I finally watched Mira Nair’s ‘Salaam Bombay!’

I have a faint memory of starting to watch Salaam Bombay! some years ago and not being able to watch it. The grit and raw energy was too shocking to behold. There was a feeling that I knew this film would be affective, just that I didn’t want to let it take me to that space. However, that changed today as I saw it on the big screen and it spoke to me on so many levels apart from breaking me completely with its tragedy.

Not that this is any new revelation; a lot has been written about the film and its scathing experience that transcends and becomes something more than its immediate surroundings. It is as if Mira Nair understood the spirit of the children living in Kamathipura, the spaces they occupy, the muck that makes their bed, the smells that engulf the locality and the tormented lives they lead. She put all of that into her gentle camerawork and there emerged a form that was not trying to induce pity, sympathy nor reveled in romanticism or relied on the grittiness to create shock value.

It is extraordinary how it is achieved. Her eyes, contrary to films made on ‘prostitution’ or ‘poverty’, are not vulturous; they don’t want to prey on the lives of people and add a layer of their own experience/understanding. Rather, it feels as if there are no eyes. The form almost becomes invisible, the filmmaking existing only to fulfill the means of bringing the lived reality on the forefront. This is reflected in the choices made of filming on location, working with real people living on the streets, brothel spaces and along with that, the camera not making an effort in the direction of wanting to create any sort of spectacle.

In the middle of the overwhelming tragedy present in its frames, Nair creates moments of grace and flowery innocence. Her characters are cheerful amidst the everyday turbulence. She magnifies the supposed “ratholes” of the city and takes you closer to the stench, making you realize some glimpses of beauty along the way, which otherwise would have never caught your shadowed eyes. It is the Bombay everyone whispers about in muted conversations but no one wants to take a look at. Her aesthetics are aptly described by the pimp, Baba, played by Nana Patekar, who calls another character ‘a gulaab in the gutter’. The film and its style seem to be essentially derived from this understanding.

Apart from being an important and powerful document, Salaam Bombay! is also a textbook on making a film on complicated subjects that are not part of the maker’s lived reality. It stands in direct contrast to the glittery aesthetics of Bhansali and others who have made films made in the same world, although with a purely different eye. It tells you that, at its most rudimentary level, filmmaking is about becoming one with the subject. If it is talking about unjust power structures present around, it should not end up becoming yet another pillar of the same world that it aims to critique. The indulgence in aesthetics should not come at the expense of overpowering everything else, including the subject matter. Rather, it is about simplifying the complexities and breaking it down to the bare minimum. It should lay allegiance only to the seed in order to really bloom into the tree later.

All India Rank: Varun Grover is the lovable ‘halwai’ of this immaculate box of ‘mithai’

What is truly endearing about All India Rank is the manner in which Varun Grover observes the life of Vivek’s parents as he leaves home to prepare for IIT. Varun is capable of crafting scenes which don’t pull much attention towards itself but nevertheless succeed in creating a thoughtful moment. In one scene, Vivek’s mother is sitting in the STD solving a word riddle. Just then a boy who is of the same age as Vivek enters to call someone. She looks at him and sees something. He seems tensed and she asks if he is alright. The boy however is too lost to catch the feeling motherly love in her eyes. But Varun does as he takes us through the scene. It underlines the sense of longing that she feels for her son which reflects in this stranger of his age. It would have been an utterly heartbreaking moment if not handled with the kind of balance that Varun does. You stay with the underlying emotion of separation without feeling overtly burdened by it.

It is in such moments that the film really takes a flight. Varun is as much interested in what happens to the parents as he is in bringing the story of Kota alive. Vivek is trying to make way for the heavy dreams of his father who in turn is pressured by the changing times and lack of respect in his own office which he yearns to achieve by having his son pass the IIT competitive test. Varun takes an effort to contextualise all of this in the times of liberalisation which paved way for this change of thinking in the middle-class and the growing anxiety that followed. It is something that sets the film apart from a range of similar such films that have come out in recent years. While all of them lay a question on the nature of these competitive exams in some direct and indirect ways, All India Rank tries to get away from looking at it as an individual versus the world conflict. Rather, Varun makes his case by pointing at the drifts taken by the changing times which is guiding people’s thoughts and dreams. It is an understated political statement where some decisions taken at higher levels go on affecting lives of families in such crucial ways.

