I submitted, recently, to a brief interview about the probability that Agneepath caused a young Chennai schoolboy to plunge a knife into his teacher to avenge himself of an apparent slight. The question, in other words, was the oft-repeated one: Do violent movies shape a violent society? I said I did not know, but added that it is perhaps a little too easy to pick on movies or literature or corrosive rock music and absolve the viewer and the reader and the listener of blame. While the film was possibly the spark that ignited this horrific action, the boy surely dwelt in a psychological tinderbox for a period far longer than the film’s recent release. After all, there are so many others – children, adults – who saw the film without incurring the urge for violent retaliation. It’s not as if the sale of guns and knives shot up after the film came out, like how Hum Aapke Hain Koun! fostered the sale of saris in a particularly violent shade of violet, which Madhuri Dixit was draped in while immortalising herself in Didi tera devar deewana.

The interviewer asked me, then, if the film’s rating was the problem. There is, of course, the incident of a young boy shooting a cop, but there are also lynch mobs baying for a death by hanging, along with a number of shootouts. Just so that things don’t become too monotonous, we are treated to the violence unleashed by an army of sword-wielding eunuchs and a death by enforced drowning. How can such a film be rated U/A, the local version of the PG-13 rating, which allows that children can see the film provided they are accompanied by an adult? That, I concede, is a problem. In India, we do not care about ratings. I have, in my younger years, watched a hideous number of entirely inappropriate films – not just because they feature deaths and rape scenes, but also due to mature subject matter – and not once have I been stopped at the door. (The man seated beside me at the Agneepath screening decided to do one better. He’d brought along his infant. Didn’t he know better than to subject those delicate ears to such a shatteringly loud movie experience?)

But here I am, decades later, untouched by the long arm of the Indian Penal Code. And I can speak, too, for several of my friends, those wonderfully complicit people who were my comrades-in-crime in those theatre-going years. The only time the happenings on screen percolated into their lives was when they stationed themselves, shyly, at strategic street corners hoping for a run-in with the subjects of their dreams. If everyone did exactly what their filmic counterparts did, then I would have ballooned to twice my size today, with my mother having greeted my every accomplishment with an arm extending a bowl of gajar ka halwa. I – along with those around me – grew up with the knowledge that life was life and cinema was cinema. You cannot blame the circus if an excited member of the audience runs home and decides to balance himself on the clothesline in the terrace. The problem lies with his sense of reality.

Besides, even if these films were R-rated and this rating was enforced with the diligence of an army chief planning a surprise invasion, there’s nothing that can pry away reality-challenged adults from toxic simulations of actions on screen. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which featured an alienated young man who plans a political assassination, was a worldwide success, seen by millions of viewers, only one of whom – John Hinckley, Jr. – latched on to the idea that he could impress Jodie Foster, the object of his obsession, by assassinating Ronald Reagan. Not every fan of Ashok Kumar and Humphrey Bogart ended up married to a packet of cigarettes. This isn’t to say that films do not influence human behaviour. They do so, at times, in good ways too – the impact of Rang De Basanti on aspects of the Jessica Lal case has been widely noted. But at the end of the day, it’s not art that needs to be responsible. It’s the audience.

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.

A quintet of priests in Tirupathi, foreheads slathered with religious markings, rests under a Garuda with soaring wings and clasped hands. Nearby, a joyous family, adults and children, hold hands in Kanyakumari, a human chain at the brink of the shore. The photographs of these nameless subjects, these earthbound nobodies, hang alongside portraits of stars like MS Subbulakshmi and Hariprasad Chaurasia, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Maqbool Fida Husain. At least within the confines of Apparao Galleries, everyone is equal – and that’s the theme of this exhibition of Raghu Rai’s work. “They are all Indians,” he says. “Everyone matters.” Rai has been to Chennai many times – to freeze into found moments the artistic exertions of MS Subbulakshmi, Chandralekha, S Balachander and Balamuralikrishna – but this, unbelievably, is his first show in the city. Why has it taken so long? Rai says, without really answering the question, that there are more galleries now, and more people are interested.

