The Indian films I’ve seen from this year, ranked. A nicely varied bunch – though I’m behind on Bollywood blockbusters, which has something to do with that, will update as I catch-can – and a lot I found worthwhile.
1.
Silsila (Yash Chopra)
In a moment of crisis, a selfish man commits a selfless act and rebuilds several peoples' lives upon it. How much pain will he dare cause them because has done something that is unlike him? Can he become a more selfless person? Will he even try? Is that even a fair thing to be?
This is the second time I’ve fallen hard for one of Yash Chopra’s romantic melodramas and both times I’ve left laughing at what a sucker I must be. But I must be what I must be! In
Kabhi Kabhie he surprised me by passing opportunities to create easy villains and by pushing time forward; there were only circumstances and suffering and getting on with life, which brings sadness and joy. With
Silsila he shocked me by testing how much of a villain he was willing to make his romantic hero.
Because this is a conservative culture and (despite some of its excesses) format, I’m talking stocking glimpse-level shocks. But the excessive run time is there to acclimate you, hold you hostage. This is basically an intimate (at times, internal) three-hour film about two married couples. It could arguably lose most of its first hour; were it a
noir it could get in and out in a tight 80. (Come to think of it, there’s something of an analogue in de Toth’s
Pitfall.) Downlist I’ll shrug at Shyam Benegal’s award-winning
Kalyug for its juiceless escalations; a lot less happens in
Silsila, but my chin got carpet burn all the same. And I watched it without knowing the real-life circumstances under which it was made.
Bollywood’s most renowned star Amitabh Bachchan plays a character named “Amit” who marries a woman played by his real-life wife, but who is shown to be truly in love with a woman played by an actor widely assumed before filming began to be Bachchan's real-life mistress.
Those circumstances did not endear it to an audience, and to the film's credit it rubs your face in them. It is serious about making you feel uncomfortable. It leaves no doubt which characters belong together: If simple star power’s not enough – when they first lock eyes, oh man – they also get the perks of the genre: They meet through dance, they flirt through song, and using time, Chopra builds them a world. Their courtship is more than ten minutes of straight music, back-to-back songs that have them climbing mountains, hip-deep in tulips. The usual musical hyperreality bubble, always outdoors (because their love is natural, and because Mother Nature is the best and cheapest set designer), often oozing fog. Over days and nights and nights and days. They are indulged so much time, mostly without event, it wipes the practical world away. They fit. They burrow into each other.
(Chopra will not impress you with craft. Cuts are crass. I’ve wondered at how he kept winding up with the least talented camerapeople on the planet, but after sitting through six of his films have to assume he was getting what he wanted. At this point in his career dude just loved zooms. Maybe he didn’t trust his audience’s patience. Maybe he thought it a good way to hide deficiencies in blocking and composition. But you wind up with situations like
this, where he wants to reprise 90 seconds of a song while two people stand still in a room, so he alternates zoom ins and zoom outs on one-shots until he can slowly zoom in on a two-shot. It’s not a paucity of visual ideas, it’s a style!)
There are real-world intrusions. There are cycles of accidents parsed out with a regularity that lets you know Chopra has a structure up his sleeve. (There’s also an international political situation temporarily used as dressing.) But for the most part these characters’ real world is exceptionally generous. The people close to them care for them deeply, are kind. are more than understanding. Arbiters of guilt are de-fanged in ridiculous fashion. These two do not want for anything but each other.
There’s a second path laced through this that feels both redemptive and wrong. Chopra threads that from the beginning, before anyone has to make any damning choices. The way the he fosters tension between the film and the audience makes you wonder where to put your cynicism. I choose the ending, which for me is an all-timer, a laugh-out-loud display of bullshit shrewdly slapped on to hide a cyclical turn from a character incapable of change. But cynicism is a cancer that spreads and undeniable love is not immune; sugar-rot and eye-rolls set in as lines let and charm falls away.
The movie’s best musical number is a holiday celebration of eternal, divine love. A climactic color ejaculation. And an open transgression. How much are we supposed to hate the person posited as the practical and romantic hero of the film? How turned off are we supposed to be by his joy? The dissonance between star power and character behavior festers to the extent that, by the time he righteously rails against unfair social structures I both wanted to spit at him and see him wind up with the one he loves. It's a movie willing to be as abrasive and shameless as its central couple, as willing to be expressive beyond its competence as its hero, willing to cast effective pall upon its own deep romanticism. I loved that, and I loved this more than I expect anyone else would.
(I watched this on DVD, but it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.)
2.
Akaler Shandhaney/In Search of Famine (Mrinal Sen)
Film crew descends on rural village to recreate a famine, recreates a famine.
