Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Class of ’83: Review

It would seem that a few months of online premieres have done what a century of theatrical releases couldn’t: tame the running times of Hindi films. Raat Akeli Hai may have stretched its legs but Shakuntala Devi and Gulabo Sitabo were just over two hours, Gunjan Saxena and Dil Bechara were 112 and 101 minutes, while Bulbbul was a scarcely believable 94 minutes. At an hour and 38 minutes, Class of ’83 is another time-efficient title. Yet, this is one film that actually needs that extra hour.

Atul Sabharwal’s film begins at a police training academy in Nashik in 1982, where five cadets are having a tough time reining in their rebelliousness and keeping up with lessons. Shukla (Bhupendra Jadawat), Aslam (Sameer Paranjape), Jadhav (Ninad Mahajani), Surve (Prithvik Pratap) and Varde (Hitesh Bhojraj) seem to be on their way out when the academy's elusive dean, Vijay Singh (Bobby Deol), takes an interest in them. Instead of cutting the quintet loose, the grizzled cop tweaks the syllabus to engage their attention. Training montages with Moroder-like synths follow (welcome back, Viju Shah). Eventually, Singh reveals his endgame—he wants to form a secret squad of hitmen who’ll take down Bombay’s gangsters.

Singh has his own demons. In 1981, while leading a raid on gangster Kalsekar, he was ambushed and ended up losing several of his men. To make matters worse, he returned to find that his ailing wife—whom he’d left in the hospital—was dead. We learn that the academy is a punishment posting, and that he tried to commit suicide. The hit squad is a way to redeem himself. And for a while it works, as his protégés start killing criminals in fake 'encounters'.

Class of ’83 adapts S. Hussain Zaidi’s nonfiction book on the actual cops who became 'encounter specialists' in the ’80s. Singh spells it out to a friend: “The institutionalised killing of gangsters by policemen." The film treats such killings as a moral imperative—a cure to a disease. There’s a political parallel drawn too: the ‘Punjab model’. But encounters are illegal for a reason, still prevalent and often misused. The cops in this film are only seen as having crossed a line when they accidentally gun down civilians and start taking money from gangsters. The shooting of unarmed criminals isn’t even framed as a necessary evil—it’s just necessary. It’s difficult not to see an aligning of hardline attitudes in Aslam’s use of the line from Uri: The Surgical Strike, “ghar mein ghus ke maarenge (we’ll enter your houses and kill you)".

This is where the film’s runtime works against it. Even if there’s a willingness to examine the effects of committing officially sanctioned murder on these cops, there isn’t enough time (surely Aslam, the most conscientious of the five, has some qualms?). Class of ’83 feels like it has material enough for three hours, crunched into half that time. All the characters besides Singh are light sketches: I couldn’t tell you anything about the individual members of the squad beyond Shukla being a compulsive masturbator. Wives and children appear out of nowhere and are never seen again. Singh’s relationship with his son appears to be damaged beyond repair but when he turns up an hour later they seem reconciled.

When the film does dwell on a scene, it gives Sabharwal and screenwriter Abhijeet Deshpande a chance to tell us something about who these people are. In a scene with the five of them at a restaurant, the conversation turns to striking mill workers. Shukla has been injured in one of the rallies, and Varde mutters that stone-pelters will die if they carry on like this. Jadhav says his father is a mill worker, which leads to an argument. It's the film’s best scene, not only for how it shows the unstable dynamic of the group but also the way it addresses the larger social forces altering Bombay at the time.

In creating the Bombay of the 1980s, Sabharwal does something clever. He splices in clips from old Films Division documentaries, using them like quick ‘joins’ in the narrative. This isn’t done often, or for long, so the shots just about blend in with the film's brown-and-grey palette (credit to editors Manas Mittal and Nitin Baid). There’s the boy being splashed by a wave from Charles Correa’s City on the Water, a top-angle view of Flora Fountain from G.L. Bhardwaj’s Destination Bombay, a crowded train station from Mani Kaul’s Arrival. It’s a simple and effective strategy, a way to ground the film in reality while not departing from the world of fiction. The era is established in other ways as well: billboards, popular songs (Surve sings a line of John Jani Janardhan), movie posters, Viju Shah’s exuberant retro synths and the wonderful detail of how postmen helped cops track gangs.

If Shah is back, it’s only fitting that Bobby Deol is too. The actor isn’t making a comeback exactly, just a comeback to films that aren’t, you know, Yamla Pagla Deewana: Phir Se. His Vijay Singh is not a commanding performance but an adequate one, testament to what can happen when an actor with years on his face gets a sympathetic director who’ll cover his limitations. The actors playing the young cops are a fine, ornery ensemble—though again, a little more time with each would have been welcome.

Class of ’83 has shades of Ashim Ahluwalia’s Daddy, another dry cops-and-gangsters film that takes its Mumbai period recreation seriously. But where Daddy was coolly detached, Class of ’83 ends on a note of moral certitude. “Sometimes, to maintain order, one has to break the law," the narrator says as the cops do a hero walk—shot from below, unsmiling, purposeful—towards the camera. It’s a walk you’ll probably see in Sooryavanshi when it eventually releases, and while that film will scarcely resemble Class of '83, their ideas regarding vigilante cops may not be that far apart.

Perry Mason season 1: Review

Some shows hit the ground running. I don’t know a Sopranos fan who wasn’t hooked by the end of the pilot. Mad Men’s first episode had the famous “It’s toasted" pitch to Lucky Strike. Justified starts with the hero outdrawing a gangster and ends with him shooting the man who’ll be his main rival for six seasons.

Then there are the ones that take their time. A common discussion among fans of The Wire is when the show started to “kick in" for them. Halt and Catch Fire fans avoid that discussion—it’s too embarrassing (the last episode of the first season is when I first had an inkling of greatness). The Americans had a killer first episode, but soon settled into its trademark slow burn, with intricate story arcs unfolding across entire seasons.

The HBO series Perry Mason—created by Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald—which just wrapped up its first season, certainly has a delayed kick. There are eight episodes, and four of these are an origin story. Perhaps this was necessary to distinguish this Perry Mason from the memory of Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels and the long-running TV show with Raymond Burr as the criminal defense lawyer. So we get a decidedly unimpressive Mason to start with—a private investigator working for a veteran Los Angeles lawyer, E.B. (John Lithgow). He’s more crumpled tissue than human being, haunted by his time in the war, broke, divorced and forced to take photographs of stars for the yellow papers to make ends meet.

Matthew Rhys, who plays Mason, is a marvellous subtle actor, but the first few episodes seem to encourage our impression of him as the saddest face on television, as the increasingly conflicted spy in The Americans, and in films like The Post and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It’s hard to see the hotshot lawyer of the books in this sad sack digging around morosely for evidence to help E.B. defend a woman accused of abducting her baby, who turns up dead in a harrowing scene at the start. Yet, as the case stretches on and the involvement of the Radiant Assembly of God, a cult-like church, becomes more evident, Mason’s spine—somewhat bent out of shape at the start—starts to straighten.

It sounds strange to hear but the show’s obvious pedigree also hampers its early episodes. The careful detailing of the seedy 1930s setting pretty much shouts prestige series. The directors are HBO MVP Tim Van Patten and Deniz Gamze Ergüven, who made the acclaimed Mustang. The music is by Terence Blanchard (his second great score of the year after Da 5 Bloods). There are war flashbacks whose main purpose is to flash the show’s $74 million budget. It feels a bit too artfully arranged, too dark-night-of-the-soul, and not enough fun.

Fortunately—and taking away nothing from Lithgow’s fusty performance—E.B. dies and the show comes alive. The fifth episode starts with his secretary Della Street (Juliet Rylance) discovering the body; it ends with her convincing Mason to take the bar exam, become a lawyer and take on the case. The transformation from PI to lawyer, even a fumbling one, is perhaps a bit too quick, but Rhys sells it as few actors could, retaining the hangdog look but conveying a growing sense of purpose and moral clarity. Rylance is wonderful too, her character swiftly and calmly taking charge, carrying Mason until he’s ready to walk. And there are wonderful supporting turns: Gayle Rankin as the stricken mother, Shea Whigham as Mason's dirt-digging friend, Chris Chalk as an honest beat cop and Tatiana Maslany and Lili Taylor as the mother and daughter who run the Radiant Assembly.

A scene near the start of the last episode is indicative of the confidence the show has going into its final stretch. Mason is laying into a crooked cop on the stand, in complete control, full of righteous fury. As he goes in for the kill, a lawyer who’s been helping him stands up and says, “It won’t work, Mason. He's not going to confess." It’s a weirdly stagey moment, but Mason continues. Again the man says, “It won’t work." Mason yells at him, “I’m not finished." And suddenly there's a cut to the night before, with Mason and team practising, and we realise that what we’ve been seeing is a vision of how they hope it will go. To place the Perry Mason of legend in a lying flashback is incredibly clever. And with a second season announced, it’s a promise that we’ll see the finished article sometime in the future.

28 films for 28 states

One thing about Indian cinema that isn’t appreciated enough, even by film fans in this country, is its vastness. The widely spoken languages have their own film industries, but the drive to tell stories through cinema extends to the most far-flung communities and obscure dialects. On Independence Day, we pay tribute to this diversity by selecting one film set in each state of India. To give a relatively recent picture of each state, we’ve limited ourselves to films from the last 20 years and largely avoided period dramas. From 'Anaarkali Of Aarah' to 'Iewduh', here's a snapshot of Indian cinema, state by state.

Arunachal Pradesh: Crossing Bridges (2013)

A web designer working in Mumbai returns to his village in Arunachal Pradesh, and spends his time there in the hope of finding another job and leaving again. Sange Dorjee Thongdok’s film was the first to be made in the local Shertukpen dialect.

Andhra Pradesh: C/o Kancharapalem (2018)

Kancharapalem, a locality in Visakhapatnam, is the inspiration and setting for Maha Venkatesh’s Telugu feature. An anthology film, C/o Kancharapalem draws its stories and most of its actors from the neighbourhood.

Assam: Bulbul Can Sing (2018)

In the last decade, Assam has been represented in films as disparate as Aamis, Bornodi Bhotiai and Local Kung Fu. One particularly successful modern chronicler of the state is Rima Das, whose Village Rockstars and Bulbul Can Sing have been feted at home and abroad. The latter, a delicate coming-of-age film in Assamese, is a vivid but unsparing portrait of village life.

Bihar: Anaarkali Of Aarah (2017)

Avinash Das’ film is an energetic portrait, as well as an indictment, of modern-day Bihar. The story of a risqué stage singer whose life is turned upside-down after fending off the drunken advances of a powerful university vice chancellor, Anaarkali Of Aarah uses the same local tradition of erotic singing that gets its central character into trouble to also mark her ultimate victory.

Chhattisgarh: Newton (2017)

A rule-obsessed government clerk sent on election duty to the Naxal-controlled jungles of Chhattisgarh finds his main opposition in the form of a CRPF officer. Amit Masurkar’s Hindi film is a layered and ultimately moving portrait of a part of the state that’s rarely seen peace.

Goa: Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015)

Goa has been the setting for so many films from outside the state that it seems only fair to highlight one that tells Goa’s story. This Konkani film by Bardroy Barretto is a short history of Goan popular music, told through the relationship of a jazz singer and a trumpeter-bandleader.

Gujarat: Amdavad Ma Famous (2015)

“It’s a terrible addiction," a disapproving cleric says. “These boys are like artists," says another. Between these two extremes is suspended Hardik Mehta’s delightful non-fiction short, which looks at kite-flyers (and the daredevils who run after severed kites) in Ahmedabad.