“But not deeply,” he says. “They just glance through the pictures.” To really see a photograph, he advocates what sounds like advice borrowed from a lab technician scrutinising a blood sample. “You have to look at every inch of space, every element. You have to see how form and texture come together.” That’s what he does while taking his famed photographs. He scans every inch of space in front of him, and then something, an instinct, taps him on the shoulder and says, “Hey.” To hear that “hey,” he has to be ready “mentally and physically and spiritually.” This is especially important in capturing images of India, because “so much has been covered. The challenge is finding a new way to show it. But if you are patient, then Nature will give you something.” He likes to talk about a supreme energy – or should that be Supreme Energy? – that makes a creative person surrender to the possibilities before him.

Nature has so many magical treasures, Rai says, but people don’t have the patience and the sensitivity. He illustrates this contention by pointing to a photograph, above him, of S Balachander playing the veena beside a mountainous boulder in Mahabalipuram. Behind him, we see a line of walkers, and behind them swaths of cloud torn from a theatrical sky. “I took him there,” Rai says, and launches into an interpretation of the image that will warm the hearts of deconstructionists everywhere. “His strokes were so deep, they were like boulders dancing rhythmically in space. The four men walking behind are four notes emerging from his instrument. The clouds are witness.” When you meditate, he says, Nature gives you a gift. What matters is not the tool in your hand – digital camera, or old-fashioned film camera – but whether you’re serious enough and sensitive enough. “After all, one person uses the knife to perform surgeries, another to chop vegetables.”

Of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose encouraging eye transformed Rai in his early years, he says, “He was rich. He didn’t have the responsibilities of earning money. He could fly around the world and take photographs.” This is less a long-simmering fit of petulance than an acknowledgement of the forces that shape each photographer – indeed, each creative artist. “The early photographers,” Rai says, “were inspired by painting. Even their portraits were done painting-style.” Then came the pioneers who discovered that they could grab moments on the fly. “If they weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here,” Rai says. He adds, however, that for western photographers, the ability to capture a moment is everything, and that will not do in a country like India, which is so multilayered – multi-religious, multicultural, varied in terrain, and with so many centuries existing side by side. “A moment in space is just not enough. My panoramic pictures reflect a multiplicity of moments. That’s what I’m capturing.”

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Like Pyaar Ka Punchnama, this is essentially a Mars-Venus story about boys and girls being fundamentally different, but unlike that film, which took the easy way out and reduced its female characters to shrill shrews, we see, here, impressively nuanced women – the girl who’s getting engaged and doesn’t flinch from meeting her ex (because she knows it was bound to happen someday), or the heroine who loves the hero (Siddharth, in ones of his best roles, his best performances) but also knows that higher education in a first-world country is not something to be scoffed at. It’s only in the second half that the cracks begin to show. An annoying strain of thathuvam-ism creeps in (though these nuggets of wisdom are mercifully not bludgeoned into our consciousness), and more crucially, the director doesn’t handle older love as well as he does its younger counterpart. (Then again, there’s his age. Older people have been through young love, they know young love, but the vice-versa is rarely true.)

It’s a stroke of genius to have cast Suresh, second only to ‘Mike’ Mohan as the go-to lover boy of the nineteen-eighties, as a man contemplating divorce (at least for some of us, those associations percolate into this part), but the director cannot decide if he wants to treat this angle (somewhat) seriously or just milk it for easy laughs. (And with Suresh, why employ Valayosai as a flashback to an emotion? Why not Kaadhal oorvalam inge, that exquisite T Rajendar creation that showed that the man certainly knew his way around a tune. Also refer Idhu kuzhandhai paadum thalaattu.) But these are minor hiccups in an entertaining (and beautifully photographed) rom-com that begins with a broken-up couple and ends with them… Not that the outcome is weighted with much suspense, but go see the movie to find out. Or to use the jargon of our yesteryear cinema writers, meedhiyai velli thirayil kaanga. I suspect you’ll come out smiling, not just at the one-liners, but also at the sweet shock of recognition that, yes, this is how it was.