In 1960, Mrinal Sen went to a rural village to film
Baishey Shravana, a period piece which incorporated elements of the devastating man-made famine of 1943. In 1980, Mrinal Sen went to a rural village to film
Akaler Shandhaney, in which Dhritiman Chatterjee plays an unnamed director shooting a film about the 1943 famine called “Akaler Shandhaney.”
The result is less a clever series of meta echoes than a fluid, pointed cycling through ever-present history. Sen tones down his choppy formal playfulness (outside a hilarious chorus of children screaming "Cut!") in favor of long tracking shots to keep eras interwoven. Yet still relies heavily on improvisation. (According to
Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, “About 60 percent of the film was improvised on location and whatever working script [Sen] had with him went totally haywire.”)
Preferring captured inspiration to a lock-tite puzzlebox can mean leaving a lot of ideas on the table, but it also means the obvious ideas get more than obvious satirical gloss. So certainly, there can be a crass tone-deafness to the visitors – anyone for a game of "Guess which famine?" – but the "film crew" and "villagers" are not monolithic entities and relationships between individuals are varied and revealing. There is a refusal to compromise in art and a refusal to compromise in life and a refusal to change in the face of evidence that what you're doing has done wrong before. (There is a lot of suffering, and particularly women's suffering, created at the hand of male pride.) There is a lot about how we relate to history, to what we make and what we watch, to each other.
Sreela Majumdar's show-stopping moment may be the point where everything comes most fully together and also where everything decisively falls apart.
(There are two English-friendly options on YouTube, both compromised: A
muddy VHS rip in the correct aspect ratio, and a
digitally scrubbed, reformatted version. The cap is from the latter, but I watched the former.)
3.
Umrao Jaan (Muzaffar Ali)
Thousands are intoxicated by these eyes
Associated with these eyes are a thousand tales
You are not the only one disgraced for love of me
In this city, there are thousands like you
I’m the only one who intoxicates with my eyes
Though there are thousands of taverns in the world
You think a gale can scare such a flame
A flame which is protected by a thousand moths
Thousands are intoxicated by these eyes
Associated with these eyes are a thousand tales
If you are here for the poetry and the music,
this one’s for you. (You, and the person who voted for it on the forum’s
Musicals List.)
The actor pictured above is Rekha. She won the Filmfare Best Actress award the previous year for playing a bubbly anarchist in
Khubsoorat. She would win the National Film Best Actress Award for this performance, which evolves into one of stillness and control. imdb credits her with 14 films in 1981, including
Silsila up top, not including her cameo in the film below.
Umrao Jaan is the slave name of a young girl who is abducted and sold into service at a brothel; eventually she becomes a celebrated poet. The film is based on a novel from 1905. It recrosses too many paths and dots way too many i’s. It soft-sells the sex work and the conditions of a life in captivity, but I think Rekha makes those burdens felt. The music is by Khayyam, who also worked on Yash Chopra’s
Kabhi Kabhie. Urdu poet Shahryar’s ghazals are great, even in translation (my library had
this dvd); his film work mostly consists of the few films his college friend Muzaffar Ali directed. Ali's best when he lets the sets and actors do the work in this; the rare inspired camera move can come as a surprise and a distraction in the middle of too much random activity.
I did not find what I looked for
But this became an excuse for seeing the world
4.
Chashme Buddoor (Sai Paranjpye)
A playful delight. A bunch of kids whose idea of love has been deeply affected by Bollywood romances spend time either recreating their lives as a Bollywood movie or seeing their experiences distorted through that mirror. A winsome cast. Ideas and jokes that arrive without ponderous telegraphing. For a while, this is an irresistibly good-natured, low-to-the-ground comedy. I beamed through the first 90 minutes.
No comedy should be longer than two hours, though, and when complications come due the film chooses some needlessly mean ones. It recovers in time to get ridiculous and fulfill the promise of a running (literal) gag. I'm glad I've now seen enough of these movies to recognize at least a couple of the tunes in its
the quick-hit parody song, but familiarity is definitely not a prerequisite.
The first of two films directed by Indian women on this list, Sai Paranjpye's writer/director credit in the cut-out animated opening titles is a sharp way to assert her presence:
(Watched the Shemaroo DVD. Have not seen the 2013 remake that’s on Netflix.)
5.
Bhavni Bhavai (Ketan Mehta)
“Which sin will you choose?”
“The middle one.”
A find I’m frankly underrating because it’s an adaptation of a play by Dhiruben Patel and I’m unsure exactly where credit is due. Bhavai is a form of folk theater whose 14th-century origins are credited to Asait Thakar, who was punished for associating outside his caste and turned to theater to make a living. (Mehta’s film is dedicated to Thakar and Bertolt Brecht, also acknowledges the creators of Asterix in the credits.)
Bhavni Bhavai is a clever and broad and furious attack on caste that uses folklore and theatricality to lampoon social hierarchies and spit on the violence of their continued existence.