Haryana: Sultan (2016)

Ali Abbas Zafar’s film, starring Salman Khan and Anushka Sharma, is the one unabashedly mainstream title on this list. An ode to the akhara wrestling tradition, the film addresses issues of patriarchy and gender roles while nudging its characters and audience to be more broad-minded.

Himachal Pradesh: Dear Maya (2017)

Plenty of Indian films have shot in Shimla, but not many are set there. Sunaina Bhatnagar's Dear Maya unfolds in the hill station, which allows us to see like any other sleepy town and not a tourist destination. Manisha Koirala plays a mysterious middle-aged woman whose solitary existence prompts two teenagers to hatch a risky scheme.

Jharkhand: Udaan (2010)

The steel town of Jamshedpur is the backdrop for Vikramaditya Motwane’s debut film, in which a young boy tries to find the resolve to stand up to his domineering father. The regimented, unsparing nature of factory life and the drabness of the setting seem to mirror the boy’s thwarted life.

Karnataka: Thithi (2015)

In Raam Reddy’s Thithi, we get the specific flavour of Nodekoppalu, co-writer Eregowda's native village. A lot of this is conveyed through food—its procuring, cooking and serving at the ritual feast by the sons of the village elder who dies at the start of the film.

Kerala: Maheshinte Prathikaaram (2016)

In recent Malayalam cinema, setting is everything. The best films conjure up such a specific vision of these towns and villages that they end up in the titles: Angamaly Diaries, Kumbalangi Nights. One underrated gem is Dileesh Pothan’s Maheshinte Prathikaaram, which suggests beautifully the small-town rhythms of Prakash city, in Idukki district. The opening minute and a half of Idukki, sung by actor Fahadh Faasil, could be an advertisement for Kerala tourism.

Madhya Pradesh: Stree (2018)

By coincidence, two Hindi films shot in the town of Chanderi released in 2018. One was Sui Dhaaga, which took as its central theme the town’s famous saree-makers. The other was a supernatural comedy, Amar Kaushik’s Stree, with Rajkummar Rao as an expert tailor. This blithe sleeper hit takes in Chanderi’s customs (it’s set during the annual four-day puja) and plays cleverly on the centrality of local legends, no matter how far-fetched, in small-town life.

Maharashtra: Killa (2014)

It’s impossible to pick one title from Maharashtra, with so many classic Mumbai-set films and excellent Marathi films set elsewhere in the state. But Avinash Arun’s gentle coming-of-age Marathi film, Killa, stands out for the way it captures the pristine beauty of the Konkan coast.

Manipur: Loktak Lairembee (2016)

This Meitei fiction film is about a couple who live on Loktak lake in Manipur, and what happens when the man finds a gun and starts seeing apparitions. Director Haobam Paban Kumar had earlier made a documentary on the same lake, and his first feature hews close to reality, basing itself on the 2011 eviction of lake-dwellers by the government.

Meghalaya: Iewduh (2019)

Iewduh is Meghalaya’s biggest market, in its capital, Shillong. Pradip Kurbah’s film, a rare title in Khasi, is a wonderful introduction to the place, weaving in local customs, music, food and the Shillong Teer lottery.

Mizoram: When Thunders Roll (2015)

Not many films have been made or set in Mizoram. There’s the documentary Rambuai: Mizoram’s ‘Trouble’ Years, and the Hindi film Dansh, set against the backdrop of the Mizo Nationalist Front’s struggle, but there’s barely a trace of either online. So we’ll go with Napoleon RZ Thanga’s modest non-fiction short When Thunders Roll, which documents the 2015 Independence Day charity ride by the Royal Enfield riders’ club The Aizawl Thunders.

Nagaland: Up Down & Sideways (2017)

Two directors from Chennai, Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar, made this film about work songs in Phek village in Nagaland. This unique musical documentary, in Chokri and Nagamese, shows how the polyphonic singing is done in time with the rhythms of rice cultivation, creating a literal sense of harmony.

Odisha: Chilika Bank$: Stories from India's Largest Coastal Lake from 1970-2007 (2008)

Akanksha Joshi’s documentary, produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, looks at the various people who live by, and make their living off, Chilika, India’s largest coastal lake. Through her narration and lively interviews with locals, Joshi shows how the desire to service the export market has deprived fishermen of a steady living.

Punjab: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012)

There have been wonderful films in Punjabi in recent years, but Luv Shuv is significant in offering up just enough Punjabi dialogue along with Hindi to seem like it actually belongs to the state (that proportion has increased further, as seen in films like Udta Punjab and Kesari). Sameer Sharma’s colourful film offers a snapshot of present-day rural Punjab, with Amit Trivedi’s music nicely poised between tradition and hipness.

Rajasthan: Manorama Six Feet Under (2009)

Rajasthan is a ridiculously picturesque state, whether in arty films like Rudaali or epics like Padmaavat. All credit to director Navdeep Singh, then, for wiping all traces of exotica and making the small-town setting of Lakhot nondescript and menacing in his expert reworking of Chinatown.

Sikkim: Ralang Road (2017)

Karma Takapa’s debut feature is a difficult-to-categorise mix of psychological drama, dry comedy and neo-noir. It’s also a rare look at daily life in misty Rabong and Borong (where the director is from) in southern Sikkim.

Tamil Nadu: Kaaka Muttai (2015)

Two young brothers living in a Chennai slum watch a pizza commercial and are filled with the desire to try one. Director M. Manikandan casts an unsentimental eye on their quest, imbuing everything from a trip to the mall to stealing crow’s eggs with humour and poignancy.

Telangana: Bobby Jasoos (2014)

Samar Shaikh’s film was initially supposed to take place in Mumbai before the change to Hyderabad was suggested by producer Dia Mirza. This easygoing comedy starring Vidya Balan gains a lot from its setting, weaving the cultural markers and accents of old Hyderabad into each scene.

Tripura: Tree of Tongues in Tripura (2016)

Joshy Joseph's self-reflexive feature, in Kokborok and English, was developed at a film-making workshop in Agartala. Tripura’s tribal culture and music is at its heart, in particular the efforts of folk artist and preservationist Thanga Darlong, who turned 100 this year.

Uttar Pradesh: Mukkabaaz (2018)

The state has become a popular setting for the New Middle Cinema (Bareilly Ki Barfi, Bala) and for tales of old-world nobility in decay (Dedh Ishqiya, Gulabo Sitabo). Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz—the story of an underdog boxer up against the powerful, casteist head of the boxing federation—is another kind of UP story, as outspoken, overstuffed, chaotic and roughly poetic as the place itself./

Uttarakhand: Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015)

Several films pass through the holy city of Haridwar, but few are set there. Sharat Katariya’s film is an exception, though it’s concerned with matters more earthy than spiritual. The detailing is immaculate: I can’t think of this film without imagining the comic vision of shorts-wearing shakha members exercising by the river.

West Bengal: Bakita Byaktigato (2013)

Bengal isn’t the force in Indian arthouse cinema it once was, but there are still some directors searching for new ways of seeing. One undeservedly obscure title is Pradipta Bhattacharyya’s Bakita Byaktigato. The deliberately documentary-like shooting style brings energy to its vision of Kolkata, and the shift to rural Bengal takes the narrative to wonderfully weird places.

Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl: Review

On the heels of Shakuntala Devi comes another literal-minded biopic. But where Anu Menon’s film muddied its emotional waters and switched around its timelines, Sharan Sharma’s Gunjan Saxena tells a simple and more or less linear story. After opening with Gunjan (Janhvi Kapoor) on her first mission during the 1999 Kargil War, the film loops back to the start and maps a straight line from her childhood dreams of becoming a commercial pilot to her joining the air force to being one of the first two Indian women to pilot a helicopter in combat. This uncomplicated approach seems to mirror the film’s view of its central character, who isn’t shown as exceptional, only exceptionally determined.

When Gunjan is taken into the cockpit of the flight she’s on by a kindly stewardess, it sparks an all-consuming desire in her to become a pilot. Her older brother, Anshuman, tells her girls can’t do that, but her father (Pankaj Tripathi) is encouraging. When she’s old enough, she applies to flying school, but is told she needs to finish 12th grade first. Two years later, she re-applies—and finds out she needs to graduate from college. Three years later, she meets all the requirements but doesn’t know the fees have increased to the point that her family can’t afford it.

This passage—played for laughs, with the same sad-sack clerk disappointing her every time—is an example of how a realistic film must decide whether it can stretch credulity in order to have a little fun. It seems altogether unlikely that Gunjan would be this uninformed about the means to achieving her one ambition in life—so uninformed that she’d repeatedly turn up without finding out the rules of admission. But there’s no mulling over lost opportunities, as the film immediately offers her another chance to fly. Her father suggests she joins the air force and, despite the misgivings of Anshuman (Angad Bedi), who’s now in the army, and her mother, who wants her to “settle", she applies, joins the academy and successfully completes training.

Gunjan finds her brother’s scepticism mirrored and magnified once she becomes an officer. As the first woman on the base, she’s ostracized and condescended to by her fellow officers. She misses her flight training several times as there isn’t a women’s bathroom and she has nowhere to change—an idea seemingly lifted from Hidden Figures, a film about the first female African-American mathematicians at NASA. This passage should be the film’s heart but is hampered by the lack of subtlety and wit. When Gunjan tries to talk to a group of officers at a party, they walk away from her one by one—a scene that would have seemed stagey in the 1950s. “What if there's an emergency and she starts crying?" a captain asks in another scene, trying to get out of flying with her.

This is not a film interested in people as complex beings. Instead, it deploys each character either as an outright detractor or cheerleader for Gunjan. Her father is unconditionally supportive, while her brother remains dismissive of her even after she becomes an officer. All the men on the base keep her at arm’s length; not one of them is shown as vaguely sympathetic. Flight commander Dileep Singh (Vineet Kumar Singh) deliberately keeps her from logging flying hours. Only the commanding officer (Manav Vij) recognises her potential, but instead of ordering Dileep Singh and the rest to do their job, he takes her training on himself. Yet, there's a politeness to the discrimination, as if the makers didn't want to make the armed forces look too close-minded.

Kapoor gives a quiet, unassuming performance. There’s a softness to it that skirts military clichés, but not enough steel when the film calls it. Variation is a problem as well—there isn't much that separates Kapoor’s disappointed face from her angry face from her game face. Her big outburst, when it finally comes, gives the impression of lines learnt and carefully delivered and not someone driven to desperate, career-threatening anger. There’s not much Bedi or Vineet Singh can do to make their one-note sexist characters interesting. It falls to Tripathi to elevate the film, which he does with gentleness and humour. It’s an atypical portrait of a former army man: mild-mannered, loosely strung, someone who registers protest not by barking orders but by getting up from the table in the middle of a meal, saying he’d planned to eat light anyway.

Kargil comes later in the film than I expected. Gunjan, having never flown a combat mission before, finds herself at the centre of a dangerous helicopter rescue, with an Indian Army platoon stranded and under fire. The sequence, filmed in Georgia, lasts only 8 minutes, a rather small amount of time to dedicate to the film’s most dramatic incident (and only war scene). It feels hurried and truncated and not entirely convincing, especially with the memory of Uri’s exceptional action scenes still fresh (also, someone forgot to remove the text saying "Great Battles"—an NDTV episode on the war aired in 2006—from the Kargil footage playing on TV).

Uri, too, had at its centre an army family—Vicky Kaushal’s major, his late father and brother-in-law. The rhythms of that household are essentially militaristic: talk of service and duty, clipped speech, emotions held in reserve. The Saxena family, on the other hand, could be mistaken for any civilian household. Given the surfeit of aggressive patriotism in recent Hindi films, it’s interesting to see Sharma and co-writer Nikhil Mehrotra hold back in this regard. My favourite scene is when Gunjan admits to her father, the night before she leaves home for her training, that she doesn’t want to be in the armed forces out of a desire to serve her country: she just wants to fly. His reply is telling. “Do you think the air force wants people who yell Bharat mata ki jai?" To see a Hindi film dial down rhetoric these days feels downright subversive.

Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl is on Netflix.

Amit Dutta talks 'Wittgenstein', chess, animation and art

Amit Dutta is often described as the best Indian film-maker you haven’t heard of. His films, which fall under the broad umbrella of experimental cinema, have been shown in leading museums and festivals across the world. Retrospectives of his work have taken place at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany; Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California. His relative obscurity outside art film circles is partly due to the difficulty in finding his works, which is why the ongoing retrospective on MUBI is such an event. Then there’s the work itself: formally constructed, minimalist, allusive. But Dutta’s shorts, features and documentaries also offer unique pleasures, with their subtle cinematic disruptions and tiny miracles of sound and movement.

Dutta’s latest film, Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Marcel Duchamp, Or How Not To Do Philosophy (on MUBI), is a 17-minute animation that adapts an essay of the same name by Steven B. Gerrard. The essay examines how Wittgenstein and Duchamp, both keen chess players, used the game to question language and perception. The film has a winking style of animation—by the director’s wife, Ayswarya S. Dutta—that involves the juxtaposition of cutout figures, objects and backgrounds. It’s a sprightly investigation into the nature of surface appearances and how we perceive meaning, packed with allusions to art, linguistics, philosophy and chess.

Dutta, 42, who lives in Palampur in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra Valley, wanted to be a chess player before he decided to be a director. He was part of his college chess team in Jammu. Later, he started playing correspondence chess and won silver in the All India Correspondence Championship in 2017. He collects rare chess books, owns a Dubrovnik chess set and composes chess puzzles for children in his free time. Last year, a freewheeling conversation between him and International Chess Master Venkatachalam Saravanan, accompanied by a game of correspondence chess, was published in BOMB magazine. On email, Mint asked Dutta about the making of the film. Edited excerpts:

How did you come across Gerrard's essay, and why did you decide to adapt it?

One of my friends, Jaideep Unudurti, is a wonderful chess player/journalist and science-fiction author. We play chess once in a while. One day, while playing and chatting, he mentioned this article. The moment I read it, it immediately sparked a desire to make something around it. Having moved away from the path of competitive chess, the aesthetics of the game was becoming increasingly attractive and intriguing for me. And the way the essay had connected this aspect with chess players of the calibre of Duchamp and Wittgenstein and their main disciplines was extremely exciting.

After reading the essay, I wrote to Gerrard (who teaches philosophy at Williams College, US), explained the project to him and asked for his permission. He was really kind and readily gave me permission. It took us close to two years to finish the film, all this while he was interested in the project. Once the film was finished, I was nervous showing it to him—to my delight, he was really happy with it and wrote back one of the most wonderful emails I have ever received.

From what angle were you approaching this material—as a chess player, as someone interested in Duchamp/Wittgenstein’s work?

Chess was my point of entry because I wanted to be a chess player when I was young. But, at the same time, I am equally drawn to the interdisciplinary woven-ness of the arts. That was what attracted me to this essay. It provided so many interlinked doorways and windows to ideas and aesthetics behind the facade of a simple chess puzzle. It exactly fits the description of the aphoristic Vishnudharmottara story, where a student seeking to learn image-making is prompted to study painting for a better understanding, and for knowing painting better, he is sent to learn dance and music and poetry and prosody and so on.

You had said in an interview that, starting with ‘Nainsukh’ (his 2010 film), you wanted to make research-based cinema. Was ‘Wittgenstein’ born out of a similar impulse?

Definitely. I find cinema to be a very good tool for anveshan, to discover, for the archaeology of knowledge. At the same time, research is only the external aspect; no research is exciting unless it supports an inner exploration and a feeling of wonder.

Why did you opt for this style of animation?

It developed slowly, of course, with my wife and partner in this film, Ayswarya. We tried various styles and this seemed most resonant with the theme of the essay, where we mostly juxtapose as opposed to creating. So the sum proliferates into much more than the parts.

It felt like the animation has a touch of Karel Zeman and Terry Gilliam, and if we go back further, George Méliès. Were these or any other artists on your and Ayswarya’s minds?

I did not have any style in mind except that I wanted a very rough, hand-made treatment; eventually, I went ahead with Ayswarya’s instincts. Our main inspiration was the art of the Dadas and surrealists themselves. The animators I really like are Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Robert Breer. There is a reference to Hans Richter’s work in the film as well. The artwork we have used as motion collages is all connected with the essay; and they have trespassed genres even within their times. They provided the main inspiration for the look and feel. It is an extravagantly derivative work, any influence was welcomed without qualms.

There’s a density of information and reference that makes it difficult to take in everything in one go. For instance, in one frame you have a melted clock, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Trebuchet’, Max Ernst’s ‘The Hat Makes The Man’, and Duchamp playing chess. Is the hope that people will return to the film and notice more each time?

Ayswarya has a deep interest in art history and philosophy. She was very excited about finding innumerable details that fitted so well with the themes and ideas of the essay. She is also an illustrator, and I asked her to draw certain portions, so that added an element of exposition also. I also believe that an image must not exhaust itself quickly. Just the way we were returning to the themes and discovering more and more the web of ideas that motivated those turn of the century artists and thinkers, and the brilliant way in which Gerrard has opened up those hyperlinks, we wish the viewer can enjoy and expand those threads too. This is an entirely open-source, digital film.

Never forget: How ‘Chinatown’ influenced three Hindi films

(This piece has spoilers for Chinatown, Raat Akeli Hai, Sonchiriya and Manorama Six Feet Under)

Fittingly for a noir, Chinatown casts a long shadow. Roman Polanski’s 1974 film won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar and, unlike its maker—who drugged and raped a minor and then fled to Europe to avoid prosecution—is still regarded highly. Perhaps the greatest colour noir ever, its impact on American film and culture is immense, but even Hindi cinema shows its influence. One famous moment in particular informs three fine Hindi films: Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under (2007), Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya (2019) and Honey Trehan’s Raat Akeli Hai, released last week.

Hired to dig up dirt on engineer Hollis Mulwray by someone posing as his wife, Evelyn, Los Angeles private eye JJ “Jake" Gittes (Jack Nicholson) photographs the man in the company of a young woman. Mulwray turns up dead in a reservoir, and Gittes is hired by his powerful father-in-law and former business partner, Noah Cross (John Huston), to look into the disappearance of Mulwray’s mistress. As Gittes digs deeper, he uncovers a scam involving the city's water supply that leads back to Cross. Meanwhile, he’s increasingly fascinated by the real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), Cross’ daughter, who warns him that her father is a dangerous man. When Evelyn is found comforting the supposed mistress, she tells Gittes the girl is actually her sister. In a shocking twist, it’s later revealed that they aren’t sisters but mother and daughter, Cross having raped Evelyn when she was a teenager.

Chinatown fused elements of classic noir—tough private eye, hardboiled dialogue, a femme fatale—with 1970s American cinema’s deep cynicism about the establishment. Thirty-three years later, Navdeep Singh smartly adapted the film as Manorama Six Feet Under. Abhay Deol plays an engineer (and failed detective story writer) named Satyaveer in a small Rajasthan town, who's visited by a mysterious woman. In a scene crisscrossed by shadows, she asks him to find evidence that her husband, irrigation minister Rathore (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), is having an affair. As in Chinatown, his photographs of the mark land him in trouble, the woman is revealed to be an impostor, and there's a murky public works irrigation project.

Manorama’s plot is almost as complicated as Chinatown’s, which is saying something. It isn’t a straight-ahead remake, instead borrowing and rearranging elements from the original—an illegitimate daughter, a mistress, a corrupt cop (it's still very much a remake—which Singh acknowledges by having a scene from the film play on TV). Even the way Vinay Pathak says jjje—jija is Hindi for brother-in-law—while addressing Deol is too close to “JJ" for coincidence. It’s finally revealed that Rathore is a paedophile, who’s supplied with children by an orphanage. In both films, the sexual predations of the men is a metaphor for their figurative preying on the land (in Cross’ case) and the public (in Rathore’s).

In Manorama, one of the thugs who breaks Satyaveer’s fingers to scare him off the case (the reference is to Gittes getting his nose nicked with a knife) was played by a then-unknown Nawazuddin Siddiqui. The actor is the lead in Raat Akeli Hai, playing a Kanpur police inspector named Jatil Yadav who’s called in to investigate the murder of a wealthy old man, Raghubeer Singh, on his wedding night. Honey Trehan’s film seems at first to have more in common with the comic murder mystery Knives Out (2019)—in both films, the deceased’s grasping family members are the suspects. But Raat Akeli Hai keeps pushing in the direction of noir, and when Yadav starts to fall for the victim’s widow, Radha (a haunted Radhika Apte), even as he suspects her, just as Gittes did with Evelyn, the influence of Chinatown becomes clearer.

There’s a scene in Raat Akeli Hai that’s startlingly similar to one in Manorama. Yadav searches an unfamiliar room until he finds a sheaf of photos, after which he’s seen washing his face, just like Satyaveer in the 2007 film. These lead him to the film’s reveal—closer to Chinatown than Manorama’s—that the old man was abusing his school-going niece, who ended up murdering him. I wonder if Raghubeer’s daughter being pregnant in the film was a deliberate red herring for Chinatown fans looking for evidence of incestuous predation. If so, it’s a neat bit of misdirection, as the daughter seems to have secrets she’s withholding while the niece is a brat with little screen time. The resemblance between the antagonists in the three films is unmistakable—high society, silver-haired, powerful, well-dressed, involved in political machinations and sexual deviancy. The protagonists too are cut from a similar cloth—all sleuths, with a stubbornness and gruff moral code, each fascinated by a mysterious woman who seems to need saving.

The third film with an echo of Chinatown has nothing to do with noir or detectives. Sonchiriya is a dacoit Western directed by Abhishek Chaubey, who happens to be one of the producers on Raat Akeli Hai. In his film, Sushant Singh Rajput’s dacoit, Lakhna, helps Indumati (Bhumi Pednekar) as she tries to escape her family after killing her father-in-law; with her is a young girl the old man was abusing. Towards the end of the film, her husband and son catch up with them. As the furious boy holds them at gunpoint, it’s revealed that he is a product of incest and rape. “He was your grandfather. He was your father," Indumati says, in an echo of Evelyn’s pained outburst: “She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She's my sister and my daughter."

Raat Akeli Hai, Manorama Six Feet Under and Sonchiriya are fine films, each with its own distinct milieu and tone. That they all borrowed, in small and large ways, from the same source is testament to the adaptability and vitality of Chinatown.

Raat Akeli Hai: Review

Has any Indian film used celebratory gunfire at a wedding as a cover for murder? The victim in Raat Akeli Hai is Raghubeer Singh (Khalid Tyabji), aged patriarch of a wealthy Kanpur family. On the night of his wedding—his second, to his former mistress—he’s found dead in his bedroom, with a gunshot wound and multiple stab marks. The case falls to inspector Jatil Yadav (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who tells the family members firmly, “Yeh jo kaand hua hai na, hum karenge uski jaanch (this incident that has taken place, I’m going to investigate it)."

Siddiqui's slight emphasis on the last word is key: jaanch, process, the chase, is everything here. Jatil may be a cop, but he has a sleuth’s heart. “Naam yaad rakhiyega (remember the name)," he tells Radha (Radhika Apte), Raghubeer’s widow, as he's leaving. It’s the sort of pronouncement you’d expect from Byomkesh Bakshi, arguably India’s most famous fictional detective. Later, Yadav tells powerful local politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava) that he will dig out the truth come what may. Satyanweshi—seeker of truth—was also Byomkesh’s preferred term for himself.