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

Snarling men with guns are after Frost because he possesses a microchip with vital data. Will Weston foil their plans? Is Frost really the bad guy we are presented with? The answers are a nail-biter only if you’ve never seen a spy thriller (or, for that matter, a latter-day Denzel Washington movie). The relationship between the stars is a pastiche of familiar constructs – Weston, the rookie, lucking into a training day with Frost, receiving wisdom both professional and personal; the younger Weston, against all odds, earning Frost’s grudging admiration; the masculine Frost squaring off with the feminine Weston, who is referred to as a “housekeeper.” But the other tropes are equally battle-weary. (There’s treachery in high places. Who could have guessed?) What keeps us watching, besides the non-stop action, is the top-drawer cast (including  Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard and Vera Farmiga, who bolster their template-moulded parts with undeserving dignity). Safe House, finally, is a sturdy endorsement of well-honed Hollywood professionalism. It could have been better, but at least it isn’t worse.

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.

Romantic comedies aren’t the most bountiful breeding grounds for fresh talent. The terrain is terrifyingly minimal, allowing little scope for ambiguity, and like a schoolboy poised before a xylophone to play Happy Birthday, there are a few simple and familiar notes that the filmmaker has to hit – the meet-cute, say, or the inflection points where annoyance curves into attraction, attraction into affection and love. Without these notes, there is no rom-com. Your only way out is to clothe these must-haves in the latest fashions, leaving the impression that you’re doing something different but nothing too different. The recently released Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, directed by Shakun Batra, begins like one those films where we’re going to be hoodwinked into thinking that we’re watching something different when all we’re seeing is the same thing we’ve seen a hundred, a thousand times before. Boy is the kind of repressed control freak who wears bow ties and irons his socks. Girl, meanwhile, is one of those irrepressible free spirits that screenwriters love to unleash on somber, sock-ironing young men. They’re opposites, they’re going to attract. Am I right, or am I right?

As it turns out, not quite. Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu only looks like a rom-com, thanks to its exuberantly in-love posters and promos, and the initial contrivances of Boy running into Girl. Otherwise, Batra pulls off a rather neat trick. Scratch off the romantic veneer, and this is really the story of Boy becoming Man. In other words, it’s less a rom-com than a coming-of-age story like Wake Up Sid. Even the impediment to the Boy-Girl romance isn’t what you’d find in the traditional romance, where external agents precipitate the couple’s falling out (before, of course, they get back together at the end with a tight clinch). Like Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Vinnai Thaandi Varuvaaya (whose Hindi remake opens this week as Ekk Deewana Tha), the troubles lie within. Boy and Girl are frustrated in love because of who they are and not because of what others do to them. But Batra’s tone is lighter. The romance that registered as angsty in Menon’s film comes off as breezy here. Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu is definitely the work of someone with a voice, someone very clear about what he wants to do and how he wants to do it.

This voice – a droll one, aided by witty, deadpan and obsessively controlled staging – could be described as Wes Anderson-lite (or harking back to another generation, Hal Ashby-lite, especially considering Harold and Maude), where tectonic shifts of emotion are rendered like placid pools. If your antennae are turned a particular way – namely, if you are likely to be tickled by the idea of a hyper-controlling father chewing out his son while, on a nature channel on television, a lion pounces on a luckless zebra – this is a very funny film, except that most of the laughing takes place inside your head. And yet, this isn’t a cool, distant, ironic take on romance, which employs hip humour to mask its old-fashioned preoccupations with the heart. Some of the best scenes – the one where Boy and Girl lie next to each other in bed and talk; the one where they open up to one another in a spa; the one where Girl won’t give up on Boy because she knows he’s hurt and she’s the one who’s hurt him – are hugely emotional in content. It’s just that they’re formed with very little muss and fuss.

The only thing that may leave you quibbling is the director’s decision to make the film in Hindi. If you’re staging a gag with a little boy leafing through Freud for Beginners – and you’re obviously expecting your audience to get this gag, otherwise you wouldn’t have put it in – why bother that the interiors of India may not flock to your film if the dialogues were entirely in English? After all, the title cards that break the story into chapters are in English, and the characters speak of white wines being aphrodisiacs and of PMS-ing and of “screwed-up relationships.” Did this need to be a “Hindi film” simply because of the infectious Aunty-ji song sequence and because the producer’s first huge hit needed to be acknowledged through a sequence soundtracked to Koi mil gaya? When are these niche multiplex films going to stop pretending that they’re somehow speaking to all segments of Indian audiences simply because the characters deign to touch upon the occasional Hindi. Isn’t it time for the Bollywood English film, made for those Indians who talk and think in English? No gripes about the ending though, which is wonderful, simply wonderful.

