The Curious Case Of Vishal Bhardwaj

Let me begin by saying that I am the biggest Vishal Bhardwaj fan that there is. I forever have been. Even before Vishal Bhardwaj became a fashionable music director, I’ve been in love with his work. And then when he directed his second film Maqbool, it blew me away. I have waited for each one of his films. I of course watched Saat Khoon Maaf and came out more disappointed than I thought I would be. There are no Saat Khoon Maaf spoilers here. It’s again the ranting of a fan who feels betrayed. I somewhere didn’t have a good feeling about this film…something didn’t feel right. But then even a half decent film by Vishal bhardwaj is a million light years ahead than many other directors. But I didn’t find it even a half decent film, and it’s heart breaking. It feels like a huge sense of loss. Like somebody my own made an unpardonable mistake and put all us believers into a crying shame.

Saat Khoon Maaf is as clueless as it can get. Susanna is one woman on a killing spree of her 6 husbands, but for no apparent reason. There’s hardly any back story to why she’s the way she is. No human angle to whether in the whole process of defeating the evil, she herself embodies it( a film subject, South Koreans have masterfully handled). She’s got no moral dilemmas, no human conflict. If a comedy is what Vishal bhardwaj intended to make, then he successfully did so. Because people laughed along even in the supposed serious scenes. 

I wonder why he’s doing what he’s doing. He is one of the most powerful men in the Indian film industry. He has the ability to change the kind of films people would go watch in cinema halls. But instead, he is constantly compromising on his craft. Directors like Dibakar banerjee( who again I have huge respect for as a film maker) and Anurag Kashyap (who I think is very derivative…his direct lifts from the films of Fateh Akin and such directors is quite blatant, but still a fearless film maker) have been doing some amazing job. They are taking up different subjects and are casting apt people. Somebody like Dibakar Banerjee, who after two successful films could have picked any big subject and made a film on it. But instead, he chose to make a film with hand held camera with no established actors. That shows the arrogance and belief of a director in his craft.

Though it’s his second film, Bhardwaj truly burst into the scene with Maqbool in 2004 and it still remains the best Indian film I have watched in the last 10 years. It was such an amazing film with brilliant human drama, an all consuming theme of greed, passion and deceit. Brilliantly casted and even brilliantly directed, it is a masterpiece. The pride of having a film maker like him in our era is immeasurable. Sadly it has only waned after that.

But then, Vishal Bhardwaj has been very meticulously working towards it. He has been constantly compromising on his cinema. The crack started appearing from his second film Omkara onwards. Taking stars over actors, giving precedence to style over substance. And I repeat, that his half decent films also have more soul than a lot of films by other film makers. It’s just that after a Maqbool, he’s set his own standards so high, that it is a huge task to live up to. But a die hard fan like me would forever want that from him. 

The sad part is that Vishal Bhardwaj insists that Priyanka Chopra with her limited range of acting skills is a great actor and that she should get the National Award for her role. And she will. Because when it comes to acting, we are quite happy with doling out big awards to non-actor stars over really talented actors. How else would you justify Arjun Rampal getting a National Award for Rock On and Priyanka Chopra getting it for Fashion last year.

With his short film on AIDS, Blood Brothers included, Vishal has already made 7 films. The next projects he’s supposedly making are a musical with Priyanka Chopda and then there’s another film in line with Shahrukh Khan. God only knows what to expect out of them. 

vimsandfancies: This Truman Show

vimsandfancies: This Truman Show: "Today, The Truman Show was on tv again and I ended up watching it again. I quite like the film. Well, I woudn’t call it one of my most fav..."

This Truman Show

Today, The Truman Show was on tv again and I ended up watching it again. I quite like the film. Well, I woudn’t call it one of my most favourite films, but I love the completely original idea of the film.

As you would know it is the story of a reality tv star called Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey. The scary part is that his entire life is THE reality tv. Everything he does is watched by millions of audiences worlwide. Whether he's eating, sleeping, heading off to work or visiting the loo, the world is watching – and he doesn't even know it. At least, not at first.

Since birth, Truman has been brought up inside a giant Hollywood dome, inside of which is the made-for-TV town of Seahaven. Everyone he knows – his neighbours, his workmates, his parents, his wife, and even his best friend since childhood – are actors hired by media mogul Christof,( brilliantly played by Ed Harris) for the planet's biggest and most intricate one-man reality show.

Towards the end, he smells something fishy and subsequently plans his escape.