The film itself nods to a classic crime fiction staple: the locked-room mystery. There are shades of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019), in that the suspects are all family members, and are all in the house at the time of the murder: Raghubeer’s druggie son (Nitesh Tiwari); his pregnant daughter (Shweta Tripathi) and her husband (Gyanendra Tripathi); Raghubeer’s brother-in-law (Swanand Kirkire, very droll); his nephew (Nishant Dahiya), niece (Shivani Raghuvanshi) and their formidable mother (Padmavati Rao), in addition to the young domestic worker (Riya Shukla). It’s not a pleasant bunch of people—and Raghubeer is soon shown to be a terrible man. Yet the needle of suspicion keeps pointing towards the most sympathetic character, Radha, whom everyone in the family is awful to.

Through a brief flashback, we learn that Jatil and Radha had met five years ago, as strangers on a train; she might have jumped to her death, but he pulled her back. Five years ago is also when Raghubeer’s first wife was killed in a hit-and-run incident (from the film’s opening sequence, we know it was murder). The train sequence, though not strictly necessary from a narrative point of view, tells us that Radha was presumably on her way to being sold to Raghubeer by her father when Jatil met her, and that she was as miserable then as she is now. It also suggests the dynamic that’ll persist between Radha and Jatil, where she keeps giving up on life and he’s determined to save her.

This is the first film directed by Honey Trehan, one of Hindi cinema’s leading casting directors. Shot with customary grit by Pankaj Kumar and smartly scored by Karan Kulkarni, it’s a cousin to neo-noirs like Manorama Six Feet Under and loquacious Hindi-belt films like Omkara and Ishqiya (the latter’s director, Abhishek Chaubey, is a producer here). Screenwriter Smita Singh, who co-wrote Sacred Games, comes up with wonderful turns of phrase. Jatil’s superior officer (Tigmanshu Dhulia) raps him for working “ekdum vivek shoonya kar ke (reducing reason to zero)". “Tiraskaar karte hain humara (he has contempt for me)," his junior complains. Jatil’s mother (Ila Arun, delightful) reminisces about his deceased father, saying he always spoke lovingly, as if sugar were dissolving on his tongue. “He was a cook," her son retorts. “His job was dissolving sugar."

As Jatil goes to Gwalior to pursue a lead, gruffly mentors his junior officer, and fends off pressure from his superiors and Munna Raja, you might be reminded of Paatal Lok. Raat Akeli Hai does resemble the Amazon series in its bleak outlook and attention to granular detail, though Yadav is a more conventional protagonist than Jaideep Ahlawat’s dogged cop. He’s a creature of habit (another classic sleuth trait), so unreceptive to change that an order of chowmein instead of his regular fried rice provokes a violent reaction. Yet Siddiqui, as only he can, turns this cop without humour or charm, whose defining trait is fixity of purpose, into something attractive and heroic.

Halfway through, I thought the film was making its antagonists too obvious. But Trehan and Singh methodically introduce layers to the case, and the reveal, when it finally comes, is a gut punch. I do wish the build-up hadn’t been so similar to the scene in the Chinatown-inspired Manorama Six Feet Under: Siddiqui rummaging around for clues in an unfamiliar room, finding old photographs, having to wash his face after, just like Abhay Deol in the 2007 film. Chinatown has been a source of inspiration for several fine recent Hindi films, but film-makers perhaps forget that it’s also in the DNA of viewers.

There are things you can do as a writer, a director, when Siddiqui is your lead, which wouldn’t be possible with a traditional hero. Before we even see him, Jatil is rejected because of his dark complexion by a girl his mother presses his photograph on at a wedding (Ila Arun having to hear “rang saaf nahi hai" about her son and replying “par mann saaf hai" would have killed in a theatre). Raghubeer's nephew, meanwhile, is described as a hero-type. With no other major actor would this have been possible, but Siddiqui’s charisma has never obscured his characters’ ordinariness. When Radha rejects Jatil’s romantic overtures, he says, “Hum toh tumhare saamne ekdum saade hain (I’m too simple for you)." Apte soft reply is the film's best line: “Jung khaya hai hamara dil (my heart is rusted)."

Raat Akeli Hai is streaming on Netflix.

Shakuntala Devi: Review

Shakuntala Devi, about a woman who got to answers quicker than anyone, also arrives at its final product disconcertingly fast. We’ve just been introduced to five-year-old Shakuntala, playing in front of her home in Bangalore in 1934, when she solves a cube root of an eight-digit number. “The answer just appeared," she says matter-of-factly. “This is no ordinary girl, she's a genius," someone says in the seventh minute. So much for an origin story.

An inordinate amount of foreshadowing follows. Shakuntala is made to skip school and earn as a kind of performing maths prodigy by her father. Her mother tells her, “One day your daughter will give you a hard time". Her sister, Sharda, tells her she’ll be a big man someday, because there’s no such thing as a big woman. Having fulfilled her purpose, Sharda dies of an illness in the next scene, leaving Shakuntala with lifelong resentment against her father, who did nothing to prevent the death, and her mother, who didn’t protest when her husband did nothing.

The real Shakuntala Devi was certainly a genius, someone who could answer impossibly difficult mathematical questions in seconds, and whose books helped generations of students overcome their fear of the subject. Yet, the film struggles to make this sort of natural talent come alive on screen. The main problem is, from her appearance on stage at a Bangalore gentlemen’s club to her calculating the 23rd root of a 201 digit number faster than a computer, she’s always in control, answering questions quickly and with a laugh. What’s the fun in seeing someone get things right all the time? The numbers may dance on the screen as they did in A Beautiful Mind, but Shakuntala is the anti-John Nash, her gift bringing her nothing but joy.

It’s only when the film—directed by Anu Menon, who made the spiky, moving Waiting in 2015—starts focusing on areas of Shakuntala’s life where she isn’t in control that it finds some purpose. She has a daughter with Paritosh (Jisshu Sengupta), a thoughtful, accommodating IAS officer, and for a while gives up her lucrative stage shows. But she misses the adulation and, on her husband’s urging, resumes her travels. She finds she can’t live without her daughter either, and brings her to London. She starts taking her everywhere, cutting her off from her father. “You’re stealing her childhood like your father stole yours," says Paritosh, long after the viewer has made that connection.

As the film switches between the lives of Shakuntala and the grown-up Anu (Sanya Malhotra), it becomes an examination of the choices before ambitious women who are mothers, and the compromises they make. Anu has grown to resent her mother for her dominance as Shakuntala resented hers for her silence. Two of the best scenes are domestic squabbles triggered by this thorny relationship; the flare-up of anger in Anu’s otherwise mild husband, Ajay (Amit Sadh), is startlingly lifelike, while Paritosh telling his wife she’s been abandoning Anu has the unfortunate ripple effect of Shakuntala keeping her daughter close for the rest of her childhood.

Menon and Nayanika Mahtani’s screenplay jumps back and forth in time distractingly, muddying rather than clarifying the emotional journeys. Ishita Moitra’s dialogue is done no favours by Balan throwing her head back and laughing in every scene. Shakuntala’s catchphrase is “Vidya kasam", a meta-reference which, even if drawn from Devi's life, should have been avoided. The early parts of the film, when Shakuntala is just becoming famous, are a slalom course of bad accents and flat humour. Shakuntala tells someone who comments on her pigtails, “Joke also Indian man in dhoti with stick." Joke also writing this simplistic.

Shakuntala Devi does allow its protagonist room to be selfish and shallow along with kooky and brilliant, but all the deep-seated emotional trauma is handled in a manner that’s hurried and facile. At a gathering to promote her book about homosexuality, Shakuntala says she grew interested in the subject because her ex-husband is gay. When Anu asks her how she can lie like that, she says that personal stories sell better and a little embellishment doesn’t hurt. Years later, when Anu confronts her father about why he let her mother keep them apart, he just says, “To love Shakuntala is to let her be. She’s like a storm."

This is a film in love with parallels. Shakuntala is made to skip school, then makes her daughter skip school. Shakuntala becomes like her father, Paritosh is like Shakuntala’s mother, Ajay is like Paritosh. Two of Shakuntala’s relationships end with a man telling her she doesn’t need him. Shakuntala pushes Paritosh during an argument; her daughter pushes her during another. Most gratingly, Shakuntala and Anu both find out their mothers cared about them through old scrapbooks. All this emotional rhyming and the breathless rush of events cannot obscure the fact that this film never finds a way to make its protagonist’s genius interesting.

Shakuntala Devi is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Healing Is a Miracle: Album review

The first time I heard Julianna Barwick’s music, it sounded like a film score, something Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog might use. It seemed untethered, as if her layered, wordless choral harmonies needed a visual to anchor them. But then I heard her again, in a more relaxed frame of mind, and the sound slowly expanded in my head. Depending on the kind of music you’re into, Barwick’s ambient mosaics might remind you of Brian Eno or Cocteau Twins, Arvo Pärt or Enya. Her method is simple: using a digital pedal to record and create vocal loops, which are layered into a dense but wispy sound. There are synths and sometimes strings and other voices, but mostly it’s just the multiple echoes of her pristine voice.

Healing Is a Miracle, her fourth album (released on 10 July), is the fullest iteration of her sound. Its judicious electronic touches owe partly to Barwick’s friends, producer Alex Somers and Sigur Rós’ Jónsi, gifting her a studio monitor for her birthday. She first used it while recording Inspirit, the opening track. “When I added the bass I really felt it in my body, you know, in a way you just wouldn’t with headphones… I got really excited about making the record in that moment, and I think that really had an impact on the sounds I ended up making," she said. The electronic embellishments—scattered beats on In Light and Nod, the rumbling that closes Flowers—are useful additions, adding some grit and bottom end to her ethereal sound.

Most of the tracks are a wash of synths and Barwick’s voice, often layered five or six deep. This is not music that reaches out to grab you, but the simplicity of its construction has the benefit of making every addition in a song—a new loop, for instance—seem crazily dramatic. The guest spots are unobtrusive and apt—harpist Mary Lattimore on Oh Memory; producer Nosaj Thing on Nod; and Jónsi, patron saint of ambient vocal soundscapes, on In Light.

Healing is a Miracle is, as the title promises, a restorative, uplifting record. Barwick's previous album, Will (2016), was a more fractured sound; this one is closer to the euphoria of 2013’s Nepenthe. You might wonder if you should hear it like a regular album or leave it on in the background. My advice would be to let it find you in the right mood. I’ve heard it while working, while washing dishes, in bed before going to sleep, and it’s a different experience each time. Whether or not you’re in need of healing, Julianna Barwick’s sound is a miracle.

Dil Bechara: Review

Twelve minutes into Dil Bechara and I was sad.

What’s weird was this was one of the few moments when the film wasn’t trying to induce that feeling in me. It had just pulled off a superior version of that standard Hindi movie scene, the musical number introducing the hero: a young man dancing on stage, then climbing down and performing amidst the audience, tracked all the way by the camera. This was achieved with deceptive ease, without a single cut, and it occurred to me that this would be a sensational way to introduce an unknown actor to the public. And then I felt a twinge, because, of course, this wasn’t hello, it was goodbye.

Dil Bechara was always going to be rough. Rajput died less than a month and a half ago, the intervening time marked by profound sadness and terrible acrimony. Now, not only do we have a new film starring him but one that’s based on perhaps the sappiest YA property ever: John Green’s 2012 novel, The Fault In Our Stars, about two young cancer patients in love. What’s more, Mukesh Chhabra’s adaptation, with its likeable leads and wall-to-wall music by A.R. Rahman, really pushes your buttons. The more stoic might last till the final scene before dissolving in tears but most viewers will be sniffling their way through.