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.

Agneepath welcomes back to the Hindi screen the masterji, the zamindar, the prostitute-equivalent with the heart of gold, the venerable mother-figure, and, especially, the villain (Sanjay Dutt) so larger than life that he looks like he’s risen from hell, hulking and hairless. There is also a sincere attempt to infuse some of Bachchan’s anger into the proceedings, that smouldering rage against an establishment that just won’t let him be. Vijay’s (Hrithik Roshan) father, the doomed masterji, muses, “Bahut gussa hai mere bete ke andar.” The child actor frets and fumes, but very little of this anger finds its way into Vijay as an adult. The director and the star (understandably) see the protagonist as a tragic figure, but the only time he is shaped by the titular fire is when his path is determined for him in an early scene staged around a burning house and lit by the torches of a lynch mob. Elsewhere, there’s only water – most of it in Hrithik’s eyes.

Has there been a gangster in Hindi cinema who has wept as much? Vijay weeps when he spies his estranged family from afar. He weeps when his sister returns to him. He weeps around his girlfriend (Priyanka Chopra). He weeps when he visits his birthplace and sets eyes on his now-dilapidated roots. After a point, you may feel like calling him aside and whispering into his ears the injunction that Aamir Khan delivered to the dithering Saif Ali Khan in Dil Chahta Hai: “Mard ban. Be a man.” It’s hard to see Hrithik as someone possessing the “jungli khayal” that his mother accuses him of. Even his posturing is filled with a delicate feminine grace, as if he were starring in a dreamy ballet. (Those long strides in slow motion. That self-aware blossom of a smile.) When Hrithik, in the climax, is stabbed from behind, his arms flail about as he sinks to his knees, and you feel he’s auditioning, yet again, for the part of Jesus. You can almost hear his silent scream: “My lord, my lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Such a “hero” would have been laughed off the screen in the Bachchan era, where real men did not flaunt six-packs and biceps like walking advertisements for the local gymnasium – their masculinity lay inside, fostered by the punches life threw at them. When Vijay, as a child, shoots a cop, we are reminded of Nayakan. That was another film where the hero toted around a paunch, and was none the less masculine for it. This isn’t to say that a startling handsomeness like Hrithik’s lies outside the precinct of movie masculinity, but what we sense in him is an excessive preoccupation with how he looks and – more importantly – how he wants us to think he looks. (His performance in Guzaarish was honest and heartrending precisely because, in that film, he didn’t care how he looked.) At no point in Agneepath was I able to buy Hrithik Roshan as a gangster. The Bachchan performance in the earlier film is not one of my favourites – but even amidst the very showy (and distracting) histrionics, we were never allowed to lose sight of the anger within the character. And without that anger, there is no fire – no matter how many times you recite Agneepath.

It’s not just Vijay who’s all surface, with little inside. Kancha, the villain, is introduced in a scene that imbues the character with tremendous psychological heft. He hates mirrors – or perhaps he’s afraid of them – because they remind him of how he looks. How much more this antagonist’s self-hatred should be, then, when confronted with a protagonist as supremely good-looking as Hrithik. But nothing much is made of this, just as nothing much is made of Rishi Kapoor’s character, who sells little girls to leering old men from the Middle East. These vivid brushstrokes are audience-grabbing ways to introduce these characters to us, but they don’t paint them, thereafter, in particularly significant ways. I would have also liked a little more investment in the relationship between Vijay and the good cop (played beautifully by Om Puri). What lies at the root of this man’s affection for someone so clearly on the other side of the law?

