Twins and our other selves

We’ve always been fascinated by the selves that we don’t ‘wear to work’. Ergo, many of the interesting films over the past few years have had split-personality protagonists. Take Vishal Bharadwaj’s Kaminey (2009), for instance. Guddu and Charlie can be seen as two sides of a young urban Indian – one, a social do-gooder and the other a crook who will stop at nothing to make a fast buck.

Twins have always been stand-ins for our other selves, one of the pair usually playing Hyde to the other’s Jeckyll, indulging in guilty pleasures on the other’s behalf. In the late-sixties / early-seventies, Dilip Kumar (Ram Aur Shyam, 1967) and Hema Malini (Seeta Aur Geeta, 1972) split into two so that one of them could bash up villainous family members. Back then, overbearing family members who were always around must’ve seemed like they could use a whipping. Since we couldn’t dream of doing it, why not let our less scrupulous twins out? Perhaps these movies were the early signs of an Indian middle class hankering for a nuclear family. But the villain now isn’t society – it’s one of our selves. Charlie, in Kaminey, is not on much higher moral ground than Bhope Bhau, the closest thing to a villain in the movie. This is why Kaminey speaks to our times.We are all part Guddu and part Charlie and the two fight within us, as they do in the movie.

In the year after Kaminey, came Vijay Lalwani’s Karthik Calling Karthik (2010). This one did not hide behind twins. Karthik has dissociative identity disorder, a split personality. Lalwani’s movie was an intelligent comment on, among other things, Indian men’s schizophrenic attitudes towards women. So, one Karthik loves to party with co-worker and love-interest Shonali, but the other one calls her names. The movie inverts the traditional Madonna-whore (or Paro-Chandramukhi) perspective and shows that the split really lies in the (usually male) eye of the beholder. Karthik also embodies our ambivalence towards what’s often called ‘corporate culture’.

Which brings me to Bharadwaj’s more recent Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013), an absurd (in the genre sense of the term) Shakespearean comedy about a landlord with split identities. Mandola is a ruthless land-grabbing lord by day, when he’s sober. At night, pour a few pegs down his hatch, and he fights his greedy self (Guddu v/s Charlie again) on behalf of the very hapless farmers he’s out to dupe. And, Matru, his man Friday by day, goes by ‘Mao’ at night, stoking revolutionary fires. Matru and Mandola are four people, not two. While Kaminey was more circumspect about the capitalist-socialist doublethink that is the urban Indian mind, Matru spells it out. After all, who needs twin siblings and bad family when there are demons within?

Bombay Talkies: To the Four Fathers

At last, we get the real Karan Johar. Constrained only by time and not by seven figure ROI concerns, Johar finds his voice. Sure, there are flaws. Take the openly gay Avinash (Saquib Salim). He is refreshingly different in some respects. He isn’t effeminate. He doesn’t want to be tagged by his surname. “Avinash what?” , his boss enquires. “It’s the what that screws things up”, he responds. And yet, so often does he flash his sexuality-badge that it overshadows his other selves.  In effect, he has simply swapped surnames, not shunned them. He might as well go by “Avinash Gay”. Also, maverick irreverence is all very well, but an openly gay man who relentlessly hits upon his love-interest with scant regard for time and place simply reinforces the “despo” stereotype. This is a recurring theme in Johar’s minority characters (Kurbaan’s Muslims come to mind); they come across more as projections on a single, defining axis rather than as multi-dimensional characters.

That being said, Johar’s film is richly layered elsewhere. The hollowed out marriage between Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) and Dev (Randeep Hooda, outstanding) and Dev’s trapped, tormented sexuality are handled with an adult sensibility that is rare in Hindi cinema. The looks that Gayatri and Dev give each other convey a mutual exasperation beyond repair. In interviews, Johar has often expressed his dissatisfaction with marriage as an institution; he at last puts his movie where his mouth is.

Cinema isn’t central to Johar’s plot, the way it is to the other three. And yet, it circles Johar’s film in interesting ways. Gayatri’s last line, “I hate lies” is loaded with irony given that she edits a film tabloid. And it is the street urchin’s rendition of a film song that finally forces Dev to come to terms with himself.  Johar finds new meaning in “kisii ke itne paas ho, k Khud se duur ho gaye”.  Above all, he seems to remind us that we cannot dismiss cinema as lies; its truths can often expose us to the lies we live.