The story is fascinating. And scarily unnerving too. The insecure person that I am, I have forever doubted if my life is a reality tv. What if I’m live entertainment? mundane but entertaining to some. What if all this is make-believe. What if my mother is a brilliant actor, so are my siblings.What if priti actually hates the fat, short and ugly me but sticks to the role brilliantly, day after day. What if my friends deliver their lines, do their part brilliantly, switch off the light and go do the same scene brilliantly in some other set. And for all i know, they’re getting awards for their performance. But I don’t have a clue. Nobody awards me. I’m the lead character, am I not! Maybe they are stocking my best lead award, year after year, but I don’t think I’ll ever see them.

The thing is that we always accept the reality of our surroundings without question. Maybe there’s more to it than I know. At times, it all seems like it is the case. And if it is, then I hope I’m a good entertainer and you’re having a good time.

Please Give

I watched writer-director Nicole Holofcener's Please Give a couple of weeks back and since then I’ve been thinking of writing this post. This is sort of a ‘what-this-movie-is-about-and-why-does-it-make-me-write-this-post’ post. It is a story about a well heeled present day New York couple, Kate and Alex (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt).

In this era of really complex storytelling, Please Give is one of those films where nothing much happens. It is too self-indulgent, full of dialogues and follows linear storytelling. But it is as charming as life is, warts and all. It’s got its selfish, guilty, passionate and morbid moments.

It is set in present day New York. But it could have been a story of any metropolis in any part of the world. It is so much our story. We, the children of the new world, who make more money than all the family members of our previous generation combined . We, who are fighting this daily fight of being part of this dog-eat-dog world and yet want to believe that somewhere we are good people. I don’t think anybody likes to believe himself or herself as a bad person. We all got reasons to justify any shit we do in life.

Kate and Alex run a business selling overpriced retro furniture to upper class hip people of the city. Furniture which they buy as scrap from the unsuspecting people selling off their dead parents ‘useless stuff’ and hoping to make some money in the bargain.

The business is doing fine, swindling off people of their priceless furniture. But then again, Kate is saddled with this desire to do something good. Maybe she’s saddled with her guilt of bilking people and wants to redeem herself. So she hands out generous dollars to the homeless in the street. But at the same time, she wishes the next door old lady dead, so that she can buy her apartment and combine it with hers. Kate’s character likes to believe that the old lady lived a sad life, no matter if she actually did. But she needs to believe so, maybe to feel good about her own life. She needs to do something to feel good about herself. She doles out 20 dollars to a homeless but denies her teenaged daughter a 200 dollar pair of denims. Because somewhere she likes to believe she is middle class, rooted to the downtrodden. Even Nita Ambani and Shahrukh Khan like to indulge themselves in that belief, no matter what obscene depths of money they are in. There has to be a redemption about being the way you are. Sounds familiar, isn’t it? It does to me.

I loved Please Give because it is such a comment on how our heart is. How we really are and how we like to believe we are. Clueless but clued in. Selfish and generous. All that makes us human. It is in the same school as a Woody Allen film. Or a Satyajit Ray, or a Ritoporno Ghosh, or a Dibakar Banerjee film.( I know, somewhere some bengali is rubbing his palms, grinning, that all the references are of bong directors…hehehe). All the directors and storytellers adept at dwelling into the finer nuances of human mind and heart.

Ok, coming back to the film, Nicole Holofcener writes strong women characters. And she manages to take out some brilliant performances out of her actors, specially the female characters. Even in this film all actors, especially the women, outshine their male counterparts. Whether it is Kate’s gawky 15 year old daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), or the controlled radiologist Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and spa attendant Mary (Amanda Peet) – or their ailing and sharp-tongued grandmother (Ann Guilbert). But the one who really is most amazing is Catherine Keener as Kate. I must confess that I never much liked her, unlike Priti who forever did. In fact, i almost hated her. That’s maybe because I always saw her enacting these very strong women characters. But I saw her as the mother in Where The Wild Things Are, and now in Please Give, both parts where she is vulnerable and yet strong. And I have to confess that I am in love with her. Maybe that’s how all love stories begin. With a certain dislike and resistance towards a potent force and then a complete surrender.

Please Give is kind of movie which is critical of us but at the same time is sympathetic to us. All it’s doing is showing us that what we really are. Human, with all our flaws and shortcomings, far from the idealist picture of this righteous person we carry in our heads.

So if you can lay your hands on it, please watch Please Give.

So Long...

There’s something about leaving, which is always hard. Parting with things, places and people is harder than you imagine. And then it is harder if you have a filmy mind like me. You imagine events in a certain way in your head and it never turns out that way. Real life so doesn’t imitate reel life, for sure.