Perhaps it’s the fact that we never really see Vijay as being on the other side of the law. In the great gangster films like Deewar and Nayakan and Vaastav (which I kept thinking about throughout this film), we are presented with the other side, the moral side, the male’s petulant privilege of doing wrong balanced by the female conviction of what is right. The mothers and the daughters in those films shamed the men into introspection, whether what they were doing was right (even if they reconciled themselves, eventually, with reasons of their own making). That sense of morality, which is so necessary to showcase a man compelled to be the man that he is, is absent here. (The mother figure, played by Zarina Wahab, barely makes an impression.) We see Vijay, therefore, not as the tragic figure that the director and the star envision, a good man cast into murky waters by the doings of destiny, but as a mere hero who bays for the villain’s blood in order to avenge himself of his daddy’s death. We could be watching Yaadon Ki Baarat – with blood.

Agneepath is thunderously staged (quite literally; the background score is a force of nature) and it’s never boring, but the film never amounts to anything. I especially enjoyed the song sequences, which erupt with the kind of spirit and colour and noise that we don’t find, any more, in the modern-day multiplex film, which prides itself on being cool and removed. And Katrina Kaif, in the roof-raising Chikni chameli song sequence, may well be a metaphor for the movie. She makes all the right moves, giving every part of her creamy anatomy a vigorous workout. She throws herself into this invigoratingly vulgar song – but the vulgarity never reaches her eyes. She’s designer-chic, a convent-educated actress simply playing a part, unlike a fleshy and robustly rustic Jayshree T, whose hips would have told an entirely different story. I watched Agneepath torn between these twin admonitions from my mind: “They don’t make them like they used to.” “But then, they don’t make them anymore.” In these parched times, perhaps we should be grateful that the well, even if shallow, hasn’t run dry.

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

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, every schoolgirl who ever ascended a competition stage to showcase her vocal chops sought refuge in the Whitney Houston oeuvre. Houston, the 48-year-old R&B star who regularly stormed the pop charts and who died last Saturday from undisclosed causes, was to the Michael Jackson generation what Aretha Franklin was to the Elvis Presley era – a melismatic counterpoint to the syllabic, staccato intonations of dance-ready pop. Has any single alphabet crested over as many notes as the one that inaugurated I Will Always Love You? That smash from The Bodyguard – the 1992 feature film that was Houston’s first; she essentially played herself, a chart-storming diva – became the best-selling single by a female artist in music history. Few remember, today, that it was originally a Dolly Parton ballad, written and recorded in the nineteen-seventies. It became Houston’s signature song.

By this time, of course, success was nothing new to Houston. Her eponymous debut album, released in 1985, burst onto the Billboard charts with three Number 1 singles – How Will I Know, Greatest Love of All and Saving All My Love for You. The latter was yet another cobwebby pop-culture artifact that Houston commandeered from its original singers, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., and her rendition was an immediate announcement of the talent that separates the great singers from those with merely great voices: the ability to narrate a story through song. Assuming the role of a woman in love with a married man, Houston caresses the opening lines to indicate little more than a fond familiarity. “A few stolen moments is all that we share / You’ve got your family, and they need you there.” We think she has given up, that she has settled for these stolen moments – and then come the lines that close the stanza. “But no other man’s gonna do / So I’m saving all my love for you.” The emotion amplifies ever so gradually, not just with the ascent into the higher registers of the octave but also in the way her throat opens out to issue a stentorian declaration of obsessive intent. A star was instantly born.

And a star she remained well into the nineteen-nineties, forsaking exploration and experimentation for a soothing sound that she knew would please her millions of fans. Critics, after a point, were frustrated by the gospel-trained singer’s penchant for gold-plating imitation jewellery (say, Shoop Shoop from the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack) but she sold over 170 million albums, and in 2009, the Guinness World Records cited her as the most-feted female performer of all time, with a haul that included two Emmies and six Grammies. With seven Number 1 singles in a row, she even overthrew a Beatles’ record.

And then she fell to earth. Her tempestuous marriage to singer-songwriter Bobby Brown crumbled and an addiction to marijuana and cocaine whittled away her greatest asset. Post divorce and rehab, her last album, I Look to You (2009), was received well enough, but it was less a superdiva’s long-awaited comeback than a sobering acknowledgement of a former star’s will to survive. Houston’s death came just before the Grammy Awards were to celebrate the best of last year’s music. At least, they won’t have to search very hard for a number to honour her with. They just have to look towards her signature song.

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.

