Between Reviews: A Birthday and a Death

A BIRTHDAY AND A DEATH

APR 19, 2009 – TWO FILMMAKERS SEPARATED BY a legion of considerations – ambition, temperament, acclaim, distance – were united, recently, by the simple incident of being in the news long past their prime. The first was Francis Ford Coppola, who turned 70 and subsequently found himself the subject of numerous fond remembrances – partly because these anniversaries are the lifeblood of entertainment scribes perpetually on the lookout for topical, article-anchoring occasions, and also because any time is a good time to talk about Coppola. What a swashbuckling story his is – a decade-long blaze of eye-blinding glory, followed by a ceaseless string of half-hinted comeback promises that spiralled, sadly, into major failures at the box office. That’s the price you presumably pay for straddling the seventies as the Colossus, racking up more artistic cachet than a Spielberg or a Lucas, and more commercial clout than a Scorsese or an Allen.

After beginning the decade with a flat-out masterwork (The Godfather, 1972), and proceeding to conjure up two more (The Godfather: Part Two and The Conversation, both in 1974), Coppola signed off the seventies with, unbelievably, a fourth flat-out masterwork (Apocalypse Now, 1979). How could such a filmmaker escape becoming anything but living proof of the law of gravity? Seen today, however, even his hubristic “failures” like One from the Heart (1982) – a musical shot entirely on soundstages to reflect the theatricality of the proceedings, much like the similarly ill-fated Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya, almost twenty-five years later – are infinitely more fascinating than most modern movies that tumble off the studio assembly lines, which are so intent on being everything to everyone everywhere in the world that their last priority is to be, well, one from the heart.

Coppola was fortunate. He rose to prominence at a time the mainstream embraced the idiosyncratic in addition to the idiotic. In today’s climate, he’d have ended up an avuncular Paul Thomas Anderson, working his magic for the studios’ specialty divisions with their eyes on the Oscar – but hardly the cultural behemoth he was back then, beloved by both the men in the studios and the man on the street, the men behind the reviews as well as those behind the box-office counters. Speaking of the latter leads me to the other director recently in the news, Shakti Samanta, who was responsible for a series of beloved hits like Howrah Bridge, China Town, Kashmir Ki Kali, An Evening in Paris, Aradhana, Kati Patang and Amar Prem. Why, then, hasn’t the Indian press been as recognising of this filmmaker’s death as the international press has been of Coppola’s birthday?

Is it because Samanta is a stalwart of what can now sneeringly be termed “Old Bollywood,” from before the multiplex era (akin to how Coppola, among several others, came to represent the “New Hollywood,” from after the studio era)? Is it because Samanta’s oeuvre did not encompass the exciting and the edgy, inspired by the best of world cinema, but rather revolved around the comforting rhythms of old-fashioned “Indian” storytelling? Is it because Samanta, unlike someone like Guru Dutt, wasn’t an auteur who made the highly personal films that he wanted to make, and instead crafted the kind of broadly popular entertainment that we wanted to see? Is it because the unapologetically melodramatic nature of his serious films (like Kati Patang and Amar Prem) is a mild embarrassment in a cinema culture where the word “melodrama” has become a pejorative?

Or is it because what we remember, today, are simply the songs? At least the latter is an undeniable truism – memories of Samanta’s cinema are inextricably intertwined with memories of the marvellous music in them. The charming Euro-sophistications of Raat ke humsafar (An Evening in Paris), the irredeemable melancholia permeating the daisy-chain of existential metaphors in Chingari koi bhadke (Amar Prem), the moonshine-soaked languor of Aayiye meherbaan (Howrah Bridge), the irrepressible romantic rhythms of Gunguna rahe hain bhanwre (Aradhana), the batty boisterousness of Subhan Allah hai (Kashmir Ki Kali), the orchestral grandiloquence sugarcoating a string of bitter tirades against romance in Yeh jo mohabbat hai (Kati Patang) – these are a mere smattering of tunes from a career that consistently demanded greatness from a starlit parade of the very best of Bollywood composers.

But there was something more to Samanta. He hailed from the now-classic tradition of journeyman directors, the kind of proficient filmmakers once contracted to studios and assigned to work on films of every stripe. Samanta was the polar opposite of someone like Coppola, but what he lacked in auteurist ambition or signature, he made up for with his ability to skillfully shepherd everything from a glancingly noirish thriller like Howrah Bridge to a social melodrama like Amar Prem to a blessedly bubbleheaded romp like An Evening in Paris. There aren’t many filmmakers like that anymore. Perhaps the system today doesn’t foster (or require) this stretching across moods and genres, and so we have the urban-slickness of Farhan Akhtar or the nihilistic despair of Anurag Kashyap, with everyone ensconced in their self-erected sandboxes. But this age of skilled specialisation is all the more reason to remember a general practitioner like Shakti Samanta, the old-world charms of whose films go a long way towards keeping our nostalgia in the pink of health.

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Posted in: Cinema: Hindi