A tribe of Dalits whose homes were burned – refugees due to “games elders play” – stops to camp for a night; a storyteller entertains the children with a tale from earlier times when things were worse and their people were called Untouchables. Most of the film is spent inside that story, a familiar one of court intrigue around a buffoonish king and a foundling prince. Poor people love tales of royalty, and (as the
play within the story within the film shows) kings love a beggar’s opera.
Everyone is playing dress-up, everyone is putting on an act. Actors take multiple roles, multiple actors play one role. Name actors (Naseeruddin Shah (having more fun than I’m used to), Smita Patil, Om Puri) recite couplets outside their language (the film is in Gujarati); at one point, Patil’s dubbed with a male voice. People in the story talk to the camera, people outside the story talk to the camera. Mehta uses James Bond needle drops and an electronic score that would qualify as anachronistic if you could be safe in thinking these problems were in the past.
There’s a washed-out English-friendly copy
on YouTube.
6.
36 Chowringhee Lane (Aparna Sen)
Unlike everything else on this list, not simply because it’s mostly in English. Aparna Sen's first feature contemplates loneliness and connection and changing guard in changing times. Merchant-Ivory grad Jennifer Kendal is an elderly Anglo-Indian Shakespeare teacher at a Calcutta girls' school. Never married, all her family is either moved away or wasting away in hospice. Her hobbies are: Dragging her feet through graveyards, reading letters to her cat, losing herself in wistful remembrances.
One of her former students is looking for a place for day hook-ups with their fiancé, a would-be writer, and arranges to borrow the teacher's flat during school hours on the pretense that would-be writing will get done there.
Sen and her production team favor muted palettes and shadows and find some decisive static shots. The pacing appropriately preaches, and occasionally tries, patience; it's a sad and sweet little film that mostly knows when to get excited. It is not a film with a lot of plot or complications, not busy or confrontational to its benefit. A solid short story drawn out to two hours. A fine opportunity to try things, and Sen's expressive touches are welcome whether they work or not. The evocative dissolves do. The lavender-tinted dream sequence comes off a bit like a student art film. She can be overbearing. ("Silent Night" plays over a montage of homeless people.) She can favor understatement to a fault -- a lot of the early going hangs on Kendal's plaintive stare -- but finds some great rewards. The end of a party sequence is beautifully done.
7.
Kalyug/Age of Vice (Shyam Benegal)
Benegal updates the
Mahabharata as a corporate soap opera, two branches of the same family bloodthirsty for contracts, the Kali Yuga as late-stage capitalism. And it may be (like this year’s
French Lieutenant’s Woman) more a triumph of adaptation than a work of lasting effect. (Samir Chopra’s
dissection deals mostly in compare/contrast.)
Kalyug suffers an inevitable cultural barrier for those of us unfamiliar with the
Mahabharata, and it’s so pared down it’s not going to open the old work to new eyes.
Chopra asserts its value as critically tying rising corporate culture to India’s warrior past, but equaling big business with moral bankruptcy has long been old hat in the West.
Kalyug predates Gordon Gekko, but not Michael Corleone, and the intervening decades of
Dynasty,
Profit,
Succession, etc. have given us so many clashing archetypes and ruthlessly propulsive cutthroat narratives that things have to get extravagantly juicy or clever or deep to warrant attention.
It is a problem how inured to all this I felt! Family members killing family members. blah blah blah. Some of that’s due to overcrowding. The film opens with a narrated family tree chart, moves at a good clip because you’re playing catch up with characters; Benegal drops the occasional ellipse to keep ahead. Events and complications come on strong, and when labor unions fight each other to control a strike it’s a nice bit of divide and conquer. But unlike other Benegal films this one gets smaller as it goes along. His first (I think) contemporary urban drama even
looks cramped. Escalations are often uncinematic (a lot of time on telephones) and easily shrugged off.
Some of that is to point. The claustrophobia, the self-containment, the contraction. When real people intrude on family space by presence or mention it’s a passing shock. Even though there are two competing family businesses, all the business is kept in the family. Letting competition supersede all other values makes your family as horrible as your family has made the world. But it's still their world, what choice do we have but to shrug at it?
8.
Chakra/Vicious Cycle (Rabindra Dharmaraj)
The Filmfare awards seem mostly dominated by typical Bollywood fare, but in 1981
Kalyug won Best Picture and this downbeat slum-set drama was among that category’s nominees. (Parallel cinema stalwarts Smita Patil and Naseeruddin Shah both won for their acting here.)
Chakra played in Cannes' director's fortnight and won the gold at Locarno after its director's
early death. This was the only feature from Dharmaraj, a former journalist, and as it weaves a number of characters and incidents into a portrait of a shanty "colony" (as translated), it cries out for a stronger sensibility and a surer story-shaping hand.