But at the other end, War Horse isn’t a Spielberg film in the slightest. It’s more a throwback to Spielberg’s predecessors, those creators whose cinema came to define the classical Hollywood narrative, stirring and straightforward and unencumbered by influences from the more personal cinema that emerged from Europe. Two shots, in particular, explicitly evoke Gone With The Wind, the first where a rising camera pulls back from a single actor and records, with an unblinking eye, the slumped bodies of scores of dead and wounded soldiers, and a second one that frames an irrepressible woman beneath a twisted tree and bathes her with light from a red-orange sky.

The rock-solid (if unremarkable) early portions, especially, are right out of the mould that shaped How Green Was My Valley. Spielberg – intentionally, I think – opts for archetypes over characters, and we are instantly immersed into the pastoral world of a penurious tenant farmer (Peter Mullan), his loving and long-suffering wife (Emily Watson), their son Albert (Jeremy Irvine), and their money-grubbing, moustache-twirling landlord (David Thewlis). The film, thus far, tells the kind of tale where the tragedy is leavened by broad comedy from a cantankerous goose. In other words, the people streaming out of the theatre at this point are the ones whose idea of cinema is characterised by subtlety and subtext, and who cannot abide a score that unabashedly highlights the more sentimental aspects of the story, the measured deliberateness of the cutting, the open-faced earnestness of the acting, and a richly saturated colour palette that transports us to a world slightly more magical than our own.

All this makes War Horse something of a fable, the dispenser of whose wisdom is Joey, the horse that Albert looks upon like a brother. Like E.T., Joey is a miraculous creature, a dry-eyed, non-human observer of human folly as it passes from one owner to another. As World War I breaks out, Albert’s father sells Joey to an English cavalry officer, from whose loving hands it falls into the care of two German brothers, after whose death it ends up with a French girl and her grandfather, and so forth – and that brings us to the big problem at the film’s expansive heart. How do you make an audience, however complicit, buy into a sentimental story whose protagonist is an inexpressive equine?

Joey is the film’s only constant, its connective tissue as the narrative lurches from one episode to the next, one mood to the next, one set of characters to the next, and none of the humans – the actors – are allowed much time to make an impression. Before we can latch on to the bond between Albert and Joey, the horse is sold and Albert exits the picture. Before we can soak in the relationship between Joey and the cavalry officer, he rides into an ambush and is killed. Each new character that Joey ends up with is a notional marker of gender and age and nationality, little else, and the result is a series of fleeting subplots – many of them extraordinary shot and staged, and suffused with a quiet grandeur – that simply do not possess the power to make us care. We remain as dry-eyed as Joey.

Spielberg is so reverential in mimicking the older masters that he forgets to be himself – except in a handful of scenes like the one where Joey is enmeshed in barbed wire in a no man’s land between army trenches. The ensuing exchange is humorous and heartfelt, with a deeply human core of unspoken philosophising. It’s the only time Spielberg achieves a balance between making an homage and making his own movie. Elsewhere, the director of Saving Private Ryan – another film that dealt with archetypes, but managed to elevate them into red-blooded characters whose fates we carried in our clenched fists – is barely in sight. When Albert and Joey meet again, the moment should have detonated with an emotional charge, but Spielberg shies away, as if aware that to surrender to these emotions would leave him defenseless against the charges of sentimentality that are so often hurled at him. War Horse is a curio, a film built on an abundance of Spielbergian craft but with very little Spielbergian heart.

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.

In two weeks, the madness we call the Oscar awards – and which we just can’t seem to stop talking about, at least those of us who make a living talking about cinema – will come to an end, and I will know who won Best Actor. As of this writing, I don’t know who the nominees are – this piece is being written far head of the deadline, as I am going to be away for a while – but let me go out on a (rather stout) limb and say that it’s going to be a race between Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Brad Pitt (Moneyball), George Clooney (The Descendants), Gary Oldman (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Michael Fassbender (Shame) and perhaps Ryan Gosling (The Ides of March). And it will please me very much to have either Clooney or Pitt win, regardless of how worthy the other contenders are – simply because they are representatives of a rare species, the handsome box-office star who’s also a damn fine actor.

