The Brothers Grimm seem be the flavour this year. We just saw, in Tarsem Singh’s flamboyantly mounted Mirror Mirror, a revisionist update of the Snow White story, and now we have Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, who is a more subtle stylist. His visuals carry an elegant charge. The opening sequence depicts the queen (Snow White’s mother) strolling through her castle grounds in winter, and the sight is presented as an ice-encrusted topiary, as if seen through a snow globe. Once the story steps outside, into the squelch of mud in what appears to be the Middle Ages, the images acquire the sheen of the macabre – bird carcasses teeming with maggots, the back of a witch rendered like the skeleton of a fish that’s just been devoured at dinner. Even the home of the fairies is not a twinkling wonderland but a quiet expanse of green, dotted with one-eyed toadstools and a moss-encrusted tortoise.

This, in other words, is not the Snow White you want to take your four-year-old to. With the exception of birds that help the adult Snow White (Kristen Stewart) in return for the kindnesses she showed them as a child, the director is not interested in a family-friendly fairy tale. What he wants to do, at least going by the initial stretch, is impart to Snow White’s stepmother what screenwriters like to call “motivation.” In Walt Disney’s telling of the story, she was evil because… that’s what villains are, evil. But Ravenna (Charlize Theron), here, is a clear case of damaged goods. She comes with a backstory that has her, as a child, “begging for scraps,” and as a grown-up, replaced in the hearts and the beds of many men. “Men use women,” she snarls (Theron throws her voice around like she’s never done before), and her revenge is to kill her husband – Snow White’s father – on their wedding night. (He married her after his queen died.)

Theron plays Ravenna the way Demi Moore played the emasculating boss in Disclosure, as a power-mad creature yoked to a wagonload of insecurity. There is a hint of incest in her relationship with her brother (Sam Spruell, in a creepy pageboy haircut), whom she orders around like a slave, and when she stands before the famous mirror and asks “Who is the fairest of them all?”, she looks as if she dreads the answer. When she learns that it is Snow White (who was thrown into prison as a young girl and has now grown-up), she demands the heart of her stepdaughter, which will make her immortal. Ravenna’s beauty regimen consists of bathing in milk (in the presence of said brother) and sucking the souls of the young girls of the land, whose youth banishes her wrinkles and makes her look young again. (It’s a fitting metaphor for Botox.) And yet, these baneful powers do little to reassure her. Is she a victim? An avenging white-goddess? An embodiment of womanly insecurity? Scholars of feminism can embark on boundless treatises on Ravenna, projecting on her whatever they want.

The film’s big tragedy is that this fascinating woman – all right, witch – is forced to abdicate the screen for a bland and altogether generic warrior-heroine. Stewart certainly looks the part – she always seems on the verge of a major decision, yet hesitant to do what she must – but unlike Theron, she’s playing a construct rather than a character. With her arrival, the film transforms into an adventure/quest filled with strange creatures of every stripe, with Ravenna as Darth Vader/Sauron and Snow White as Luke Skywalker/Frodo, an unlikely conscript in a war against evil. (“She will heal the land,” says one of the dwarves, with the kind of hushed awe that accompanies gnomic utterances in the movies. “She is The One.”) Snow White is helped by a huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), a drunk mourning his dead wife, and William (Sam Claflin), a childhood friend. The ensuing love triangle is acknowledged but never acted upon, another narrative thread sacrificed at the altar of action.

For that is what Snow White and the Huntsman settles into – a series of combat sequences, egged on by excessive special effects. (Of course the evil army under Ravenna’s command cannot consist of just human soldiers. They have to be made of what looks like shards of graphite, all the better to spill out when dismembered in battle.) Ravenna resigns herself, bafflingly, to the sidelines, content to worry about her wrinkles, waiting till almost the end of the movie to work her dark magic again. But for all its frustrations, this isn’t a film you easily forget, if only for its overreach. Where else, these days, will you find yourself transported into a simulacrum of the Middle Ages, with its curious conflation of the Christian and the pagan? (Throw in the revenge angle, and this begins to feel like Bergman’s The Virgin Spring reshaped for the digital era.) As Snow White entreats a higher power (“Our Father, who art in heaven…”), we realise we are in the presence of a fairy-tale heroine whose truck isn’t with her godmother but with God. It may be no accident that Ravenna, bearing the cross of womankind, is often sighted with a tiara that tapers into jagged spikes. That’s her crown of thorns.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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The Wednesday Kiran Nagarkar is due to launch his latest book in Chennai, he is smarting from a bad review. It dogs him like a malignant shadow, nipping occasionally into our conversation – he just can’t seem to shake it off. At some point, this criticism of his book rouses a broadside against all Indian critics. “If the USA and the UK accept a book and give you money, it has to be good. If they give you 500,000, it has to be superb. And if they give you one million, then it has to be doubly superb. We still do not have the willingness or capacity to try and gauge it for ourselves.” Good criticism, Nagarkar proposes, is being unafraid of being wrong. “We’re terrified of making a mistake, and the only time you can make a genuine mistake is if you respond on your own. So who is looking at these Bombay books? Are they really checking out if it feels like it’s from the place?”