There is an exchange in the second half between the parents where Vivek’s mother breaks down while talking to the father as to how their son would never come back home now. As after the IIT preps, 4 years of college would follow and then job in another city. It is a very motherly complain and also an existential question for her. Her husband consoles her by saying that this is how it is. Both of them had to leave their individual homes as well in order to create a new life. Families are left behind, old ways of existing replace newer ones and nothing stays the same. Including yourself. The film makes space for something so crucial and puts us into a sway of questions. Is the mother’s anguish really inevitable or can it be avoided? In the way of the world in its current state and form, the answer is not really difficult to imagine.

All India Rank builds many such important blocks throughout even though it doesn’t manage to reach a state of completion in the story. The end feels less organic and more spiked with a burden of creating a lake only to make your dry leaf float on its surface. There is little insight on the competitive exams that is not already realized in pop-culture. However, Varun’s strength lies in his ability to spot moments of magic in the ordinary. It works well within the film which has discussions around science, which is perhaps the only magic with a rationale. The film’s aesthetics are guided by that magic with the blend of animation into its space. Coupled with a lively music composed by Mayukh-Mainak that is filled with a freshness difficult to find in popular film music these days. The songs are quirky with Varun’s own verses that are fragranced with a certain innocence one used to find in the songs of Shailendra and Sahir in the bygone era. In reply to a question on Twitter if the film’s songs are written by him, Varun had remarked that if the wedding is at the halwai’s place, the mithai will certainly be made at home. Watching the film too feels like opening a box of laddoos that you have not devoured since long. It takes you to a familiar feeling of having it for the first time. You take a bite, nice and slow, with eyes closed and your lips spreading to a natural smile, and it all comes together.

The Enhanced Political Aesthetics of Devashish Makhija’s Joram

I watched Joram last week and something about how the film unfolds, struck me. Devashish Makhija has managed to do many things right with his storytelling that is filled with a political spirit as it moves ahead as a chase-thriller-revenge saga. There is a narrative thread that goes in accordance with the structures of screenplay writing; but along with that, it doesn’t compromise its politics in attempt to just have a fuller story. The elements of politics merge well within the story and if anything, only further accentuate its effect. By doing so, ‘Joram’ may have just become one of the very few Indian films that doesn’t succumb to just become a film with a good heart with an unreasonable and lazy narrative.

It stands in direct contrast with another film that released earlier this year, Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah. It had a similar plot where a man is wrongly accused of something and he in on the run from powerful people who are after his life. However, the film suffered from making its entire politics feel like headlines from newspapers. It failed to bring out the political conflicts through its narrative and rather, the politics had to be spitted out upfront in order to make sense. There was more display of the political scenario than a thoughtful reflection. That way, it ended up feeling more like a well-meaning pamphlet than a powerful film.

Joram, on the other hand seems to be aware of these pitfalls. Devashish Makhija operates carefully as he builds the story. There is a proper layering of the political conflicts done that drives the thriller aspects ahead and vice versa. The back story of Dasru(Manoj Bajpayee) as a Naxalite proves fatal for him in the current times as he lives in the city to leave behind his tribal roots. However, all of it comes back to haunt him one day when another character eyes him with vengeance. What follows then is not just a cat-and-mouse chase that is devoid of a larger meaning. The chase becomes symbolic of the way current state machineries are always boiled up in hammering blow after blow on the existence of tribals. Everything is intricately crafted where the politics find a release with help of the narrative and never in isolation. One is driven by the other and also, it is never didactic. He creates frames that silently exist in the film. Like the one where Dasru and his 3-month-old daughter are sitting below a wall that has some section of the Indian Constitution painted on it.