I realise this sounds, at first glance, somewhat shallow – for what have good looks to do with a good performance? After all, no one went to see Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart or Robert De Niro or Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman because they resembled Greek gods. In fact, you could say that it was exactly the lack of Greek-god looks that made their performances so vital. They looked like ordinary people, so when they played ordinary people we believed them in a way we never would have believed, say, Cary Grant (instead of Bogart) as the uncouth and drunk and dirty riverboat captain in The African Queen. It is almost a form of divine justice, as if God looked down at the handsome leading men and said, “Listen boys, you have the looks, and the price you’re going to pay for those looks is being typecast in pretty-boy roles. Those others, the ones you wouldn’t give a second look to if they passed by you on the street, they will get the great parts.”

And yet there are some who manage to cheat God, sneaking away with good looks as well as solid performing capabilities, actors like Paul Newman and George Clooney and Brad Pitt and (now) Ryan Gosling. Can they play everything, anything? Perhaps not. Every actor is limited by his physiognomy, the associations he brings with him, the expectations his audiences have of him (and therefore what they’ll pay to see him in) – but these actors have found a smart balance between pleasing their legions of fans (as Clooney and Pitt did in the Oceans Eleven movies, where they did little but advertise their pretty-boyness) and ensuring that they don’t get stuck in a rut. One of the principal pleasures of the movies is gazing at stars, those perfect creatures with perfect features, and these actors give us that satisfaction, but they’ve also gone beyond, giving us characters we can take home with us – and it would be nice if this aspect got recognised during this year’s Academy Awards, if Clooney or Pitt won an Oscar for not just being content to coast along with their looks but also slipping into slightly difficult films and making these films bigger grossers than they would have been without these names at the top of the cast.

A Brad Pitt, today, acts in Babel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Inglourious Basterds, The Tree of Life and Moneyball – there’s not a single predetermined blockbuster in the bunch. And Clooney’s recent roles were in Michael Clayton, Leatherheads, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Up in the Air, The American, The Ides of March and The Descendants – again, nothing that smells like instant success. There’s no Ocean’s Fourteen tucked away in between. It’s as if they’re saying, “I’ve made my big bucks. I no longer need blockbuster pay cheques. So I’ll do what really interests me.” And every time I look at these actors, I wish more of our big stars would do their bit to foster a slightly different kind of mainstream cinema. This isn’t about Aamir Khan using his clout to make Dhobi Ghat – that’s a little too arty to sustain consistently in an Indian context. But a grown-up cinema (like Up in the Air or Moneyball), I’d think, is viable if budgets were kept low and up-front salaries made way for back-end percentages. Audiences all over the world pay to see stars on a giant screen, and it is nice when this star makes them stand in line to pay for something else, something more than just a nicely sculpted face.

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.

The twenty-sixth of January, our Republic Day, is also Australia Day. The Advertiser, a newspaper whose name suggests an unblushing commitment to its priorities, asks its readers about their holiday plans. Tenille Aberle from Mawson Lakes replies, “Taking my new son to the beach.” At the other end of the spectrum, the decidedly commonsensical Jeff Kombuts, from Flagstaff Hill, says, “Sleeping and recovering from my hangover.” I would have written in that, as part of a media contingent visiting the city at the invitation of Tourism Australia, my plans were to spend the day at the Adelaide Oval, watching my home team undergo what the local papers are calling a whitewash, as if a fresh coat of paint were being applied over a wall inscribed with the legend “the greatest batting lineup in the world.” In The Advertiser, Scott Walsh gloats, “The shambles that has become India’s summer plunged to a horrific new low as Australia zeroed in on its inevitable 4-0 series sweep.”

Outside the legendary stadium, whose grass bears the crushing brunt of cricketers as well as footballers, people scurry past like ants heeding a queen’s call – thick lines of sports fans from all directions, a few brown-skinned and in defiant detergent-blue T-shirts, the rest white and proud and happy at finding a fitting occasion for an outpouring of patriotic feeling on their national day. Their happiness is manifest in team-coloured hats and face paintings and, in one attention-seeking instance, the Australian flag hanging off the shoulders like a cape. An emphatic roar erupts from inside the stadium – this has got to be bad news. However sporting a nation, they are not going to applaud so enthusiastically a visiting team’s anemic achievements. Our guide arrives. We skirt the perimeter of the stadium and head towards special seats at the specially designated member’s area, where our sense of privilege is quickly extinguished. The woman at the window insists that there were no tickets left in an envelope for us. Wait here, our guide says, oblivious to the reality that a different option does not exist. He disappears inside with a grim sense of purpose.