A little earlier, we were discussing the cottage industry that appears to have sprung up in Mumbai, especially in non-fiction, with writers – many of them handsomely talented, some less so – seeking to prove their mettle, as if in battle, by crossing over to the other side of the tracks and unearthing stories of survival from slums. Nagarkar did that himself almost two decades ago, with Ravan and Eddie, which, in its time, was hailed in some quarters as the quintessential Bombay novel, aiming to accommodate the excrement on the earth, the stars in the Hindi-film firmament, and everything in between. His new novel, The Extras, is – in the parlance of cinema – a sequel. It is also the first Nagarkar novel to have been keyboarded. “I have gone down very badly in life,” says Nagarkar mournfully, as if confessing a compulsion to peer into the bedrooms of particularly athletic neighbours. “I now use a laptop, and it has been a singular disaster.”

Till he finished God’s Little Soldier, everything was written by hand. This must make him the possessor of the supplest wrists in the subcontinent – he rewrote it about eight times. “It’s such a cliché but it’s true,” Nagarkar says. “Thinking with your hand is a different story from thinking while you’re typing. On the machine, as you start and as you’re typing it in, you’ve already decided to change the sentence. Earlier, you sat down and tried to get your – if not act – at least thought process together.” He was left with no choice after the lady who used to stop by on Saturday afternoons to type out his written drafts stopped stopping by. “She was really gifted,” he says, because she could decipher it all, despite “the cross here and a circle there,” and despite “handwriting that grows smaller and smaller till an ant’s shit appears larger than the letters.” Every once in a while, I find myself at the receiving end of an uninhibited dispatch from a mind whose outpourings, at least on page, have been extolled (or excoriated) as Rabelaisian. “By the great grace of God,” he tells me later, “I am not at all self-conscious about writing about sex.”

The unflattering review nudges its way into the conversation again when he speaks of The Extras, which began life as a screenplay when an unsuspecting director commissioned from Nagarkar a “garish, 1970s-style melodrama.” The director was unconvinced by an early draft, and the screenplay veered over to literature instead, as the basis for Ravan and Eddie. “Once the first chapter – which I’ve repeated in The Extras – was over, I got the titles on,” says Nagarkar. “The next scene, the two boys are grown-up. The original screenplay was mostly about the grownups. Everything that was there about the children was completely new to me.” The unused material – the extras, you might say – gave birth to The Extras. “People have accused me of overwriting in The Extras. But I am writing about Bollywood, about excess at its worst.” His peeved emphasis on worst renders the word disyllabic. “I thought it would be words and language that created that character. But we lack… Today’s critics…”

Nagarkar has been reading, recently, The Man inside My Head, Pico Iyer’s book-length grapple with Graham Greene. “Here is an author [Greene] who, thanks to Anthony Burgess and others, we have decided is a bloody third-rate bugger. You know, there’s a limit to what asses we have become.” Nagarkar doesn’t think highly of Western critics either. “Even with them, out of a hundred, maybe a thousand, you’ll find one good critic. Otherwise, they’re using words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘fantastic’ – what else is there?” Somewhere in between, he transforms into his own critic. “I am not a good writer, yaar. I take too much time.” The thoughts are now ellipses, and the narrative has begun to leap from his adoring publishers in Germany to his relative obscurity in India. “The UK and the USA have never accepted any work of mine, which is why any time you read an article about me, they will always say – if the person is favourably disposed towards me (which not many people are) – that it’s a major mystery why Kiran Nagarkar is almost completely unknown.”