There is another scene that is so curiously well-thought and shown with a dutiful gaze. A cop, Ratnakar(played with an unfounded restraint by Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub) comes to a dilapidated police station in Chhatisgarh, and spots three tribal boys jailed for a ridiculous reason. Ratnakar feels bad for them as is evident from his face. Just the way his entire character is designed, makes him to not fall into the cliches of typical social dramas, where the protagonist usually comes across injustice and wants to make things better. Often during such scenes in films there is hardly any agency carried by the oppressed. But here we see the tribal boys through a lens which doesn’t make us feel pity for them. They exist while being in hold of their self-respect and dignity. Makhija makes sure not to suck away humanity from the boys by making them images of trauma gazed from a lens of overt sympathy. Rather, we see them just blocked within the cell, their faces barely visible. They are 3 tribals occupying darkness.

In the next scene, Ratnakar goes to his room in the back side of the station and from there, he stands looking in the direction of the jail. He looks at the three tribal prisoners, but the camera never points on them through his eyes. We just see him and then expect to have his POV shot of the boys in the next cut. However, Devashish chooses to give a completely opposite point of view when we look at Ratnakar from the shoulders of the tribals instead. The camera is pitted behind their backs in the cell. His body gets almost trapped within their shoulders. The moment is but just a few seconds long but goes on to say way too much. This fine detail in the filmmaking is what makes Joram truly revelatory.

There are many more such examples in the film right from its harrowing opening scene which finds an even stronger resolve towards the end. It comes in full circle when Dasru comes back to the same place where years ago he was watching his wife sing a song while riding on a swing tied up to a huge tree. The entire land is now dug up to make place for a mining plant. The tree, which stood flamboyant on their land, now has become just a dried up, scrawny patch of wood. Dasru looks at the dried patch of land and Makhija again lingers his camera for some time in the moment. He stretches time to make us feel what Dasru does in that pertinent moment. The slowed down scene is filled with a deep sense of loss of life and identity for Dasru whose home has been uprooted to the ground by the wild claws of the state and crony capitalists. The entire sequence is truly a landmark in poetry through visuals.

Devashish Makhija has applied the tools of filmmaking to extend meanings to a political reality. He makes sense of the politics with his new founded aesthetics. It is how some writers think while writing and make hitherto unknown connections while being in the process of writing. Similarly, Makhija finds novel creative means to come up with powerful scenes. His cinematic language takes upon the story and makes it grasp finer meanings. By choosing such a grammar for his filmmaking, Devashish Makhija undoes what popular cinema has been doing while telling stories of the oppressed. He subverts the gaze and finds a solution to have it looked upon in a different way that is nuanced and empathetic in its reflection. It is a quietly remarkable feat.

Animal: It is not the film which is a problem, but the filmmaker

Just the other day, I was thinking about how my ability and patience to sit through any film have now increased, and I don’t easily get bored or put off by them as I used to some years ago. I said to myself that I can watch any film now and thought of re-visiting all the films that I have closed in between due to their different appeal and unconventional pace. I was ready now. However, I didn’t know that just within days I would be sitting in a film, tiptoeing to make a decision between storming out and staying. I didn’t know that within days, someone could make a film like Animal that would just make me want to dismiss it completely.

Not because it has some unconventional storytelling that is just difficult to get hold of or has a really arduous way of moving the plot ahead, or because it has no plot at all. But a film that has everything right other than the filmmaker’s vile motives for which he is making it, due to which everything else turns out to be like his mind: disruptive, disgusting, and just absolutely deplorable to witness.

I would like to drift further to another film that was released earlier this year that made me think of something crucial about the nature of cinema on my second viewing. The film I am talking about is ‘Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani’, which uses emotions and storytelling devices to break societal notions. The particular moment in the film when Ranveer Singh dances on ‘Dola Re Dola’, made me realize how truly powerful the medium itself is. Its myriad ways can make you believe in new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. It can challenge what you thought you knew and present a completely different point of view, which you cannot help but root for. When emotions take over a particular concept and make their way to your heart through the journeys taken by characters. Cinema can achieve all of that through its techniques. RRKPK truly did that and represented the very nature of cinema for me. It is a virtue to be a filmmaker, and it is a triumph to tell a good story. And yet, like all virtues, even this one has its shortcomings. If the same tools can be used to destroy a regressive idea, they can be used to construct it too.

