't insist on pushing the real presence of divinity down our throats. His point is gentler, and harder to argue with - if having faith makes people feel better, gives them strength in difficult times, we have no right to try and deprive them of it. 

What the film does, and somehow does with sparkle, is to draw our attention to the nasty things that are done in God's name -- as PK says, if God is asking you to do these impossible things to solve your problems, he can't be real, he must be a fake 'duplicate' God, a wrong number. The remarkable thing is that Hirani and Co. are able to take these things we all know perfectly well -- that the dharm ke thekedars are making money off our fears, or that if we are all the children of God, rich people shouldn't get to jump the queue -- and weave them into an effervescent piece of cinema. 

The strange ways of earthlings seen literally through the eyes of an alien -- the premise has been used to comic effect in countless Hollywood films, and yet it is put to such charming use here that you cannot but smile. 

And it isn't just organised religion that PK holds up to ridicule. From the 'dancing cars' that supply his oddly mismatched clothes, to the conventions that prevent people from holding each other's hands, PK finds human beings mystifying. 

The Hindu-Muslim love story is sweet and simple and impossibly pat, and yet Hirani (and the under appreciated Sushant Singh Rajput) manage to make it work, allowing it to function as the urtext for the million ridiculous rules we have devised to divide ourselves from one another. As PK's paan-stained grin makes clear, the joke is on us.

Film Review: Joker

My review of Joker is up on Firstpost:

The idea of an alien movie set in India isn’t half-bad. An alien spoof movie set in India: sure, that’s even better. A movie about a village of madmen that doesn’t exist on the map: that’s a perfectly good idea, too (especially if we don’t think too hard about the fact that the germ of it almost certainly came from Manto’s genius story ‘Toba Tek Singh’). So Shirish Kunder’s Joker isn’t short on starting premises. But a film that hopes to fly all these kites simultaneously can only be setting itself up for a spectacular fall. And boy, does it crash and burn.

The tragedy is that if you look at it all as an intentional spoof, you can begin to see where Shirish Kunder is coming from. After all, Joker takes Hindi cinema’s favourite kind of makes-us-thump-our-chests NRI – the NASA scientist – and puts him in charge of his most ridiculous project yet: a search for aliens, conducted via a roomful of flashing screens and dish antennas which can be apparently be condensed into a briefcase version and carried along to India when the need arises...

The spoof carries on: having been brought back to his ancestral village by the oldest Hindi movie trick in the book, the great Indian deathbed call (Pitaji aakhri saansein gin rahe hain), our noble scientist Agastya (Akshay Kumar) is most annoyed to find his father hale and hearty, and decides to go right back to his alien search in Amreeka. It’s only after a bizarre series of events — involving the old man (a deliberately cross-eyed Darshan Jariwala) hanging upside down over a daldal to rescue Agastya and his younger brother Babban (a gibberish-speaking Shreyas Talpade) — that the NRI decides to stay and rescue the village from the daldal of daridrata (mire of poverty).

This brings us to the second stage of spoof: Agastya decides to create a fake crop circle to attract the attention of the world to his neglected Paglapur. And this, naturally, he must do while masquerading as a dhoti-clad ‘farmer’. So what if the rest of the village wears whatever the hell they like – from the leftover firang Lord Falkland in his time warp angrez uniform to the village headmaster (Asrani) who dresses, as one reviewer correctly points out, like CV Raman? Who cares, when our hero gets to switch from parodying Shah Rukh Khan in Swades to parodying Aamir Khan in Lagaan. And that too in a gaaon that looks like a cross between an old-style mela and a new-style amusement park (there’s even a permanently stationed ferris wheel), with a big helping of Asterix’s Gaulish village thrown in.