He brushes aside the proffered theory that he may be too highbrow. “I am extremely modest in my demands,” he says. “I don’t want anything but the whole world to be my reader. I write to read aloud, and I am willing to sit at Churchgate station and read to anybody who will listen.” It’s the writer as troubadour playing to an uncaring world rushing by, an outcast even, seeking entry into the mainstream – and it may explain why the protagonists of all his novels are, in some sense, outsiders, extras, fringe characters cast into the foreground through forces not of their own making. The protagonist of Saat Sakkam Trechalis (Seven Sixes Are Forty Three), Nagarkar’s first novel, is a writer, a total unknown. The leads of Ravan and Eddie are little extras in chawl, and the princely husband of Mirabai in the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Cuckold is an extra in his wife’s life. Even the fanatical Zia of God’s Little Soldier is an extra in his liberal Muslim family, an outsider awaiting his moment in the limelight. And in Nagarkar’s newest book, Ravan and Eddie are quite literally extras in the Hindi film industry.

Nagarkar agrees with this observation – up to a point. “I hate metaphors which start a book in the mind of the author,” he says. “I cannot do this Waiting for Godot business. Don’t give me something so bloody simplistic, yaar. But as I was completing The Extras, I realised, to my horror, that there was a metaphor there, and the metaphor was ‘the extras’. I realised, as a matter of fact, that there was a very solid metaphor for me in the book.” Which is this: Barring maybe 0.0001 per cent of the population, all of us are extras. Fortunately, we also think we are the centre of the world. And we don’t even know if we’ve been cut out of the frame on God’s editing table. “This feeling kind of grew over me, that we make so much of ourselves – and thank God we do – but we don’t really amount to anything. We are not the Buddha or Mahatma Gandhi.” Ant shit, in other words.

The other constant in Nagarkar’s novels is the lingering scent of Hindi cinema, most pronounced, of course, in Ravan and Eddie and The Extras, both derived from a Bollywood screenplay, but also in Cuckold (with its central love triangle) and God’s Little Soldier, which contains this marvellous passage: “Zubeida Khaala had once taken him to a Hindi movie and had asked him to close his eyes when a woman in hot pants, along with fifty other girls in skimpy skirts, had danced to the most enchanting song he had ever heard. ‘Rumba ho, ho. Sumba ho, ho.’ He had covered his face with his hands and watched the disco dancing through the gaps between the fingers. He’d felt strange in his chest. His heart had taken on the rhythm of the song. One slow beat followed by two quick knocks on the rib cage.” Few writers in English have captured the spangly seductiveness of kitsch as Nagarkar did with these few sharp lines. Fewer still would have recalled Bappi Lahiri’s gaudy score from Armaan.

But Nagarkar says he disliked Hindi cinema intensely. (He calls himself a “Hollywood baby.”) He was dragged along to films like the Shammi Kapoor-starring Janwar, and found little to make him recant his opinion that “Hindi films can be a bit of a joke.” But when he began to write the bits about Hindi movies in Ravan and Eddie, he mellowed down. He used to review English and Hindi films, and he realised that if you want to talk about India, you have to know that the Hindi movie is central to understanding it. He adds, with a writer’s empathy, “If you’re writing about a film star, however phony he or she may be, you cannot ignore the tragedy. They are constantly terrified that someone else is going to get the No. 1 slot. Unless you’re aware of your own ambivalence and the ambiguity of their fate, you’re never going to depict them properly.” Long after his aborted screenplay, Nagarkar experienced a second brush with cinema, with what he calls a half-second role in Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open. “Talk about extras,” he laughs. “You’re sitting in front of one of them.”

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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While one part of the population complains that Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is being sold on the basis of little more than its visuals, and the hint of a heroine (Noomi Rapace) in the future, the rest of us sit back and wonder: What else do we need? Forget, for a minute, Alien, which was propelled by Scott’s most vivid visuals, his most memorable heroine in the future. Remember, if you will, his groundbreaking commercial for the Mac, an as-yet-unknown product in 1984, when IBM ruled the electronic universe, with Microsoft nipping at its heels. How to introduce David to a world that only knew Goliath? Scott’s solution was to draw on the Orwellian nature of the year, and insinuate that Goliath was really Big Brother. Rows of identical-looking men march down a passage and seat themselves in front of a large screen, where a phosphorescent Big Brother representative delivers an address about celebrating “the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives,” adding that their “Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth.” This impassioned rhetoric is delivered in the coldest of tones – the colours are appropriately dank.