With ‘Animal’, Sandeep Reddy Vanga just wants to do that. Seeing Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, and all the other thousand goons on the screen, there is a sharp presence of Vanga. He is the one, superimposing himself through the frames and giving an evil laugh while he looks at the audience looking at him. It is not Ranbir Kapoor’s Ranvijay or Bobby Deol’s Abrar who is the most dangerous, but Mr. Vanga, who is reflected through them. I am not even talking about the many ways in which the film is trying to be something completely vile. In a film where there is so much psychological trauma, distress, and a crumbling father-son bond in place, nothing is worthy of spending more time than just investing in the curious case of Sandeep Reddy Vanga.

Here is a storyteller (for I truly believe he is a good one if he just comes out of the shell he has created for himself) who is making a film 100 times more violent and incessantly, self-consciously, more problematic than his previous films. He acts like a toddler, who, when told not to do something, turns defensive and does it harder. He acts like all those men who, when told that they are wrong, don’t turn inward and introspect but rather take it upon themselves to do it even more the next time. That’s what he promised in the interview he gave to Anupama Chopra. When the creator of a world is a person who, when told not to pluck a flower from a plant, will instead break off the roots of the entire garden, it is futile to even say anything about the world he creates. Like his characters, he won’t bow down and accept; he won’t introspect and change, but just the opposite. Never has the fact that ‘a piece of art reflects the life of the artist’, been more true than in his case.

Through the 3 hours and 21 minutes of sheer massacre that we are shown on screen, there are minute glimpses of what Sandeep Reddy Vanga could really have been if he really was an authentic human as well. Especially in the climax, where Ranbir Kapoor and Anil Kapoor finally sit down to talk. It is a powerfully written scene and portrays the toxic nature of their relationship beautifully. If only Sandeep Vanga focused on creating more such scenes rather than just wanting to be a college-going knucklehead who will just do everything opposite of what he is told to.

In that respect, ‘Animal’ doesn’t work as a film. How will it, when the narrative has other venomous goals than just providing a resolution to the story; when the story is just a means to peddle into the arrogant mind of the maker who wants to show the world that he will keep doing only that, and in a much greater capacity, for which he has been criticized? It is a highly toxic masculine trait that causes a lot of anguish in many men. It is not his characters that need fixing; it is him.

‘Animal’ is a classic example of how to ruin a good story by bringing your grudges into it. It could have truly been a complex exploration of so many things that have not happened as much in mainstream Hindi cinema. It chooses to base itself on the truly disruptive mind of the character but then takes a completely different turn to show its real destination, which is nothing like what the correct destination would have been. It is Sandeep Reddy Vanga being truly, comfortably self-indulgent to an extent that he even crosses the boundary of arrogance to reach a stage beyond that. If films are made with such motives, how do we call them films?

I would refrain from making such dictatorial statements and leave the film as it is. If it were up to me, I would want to forget that I sat through the 3 and a half hours of mindless, venomous, blood-thirsty egoistic exploitation of the medium masquerading as a film. I am no purist, and I don’t want to define what film is and what it isn’t; however, with how Animal plays out and, more importantly, the skewed dimensions that it brings of the filmmaker, it makes me want to dismiss it to the core.

‘All That Breathes’: An uncomfortable clutter of beautified aesthetics

In the Saim Sadiq’s “Joyland”, there is a scene following a character named Biba who is asked to give an interview to a documentary filmmaker regarding the death of their friend. “It’s for Tina”, the friend says to which our Biba replies, “It’s for themselves. Tina is just an excuse.” Biba’s declaration in anger, unbeknownst to her, is a poignant perspective on the nature of cinema and its romanticization of telling a ‘story’ and how it is supposed to be a deed of paramount importance that the storyteller engages in by picking out their camera and flashing it in front of anything they feel needs to be told. While it is one thing to purely tell a story in order to bring out its many layers to a larger public, it is a completely another preoccupation when a filmmaker indulges in an artistic trip of their own to elaborate on what happened to a set of people when they were stuck in a devastating conflict. The filmmaker here is hungry for something to happen after which, picking up the camera, rolls out on a mission to say what they have been wanting to for the longest: to make a film that has never been seen before; to tell a story that would make everyone reimagine their idea of storytelling; to create a marvel out of a tenderly ordinary circumstance. While I have no intention of talking here about the brilliant “Joyland”, it is the other film, I will be reflecting on that is generating a lot of accolades world over for its genius: “All That Breathes”.