“I don’t want to be strong," Kizie (Sanjana Sanghi) says in a voice-over at the start. “I just want to be normal." Instead, she gets a lot of merry abnormal as Immanuel ‘Manny’ Rajkumar Jr (Rajput) dances his way into her life and refuses to dance out. He’s cocky and persistent at first, as most Hindi film heroes are nowadays, but obviously taken with her. She starts off sparring with him (as female leads are supposed to) but it’s half-hearted; even as he makes fun of her name, her music and her primness, a smile keeps breaking through her irritation.

Unlike Green’s book, and the Hollywood film based on it, Kizie and Manny don’t meet in a cancer support group. That scene comes later, with Manny sharing offhandedly that his leg was lost to osteosarcoma. Other than that, though, he seems fine. Kizie is the one who's visibly ill—she has difficulty breathing and carries around an oxygen cylinder she’s named Pushpinder, connected to her nose at all times by a thin tube. The morbidity of the premise is leavened somewhat by Manny’s determined silliness (he ropes Kizie in for a zero-budget film he’s making with a friend) and Rahman’s warm embrace of a soundtrack. There’s even a weird quest thrown in: Kizie is obsessed with an old album and wants to find its reclusive composer and ask why the title track is unfinished (I regret to inform you that this is a metaphor).

The writing tends to get overwrought at times; I rolled my eyes when Kizie tells Manny he’s as important for her heart as Pushpinder is for her lungs. Shashank Khaitan and Suprotim Sengupta are fine comic writers, so it’s surprising that the dinner scene with Kizie’s parents (played by Swastika Mukherjee and Saswata Chatterjee) and the couple doesn’t sing the way it ought to. A trip to Paris yields little more than a couple of touristy montages. Sanghi, in her first lead role, has an appealingly non-pixie manner, a measured voice and a fantastic alarmed face. She and Rajput are a believable odd couple in love, but their stabs at genuine emotion are diluted by the almost cynical premise and the frank attempts by Chhabra, making his debut as director, to wring every last tear he can.

It’s no shade against Dil Bechara—an adequate weepy romance—that the one thing that makes it unique is the circumstances surrounding its release. Rajput is gentle and moving, yet I doubt Manny would have moved me to tears had this released a year ago. It’s the sight of Rajput as Manny, listening to his own eulogies, that breaks through the choreographed tear-wringing and is just elementally, desperately sad. Thankfully, Dil Bechara doesn’t end without offering some hope. Cinema takes away, but it also heals. Tacky films by Rajini fans get an appreciative screening. Songs unfinished for years are made whole. Imperfect farewells are rendered graceful and complete.

Greyhound: Review

On Conan O’Brien’s podcast earlier this month, Tom Hanks told the host how he found The Good Shepherd, the C.S. Forester book that formed the basis for Greyhound, in a used book store. The picture on the cover, of an “aged, grey-haired, beaten-up guy", grabbed him. When he got to reading it, he couldn’t put it down. “It was like a procedural. It was start, continue, finish, that’s it."

Greyhound, written by Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider, is also a start-continue-finish kind of film. It gets its name from the codename for the light warship commanded by Ernest Krause (Hanks), an American doing his first Atlantic crossing, in 1942. He must guide an Allied convoy of 37 supply ships to Liverpool, crossing the dangerous “Black Pit", a stretch of the ocean where aerial cover isn’t available and German U-boats lurk. The film’s on a mission too. It’s 90 minutes, and barely a few moments are taking up by anything that’s not germane to the action. Apart from a flashback that lasts about three minutes, it all takes place on the ship.

It took Hanks some 10 years to get Greyhound made, and it isn’t difficult to see why. This is a film that’ll appeal most to World War II and navy nerds—not a demographic studios are looking to capture today. The script must have seemed impenetrable to execs reading it, a maelstrom of boatswain and commodore and huff duff (high-frequency direction finding). I’d estimate that 60-70 per cent of the dialogue is naval terminology. Yet, the film surges forward coherently; you may not know the terms but you’ll grasp the import.

Greyhound begins with the convoy three days away from air cover. The subtext—which we get to know early on—is Krause’s inexperience in war situations. The film plays it subtly—a microsecond of hesitation after one of his commands, a look of doubt quickly covered up. And Krause proves himself calm and capable immediately, successfully blowing up a threatening U-boat. However, he refuses to take a detour and pick up evidence of the ‘kill’, an indication of his unwavering focus on getting the convoy to safety but also his religious beliefs (he begins the film in prayer and occasionally speaks in scripture). When one of his men says the U-boat's sinking means there are 50 less Krauts out there, he replies, “50 souls."

Krause gets the respect of his men but the dangers increase once the convoy suffers losses and six German subs are found circling them. Krause, low on sleep, drinking endless cups of coffee, yet civil and calm in front of his subordinates, is a typical Hanks leader. There are shades of his captain from Saving Private Ryan and his commercial boat skipper in Captain Phillips—ordinary men who must lead by example and keep their self-doubt hidden away. There’s a moment where he seems frozen by a bad decision he’s made and half a dozen other problems requiring immediate attention. But he snaps out of it after a few seconds; there’s no time for even the brief breakdown of Saving Private Ryan.

One of the few times we leave the ship is when the camera lifts up, over the cloud cover until we can see the green Northern Lights. The reference might be to Krause’s religious bearings, or it could be a way of indicating the vantage point he needs to take everything in. But Krause is never above the action, he’s always in the thick of things, and Hanks is supremely adept at keeping us in the moment. His face, though largely impassive, is a map of the character’s emotions: the conversation with his executive officer (Stephen Graham) on the deck shows all the pressure and nagging doubt Krause is feeling at that moment without losing sight of his practical nature. There’s also a beautiful scene later when he’s asked to give up a well-deserved victory lap, and Hanks' face falls momentarily before righting itself.

This is such a dad film it’s almost a granddad film. It isn’t just the WWII setting and the naval geekery. Krause spends the whole film getting sailor’s names wrong. He changes from shoes to slippers at one point. Twice we hear cusses; in both instances the men apologize to Krause immediately. Greyhound is a modest effort, unconcerned with providing conflicts for the supporting characters or with larger statements about war and honour. Instead, it’s efficient, stirring and self-contained, virtues that seem almost quaint in American cinema today.

Greyhound is streaming on Apple TV+.

Dil Bechara: Album review

Coming a month after Sushant Singh Rajput’s death, AR Rahman’s Dil Bechara soundtrack could have ended up, for no fault of its own, out of sync with the still-mournful public mood. Instead, here is an album that’s perfect for this delicate moment. There’s nothing that’s jarring or experimental or harsh. Instead, the soundtrack has something like a healing touch, an enveloping warmth of melody, harmony and familiarity.

The title track sets the tone. It has some of the insinuating quality of Aye Udi Udi from Saathiya, but is slinkier and softer, with Rahman crooning about friendzones, shadowed closely by backing vocalists Poorvi Koutish and Hriday Gattani. There’s a brief bit of weirdness in the bridge but Rahman’s tender reading of the second verse (he stretches the word “kyun" over a whole line) reinstates the low-key romantic mood.

Taare Gin is in the style of a Disney musical, Shreya Ghoshal and Mohit Chauhan singing different lines and melodies at the same time, the song lifting two-thirds of the way through into a beautiful crescendo. It comes down just as quickly, the wistfulness in Chauhan’s voice reflected in Amitabh Bhattacharya’s questioning lyrics: Yeh waada hai ya iraada hai/kabhi yeh zyaada hai kabhi yeh aadha hai (is this a promise or a decision/sometimes it’s too much, sometimes halfway there). Later, on the charming Maskhari, Bhattacharya shows his unparalleled knack for the unexpected phrase, rhyming “dil ko de araam" and “fokat mein badnaam" with “peedahari balm" from the old Zandu balm jingle.

I don’t think I’ve heard so many close harmonies on a single Rahman album. Khulke Jeene Ka has Arijit Singh and Shashaa Tirupati singing in unison right out of the gate. Jonita Gandhi joins Hriday Gattani on the chorus of Main Tumhara, and later sings an aching verse with him. On the jaunty Mera Naam Kizzie, it’s Aditya Narayan and Poorvi Koutish who harmonize, their playful vocals underlined by a chirpy clarinet in the style of 1950s song arrangements like Eena Meena Deeka. Rahman’s usual stable of excellent backing vocalists add further layers to all the tracks, creating a warm, pillowy sound.

The one departure from the easy-going sound doesn’t land. Afreeda is such a tepid revisiting of Khalbali that you have to wonder why they went to the trouble of getting Palestinian vocalist Sanaa Moussa to sing it. Hip hop artist Raja Kumari makes it worse with her nonsensical bars—for all his unerring musical instinct, Rahman continues to have terrible taste in rappers. There’s also an unnecessary remix of the title track, before the album closes out strong with a limpid violin instrumental, The Horizon of Saudade.

The general consensus among Rahman fans is that his music in the 1990s and 2000s was more immediately arresting, and that you have to let his recent work wash over you. Dil Bechara certainly gains from a couple of relaxed listens, with smaller details of instrumental colour and vocal arrangement coming into focus. I’d imagine the music will gain further resonance once the film is out and the warmth of the melodies offers some comfort to viewers struggling with the thought that this will be the last time they see Rajput in a new work.

Cricket returns to rain, empty stands and Black Lives Matter

After 117 days, there was cricket. Only, because this is England in July, there wasn’t much cricket. Rain interrupted play several times on 8 July, and only 17 overs could be bowled on the stop-start first day of the first Test between England and the West Indies at Southampton. The hosts ended the day on 35/1, Dom Sibley the lone wicket, losing his off stump to a fiery Shannon Gabriel in the second over. Even as fans cheered the return of cricket, some might have wished the restart was in drier climes.

Though short on sporting action, the day was made significant by something that happened just before the first ball was bowled. All the players, in position on the field and on the boundary, took a knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The West Indies players wore a black glove on one hand and raised that arm aloft. Both teams also have the BLM logo printed on their shirt collars.

That morning, broadcaster Sky Sports posted a video featuring two of its commentators, West Indies great Michael Holding and Ebony Rainford-Brent, the first black woman to play for England, talking about their experiences with racism and the need to address it in cricket and society at large. The two of them spoke again, separately, on the issue, the Holding monologue going viral on Twitter. During the broadcast, the scorecard carried the words “Black Lives Matter". Small gestures, perhaps, but necessary ones.

Cricket with covid restrictions took some getting used to—for the players too, as West Indies skipper Jason Holder returned interim England captain Ben Stokes’ fist bump with a handshake. Though football has prepared us for it, the absence of a stadium crowd is felt just as keenly in cricket—perhaps more so, because unlike the constant noise of a football game, cricket has moments of relative quiet followed by explosions of sound. I missed the cheers that would have accompanied Joe Denly’s pull for 4 off Gabriel, and the groan that would have come from West Indian spectators as he edged the next delivery past third slip for another boundary.

Day 2 brought with it more gloom—but no rain. With the benefit of uninterrupted play, I could begin to appreciate the small joys of cricket without crowds. Gabriel knocking Denly’s off stump over was a thrilling sound, as was the crisp ‘tock’ of a Stokes pull. There was a purity to this spectacle: cricket for the sake of cricket, no one to applaud you but your teammates, like a village or gully game elevated to the highest level.

The visitors won the first session, their four-man pace attack reducing England to 87 for 5. Stokes and keeper Jos Buttler righted the innings post-lunch, nudging the run rate, which had hovered around 2, closer to 3. Holder broke the partnership in the 53rd over, inducing the edge from Stokes. Soon after, he had his fourth, getting Buttler to edge, keeper Shane Dowrich taking a fine outstretched catch; and his fifth, Jofra Archer LBW for 0 (Holder had an excellent day with the reviews as well, with three decisions overturned). Holder took yet another before Dom Bess and James Anderson frustrated the opposition for 30 crucial runs. England were finally bundled out for 204, Gabriel picking up his fourth.