The problem, however, is that all of these carefully constructed spoofs fall as flat as a failed souffle. We aren’t exactly expecting the visual jugglery and non-stop clever gags that make an alien spoof into a classic like Tim Burton’s gleefully destructive Mars Attacks (1995) – but a little bit of spark would be nice. It would be nice, for example, if it was possible to have dialogue whose ‘humour’ didn’t depend on the tired gimmick of literal translation from Hindi. Lines like “Don’t fly my joke’ (mera mazaak mat udao) and ‘Hair hair remains’ (baal baal bache) aren’t unique to Joker, but that doesn’t make them any less shockingly lame.
It would be nicer still if a range of comic actors as talented as Shreyas Talpade, Anjan Srivastava, Sanjay Mishra and Pitobash Tripathy were given a script which didn’t crush them under the weight of its ridiculous stupidity. (Anjan Srivastava, it seems to me, hasn’t got a meaty funny role since his iconic Wagle ki Duniya was on Doordarshan circa 1988 – I’d be happy to be corrected – while Shreyas Talpade last managed a proper centre spread in 2008’s Welcome to Sajjanpur. The others are still waiting.)

After Agastya’s crop circle ploy succeeds, the film holds out the promise of a ‘contemporary India’ comedy: the media arrives, and where the media comes, governments follow. So do religious loonies and tourists. Visitors mean revenues, and the media musn’t leave, so Agastya and his girlfriend Deeva (a simpering, annoying Sonakshi Sinha) come up with one fictitious otherworldly experience after another to keep them there, including – wait for it – the creation of vegetable-dyed and vegetable-anointed ‘aliens’ out of Paglapur’s less gifted inhabitants.

There’s also a running make-fun-of-America track, which gives us at least one rather good moment when the alien sighting in Paglapur is proclaimed a “definite threat to the security of the United States” – but why Agastya’s eager-beaver firang rival (the gleefully named Simon Goeback) should be a villain when all he’s trying to do is uncover Agastya’s deliberate scam is beyond me.

As compared to the in-your-face screechiness of a Ready or the excruciating double entendre humour of a Kya Super Kool Hain Hum, Joker is almost inoffensive. The trouble is that it doesn’t know if it wants to be a cynical take on the state of the country, or a deep-down-philosophical fantasy in which the gibberish of madmen turns out to be an alien language – or just a standard-issue jingoistic comedy in which Indians can be heroes no matter what and white people are just evil, dude.

Cinemascope: Harishchandrachi Factory; Ra.One

Manufacturing joy
HARISHCHANDRACHI FACTORY
Director: Paresh Mokashi
Starring: Nandu Madhav, Vibhawari Deshpande, Atharva Karve
***1/2

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke's life would be considered a remarkable one even if he was not credited with having made the first-ever Indian motion picture. The son of a Sanskrit pandit from Trimbakeshwar, Phalke was a young man with an unquenchable thirst for the new. At 15, he went to Bombay to study at the JJ School of Art. After several more years at Baroda's Kala Bhawan, he started a small photography studio in Godhra. Soon after this, he apprenticed himself to a German magician called Carl Hertz, who had been employed by the Lumiere Brothers. He then worked as a draftsman with the Archaeological Survey of India before entering the printing business: specialising in lithographs and oleographs, working for artist Raja Ravi Varma, even visiting Germany to learn more about the technology.

Sometime around now, Phalke watched his first moving picture, The Life of Christ. Struck by the possibility of making an Indian film where it would be Indian gods who flickered into life on screen, he sold his stake in the printing press and embarked on what was to be his most ambitious project yet. Harishchandrachi Factory focuses on this section of Phalke's life, showing us a man both eccentric and driven. Marathi theatre director Paresh Mokashi gives us a film whose finely-tuned sense of the tragicomic is reminiscent of Chaplin and Jacques Tati. Phalke is introduced in a black top hat doing magic tricks for delighted children, only to actually disappear when an angry debtor shows up. We laugh, but there's a sense that we could cry instead. We see a grieving wife and neighbours and prepare for the worst, but they're mourning a cupboard Phalke has sold off. Even his temporary blindness in 1912 is not off-limits for laughter: as Phalke lies there with eyes bandaged, someone says with mock gravity, "Your eyes will get cured – what shall we do about your mind?"