Last week I said goodbyes twice. First to Calcutta, and then to Ogilvy. Strangely with Calcutta, it wasn’t so hard. Every time I go there, a certain sense of detachment sets in.
And that’s because of the political scenario which just doesn’t let the city move. Out of the 5 days I was there, one day the city was crippled thanks to Mamata Banerjee’s Maha Rally, the other day there was Cab strike. So it wasn’t exactly a dream run in Calcutta. So saying bye to my people was harsh, but not so much to the city.

And then my bbye moment to Ogilvy. It was harder than I thought. I just hung on to it. I just wanted to be and not leave. I wanted to have my friends gather around and talk, maybe go out drinking. But then with everybody gone before me, there was no one around to do that with. So I hung on to studio and client servicing people I have never spoken and said my bbyes for ages, hoping someone would walk me out. Because that’s the way the reel rolls in my head. But thank god to Nitin and Jossy. It was nice talking to Nitin. Thanks for the gift. And Thanks so much to Jossy for the book. Very well thought of. And I loved what he wrote on the inside page. May your wish for me come true, because that’s my wish too. So I staggered out of the agency alone, and no matter how much you tell yourself to be a man and not cry, your eyes do well up. I have spent close to 3 years in this agency, known some wonderful people, made friends with some, goddamn!

So anyway, both my bbyes weren’t exactly the way I imagined. Maybe I should start dreaming those morbid NFDC type movies of 70s where nothing great happens through the movie, the jholawala union leader gets killed, people die of hunger and in the last shot the sun sets behind the fume belching industrial backdrop, leaving the screen dark. But maybe I’ll not. Why screw the vision of the head. It’s a wonderful world in there. Atleast things are perfect in there. So I’ll keep dreaming in Technicolour.

Love, Sex aur Dhokha, darling!

“And you call this a film!?”

That’s how one of the 3 young women sitting next to us reacted when the end credits of Love, Sex Aur Dhokha started rolling. Not that they were quiet through the film, like most of the other viewers. Like this man in the row in front of us complained during a brutal scene of honour killing ‘kya film hai yeh?. He even asked his wife to remove the food-tray in front of him, citing ‘mann khatta ho gaya.’

What were you expecting, bade bhaiya? Probably a movie with some ‘scenes’. Before he bought his popcorn, he could have done a little homework on the film. But I guess that is too much to expect out of people, the whole thing about expectations out of a film, that is. People just float in, expecting to watch a film which is already there in their head. A film just the way they are used to seeing, a three act narrative of the beginning, the middle and the end. Nowadays, most have opened up to the idea of ‘different’ films as well. But LSD is nothing like you expected. You don’t have a clue of what’s coming. LSD fucks you. In the ass.

With so much voyeurism and reality TV happening around us, somebody had to make a film on it. And thank God, it wasn’t Madhur Bhandarkar.

LSD doesn’t follow a pattern of single story with the beginning, middle and the end. It uses three different stories of love, sex and betrayal to give you one composite film experience. A film which has no lose ends, all of them tied together tightly with one another. Long back when I was in college, I’d watched a film called ‘The Idiots’ in a film festival. I had no clue about the director Lars Von Trier or Dogme films, but I was pretty moved by the film. There was a certain naivety, and a certain devilish morbidity to it. It was heartbreaking to watch that film. As was many of Lars Von Trier’s films I later watched. I had the same reaction watching LSD. It slaps you across your face throughout. It is not exactly funny when you think it is. It is moving to see how mundane people are, and yet how devilish they can be. People do the most horrible things to people they love, or let’s just say to people who are their own.

The first story follows an Aditya Chopra school of film making obsessed young guy Rahul (Anshuman Jha) making his diploma film, who has the same idea about love as depicted in his mentor’s films. Now you can laugh saying this guy is unreal, but believe me this guy is real. They are all around us. There are so many like him, my brother in law is one such guy, with his motley crew of FB friends who sound just like him. So the hero falls for his film’s heroine, a rich girl Shruti (Shruti) with a fleet of Mercs and her Punjabi Baroque house. The second story is about Adarsh (Raj Kumar Yadav) and Rashmi (Neha Chauhan) in a 24×7 departmental store, always under CCTV surveillance. The third is about a sting operator journalist Prabhat (Amit Sial) who carries out an operation with frustrated model Naina (Devdutta Banerjee), who is out to avenge being ditched by famous Punjabi pop star Loki Local (Herry Tangri). All mundane people, like you and me. Feeding off each other like parasites. Clinging on to each other for love, giving in to sex, and tied with a common thread of betrayal.