For a variety of reasons, Dibakar Banerjee’s segment is the finest of the four. First, by choosing to base his film on a Satyajit Ray short story, Banerjee reminds us of the huge Bengali influence on Hindi cinema. Second, the story revolves around an ordinary man’s (literal) brush with stardom. He is the protagonist, not the star. Purandar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) doesn’t have much going for him. He’s looking for a job (but has entrepreneurial ambitions based on eggs from a pet emu he keeps) and some dignity, eager to shine in the eyes of his wife and sick daughter. By happy accident, he’s chosen to appear – ever so fleetingly - in a movie. All he has to do is bump into the hero, exclaim “aye!” and walk out of the frame. But for Purandar, this is his to be or not to be moment.

In the pivotal scene where Purandar rehearses for his big moment, Banerjee pays homage to theatre (Kusumagraj’s Natasamrat). Facing his Hamlet-like existential dilemma, Purandar is visited by an apparition (Sadashiv Amrapurkar) of his father figure (a la Paresh Rawal in Oye, Lucky!). He must now face his failings and his ambitions (represented by the emu mulling about). Purandar’s memorable cameo in the movie-within-the-movie is not only an ode to an everyman’s resilience, it is also a bow to the countless theatrewallas who have enriched Hindi cinema in ways that stars could not have done.

 Banerjee’s film is the only one that alludes to the non-Hindi (Bengali and Marathi) cultural influences of Hindi cinema. It plays out as a classic Chaplinesque tragicomedy:  In his eagerness to share his moment of glory with his daughter, Purandar forgets to collect his fees for the cameo.  We know how much he needs the dough; he is too high to care. Nawazzudin Siddiqui sinks his teeth deep into the part, using body language and dialogue delivery to perfection. This one makes you smile, cry, feel and think. What more could you ask for?

Zoya Akhtar’s tale is less ambitious but equally heart-warming. A brother and sister help each other fulfil their little dreams, outsmarting their simple-minded father. The little guy (Naman Jain, delight to watch) wants to grow up to be Sheela (she, of Sheela kii jawaanii) and dresses himself up in his sister’s clothes and mother’s makeup, earning a slap from his father. Akhtar’s silent scenes capture the pain of a childhood dream denied, as when the dance instructor shoos the little hanger-on away.

Anurag Kashyap’s short has its strong flavors, but is overcooked in parts. A young man, Vijay (Vineet Kumar Singh) from the dusty hinterland is seeking an audience with Amitabh Bachchan for his sick father’s sake. Kashyap’s greatest success lies in mapping out the huge distance between a star and his worshipper. How inaccessible Amitabh is to a man who has a lot in common with the star (his looks, his hometown and his most famous screen name)!  Alas, Kashyap overshoots too often. The opening pee-jokes seem forced, a self-conscious peddling of brand-Kashyap bawdiness.  Still, with notable help from Vineet Kumar Singh, he makes our heart go out to the “outsiders” eking out a living in Mumbai.

The coda, “apnaa Bombay Talkies”, with a battery of stars obliging us with their presence in a lazily written and composed track is jarringly out of character for a film that looks at cinema from our perspective. And the merrily penned title track (Swanand Kirkire, I guess?) “yeh khilaaRi nah buuRhaa huwaa”  is anyway a hard act to follow. Blame this one on the promo designers.

It’s interesting that a common thread running through the four films is fathers disappointed in their children. Consciously or not, these four children of Hindi cinema have given us their takes on the generational shifts that have characterized Hindi cinema – each generation of filmmakers imbibing and rejecting various traits of the previous one.  Vive l'evolution!

Ishqiya: Sex and Sensibilities

(First published at Desicritics)

Abhishek Chaubey's Ishqiya opens with a shot that will rank among the most sensuous ones in Hindi cinema. The camera zooms in on a half asleep Krishna (Vidya Balan), as Rekha Bharadwaj's husky voice breaks into a couplet on the end of longing. The aesthetic here, as in much of Vishal Bharadwaj's work, is that of the finest Urdu poetry and literature. Indeed, the two male perspectives on love, personified by Babban (Arshad Warsi) and his Khaalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah), respectively mirror the majaazii (figurative/sensual) and haqiiqii (real/spiritual) layers of meaning in Urdu poetry, the name Krishna underscoring the bhakti element.
Babban's sexuality, then, is overtly carnal - he reads Hindi soft-porn, likes catchy numbers, frequents whorehouses, and plays peeping Tom on Krishna (though she knows this, and is simply seducing him). A line in word-czar Gulzar's penned to perfection ibn-e-Batuta could well be a description of the fly-by-night playfulness of Babban: "uR uR aawe, daane chuge, uR jaawe chiRiyaa phurr". It takes an actor of Arshad Warsi's cool and acumen to endear such a character to the audience.