And in the middle, a flash of red – from the running shorts of a woman athlete, hammer in hand. (Her singlet is Mac-white.) This heroine, in this dystopian near-future, races towards the screen and hurls the hammer. The target explodes in an eruption of smoke and makes way for this scrolling text: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.” The idea to borrow from Orwell may have been the writer’s, but the staging is all Scott. He’d tackled a more sprawling dystopia, a couple of years earlier, in Blade Runner, derived dreamily from Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and he invested in the visuals of this historic commercial – first aired on television during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, and only once afterwards – a similar sense of unease. Where are we? Who are these mysterious others? These questions are never really resolved in the commercial, which, like Scott’s films, is more a meditation on mood. But imagine the alternative: the product is actually shown, its highlights demonstrated. Where’s the mystery then?

In a scant sixty seconds (and with an intrepid heroine), Scott sold the Mac to a nation, and in his two-hour films, he strives to do the same: suggest rather than show, evoke rather than elucidate. Mood is to Scott what landscape was to David Lean, at once muse and canvas. And his most wondrous evocations of mood have been set in times not our own. Even his least successful period films – 1492: Conquest of Paradise, American Gangster (set in the years following the late-1960s), Legend (a mythical tale set “long ago”) – are suffused with the power of suggestion; that that wasn’t enough is due to the deficiencies in the scripts. Scott’s contemporaneous films, on the other hand, feel the creations of a journeyman from the Hollywood factory system. There are glorious exceptions like Thelma and Louise, surely one of the most empathetic eviscerations of the feminine psyche by a male director. But then, Scott has always done well with his action heroines. We will know, June 8, whether Noomi Rapace will join the ranks of Sigourney Weaver, or vanish from the mind like the heroine of Robin Hood (who was that again?) – but the film, at least from the vantage of this weekend, remains an event.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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People seem to be of the opinion that the third installment of the Men in Black series is better than the second one, but I cannot add to the chorus. I can hardly remember what the earlier films were like – except, of course, that they involved men who liked to dress in black. The most vivid takeaway from those films were the sunglasses, and I wondered who, other than Ray-Ban executives, would be interested in a second sequel. And the trailer that began to make rounds was anything but appetising, its sole speck of wit coming from the visual of the Columbia-logo lady sporting the series’ trademark dark glasses. Then, in order to refresh our memories, there’s this line: “Our mission is to monitor extra-terrestrial activity on earth.” And afterwards, it’s just the usual mash-up of peals-of-thunder percussion (why do Hollywood’s event movies always sound as if Armageddon were around the corner?) and fast-cut images that don’t really add up to anything.

Well, the trailer does establish that K (Tommy Lee Jones) is now dead – J (Will Smith) gets a good laugh mimicking K’s smile as a frown – and that J is going to travel back in time to solve the mystery, but as an incentive to take a trip to the theatre to another installment of a series that’s not quite a pop-culture milestone, it does very little to convince us. (Or maybe I should say “convince you,” for people like me have to watch everything, regardless of trailer quality. Buy me a drink someday, and I’ll tell you all about my existentially questionable life, ebbing away slowly in darkened movie halls.) And that’s the way most trailers are. We know we want to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, but it’s not because the trailer does a bang-up job of selling us the film. We can only hope that whatever Christopher Nolan and Co. serve up is going to be better than the peals-of-thunder percussion and fast-cut images in the sneak peek.

That is the case with Men in Black 3. I had a really good time, and I don’t think it was just due to the underwhelming expectations derived from the trailer. The director, Barry Sonnenfeld, has at his disposal a fairly witty script. (When J undertakes his “time jump,” to travel back to 1969, he literally takes a giant leap, and while slipping through other eras, he finds himself accompanied, at one point, by a fellow-jumper – a Wall Street executive, presumably, during the Great Depression. When they make Men in Black 16, maybe J will find himself alongside a 9/11 jumper, for that event, by that time, might have receded far enough into history that it’s safe enough to make jokes about it.) And the creature design is fantastic, especially the villain, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement), who gnashes several sets of teeth and is aided by a scurrying sidekick situated inside his palm. Special-effects movies, these days, are all about blow-‘em-up bluster, and it’s a pleasure to see these latest technologies being employed to service genuine vision. Men in Black 3 is that rare film that makes you happy we live in this age of digital effects.