At the centre of its extremely well fashioned and manicured filmmaking, it is a simple and humane story of a family involved in rescuing birds for generations. What could have been a story of their daily struggles, also ends up becoming about the filmmakers’ larger ideas of what he thinks of the world around him. It appears that looking at the family and their roots, made him think about all of those ideas that he underlines in the film. And it is of no problem either, other than the fact that, there appears to be two voices dominating it: one of the filmmaker and the other of his subjects. It would still be of no flutter to me, had the former not completely taken over the latter. Shaunak Sen seems to be treating his subjects as a toolkit to spread the canvas of his own larger concerns on climate change and the degrading environment. It is what he interpreted from their story and made his own individual connections. It is deeply affecting of how it makes the brothers look; like soldiers carrying the weapon of Sen’s ideas. So, although I was deeply moved with what it is trying to say and the filmmaking evokes a certain kind of tragedy, a feeling of distaste had spread over me as the credits bumped across. It feels almost colonial to exploit on someone’s lived experience and make it a means to release bubbles of a completely different mind. It would still be fine if it was not a documentary as it claims, for it is unlike any documentary I have seen.

While watching another film recently, my mind took me to a line of thought where I came up with the strange analogy of democracy in films. The film that I am talking about here is “Aftersun” which I found to be an out and out democratic film, not definitely one of its kind. It is democratic because there is not an authoritative voice gliding over your heads telling you what to feel, how much to feel and when to stop feeling it. There is no attempt made to force your emotions to a particular zone. Watching “Aftersun” was like a heavy feeling engulfing inside after the last frame, like a bus ride which only takes you places as you look out from the windows at whatever it is the journey has to offer. There are no loudspeakers asking of you to only look at specific sites or wanting to emphasise on one visual. “All That Breathes” feels like a dictatorial clutter of sounds that is feeding on unclaimed fodder as its own. While watching the film, it feels as if you are under the influence of Sen’s mind, completely trapped within its walls. There is too much meddling in the life of his subjects. Pretending to be just an observer, Sen actually is the opposite, driving the story on his own wheels. It suffers from over-dramatization of a real incident to the point that one begins to question whether what is being shown has actually happened or was it added on the part of the maker’s dilution in order to make the film more engaging. Cinema has that overarching power to consume a subject of its characteristic feature of creating a spectacle from normal things. It is inherent in Cinema to be authoritative, to be in the all-pervading presence of the maker’s mind. It is the power which beholds us to the screen yet it is the same power that can enslave us. The larger-than-life appeal of the screen and the overt emphasis put on the subject with specified framing makes the result look far away from reality and that’s what Sen’s visuals suffer from. In the attempts of beautification, I was left at a two-hand distance from what’s supposed to be a real-life story.

Sen is all game at his aesthetics; he employs a poetic approach to tell the story of a community that rescues eagles as part of their job. Through their adventures at conservation, pivotal points are made about the city’s degrading air quality, how human occupation in the territory of the eagles affect them and how their disappearance will create an imbalance in the society. The film goes on to make wider points about the entire ecosystem that is comprised of many such smaller animals, who breathe the same air and hence all connected with each other by that relation. This is an extremely valuable thought but perhaps the medium through which it runs, makes it dicey. If it were through written word, it would have felt less authorial and more provocative. Spreading it on the screen, gives it an almost textbook-like quality creating a dichotomous juggle between what Sen wants to say with what is implied of from the brothers’ mishaps.