Most film-makers have a brilliant debut film and there after start corrupting, giving into the pressures of banners and box office. Or simply because they don’t have any good story to tell. So the treatment takes over the content. Not the case with Dibakar Banerjee, he debuted with the brilliant Khosla ka ghosla, followed it with an even sharper Oye Lucky! And now has surpassed all his brilliance with his most caustic film. He is a director in command of his craft.

The screenplay by Urmi Juvekar and Dibakar Banerjee is gripping. The camera work by Nikos Andritsakis is absolutely brillaint. As Dibakar said in his interview that this is the first time in India that the digital cameras are used as digital cameras, and not as a poor cousin of the 35 mm camera. Editing by Namrata Rao is crisp. You must listen to the music album, if you are not already hooked on. I’m in love with Sneha Khanwalker's music, she is absolutely charming in this one as well. The lyrics written by Dibakar himself, are sharply written and topical. Lyrics like ‘main saat janam upwasa hoon, aur saat samandar pyasa hoon’ are absolute gem. The cast is brilliant, all the actors including the guy playing Shruti’s father and the other cocky store attendant have done their bit effortlessly.

It has more heart and soul than a lot of things I have seen, read or watched. The last time I was this moved watching a hindi film was Maqbool. After watching LSD, I wanted to go sit alone somewhere. Say nothing. Light a cigarette. Maybe shed a tear or two.

Priti and I end up watching films back to back in halls. Even today we had bought tickets for LSD and Lahore, of which we had read and heard good things only. But after watching LSD I felt like tearing away the tickets of Lahore. But that would be an insult to the very reason a film is made. To be watched. So I didn’t do it. I wish I had.

Viva America

People are celebrating halloween in india now...waiting for the day we'll have 4th of July fireworks. Viva Ameerika!

That's what my FB status message read around last Halloween. Some of my friends reacted quite sharply to it, labelling me as no-fun and an anti-American. Now i take serious offence to that. Not the no-fun part. I largely agree to being a no-fun boring kind of a guy. But i have serious reservartions against being labelled an anti-American. Because i love America. I’ve never been to America, but I have this genuine love for some things American, not all, but most. I love America as I know it, these images I get of America through Hollywood, media, American sitcoms, music and popular culture.

I love films, and you cannot love cinema and be oblivious to Hollywood. Hollywood of 70s (which I only saw later), 80s and 90s played a huge part in discovering my love for cinema. Well most of Hollywood fare is utter crap but then there are some gems every now and then. I love American sitcoms, they’ve got more easy humour than British ones. I love the Stand up comedians. I love the whole idea of New York. I want to spend at least 6 months of my life there. Soak up on all the urban ‘culture’. Watch Musicals (they are unarguably the best in the world), visit pubs and listen to underground bands, jazz acts, stand ups video artists. Be part of The Central Park and the Times Square of hurried, smug people. Of warm and clipped smiles. Be part of the cosmopolitan jamboree that New York is.

How can I love a place without ever being there? Well, I haven’t met Madhuri Dixit also, but boy, don’t even get me started on how much I love her. Yes, even now.

One can always divide oneself into being a hindu or a muslim, gujarati or a Bengali, south Indian or a northeasterner and then there’s this whole thing about being a world citizen. But I believe after being an Indian, more than anything else, we are American. The urban Indian life imitates American lifestyle. And it is true for most of the countries around the world. We are bombarded by everything American (some of them excellent, some good and some bad). You switch on the TV and the sitcoms you love are all American, the music you mostly like is American, so is the fast food you so love, the language you pass off as English is American. For a country colonised by brits for over 200 years, we are more American than we are British. We drop our easy on tongue American and put on our best Liverpudlian accent only to sound exotic. You go to “fookin hell” or "let’s rob sum ciggies fellas" only when you want to sound different.

We have the same kind of family values and melodramatic ideas about patriotism and social behaviour. Are homophobic, and have closeted ideas about sexuality as Americans do. Only they being a ‘first world country’ and us being ‘third world country’, there are differences in how we approach them, but the basic structure of society is the same. Being American makes us feel at home. Gives us a sense of belonging. For example, sometime back a couple of my friends were traveling through Cambodia and Vietnam. They were sick of eating ‘exotic’ asian food and then they saw a McDonalds and they immediately felt ‘at home’. That’s how American we are.