After tea, John Campbell and Kraigg Brathwaite put on 43 for the first wicket. James Anderson finally had Campbell LBW for 28; the opener survived two earlier LBW decisions on appeal. This was the only West Indian wicket to fall, with Brathwaite and Shai Hope seeing the session to a close at 57/1. It capped a satisfying day for the visitors, placing them in a position to get a useful first innings lead in rainy conditions—though the gap of 147 could start looking more serious if Anderson, Archer and Mark Wood find early wickets. All in all, a gritty, competitive day of test cricket. The players will just have to ignore the empty stands and imagine the grateful fans.

Homemade: Review

Directors, even arthouse directors, live in nice houses. This wouldn’t normally be a surprise or interfere in our enjoyment of their work. But Homemade—a Netflix anthology of 17 short films made during lockdown—invites us into their living quarters, and the succession of sleek apartments and villas tells its own story. The starting point is comfort: not something to hold against the makers but a clue to the general milieu on offer. Sebastián Lelio (Gloria) even alludes to it in his “Algoritmo", actor Amalia Kassai singing: “There’s also the issue/ Of speaking from privilege/ Of thinking of this pandemic/ From this sumptuous place."

Even within their seemingly comfortable worlds, these films offer a multiplicity of techniques and approaches. Pablo Larraín (No, Neruda), who also produced this anthology, makes a ribald comedy from video conversations, only 11 minutes long but with a delightful twist. Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch) constructs “Couple Splits Up While In Lockdown LOL" out of text messages. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s "Penelope" is both pandemic sci-fi and a gently absurdist look at loss. Ladj Ly (Les Misérables) sends a drone out to look at his working-class, immigrant neighbourhood of Montfermeil, Paris. Antonio Campos (Christine) opts for psychological thriller, Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) for tiny talking figurines, Lelio for a musical.

You might notice motifs and tics carried over from the film work of these directors and actors. Sorrentino, even when doing little else but placing tiny figurines of Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II around his house, can’t seem to compose an ugly frame or resist a silly joke. Kristen Stewart’s mercurial, sleep-deprived performance in her own “Crickets" is reminiscent of her work on Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper. Naomi Kawase’s poetic "No Border"—the most visually striking of the anthology—is easily recognisable as hers. There are also departures: Ana Lily Amirpour, maker of the singular genre films A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and The Bad Bunch, directs and appears in the serene, straightforward "Ride It Out", a bicycle ride through a locked-down Los Angeles narrated by Cate Blanchett.

In many of the shorts, the director’s family is enlisted, either behind or in front of the camera. David Mackenzie, the Scottish director of Hell or High Water, turns the camera on his teenage daughter, who frets about turning 16 and being able to hug her grandmother again. Cinematographer Rachel Morrison’s Malick-esque “The Lucky Ones" is a letter to her 5-year-old son. Nadine Labaki and Khaled Mouzanar (Capernaum) shoot their precocious daughter as she chatters nonstop in Mouzanar’s Beirut office and ends up singing Bella Ciao. Through these glimpses of their lives in lockdown, we see our own fears and boredoms reflected: funerals we can’t be part of, rituals of handwashing and distancing, haircuts by family members, spells of introspection and horniness and despair.

As you make your way through Homemade, you’ll find echoes of one film in another. Both Morrison and Gurinder Chadha pay tribute to their deceased mothers, while Johnny Ma, in a simple and affecting short, cooks his mother’s dumplings (and includes the recipe) for his family in Mexico. There’s another, less obvious rhyme, one which speaks to the uniquely disorienting nature of this time. In Schipper’s dryly comic “Casino", he’s kept company by three other versions of himself. And in Compos’ “Annex", a strange man taken in by a couple for the night turns out to have a doppelganger, or maybe two.

Several of these films were shot on phones, using whatever equipment was at hand. The results look tantalisingly achievable—you might find yourself thinking after some of them, that was nice but I could have done it. Indeed, some of the amateur short films on Twitter and Instagram in the past few months are no less inventive or revealing of the times than the films in Homemade. What we seem to be witnessing, perhaps for the first time in cinema’s history, is a comprehensive democratisation of the filmmaking process. Phone cameras set this in motion years ago, but the pandemic has added the restrictions of access to money and materials. Things will likely go back to what how they were, but for this brief moment in time all that matters is your idea and your eye.

Homemade is on Netflix. 

Ennio Morricone (1928-2020): Eight scenes

Ennio Morricone, one of the most influential and prolific film composers ever, died today in a hospital in Rome. He was 91. It’s difficult to convey the vastness of his contribution to cinema except to say that film scoring was immediately and irrevocably changed by his electrifying soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s. He was, however, much more than just a composer of Westerns: he worked in just about every genre there was, collaborating with directors as different as Dario Argento and Terrence Malick. Out of the thousands of movie moments he scored over more than six decades, we pick eight scenes that wouldn’t have been the same without the Morricone touch.

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966) – The final duel

In the opening credits of the first film of the Dollars trilogy, with an unholy, thrilling mixture of whistles, shrieks, exclamations, bells and twanging electric guitar, Morricone revolutionized film scoring. In the third film, he perfected it. The final duel in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is a masterclass of cutting and framing but it wouldn't be immortal without Morricone’s music, those ascending guitar arpeggios joined by strings and choral singing and exploding into a searing horn figure. Fans of the film don't just see this scene in their minds, they hear it.

‘Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion’ (1971) – A little death

Morricone’s penchant for unusual instrumentation didn’t just surface in his Westerns. Elio Petri’s dark comedy begins with a man in a suit arriving at his mistress’ pad, undressing and making love to her. When she cries out, we realize that he’s actually murdered her. All the while, a merry, mocking tune plays. Morricone said in an interview that he felt the scene needed music with “a folkish feel". He used “peasant instruments": a mandolin and a Jew’s harp along with piano. He also asked the synth player to imitate the sound of a raspberry being blown.

‘Allonsanfàn’ (1974) – Vision

Most film fans today know Rabbia e tarantella as the track that plays in the closing credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Yet, its original use, in the Italian period drama Allonsanfàn, is even more memorable, as the film’s titular character, suffering from a head injury, sees villagers and revolutionaries performing an incongruous folk dance. Morricone’s theme is sincere and stirring, transforming a moment of madness into one of imagined victory.

‘Sacco e Vanzetti’ (1971) – Handshake

Even if you didn’t know that Sacco e Vanzetti ends with the execution by electric chair of two Italian anarchists, the theme accompanying their last handshake in prison is the saddest music you’ll ever hear.

‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1966) – Before the bombing

Though he did bombast better than anyone, Morricone could also pare down his sound when required. In a tense sequence in The Battle of Algiers, we see three local women fixing their clothes and hair before heading out to go set off bombs in the French quarter. Morricone accompanies the long, tense buildup to the bombing with little more than fast, agitated percussion, picking up from the rhythm of ululations by women in the Qasba in the previous scene. Critic Pauline Kael wrote that "in The Battle of Algiers, music becomes a form of agitation: at times, the strange percussive sound is like an engine that can't quite start…"

‘The Untouchables’ (1987) – Shootout on the bridge

The exhilaration of the raid by Eliot Ness and his men on gangster bootleggers at the Canadian border finds the perfect accompaniment in Morricone’s exultant theme. The old-fashioned joyousness of the piece is in tune with the film’s retro cops-and-robbers brio.

‘Fists in the Pocket’ (1965) – Alone at the party

As a young unknown, Morricone was a trumpeter in jazz bands, so he might have enjoyed composing the jazz-lite dance music that plays as Allesandro, the volcanic centre of Fists in the Pocket, stands alone in the corner at a hip party. The melody is teasing, mirroring his discomfort, then suddenly changes tempo and tenor to something more sympathetic as the camera draws in on actor Lou Castel.

‘The Cat o' Nine Tails’ (1971) – Opening credits

Morricone was as vital a horror movie composer as he was for Westerns. His theme for the opening scene of Dario Argento’s The Cat o' Nine Tails is a wonderful example of music that undercuts genre expectations. Instead of being spooky, the overlaying of acoustic guitar, flute and harpsichord with ghostly female vocals is stately and somewhat mournful.

Olivier Assayas’ altered states

Last week, Olivier Assayas delivered the State of Cinema address for the Belgian film website Sabzian. “I have some good news, for everyone: cinema is in crisis," he began. The transcriptis some 7,000 words and dense in parts: Assayas, after all, was a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma before he became a director. One line struck me as revealing: “…as nature has gifted me with a rather contrary spirit, I am left with the feeling that I had to swim against the tide...of instantly forgotten fashions of a drifting cinephile thought…"

It’s difficult to think of a major film-maker who has been as resistant to settling into an identifiable style as Assayas. There are recurring psychological and stylistic preoccupations: unbroken shots with a roving camera, fractured mental states, eclectic soundtracks. Still, to direct films as singular yet disparate as Summer Hours (2008) and Demonlover (2002), Carlos (2010) and Clouds Of Sils Maria (2014), you have to be a contrary spirit, open to the possibility of failure.

Given the paucity of Assayas’ work on streaming platforms in India, the release of his latest film, Wasp Network (2019), on Netflix last week was exciting. The film, however, is a strangely diffused affair. In as much as it’s difficult to say what an “Assayas film" is, this does not feel like one. It‘s about Cuban nationals like pilot René (Édgar Ramírez), who fled their country for Miami in the 1990s and joined organizations working to free Cuba from Fidel Castro. René is joined by Juan (Wagner Moura), who supplements his income by becoming an FBI informant on the groups he’s helping.

Wasp Network twists unpredictably, as characters are revealed as double, then triple, agents. Yet, apart from René’s correspondence with his wife (Penélope Cruz) and daughter back home, it’s hard to find an emotional through-line. Juan vanishes and isn’t spoken of till the end. Gael García Bernal turns up for a while, as a Cuban government mole. A voice-over is introduced mid-film, to no great effect. There are a couple of sublime touches, like the unbroken shot of Ana de Armas dancing her way across a room, or the Hitchcockian sequence with agents planting a bug, their faces never coming into view. Yet it feels like Assayas needed something closer to the running time of Carlos—his almost 6-hour film/miniseries starring Ramírez as terrorist Carlos the Jackal—to bring order to this packed but rather formless story.

Wasp Network might be many viewers’ introduction to Assayas. Where should you go from there? It really depends on the sort of film experience you are looking for. Fans of perverse techno-thrillers can try Demonlover, set against the backdrop of the anime porn business, or the neonoir Boarding Gate (2007). Carlos is his biggest canvas, a sprawling, elusive work involving a complex tapestry of 1970s insurrectionary politics. Or you can zoom in with Summer Hours, a film in the venerable French tradition of people just sitting around and talking.

There are the autobiographical films Cold Water (1994) and Something In The Air (2012), with their young protagonists trying to find themselves in the aftermath of 1968, as Assayas once did. And there are the films he made with Kristen Stewart in Europe, at a time when she was still the star from the Twilight movies. She gives intuitive, nervy performances as the assistant to a famous actor (Juliette Binoche) in the meta-textual Clouds Of Sils Maria, and a buyer of clothes for the super-wealthy in Personal Shopper (2016), who starts suspecting her dead twin brother is sending her messages from the afterlife.