Mokashi extracts superb performances from his cast, especially Nandu Madhav as the irrepressible Phalke, Vibhavari Deshpande as his wife, and the child actors. The 'period feel' goes much beyond the slightly low-grade costumes and sets: one comes away thinking about modernity's transformation of everything, from technology to caste and the marital relationship.

(Harishchandrachi Factory is playing at PVR Director's Cut in New Delhi this week).

A bad Hollywood film
RA.ONE
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Starring: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
*

The best thing about Ra.One, depending on the different people I've asked, is a) the kid (Armaan Verma): though truthfully, it's not him but his large Beatle-ish mop of hair; b) the spectacle of Bombay's VT Station cracking up into magnificent ruin, with accompanying sound effects; or c) Kareena Kapoor as a crazed automaton under the control of the evil villain, driving a Bombay local train towards certain death for its passengers and herself. No-one – not even the kids at whom the film is ostensibly targeted – seems in the slightest bit arrested by the epic battle between Ra.One and G.One – between the forces of evil and good – that is supposed to be the crux of this film.

The plot, for what it's worth, centres on a geeky South Indian dad (played by Shah Rukh Khan as a caricature that's worse than even his Om Shanti Om act), who designs a video game with a supremely powerful villain because his son Prateek thinks villains are cooler than heroes. The video-game villain (Ra.One) plays his first game with Prateek (who, in his badness obsession, calls himself Lucifer), is irritated at having been almost beaten and comes out of the video game to kill Lucifer in real life. Poor nerdy dad and his nerdy Chinese colleague die quick and pointless deaths, while the irritating kid has barely shed a tear for the dad who was too uncool for him when he gets a much cooler substitute: the video-game hero, G.One.

Unfortunately, though, there can be no substitute for feeling. And in this film, we feel nothing at all. When Shah Rukh Khan dies, we're too busy wondering how he gets put in a coffin only to emerge as asthi in a pot. Emotions probably run higher in an actual video game.

Nor does the film imbue its virtual world with any depth. The final video game encounter is the most underwhelming I've seen, while the Ra.One–Raavan connection is utterly banal (how much more Rakeysh Mehra did with Raavan in the flawed but fascinating Aks). The closest connection this film has to Indian mythology is a children's birthday party overrun, for some inexplicable reason, by women in skimpy green outfits and gold jewellery who look straight out of Amar Chitra Katha.

Watch Ra.One if you don't mind sitting through a series of pointless cameos (a ridiculous Priyanka Chopra defending her modesty in a red dress, Sanjay Dutt just so we can hear the word Khalnayak, and Rajinikanth as Chitti the robot – to compensate for the horrific South Indian treatment earlier?) to watch a lot of things being blown to smithereens.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Cinemascope: Super 8; Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge

My Sunday Guardian column for 23rd Oct.


Immaculately done, super-enjoyable ride

SUPER 8
Director: J.J. Abrams
Starring: Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Gabriel Basso

***1/2

JJ Abrams' sci-fi blockbuster is, as a lot of reviewers have pointed out, a no-holds-barred homage to the early films of Steven Spielberg (who is, somewhat oddly, also the movie's producer). Many of these reviewers – presumably themselves fans of Spielberg and '70s sci-fi – have found the film deeply disappointing, disparaging its 'retromania' and finding its homages overdone, obvious and manipulative. And it is true that the film does seem to reference practically every major Spielberg film in a similar genre, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET (1982), The Goonies (1985) and even Jurassic Park (1995). But as someone who has had very little to do with sci-fi – though I cannot discount the possibility that my un-jaded eye may have worked in the film's favour – I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The group of kids who stumble onto a mystery and solve it while the adults are pretty much in the dark may be a reference to The Goonies, but for the non-sci-fi viewer it can feel just as much like an enjoyable throwback to an Enid Blyton world of secret maps and midnight assignations. The kids in a Spielberg homage, naturally, are way cooler than any Enid Blyton kids could ever be, with their sophisticated nerdy interests battling for priority against the heartstopping joys of first love (a la The Wonder Years, but charmingly unsoppy). The 12-year-old Joe Lamb (the wonderful Joel Courtney) makes near-perfect model trains and specialises in zombie make-up, a skill which is put to good use in his best friend Charles' (Riley Griffith) current pet project: filming a delightfully over-the-top zombie movie which provides Super 8 with some of its most endearing moments, including a lovely 14-year-old heroine (Elle Fanning) who is inserted into the film because people must care about characters, even when they're zombies. (The zombie film is, happily, shown all the way through during the end credits).