Though the best special effect is probably Josh Brolin, who is exactly how you think Tommy Lee Jones would have looked like in the Age of Aquarius. (There’s a very funny Andy Warhol gag, whose mind-scrambling premise makes it entirely appropriate that the song on the soundtrack at the time is Strange Brew.) Had any of this appeared in the trailer, would we not have been as surprised, as pleasured? Or would we have been better primed for the late-sixties wackiness, with even Boris the Animal recast as a clamorous Hell’s Angel? But even if trailers aren’t obliged to provide a peek into every element of plot, they should be considered a failure if they don’t hint at the film’s vibe, the mood we’re in for when we seat ourselves in the theatre. The vibe suggested by the Men in Black 3 trailer is “business-as-usual summer blockbuster,” while the story is actually something else. This is a sequel with character and attitude, and that the trailer never tells us.

And that’s what the trailer for the Tamil film Attakathi tells us. I haven’t seen, this year, a trailer with more character, attitude, vibe. By its end, we know very little about the “story” of the film – just that it’s about a young man who cannot help falling in love with women, all kinds of women. The trailer strikes a pitch-perfect balance between showing us too little and leaving us with too much (and it’s set to a bouncy accordion score that buoys the spirit). There’s a bit of humour, a bit of sentiment, a bit of action, which is what we see in every film – but the oldness of content is superseded by newness of form. Here too, as with trailers from Hollywood, we are presented a procession of fast-cut images, but these images actually add up to something, and by the end (which contains a charming twist in the tale), that something is what makes us want to watch the film, bask in its vibe. We can only hope that the two-plus hour film lives up to these two minutes.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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This insight comes not from a chapter on one of the three films under discussion but from the Preface, which, along with the Introduction that follows, fills out 33 of this volume’s 85 pages (not counting the index and other back-of-the-book baggage). This smallness of size is puzzling given the broadness of Jaidka’s aims, which are manifold – an introduction to Mehta; an overview of the traditional image of women in India and their representation on screen; an assessment of Mehta’s contribution to narratives of women’s lives; an examination of the ‘elemental’ films; an overview of the other films; and, finally, a personal look at Mehta. Jaidka observes that little academic work has been devoted exclusively to the study of Mehta, but she doesn’t do all that much to alleviate this apparent crisis, opting, instead, to skim through the films with a larded, expository writing style reminiscent of collegiate theses. (“This section focuses on Deepa Mehta’s film Fire which was originally made in English and later dubbed into Hindi.”) Beware the book that brings with it the itch to blue-pencil.

As for the chapters on individual films, Jaidka cobbles together other people’s (and newspaper) quotes and personal interpretation, and those new to these films will certainly find these narratives of use as an entry point, but it’s hard to endure page after page of protractedly earnest writing. From the chapter on Earth: “In the book, and also in the film, the cracking of a country is symbolically presented through the violation perpetrated on the Ayah who is significantly named Shanta after ‘peace’ – that elusive, utopic state of affairs that Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, aspired for.” Sentences like these suggest that the book is aimed at filling up shelves in the cinema sections of libraries in foreign universities, and even the chapter titled “Deepa Mehta: On a Personal Note,” which promises insights into the creator drawn through one-on-one conversations, has little that we don’t already know. “Born and brought up in Amritsar, Deepa Mehta graduated from Delhi University and moved to Canada in 1973.” Did such a slim volume need to thicken its pages with biographical detail available to anyone with access to Wikipedia?

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That’s a strange place to be for a film whose premise points at a solid, frill-free B-movie. The opening stretch establishes Ottway as an expert shot – his job is to protect a crew of oil workers from wolves. (This is Alaska, and the frames are saturated with so much snow that the film, justly, should have been titled The White.) On the way home from work, their plane runs into a blizzard. Its guts are ripped apart with stomach-churning audio effects that sound like the gates of hell juddering open. And Ottway and his colleagues find themselves in a survival movie, a band of bickering brothers who must face knee-deep snow, cliffs, snowstorms, rapids, and, most terrifying of all, packs of ravenous wolves, whose disembodied eyes, in the dark, light up like stars in an eerie sky.  We brace ourselves, now, for a creature-feature, with nothing more in its sights than (a) who will be eaten up next, and (b) who, along with Ottway, will make it to the end.

But in an early scene, after the crash, Carnahan reveals that he’s after something higher – a B+ movie perhaps. Ottway and a few other survivors gather around a colleague who is clearly dying. Gasping for breath, the man is unable to comprehend his situation. Ottway tells him, calmly, “You are going to die, that’s what’s happening.” He doesn’t reach for platitudes to reassure a twitching, bleeding, terrified individual drawing his last breaths. “Look at me,” he commands instead. “You’re all right.” The moment is allowed to linger agonisingly, and even after the man dies, Carnahan refuses to cut away from his face. If he is staring into the void, we, along with him, seem to be doing the same, and the film has transmuted into Robinson Crusoe-meets-Walden, grappling with higher thoughts and, sometimes, even a higher power. Long stretches of dialogue (some may label them longueurs) are consecrated to musings about existing versus living, facing fears, and acknowledging that man is, in essence, an animal.