Or you could start with the one I did, his cult 1996 title, Irma Vep. The film, about a Hong Kong movie star (Maggie Cheung, sort of playing herself), cast in a remake of the silent French serial Les Vampires, is a good introduction to the many moods of Assayas: It has fetishism, nods to experimental film, ruminations on art and commerce, but also moments of human connection. It also has a cracking, eclectic soundtrack—Sonic Youth, Ali Farka Touré, Serge Gainsbourg.

There’s a specific image that Assayas returns to in three of his films: a group of young people who have taken over a country house, drinking and taking drugs, playing music and partying. In Cold Water and Something In The Air, these scenes are simultaneously destructive and introspective, a post-1968 frame of mind. In Summer Hours, things are different. The house is being sold and the teenage daughter has called her friends over to party. She steals away from the group with her boyfriend, unburdens her fears about everything changing. Then she takes him by the hand and starts to run, saying, “I don’t want them to find us." It’s another Assayas motif, from Irma Vep to Carlos, Personal Shopper, Something In The Air and Wasp Network—the desire to outrun one’s circumstances, to escape or disappear.

Part of the intermittent World View series in Lounge. 

Gone With The Wind and the question of context

 Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018) opens with the famous scene from Gone With The Wind (1939) where the camera pulls back to reveal a battlefield of injured and dying Confederate soldiers. Audiences have been conditioned to receive the scene as tragic, but Lee cuts on the fluttering of the Confederate flag in the foreground, then shows the same flag in the next scene behind Alec Baldwin’s white supremacist as he spews racist vitriol. Lee’s film also skewers DW Griffith’s straightforwardly racist The Birth of a Nation (1915), but Gone With The Wind—a much more widely seen and beloved film—was the more provocative target.

Two years later, Gone With The Wind is in the dock again. As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to grow, American movies and TV have come under the scanner for furthering and enabling racist attitudes and practices. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on 8 June, John Ridley, screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave, asked WarnerMedia to consider removing Victor Fleming’s film, a paean to the American South, from their recently launched streaming service, HBO Max. “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of colour," Ridley wrote.

On 24 June, the film was back up on HBO, this time with a panel discussion from 2019 titled “The Complicated Legacy of Gone With the Wind" and a filmed introduction by Turner Classic Movies host and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. “Watching Gone With The Wind can be uncomfortable, even painful," she says in the 4-minute video, which can be seen on YouTube. “Still, it is important that classic Hollywood films are available to us in their original form for viewing and discussion. They reflect the social context in which they were made and invite viewers to reflect on their own values and beliefs when watching them now."

Stewart’s address is thoughtful and concise, but there’s something strange about a disclaimer for a well-known, much-discussed film that’s been around for more than 80 years. The “context" provided in the video—essentially, that the film glosses over the terrible details of slavery and the complicity of the culture it celebrates in perpetuating it—isn't something most viewers would need (whether they agree with it or not is a separate matter). Its primary use is in allowing WarnerMedia and HBO to save face, to keep a beloved movie up on their channel while also appearing sensitive to the feelings of its viewers.

A context-supplying video, whatever its impact, is an infinitely better response than what many thought HBO had done, which is remove the film entirely from its site. Contrast this to NBCUniversal’s decision last week to remove from circulation four episodes of the Tina Fey series 30 Rock that featured characters in blackface. 30 Rock was a popular show, and for them to have dealt in racial stereotypes several times and remained critically and culturally relevant says something about the TV watching public and the creators. To erase this fact under the guise of sensitivity is dishonest and misleading—a retroactive falsification of a political and social climate. There's also a danger of corporations fearing to give offence where none ought to be taken; Hulu recently removed an episode of Golden Girls where the characters are wearing a mud mask, apparently because it might resemble blackface.

With the current wave of introspection that’s sweeping Hollywood, it would be interesting to see which other streaming titles are deemed to require context, or a disclaimer. The many classic Westerns depicting Native Americans as savages are as deserving of context as Gone With The Wind. What about smaller instances, like Mickey Rooney as a bucktoothed Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)? Barring isolated bursts of conscience, the likelihood of added context should depend on the capacity of the aggrieved party to make the network or studio look bad.

Bulbbul: Review

Bulbbul opens in Bengal in 1881, at the wedding of a little girl to a grown man, almost half a century before the first law banning child marriage came into effect. On the way to her new husband’s home, Bulbbul is told a story by her brother-in-law, Satya, a boy around her age. It’s a standard scary folk tale, about a chudail, a female demon, said to live in those parts, who has backwards-facing feet and a thirst for blood. In the next scene, Bulbbul, decked up, sitting on the bed, is visited by not one but two demons: her husband, Indranil, and his intellectually disabled younger brother, Mahendra.

The film jumps 20 years, and resumes in a Dracula frame of mind. Satya (Avinash Tiwary), just returned from his studies abroad, is being driven through a forest in a horse-drawn carriage. Its driver warns of the chudail. Strange noises emanate from the dark. The screen is a feverish purple. Satya is even dressed like Jonathan Harker, in a waistcoat and long jacket. At the mansion, he lights a lone candle and looks around. I half expected Max Schreck or Bela Lugosi to emerge from the shadows.

Satya is reunited with Bulbbul (Tripti Dimri), who was in love with him before he left. She's now the lady of the mansion; Indranil (Rahul Bose) no longer lives with them, and Mahendra (also Bose) is dead, the victim of a mysterious, violent attack. His widow, Binodini (Paoli Dam), has to shave her head and live apart from the rest of the household. Bulbbul has an unsettling fixed smile, one that seems almost cruel when used in the presence of the unhappy Binodini. But as flashbacks start to interrupt the narrative, we learn more about the family and begin to sympathise with Bulbbul.

This is Anvita Dutt’s first film as director; her earlier work has been as a lyricist and writer on films like Queen, Phillauri and Shaandaar. Working with production designer Meenal Agarwal and cinematographer Siddharth Diwan, she directs some impressively hallucinatory sequences. As a screenwriter, though, I wish she’d been bolder. When bad men start dying around Bulbbul, it’s fairly clear where the story is heading. This was fine in Stree, where the lack of suspense was compensated for by manic energy, but not in a film that doesn't quite work as relationship drama or as horror movie. There’s a mysterious character, a doctor named Sudip played by Parambrata Chatterjee, whose unspoken bond with Bulbbul kept me guessing. The rest are predictable, and talented performers like Tiwary and Dam have to work hard to enliven thinly drawn characters.

Dutt does have a keen eye for the small and large aggressions against women. When he first lays eyes on her, Satya says of Bulbbul: “She’s unkempt. But she’ll do." Years later, in love with her but jealous of her ease with the doctor, he snaps that she isn’t in purdah when meeting outsiders. Till then, Satya is the film’s hero; his saying this is a way of showing how the instincts of patriarchy are lurking under the surface of even untowardly nice men.

Bulbbul is best thought of in conjunction with two other films by its producer Anushka Sharma. In Pari, Sharma is a victim of a satanic cult with otherworldly powers; in Phillauri, she’s a ghost in limbo. Taken together, these three films are a loose trilogy of supernatural feminine power, each concerned, in its own way, with the injustices women have faced, and continue to face. Phillauri moves towards reconciliation, Bulbbul towards revenge, and Pari – a disturbing and original horror movie – finds unexpected grace in a gesture of sisterly solidarity.

Like Paatal Lok, another Sharma production, Bulbbul’s plot also turns on the depiction of violent crimes against women (the scene that draws out and aestheticizes spousal abuse left me feeling very uneasy). This puts us on Bulbbul’s side, though it would have been more impressive had our sympathies been won through the bravery or ingenuity of the character. Dimri’s implacable smile doesn’t allow Bulbbul much personality – it’s only in the flashbacks that she shows a broader range of emotions. Towards the end of the film, Satya calls the mysterious killer a rakshasa, to which Sudip responds “Devi hai." The suggestion that a woman must either be demon or goddess to be able to get her way is a provocative one, though beyond the scope of this film.

Bulbbul is streaming on Netflix.

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider

Hours after news of his death broke, scenes from Sushant Singh Rajput’s last big screen release were being posted on Twitter. In Chhichhore (2019), the actor plays the father of a troubled boy about to give the national engineering entrance exam. He doesn’t succeed and, mortified at the thought of disappointing his parents, both of whom were at the National Institution of Technology (a stand-in for IIT), he throws himself off the roof. The rest of the film is Rajput relating the story of his college days to his critically injured son to get him to realize that suicide isn’t a solution. Chhichhore saw middling reviews and huge commercial success when it opened in September last year. For the worst reasons, it’s unbearably poignant now.

Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicide on the morning of 14 June, at his home in Bandra, Mumbai. He was 34—the same age as Ranveer Singh, a year older than Varun Dhawan. The police investigation is still on but that didn’t stop media outlets from speculating, with unfeeling sensationalism, on the possible causes. Photographs of the body turned up on TV and WhatsApp. Actor Ankita Lokhande, his former partner, trended on Twitter as people gossiped about how the end of their six-year relationship had affected the actor. The scavenging media coverage was exacerbated by the film industry using the death as an excuse to point fingers and settle scores.

Amid all the ugliness, my thoughts kept straying to a time before the fame, when everything lay ahead of Rajput. It was just over eight years ago that he decided to leave TV for film: a young man with a soft voice and a bright future. There’s a video from around then on YouTube, of him being interviewed on the sets of Pavitra Rishta, the show that made him a soap star. “They say everything must end—this too is ending," he tells the reporter. “Whatever I do next, I am going to do it well, put my heart into it."

How intimidating must Bollywood have looked to Rajput then? He grew up in Patna, Bihar, in a middle-class family. His father was an engineer; he too studied engineering. He had no godfathers in the film industry. He was famous—but TV famous, which counts for little in Bollywood. He was, in industry parlance, an outsider.

In Hindi cinema, the actor sons and daughters of famous film folk are “launched" (and relaunched if they don’t take off at first). Everyone else must count on being “discovered", whether through modelling, commercials, theatre, dance or TV. Shah Rukh Khan is the Cinderella story that launched a million unreasonable dreams, a nobody from Delhi who parlayed his popularity on TV into movie stardom. Yet, of the many actors who have crossed over from TV, only Rajput and Ayushmann Khurrana, who began his career as a reality show participant and host, achieved something close to Khan’s level of stardom.

Rajput did a bit of everything in the beginning: He was a dancer in Shiamak Davar’s troupe, a student of acting with Barry John, part of Nadira Babbar’s Ekjute theatre group. He began his TV career on Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil and became a star when Ekta Kapoor batted for him to play the lead in another show she was producing, Pavitra Rishta. When he left the safety of TV in 2011, he was looking at a decidedly uncertain future. Then, as now, there was no shortage in Bollywood of young actors with industry connections—Ranveer Singh had burst on to the scene with Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), Ranbir Kapoor had been around for a few years, Varun Dhawan had been signed by Karan Johar for Student Of The Year (2013).

Despite the odds, Rajput’s entry into film couldn’t have been smoother. He was spotted by casting director Mukesh Chhabra in a coffee shop and brought in to read for Abhishek Kapoor’s 2013 film Kai Po Che!. He was cast, alongside Rajkummar Rao and Amit Sadh,both fairly new to the business, in the part of Ishaan, a carefree jock who finds purpose in coaching a young cricketer. The film was a huge success, with Rajput its breakout star. There was an ease to his performance, a non-threatening manly charm, as well as a quality that would seem old-fashioned in most actors but which Rajput made his own: sincerity. He wasn’t the most complicated performer but you believed him because he seemed so earnest.

His charmed run continued. Maneesh Sharma’s sharp comedy Shuddh Desi Romance (2013), in which he played a commitment-averse man in love with Parineeti Chopra’s equally commitment-averse manic pixie, came next. He cameoed in Rajkumar Hirani’s smash hit PK (2014) as Sarfaraz, a Pakistani national in love with an Indian girl; that brief appearance, and the line “Sarfaraz dhoka nahi diya tha (Sarfaraz didn’t betray you)", became popular across the border. With Yash Raj Films’ (YRF’s) Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!—a big film by a major studio, planned as a franchise—and Shekhar Kapur’s ambitious Paani under his belt, the future seemed very bright.

In Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, Dibakar Banerjee’s adaptation of the Bengali detective series, he was a delightful Byomkesh—energetic, brilliant, visibly pleased with himself (unlike your typical inscrutable sleuth, this satyanweshi smiles a lot). But the 2015 film, immaculately designed but inchoately plotted, was a commercial failure. Rajput followed that up with a big hit, playing the former Indian cricket captain in M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016). Then came the lean period—a box-office failure in Raabta (2017), an average earner in Kedarnath (2018). He left YRF Talent amid rumours of a rift with Aditya Chopra over preferential treatment to Ranveer Singh. There was also the long grind of waiting for Paani to materialize (it never did), and the projects turned down in that period.

It’s not so much that he had two middling films in two years. Actors with far worse career graphs are working in Hindi cinema today. It’s more that Rajput, even at the height of his fame, was never spoken of as a truly big star. That seems incredible on the face of it: In his seven-year career, he was the lead in three big successes and cameoed in a monster fourth one. But box-office popularity isn’t always a guarantor of stardom in a town suspicious of talented strangers.

“It takes double the talent, energy and hard work for an outsider to convince the audience and the industry that he or she is as safe a box- office bet as a mediocre, unmotivated and entitled establishment elite," Banerjee told PTI after Rajput’s death. “This leads to deep anger and frustration. Those who can let this slide survive. Those who can’t—those who hurt a little more or are vulnerable and impressionable—they are at risk."


In a discussion taped a few months after the release of M.S. Dhoni, critic Anupama Chopra asked Rajput how he had navigated Bollywood’s nepotistic waters. “I can’t complain because I got the films I wanted to do," he replied. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there…. When you are successful as an outsider you will be discussed, but in a hushed tone. And people are willing to forget about it." Asked whether stardom is important to him, he says, “If you give it to me I will keep it…. But at the same time if you don’t give it to me, I don’t miss it."

It’s tough to imagine a second- or third-generation Bollywood actor voicing a similar sentiment. You get the sense they would miss stardom terribly if it slipped away. But Rajput probably wasn’t as detached from ambition as his response made him seem. When he dropped out of the Delhi College of Engineering to try his hand at acting, “I was already a superstar in my mind", he told Man’s World. Instead, his response to Chopra reads more like a careful covering of bases by someone who had been a star in Bollywood long enough to know that he couldn’t take success for granted the way some of his peers could.

Film-maker Abhishek Kapoor spoke with feeling of the difference between the newcomer he directed in Kai Po Che! and the media-hounded star he worked with in Kedarnath. “I used to tell him, you are already a star, you don’t need other people to validate that for you," he told Shoma Chaudhury in an interview on 16 June. Kapoor said Rajput was ostracized by the industry for not being a typical star. “It’s like, if you don’t fit in our box, we have no use for you. It was the systematic dismantling of a fragile mind."

In the last three years, there has been increased criticism of Bollywood’s clique-ish workings. Kangana Ranaut created a stir in 2017 when she described Karan Johar, on his own talk show, as the “flag-bearer of nepotism" in the industry. More recently, in a newcomers roundtable hosted by Rajeev Masand, Gully Boy’s Siddhant Chaturvedi wryly responded to Ananya Panday’s assertion that star children also had to struggle, with “where our dreams come true, that’s where their struggle begins". Yet, in a country that has had film families almost from the time it has had films, this is a criticism easily shaken off. At the 2017 IIFA Awards, Johar, Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan—second-generation celebrities all—performed a skit aimed at an absent Ranaut that ended with them chanting “nepotism rocks".

After Rajput’s death, Johar, his producer on Drive, shared a post mourning him on Instagram (“I have felt at times like you may have needed people to share your life with...but somehow I never followed up on that feeling"). By late evening, Johar’s name was trending on Twitter. Most of the mentions were angry reminders of occasions when he was seen to have slighted Rajput—in particular the time on his show when Alia Bhatt, asked who she'd kill/ marry/ hookup with between Ranveer Singh, Ranbir Kapoor and Rajput, opted for "kill Sushant". It was a typically catty and vapid Koffee With Karan moment, featuring a star child launched by Johar, a friend of Aditya Chopra—all the concentric circles of insider-dom from which Rajput was excluded. Nevertheless, to link this, as many did, to the actor’s death is unfair and irresponsible. The same goes for the “blind items" that painted Rajput as difficult and brash over the years. But these slights do serve as an indicator of where power in Bollywood lies and who wields it.

By the evening of 14 June, the conversation about the death had turned into a shouting match over nepotism in Bollywood. Ranaut’s team posted a video in which she suggested Rajput was driven to suicide by a nepotistic industry’s lack of recognition of his talents (she also said the same forces wanted her to die by suicide and it was Rajput’s “mistake" that he listened to them). Sonakshi Sinha and Sonam K. Ahuja tweeted, without naming Ranaut, about people using Rajput’s death for their own battles. Abhinav Kashyap, director of Dabangg, wrote a long Facebook post alleging that Salman Khan and his family members had tried to ruin his career. Lost in all this were the voices calling for more open discussions on mental health, and the ones who just wanted to remember Rajput without speculating about his death.


In story after story about Rajput, there’s one constant: He always had a book around. Most of the time it was a science book; the actor was particularly interested in astronomy and had wanted to be an astronaut when he was young (he attended a Nasa workshop in 2017 and later sponsored two students to visit the US space agency). His Instagram was unlike any other Hindi film star’s, a mix of philosophical musings and pictures of telescopes, starry skies and scientific instruments. In a post from April, he writes that he’s learning coding because he loves computer gaming and “wanted to learn the language behind it".

Anand Gandhi, director of Ship Of Theseus, recalled on email how the actor came up to him outside a hotel in Goa during IFFI 2017 and introduced himself. “He started quoting me from my talks and interviews, which he seemed to have gone through many of. We shared many of our heroes—(author Richard) Dawkins, (philosopher Daniel) Dennett, (neuroscientist) V.S. Ramachandran. We must have stood on those steps for hours talking." The two became friends and planned to collaborate on a film about a worldwide pandemic called Emergence. “Over the years, Sushant would bring up Emergence often," Gandhi said. “In the last few months, he would bring it up every week or so. I felt certain that I could cast him in a part that amplifies who he artist of life, a seeker, relentless in his inquiry."

Director Abhishek Chaubey told me that while they were shooting Sonchiriya (2019) in Dhaulpur, Rajasthan, the actor would spend his free time reading tomes on quantum physics. “He wasn’t bullshitting either. He knew what he was talking about." He even lugged a 100kg telescope to the shoot because there were astronomical events taking place then. Rajput tended to converse about everything other than cinema, Chaubey said, quite unlike other stars, whose interests rarely extend beyond the movie business. “He was unique in that sense. You don’t get many geeks in Versova."

The revisionist Western Sonchiriya is Rajput’s best film, and his most intense performance. He plays a Chambal valley dacoit, a man who begins to question his purpose in life and eventually sacrifices himself helping a runaway woman and a little girl make it out of the ravines. Surrounded by expert growlers and grunters like Manoj Bajpayee, Ranvir Shorey and Ashutosh Rana, Rajput roughens up convincingly. “There’s something desi about him," Chaubey said when asked why he cast Rajput. “He doesn’t have that Bandra-Juhu image which most of our male actors have."

One crucial piece of the character fell into place by accident. Chaubey had planned to ask the actor to incorporate the dacoit’s contemplative nature in his performance. He realized he didn’t need to—Rajput’s slightly faraway demeanour was a ready-made fit.

By all accounts, Rajput was a hard worker, pressing directors for notes, going to lengths to enter the mind of the character. Screenwriter Kanika Dhillon recalled how her 100-page script for Kedarnath became a 300-page document after Rajput was done adding his own notes. He didn’t disappear behind make-up or accents, preferring to make changes in body language. His Mahendra Singh Dhoni looks nothing like the cricketer but he moves exactly like him on the field. He wisely avoided speaking Hindi with a Bengali accent in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, instead inventing a lithe, slightly comic physicality to match the detective’s mental agility. With attentive directors, he could slip a lot into a scene without doing much on the surface. The scene in Shuddh Desi Romance when he wakes up after sleeping over at Parineeti Chopra’s flat for the first time is a marvel of unarticulated emotions—giddy joy and sexual pride giving way to confusion and emotional vulnerability and finding its way back to joy.

Chaubey said Rajput was a loner, though also a regular guy with few airs and a “college canteen vibe". “I had heard he would be difficult, that he would have all these demands, but none of that happened." This image of Rajput as a tantrum-thrower is derived largely from blind items and unattributed quotes—testament to the power of the Bollywood gossip vine. The biggest controversy involving the actor was an unsubstantiated rumour that he had harassed co-star Sanjana Sanghi while shooting Dil Bechara, an as-yet-unreleased remake of The Fault In Our Stars (DNA quoted an unnamed source as saying: “Sushant was trying to be ‘extra-friendly’ towards newbie Sanjana Sanghi. On one occasion, she seemed to have got uncomfortable."). The actor denied the claims. Sanghi later tweeted that the story was “baseless and unfounded".

Over the past couple of days, everything from the death of Rajput’s former manager on 8 June (police are investigating if it’s a suicide or accidental death) to his final Instagram post have assumed an eerie air of significance. As of now, there are only unconfirmed reports that he was depressed and undergoing treatment. The only references he appears to have made to mental health were oblique. There was a remark in an interview to Hindustan Times in 2017 (“Who says actors are maintaining their mental health?"). And last year, he tweeted a Gillette ad about not bottling up your feelings with the words, “It’s okay to let it out and not hold it inside. It’s not a weakness but a sign of strength."

Even as clues to Rajput’s state of mind emerge in the accounts of those who knew him, there’s an urgent need for public discussion about fame and mental health. Already, there have been two deaths by suicide, reportedly triggered by Rajput’s demise, of teenagers in Bareilly and Patna. Deepika Padukone, a rare actor to discuss her struggles with mental illness, tweeted on the evening of 14 June about the importance of reaching out, as did Zoya Akhtar, Anil Kapoor, Richa Chadha and Shabana Azmi. That several celebrities were framing depression as a matter of willpower instead of an illness tells you how much work is yet to be done. Still, the best way to honour Rajput might be to work towards creating a kinder, more understanding film industry.

In mourning the recent deaths of Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor, fans could draw upon their decades of screen work. Rajput left us just 10 films from which to create a mental reel: memories of young men like Ishaan, Sarfaraz, Lakhna, who stood up for what they believed in, and an actor who smiled often and made his job look easy. I find myself returning to a brief moment in Sonchiriya. Lakhna, tired, dishevelled, possibly sensing the end of the road, sees a vision of himself in clean clothes, well-groomed and riding a camel. Is it a glimpse of a happier future? Or a road never taken? That’s the image of Rajput I will take with me: at peace, unhurriedly exiting the screen, a hint of a smile on his face.

Apart from qualified professionals, there are helplines operating across India that you can reach out to if you are struggling with mental health. Here is a list of five that offer their services free of cost.

Sahai: +91-80-25497777 (Monday- Saturday, 10am-8pm)

Sneha: +91-44-24640050 and +91-44-24640060 (all days and hours)

iCall: +91-22-25521111 (Monday-Saturday, 8am-10pm)

Parivarthan Counselling Helpline: +91-7676602602 (Monday-Friday, 4-10pm)

Aasra: +91-22-27546669 (all days and hours).