It's during a secret film shoot at the local railroad station that the gang witnesses (and captures on Super 8 film) a devastating movie-worthy derailment, ostensibly caused by a pick-up truck colliding with a train. After the accident, the weirdest things start to happen: microwaves and car engines vanish overnight, the town's dogs go missing, people start to disappear in horrific crashes and the power goes off in long stretches without explanation. "This feels like a Russian invasion," says an outraged citizen at a town meeting presided over by a hassled Deputy Sheriff, who happens to be Joe's dad. As the town is – without explanation – taken over by the US Air Force, the '70s suburban paradise of the film's first half dissolves, by the time the climax comes round, into an Apocalyptic war zone of tanks and explosive fires. As the kids are driven through this unreal terrain by a doped-out photo store worker, intensity of experience triumphs joyously over hackneyed plot. Even if you find yourself grinning in disbelief at the finally revealed 'secret', there is more than enough pleasure to be derived from the ride.

College romance gets right coolness factor

MUJHSE FRAAANDSHIP KAROGE
Director: Nupur Asthana
Starring: Saqib Saleem, Saba Azad, Nishant Dahiya, Tara D’Souza
***

After the jamalgota-and-itching-powder-laden juvenilia of Luv ka the End and Always Kabhi Kabhi, finally a film which doesn't think catering to India's 'urban youth' must necessarily involve acts of jawdropping stupidity carried out by irritating cardboard cutouts that send you into fits of despair. The young people in Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge are rather endearing. They live in a bubble and they can be silly sometimes, but they can also be clever and funny, arrogant and devious, vulnerable and misguided. They're upper middle class, big city teenagers leading the mixed-up, self-absorbed, high drama lives that teenagers so often lead.

Only these ones, like a lot of real-life kids, happen to be leading it in a world where identity is defined as much by your Facebook profile as anything you actually do in real life. So the plot is a classic mistaken-identity romance, taken online. Debutante director Nupur Asthana keeps the action taut and fun, while Anvita Dutt Guptan's superb ear for the ironic ways of cosmopolitan youthspeak makes for good dialogue ("Sau-boyfriend-vati bhava, putri") and spot-on lyrics ("Five star coffee bar, chal na yaar Shanivaar, liking the late night outings; (That's right), Very far to the bar, ek baar in the car, we will do cootchie coo make-outings"), set to music by the Bangalore-based Raghu Dixit. Add to that the stellar young cast (Saba Azad and Saqib Saleem as the squabbling Preity and Vishaal, as well as Prabal Panjabi, brilliant as Hacky), and it's clear that Y Films (Yash Raj's youth wing, previously responsible for Luv ka the End) have got a bunch of things right with this film. It effortlessly captures much that's de rigueur in college corridors: the brutal public leg-pulling, which if challenged is always met by a quizzical why-so-serious, the ceaseless tests of coolness, the obsession with hotness – until people gradually begin to figure out that there are more complicated ways to fall in love. It's not particularly profound, but it's kind of fun.

Cinemascope: Zokkomon; Dum Maro Dum

The first instalment of my weekly film column for the Sunday Guardian: reviews of Zokkomon and Dum Maro Dum (24th Apr, 2011).