The Grey doesn’t always succeed in reconciling its twin ambitions of excitement and existentialism, but Neeson remains a commanding presence throughout. He invites our empathy. We want him to make it back alive, even if, at the beginning, he was seen seeking death, sticking the muzzle of his rifle into his mouth. Irony seems to be a popular contrivance with the makers of castaway movies. Even the best of them, Cast Away, toyed with the notion of a FedEx employee, to whom being on time was everything, stranded on an island where time had no meaning. And, of course, the narrative outline of The Grey has been a popular contrivance in Hollywood for decades: Man deposited in a hostile, alien environment learns that he is not the alpha creature after all. Set this story in space, and you get Alien. Set it in water, and you get Jaws. Set it on earth, and you get everything from the Allies-in-Germany movies to The Lord of the Rings. The Grey is a testament as much to human will as the endless malleability of this single-line plot.

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Most films are essentially reconfigurations of what we’ve seen earlier, what we’ve heard – there’s very little cinema, anymore, that’s capable of shocking us with never-before content. That a pall of familiarity cloaks the opening sequence of Ram Gopal Varma’s Department is, in a sense, only to be expected. We see a cop (the tall and wiry Rana Daggubati) in uniform, and in motion. He’s chasing someone we presume to be a small-time villain, not worthy of establishment as an empathy-deserving character. The cop leaps over a car, dodges a motorcyclist headed in his direction, and shoots. The nameless villain crumples into a blood-spattered heap. The cop is suspended, and so is a question over our heads. Where is Varma headed?  What is he going to do with this tale of upright, impotent policemen struggling with rampant crime and an apathetic citizenry that hasn’t already been done in Ardh Satya or Ab Tak Chappan or Khakee?

In the absence of new content, it turns out, Varma seeks to set his story apart through form. As the opening credits establish the extent of anarchy in Mumbai, a man is shot in front of his two young children at a beach. The children run after their father, horrified and scared, and the man dies – and Varma cuts to a teddy bear far away, an apparent remnant of innocence that, for these children, has receded to a similar distance. Didn’t this sort of symbolism go out of style with the hacks, and hasn’t Varma, through his films both worthy and trifling, proved himself anything but a hack? But this isn’t as bad as the mind-bogglingly questionable cinematography. If you’ve wondered how a grown man might peer down at his big toe, or how a saucepan filled with freshly brewed tea would regard the world, this is the movie for you. At times, Department looks like a sniggering parody of a Ram Gopal Varma movie, something that a college kid put up on YouTube in order to mock Varma’s growing penchant for hallucinatory camerawork.

Showy cinematography is not at all a bad thing. We are, after all, speaking about a visual medium, and if someone wants to exploit the big screen to showcase his visuals, why should we complain? Only the sternest grouch, these days, would seek to ground cinematography in the “invisible” aesthetic , where we’re not supposed to notice that there’s a camera around. But Varma’s compositions aren’t just “visible,” they jump out and jab you in the eye. I was left massaging an incipient migraine, and after a while, I couldn’t bring myself to care about this overfamiliar story, with its feuding gangs (one of them headed by a half-naked Vijay Raaz) and the switching of sides and the inevitable conflation of gangster/politician, embodied this time by Amitabh Bachchan with a tiny bell tied to his wrist. And just as Varma made Bachchan excavate the contents of his nose in Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, he has the actor thrust a finger into an ear and perform a sustained wiggle. Which slime-slathered orifice will Varma have Bachchan’s digits crawl into next? The heart quails.

Department is ostensibly about Sanjay Dutt recruiting Daggubati into his extraconstitutional hit squad and the team’s attempts to conquer crime, but a lot of the film feels like something a doting producer-father dreamed up for a starry-eyed son who sought a launch as an action hero. Daggubati’s first scene is essentially a template for his subsequent ones. They run. He chases. They run. And he chases. In one instance, he leaps and Varma freezes the frame to showcase this mid-air stunt. Bottles of beer are brought down on the skulls of villains, who sometimes fly through the air and land at the other end of the room. And much furniture is laid waste, to the accompaniment of sound effects made to resemble a typhoon rattling around in a broom closet. Varma keeps hinting, through the occasional dialogue about right and wrong, at moral complexity, but all we see is a 1980s dishoom-dishoom movie, driven by 1980s chartbusters like Ilayaraja’s Aasai nooru vagai and Bappi Lahiri’s Thodi si jo pee li hai.