Its only two weeks after watching it, that I am able to find links to my thoughts and that happened with the 30 seconds from “Joyland”. Suddenly it all made sense and I could find the reason for my discomfort. “All That Breathes” is an overly decorated film that is not rooted in humility of the maker’s craft. The motive of filming techniques in cinema is to invisibilize itself against the story; to take its hand and be a guide at all times; to show it the way but never become the way. While Sen’s aesthetics feel just like rust which consumes iron, pulling it back from its beaming metallics. He is provocative and empathetic towards the world around him and it is a major aesthetic shift which he brings along with the film. However, it is still not ignorable how the film’s aesthetics work against the egalitarian themes that he wants to put forward. I think this is an example of the power of the language of cinema, how it can work against the filmmaker if not worked upon with care. There is no blame to be put on Sen for what happened with him is that the experiment ceased to work when it came along. Making a film is a big responsibility in itself as the game of perception works too strongly in Cinema. Its powers can lead to some poignant observations about the human condition without sounding authorial but when the screws are not tight, it can lead to a misfire. In “All That Breathes”, Sen is utmost sincere to the craft but the resulting material leads to some undesired territories as a whole. His heart is at the best place, his filmmaking on the seventh sky, yet it lays bare the discrepancies of the medium itself which can spoil that perfect marriage.

A Zombified Fist in The Air

Under the garb of a Zombie film, which it absolutely is on the surface, Zombivali speaks of Class difference and oppression of one class by the other poignantly. Certain stereotypes of people living in the slums which people living in high rise buildings have incorporated within, are given face to by designing characters and putting them in unusual sequences, which doesn’t always hit the mark but makes you ponder nevertheless. Just in the first 10 minutes of the film, it is made clear that the film is not just about Zombies and a city going haywire due to the menace. Instead, it is a film rooted in the socio-political undertakings prevalent in cities. It was a surprise to see such understanding and portrayal from what I had expected earlier to be a no brainer zombie picture.

Zombivali tells a deeply Indian story using a foreign idea, merging the politics with the aesthetics from the very first minute and is widely compelling throughout. The entire film becomes a striking metaphor of people of the slum forced to lead a life like zombies. No one cares about them and when they do, it is only to hurl abuses and blame them for making the city dirty. Right from the doctors, to the media, police and people from other class, everyone thinks of them as unwanted polluters.  When their entire existence is systemically deprived from them, the men are looked down upon as being drunkards, the women thieves and the children patted away like dust from a surface, they all become the living dead, the zombies. The film is filled with such parallels and bravely crafted images which go on to show the animosity that exists in the minds of many people about those who live in the slum. 

There is one scene which I particularly saw as an understanding of the violence brought forth by the oppressed against the powers that be and how the oppressors invoke and give birth to such a violence in the minds of the oppressed. One of the characters has a dysfunction in his right hand that at times it becomes uncontrollable. At a strike against a capitalist, when things go awry, the right hand goes and tries to strangulate a security guard who had earlier pushed the person and threatened them to leave. Such instances repeat throughout the film, which till then are thought to be there to invoke humor, but its only when the reason is revealed later that it really strikes out as a brave element. It is revealed that the characters’ parents were killed by this capitalist who had snatched away their land and built a factory there. As a kid, he saw this and when he confronted the capitalist, his hand got broken in the process. When he woke up two days later in the hospital, his hand wasn’t the same. This is a nice metaphor to explain that violence is initiated in the minds of the oppressed by violent acts of oppression meted out by the oppressors. And so, the hand resorts to striking blows upon anyone who deny them their humanity. While watching I was reminded of some lines on violence from Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire,

“Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons- not by those who are oppressed, exploited and unrecognized”.

This comes out absolutely beautifully in the film. Kudos to the writers for this stark observation and bringing it out in this brave manner.

Zombies coming in a Marathi film setting is in itself an interesting cross pollination of cultures and I was curious to see how the marriage happens when a dominantly western idea comes to live in the Marathi setting. I loved it for the matured socio-political understanding and the way it chose to present it.

Zombivali is more than just a film about Zombies. If looked down deeply, it carries the colors of revolution between its ghastly images.