Safary shines as the rationalist superhero

ZOKKOMON
Director: Satyajit Bhatkal
Starring: Anupam Kher, Darsheel Safary, Manjari Fadnis, Sheeba Chaddha

Disney Pictures has made a children's superhero movie that's deeply rationalist at its core – a superhero who doesn't have magical powers, and who's out to kill superstition. The orphaned Kunal (Darsheel Safary) is withdrawn from his beloved boarding school by his Chacha, his official guardian, who runs his own school. After a tearful farewell with his principal (which plays like the reverse of the Masoom scene in which Jugal Hansraj tugged at our collective heartstrings with "Main aap ke saath kyon nai reh sakta?"), Kunal is put on his way.

From the basketball-playing school with sensitive teachers – the evolved modern-day world, apparently – we arrive in Jhunjhunmaakadstrama, where people are either evil schemers or innocent victims. Kunal's Chacha (a smarmy Anupam Kher) and Chachi (marvelous Sheeba Chaddha) fit the former category, while most of the village is the latter. Realists may gripe about caricature, but the broad-brush characterisations work as they do in fairytales or pantomime, establishing our loyalties quickly, and often playing successfully for laughs. Chacha tries to get hold of Kunal's inheritance by declaring him dead, but Kunal reappears and befriends a misanthropic scientist (Kher again). Together they set out to reform the village through Kunal's appearances as a masked hero called Zokkomon.

The film has good things in it: the sequences where Kunal and his newfound friends wander the village, especially their discovery of the 'haunted house', are charming and Safary's combination of gravity and glee in his superhero avatar makes him fun to watch. With its refrain of 'Jab man mein ho vishwaas, to har dar hai bakwaas' and its vision of rural revolution led by fearless kids, it clearly has its heart in the right place.

But Zokkomon plays on the villagers' belief that Kunal is an avenging spirit, and the 'science' behind Zokkomon is never quite explained. It's also telling that all that's needed to proclaim the school a cesspit of ignorance is the teacher's incorrect English. Some caricatures can be harmful.


B-movie in (not very good) disguise



DUM MARO DUM
Director: Rohan Sippy
Starring: Abhishek Bachchan, Prateik Babbar, Bipasha Basu, Rana Daggubati

Everything you've heard or seen of Dum Maro Dum has led you to believe it's fairly brimming with youthful coolth. But gorgeous Goa beaches packed with bronzed bodies, psychedelic cinematography, the revamped Dum Maro Dum song with Jaideep Sahni's out-to-shock lyrics ("Oonche se ooncha banda, Potty pe baithe nanga...") – none of these can quite disguise the '80s B movie that lies beneath.

You begin to sense it early on, when Prateik Babbar does a version of the classic hero-drowns-his-sorrows-in-alcohol song. By the time you get to pasty-faced Aditya Pancholi as the white-suited villain Lorsa Biscuita, who is both benevolent industrialist and secret druglord, things begin to seem very familiar indeed. With cocaine instead of gold biscuits and rave parties in lieu of cabarets, this could have still been fun homage.

But unlike Farhan Akhtar's Don remake, or even Milan Luthria's Once Upon A Time in Mumbai, there's not a whiff of self-conscious retro-coolness here. When there is, it's awful, like Bachchan Junior murdering one of his father's iconic songs in a clunky faux-torture scene. But for the most part, the throwback to the '80s is dreadfully in earnest, with dreadful, unconvincing backstories to boot. The druglord's moll – Bipasha Basu in yet another lacklustre outing as the golden-hearted girl stuck in the wrong life – must die as soon as she's helped nail him; the corrupt drugbusting cop, Abhishek, turns clean when his wife and child die in a car crash ostensibly caused by a driver on drugs; the susegad (Goan for laidback) singer – Rana Daggubati – having failed his girlfriend, decides to risk everything to save a boy he barely knows (Prateik). Characters were clearly not what the filmmaker was focusing on.

And the leads don't help: Pancholi hams horribly; Prateik starts out believably vulnerable, but gradually gets so squeaky that you wonder why anyone would want to save him from anything. As for Abhishek, one can only watch him and wonder: where is the spry, stylishly funny Bluffmaster of Rohan Sippy's film, the goofy conman of Bunty Aur Babli, the hotheaded Lallan of Yuva? We want him back.