Our entry into the film is Patil's Amma; a pair of tragedies leave her a single mother raising her son Benwa in a Mumbai slum. We tour the slum with Benwa, the more natural central character, and two father figures who visit his mother provide the traditional paths. Shah's charismatic big-knifed pimp/thug is a neighborhood institution and takes the boy under his wing; Kulbhushan Kharbanda's straight-shooting truck driver has the steady, honest job but is an infrequent presence. There are too many scenes away from either of them to make any path clear, to make life seem anything but improvised and episodic. Perpetuated instability and impermanence are part of Dharmaraj's point.
The best thing by far about
Chakra is its outdoor set, a sprawling practical encampment that shows a bustling cityscape around it. There are standout scenes -- the chase of a leaking grain truck, exciting stolen shots of Benwa working streets as a shine boy and a squeegee man. Great percussive sections of soundtrack. And despite its trajectory, Dharmaraj does not force-wallow in miserabilism. But the film's sloppy climax mostly brings home the film's missed opportunities, not the characters'.
9.
Ranganayaki/The Heroine of the Stage (S.R. Puttana Kanagal)
Kanagal is going for something mythic in his Kannada-language melodrama about an actress and her troubled off-stage relationship with former members of her audience. I’m not sure he gets there, despite a running consternation about broken families. She is with a theater troupe that specializes in Hindu mythological plays, with which I’m unfamiliar, but a late turn toward Greek tragedy features a queasy revelation without a pronounced reveal and with a hodgepodge of hokey-pokey non-action.
It often feels that way, both jumpy and static. A huge chunk of time is devoted to one of my least favorite turns, the guy who marries a woman and wants her to stop being the woman he married. The theater Is where the actress’ and film’s hearts are and it shows. An early backstage tussle has fun with props and costumes, actors in full half-monkey Hanuman costume kicking butt. And there’s a stirring whirl at dervishry that, even as it sends the film spiraling into its next act, leads to more Wifey Don’t Do That! morass. Frustrating.
A subbed, awkwardly reformatted copy is
on YouTube.
10.
Chaalchitra/Kaleidoscope (Mrinal Sen)
Sen’s second film of the year starts promisingly enough, with an on-screen optical track and a story-within-the story, a pitch from a would-be journalist. (Sen’s
Interview, but it’s in an interview to get a job interviewing!) It turns into a hunt for story ideas around his home so Sen can do a day in the life of a lower-middle class complex and express conflicted feelings about upward mobility. There are good things, like a courtyard cleaning that shows cooperation bred through animosity. A showy dream sequence conjures Fellini against Sen’s favorite black limbo background, snaps a quip that tear gas can’t work against protestors who’ve acclimated to India’s air pollution. But this ultimately feels uninspired. Even the quick-cut street scenes feel aimless.
A subbed, digitally scrubbed copy in the wrong aspect ratio is
on YouTube.
11.
Nakhuda (Dilip Naik)
Negligible and sloppy melodrama only made interesting by a portrayal of lower-class self-hatred. A gruff ex-con hotel/café owner (Kulbhushan Kharbanda, who played Dr. Evil in
Shaan and is effectively heartbreaking despite looking a little like a Eugene Levy bit) adopts a soon-to-graduate college student, helps arrange his future, then decides he must sabotage their relationship to ensure his new son’s success. Normally this would focus on the rising son and his conflict with the ex-con’s actual son (a criminal and layabout, natch), but it largely stays on Kharbanda as he beats himself up through weird machinations to no good end.
Unranked:
Dakhal/The Occupation (Gautam Ghose)
Cannot count this as seen because the only versions I’ve found (on DVD, on YouTube) use the same source, which is missing subtitles for the first two reels.
Luckily
Dakhal is much shorter and simpler than Ghose’s ambitious and overreaching
Maa Bhoomi, though it can also seem thin. As revealed mostly in flashbacks: Andi, a member of the nomadic kakmara people, once eloped and had children with a man who settled and developed marshland for farming. After he suddenly dies, her tribe haunts her home while a greedy landowner twists the legal system to try to force her from her home.
Beyond issues of land grabbing, examples of the powerful turning poorer people against each other to their advantage (lending fine ambiguity as to who's responsible for a climactic event), and some bracing low language in a courtroom, there's the emotional crush of an abandoned past sweeping back into someone's life(*) while their future seems ready to be snatched away, the haunting feeling of having no place in the present to be. But Ghose doesn't give his heroine enough to do, doesn't seem interested in exploring any psychological connection to either of her worlds, refuses to push her readily righteous part toward resolute dramatic fire.
(*) Committed opening shot has a clan emerge from the sunrise to traverse the whole length of the screen on a river bank before turning toward us and fording the river.