Babban's Khalujaan, by contrast, is a man of refined sensibilities, an old-school romantic who cherishes the Hindi film melodies of Jaidev and Hemant Kumar. The closest he comes to voyeurism is listening in on Krishna's riyaaz. Krishna is something of a goddess to Khaalujaan; he even refers to her as "Krishnajii". His song is "dil to bacchaa hai jii", excellent in its composition (Bharadwaj's use of the accordion gives it that old world charm), its poetry ("saaree jawaanii qatraa ke kaaTii, peerii meN Takraa gaye haiN") and its picturization (Chaubey's camera seeks out the beauty in simplicity, the girl on a bus, the cook chopping almonds in a dhaabaa - just the sort of imagery that proves that the Hindi film song can be a thing of beauty when it's done right). So when Khalujaan sees Krishna boogie woogie with Babban to a Mika Singh number, in Babban's clothes at that, it isn't just jealousy he feels; it's also the inevitable disillusionment of a romantic who has seen his ideals in tatters - Krishna's sacrilegious fall from grace. Naseeruddin Shah's finesse as an actor comes through in the expression of this disillusionment and loss on his face. How fitting that the very same tragedy of a hopeless romantic was writ large on the very same face, two mentor-generations ago, in the climax of Gulzar's Ijaazat!

This tug-of-war of sexualities, and its result, are reminiscent of a Manto short, wherein a civil servant's bourgeois double standards on sex prevent him from meeting the advances of a village belle, who is eventually whisked away for a roll in the hay by a truck driver with no such qualms. Like Manto, Chaubey, Bharadwaj and co-writer Sabrina Dhawan subvert Khalujaan's romanticism to expose his attraction to Krishna. "So your love is love, while mine is lust?" asks a justifiably indignant Babban - the haqiiqii is the majaazii, and attraction is attraction even when it's dressed up as poetry. Neither are the writer-trio content with fitting Krishna into one of the male moulds of Eros or Agape - she's a woman with a bit of both and some. When Khalujaan complains, "You can never tell if a woman is a houri or a whore", Krishna shoots back, "Who are you to call me names?"; and later quips to Babban, "(Khaalujaan) can't swallow the truth; it's stuck in his throat". From an iron-willed urban mother in Balki's Paa to an earthy seductress here, Vidya Balan emerges as the most intelligent actress in present day Hindi cinema.

The sexual politics play out in the UP hinterland where politics of another kind are prevalent. In a clever shift of perspective, we're shown how the city world must appear to those outside its privileges. "In the city, you pelt a mongrel with a stone, and hits a crorepati", we're told. Here, too, there is the Mantoesque use of sex (the S&M kind, no less) to expose the seamier side of respectable society. I've said this before but it bears repeating. Bharadwaj's cinema, and Chaubey's in his footsteps, is centered on characters who don't usually figure in the urban viewer's main stream of consciousness. That the proceedings are peppered with top notch humour is simply a result of the meticulous craftsmanship of Chaubey's team of writers. They're well aware of the serious business that comedy is. Sure, the idiomatic wit and the foul language get our laughs, but they also serve to evoke empathy. Thus, unlike most Hindi films, here we're laughing with the characters not at them. In Ishqiya, Bhopalis with kohl-lined eyes aren't comic garnish (who can forget Jagdeep as Soormaa Bhopali ?); they're the dish itself.

In his production house, Vishal Bharadwaj has created an ecosystem where stories of the dusty landscapes of villages and small towns tend to flourish. To tell such stories is, in itself, a political act. But to do so in a manner that the viewer also gets her money's worth of entertainment takes genius. The Hindi film viewer has for too long been held captive to the mindset that films are either meaningful or entertaining. Ishqiya reminds her that they can be both.