Peering past the tall iron gates, like a pariah at a country club, I solve the mystery of the emphatic roar. A large man in a black T-shirt calls out to his companion, “Will, Tendulkar’s out. 25.” Our guide appears with the information that someone’s not been kept in the loop, and while that someone figures out what to do we will visit the Don Bradman museum. At least we’ll be on the other side of the gates. Inside the museum, where a near-silent movie reel of the batsman is on constant play, a representative from the stadium tells us that she saw the tickets being put into an envelope – it’s just that no one seems to know where the envelope is. This is beginning to sound like the dry police procedural that kicks off an investigation in a penny dreadful: The Mystery of the Missing Tickets. The museum is a small shrine to the great cricketer, inviting us to genuflect in front of his Royal portable typewriter and a battered briefcase whose skin is peeling away and a bat bearing the handwritten accolade “Record Test Score, Australia versus West Indies, 229 at Brisbane, 1931.”

With the assurance that the tickets will be found, we’re transitioned off to Jeff, a chatty local who takes us on a walking tour of Adelaide, the twenty-minute city. That’s how long it takes to get anywhere. Strolling past the Torrens river, Jeff informs us that the city is named for a queen and asks if we know any others. Victoria, I reply, and bask in his approval like a schoolchild who’s answered a tricky math question. We lunch at a café adjoining the Art Gallery of South Australia, whose chronologically mounted paintings are mostly photorealistic impressions of the continent as recorded by early settlers, with hints of modernism cropping up in the last few chambers. Nearby, at the stunning aboriginal exhibit at the South Australian Museum, the sad solemnity of the photograph of a native is broken by a little girl’s giggles that she could “see the man’s bum.” Rundle Mall, also close by, offers shops selling phone cards and water on this hot, hot day. In the forthcoming days, we would travel twenty minutes to the air-conditioned hills of Adelaide sprayed with scent from gum trees, to Handorf, with its tourist-ready street paved with shops determined to sell every product crafted by the hand of man, to the reassuringly lazy beach at the palindromically named Glenelg. But today, we cannot leave the city. What if the tickets arrived?

At a roadside beside the mall, leathery people in summer clothes are seated in chairs with wooden legs and canvas backs. Their necks are craned upwards, as if in anticipation of a daytime star. I follow their line of sight and see – to my delight, on a giant screen mounted on a wall – that it is a star. Kohli is batting at 91. We couldn’t go to the match but the match has come to us. The purpose on the young cricketer’s face promises that there may still be some cricket left when we enter the stadium, if we enter the stadium. The doubt transforms quickly into certainty as we walk back to the Oval and are, this time, let through. The gods of providence and perseverance seem to be smiling on more than one Indian. We slip into the shadows of the newly built stand for members of the South Australian Cricket Association – but the precaution is no longer necessary. Gulls have begun to coast in, heralding breeze from the sea.

At the seventh row from the boundary, the faces of players don’t fall into focus. But we can see the red stumps split wide open, like tree stumps splintered by a ferocious axe, every time a tail-ender is bowled out. Ashwin, Saha and Khan enter and leave like tourists making a hasty pilgrimage to the pitch on the last day of a vacation, now headed back home after setting foot on hallowed ground. Sharma, though, seems determined to support Kohli, who is teetering on the brink of a century. The packed stadium unites in jeers whenever Sharma faces the ball. But he isn’t rattled, at least until a jubilant Kohli leaps into the air and pumps a fist into nothing. I stand up and applaud. Two rows ahead, two Indians do the same. And then, one by one, many Australians stand up to cheer. Something about this youngster’s sporting spirit and defiance at the face of death has seeped past patriotic fervor. An advertising panel on the boundary says Incredible India. For once it doesn’t feel like irony. It feels right.

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.