Buried under all this clamour is a narrative about friendships gone awry, loyalties renegotiated at every opportunity, and the inevitable perversion of the powerful – but the relentless gimmickry wears us out and we find it difficult to be involved with anything, anybody. Only Lakshmi Manchu, as Dutt’s wife, allows us to feel something for her character, a smart woman who’s made her peace with whatever needs to be done to survive. (And she’s a dead ringer for Stockard Channing.) Varma certainly has guts. Few other directors would stage a scene where a child is dangled outside a window by a villain, and dropped to his death before the heroes can barge in and save him. But a few scenes and a few dialogues cannot rescue a filmmaker who seems to revel in his worst impulses. Department opens with these words: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” At least some of us will be left wondering if that isn’t some sort of soul-searching confession by Ram Gopal Varma.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Thangasamy has the ability to situate a scene around what is happening (and not just about it), and he also displays a nicely honed sense of mischief. We are now deposited in the kind of love story that, at least for a while, looks like how Sripriya’s Shanti Muhurtham would have ended up had she possessed a sense of humour. Like Mohan in that ill-advised romance, a young lad here, one of the boys in that police station, collects the discards of the girl he’s in love with – a soft drink can, a Kit Kat bar wrapper, and so forth. But instead of delving into a seriously moony treatise about the obsessiveness of young love, the director, in these initial portions, paints a humorous portrait of infatuated youngsters who’d rather stalk the objects of their affections (on the road, behind a bus, outside tea stalls) than reveal to them their feelings. They’re too afraid of rejection.

And then we get to the punch. Jayam (Lagubaran) mocks his best friend for being a coward, and says that it’s better to get an answer from the girl – yes or no – and get on with life. But once he falls in love, with plus-two student Dhanam (Swathy), he begins to feel the same way. He is hesitant about revealing his feelings, because he too is now afraid of rejection. Raattinam follows a fairly standard template, where the first half is limned with lightheartedness, until a sadistic interval twist kicks in (when a policeman reduces their love to something sordid, with the sickening words, “Endha lodge-la room potteenga?”) and sets the stage for a dramatically charged second half, with the girl’s doting family (and the boy’s, for that matter) striving to break up this romance. And while a lot of this sounds like Kaadhal, the families are refreshingly civilised – they seek not to hurt the other side but simply protect their own.

Raattinam isn’t staged as well as it could have been. Its shock ending (along with an eye-roll inducing coda) isn’t built up to smoothly, and the too-casual amateurishness of the performances, especially Swathy’s, threaten to undermine the narrative. (Lagubaran isn’t half bad though.) But the characters are etched very nicely, and they draw you into their world. Thangasamy, thankfully, appears not to have received the memo circulating around Kollywood these days, that young men and women can exist only in black and white, and he imbues his hero and heroine (and the people around them) with shades of warm colour. Jayam loves his family, but he’s also a brash adolescent, and he drinks with his friends, and misbehaves (and even lies) to catch the attention of the girl he loves, and Dhanam defies the family she adores, even after her romance results in her brother being laid up at the hospital. Best of all may be her mother, who rails at Dhanam for the family’s misfortunes, but doesn’t forget to pack lunch for her son’s friends taking care of him at the hospital. You can be one thing and another at the same time – these seemingly contradictory impulses are what make us human beings. They are also why Raattinam may sink without a whisper of recognition.

Copyright ©2012 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Late in the film, Muriel (Maggie Smith) appraises the lonely, husband-hunting Madge (Celia Imrie) and tells her not to worry, because she’s a thoroughbred. She could be speaking of all the seniors in the cast. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, set in Jaipur, is nothing if not a demonstration of how thoroughbreds can vault effortlessly over a procession of clichés and trot past the finish line undiminished. The premise is anything but subtle: Love Actually for the superannuated set. A “group of self-deluding old fossils” from England are deposited, for various reasons, at the titular flophouse, deluded by Photoshopped pictures that promised great luxury. Besides Muriel and Madge, there’s the newly widowed Evelyn (Dench), the Ainslies (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton), the just-retired judge Graham (Wilkinson), and the ageless skirt chaser Norman (Ronald Pickup). Away from home, lessons will be learnt, lovers united, old hurts healed, new lives forged – it’s India as soothing balm for frayed British nerves.

John Madden, the director, begins the film with Strangers in the night tinkling in the background, and soon enough, these strangers are exchanging glances during a long night at the airport. And once they land in their former colony, they encounter camels, elephants, food poisoning, squalor, colour (beginning with the gauzy pink-orange sunset their plane lowers itself into), call centres, domineering mothers, arranged marriages, malfunctioning plumbing, and, perhaps most perplexing of all, idiomatic Indian English. (The manager of the hotel, played by Dev Patel, cheerfully informs them, “Long in tooth you have become.”) But the trite, soap-operatic machinations of plot are trumped by that great ensemble of English thespians. How do they do it every time, imbuing the creakiest of lines and scenarios with such wit and wisdom? Not every storyline works (and the portions with the Indians are the weakest), but there’s enough to keep us invested in the redemption of these lost souls. Nighy explodes with long-suppressed frustrations, Wilton coolly assesses their foundering marriage, Wilkinson plays cricket with urchins on the street – it’s superlative acting as soothing balm for frayed audience nerves.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

The big news of last week was The Avengers, which became the first film in Hollywood history to earn over $100 million in its second weekend in the United States. (Most films are lucky if they manage that figure in their opening weekend.) What does this mean, besides the inevitable calculations for a slew of sequels? One, that we are still susceptible to buzz. Two, that no amount of superhero-movie ennui, which we claimed after a stretch when the multiplexes seemed to be playing nothing but superhero movies, will dampen our desire for a really special superhero movie. And three, that we do like superheroes who don’t seem to be ripe candidates for the therapist’s couch. One of the biggest legacies of The Avengers may be the revelation that you don’t have to reinvent superheroes with new-age traumas and yawning reservoirs of unexpressed angst, that they can make jokes and carry on in the manner of clowns in slapstick comedy and be none the less heroic.

The tradition of the tormented superhero, on film, dates back to Richard Donner’s Superman, which was released a year after Star Wars transformed the screen into a wall-to-wall repository of pre-digital-era special effects. In this film, Superman, played by Christopher Reeve with twinkling eyes and a granite jaw, sets right dangling aircraft and prevents California from being nuked into the ocean’s bottom, but his most impressive feat isn’t for public good. He tinkers with the space-time continuum, turning the earth back on its axis to save his sorta-girlfriend from death – and by unleashing his powers for such personal reasons, he laid the groundwork for the superhero who is as much a savior of the world as a prisoner of the self. Of course, this act was presented as a splash of swashbuckling heroism, that he would do anything to save his girl. (The subtext revealed itself only when you really looked at what he did in order to save his girl.)

Superman II, made after the predecessor became a huge worldwide smash, became even more personal. Torn between the planet that gave him his strength and the girl who gave him her heart, Superman gives up his powers and turns human. Looked one way, this is a thrilling romantic gesture, forsaking everything that’s super about him to become a mere man. But taken another way, this is simply the deepening of the schism between public duty and private desire – and that’s what Tim Burton picked up on when he made Batman, a little more than a decade after Superman. (The intervening years yielded nothing special; the subsequent Superman sequels became sillier in tone, and only the most fervent completists remember Supergirl.) The success of Batman turned into a commandment the agony over the split personality merely hinted at in Superman, and the best film in this tradition is undoubtedly M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, which details the gradual awakening of a man with superpowers.

With The Crow, Blade, Hulk, the X-Men films, Daredevil and Ghost Rider, the screen – Iron Man apart – was darkened by inner demons, and the darkest demon of all was Batman as seen through the eyes of Christopher Nolan, who presented the superhero as the most tortured savior since Christ. And no amount of euphoria over the lightheartedness of The Avengers is likely to dampen the anticipation for The Dark Knight Rises, which will surely be the latest exhibit in the superhero gallery of gloom. More box-office records are likely to be smashed, though the superhero film that I’m more intrigued about this season is The Amazing Spider-Man, directed by Marc Webb, whose only other film (and his first) is (500) Days of Summer, which, in its own way, was about a tortured soul and the attempts to alleviate it. Will this Spider-Man reboot lean towards Avengers-style levity or plunge into Dark Knight levels of nihilistic drama. If I were a betting man with a sense of humour, I’d go with the former, if only because it isn’t often that a story that begins with a spider is spun by a man named Webb.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.