Hating or loving Dangal?

A few days I had an email conversation with a friend of mine on the movie Dangal. She said she hated the movie for the following reason:

Mr Phogat, played by Aamir Khan, foists his wrestling dreams on his daughters. While the girls go on to excel at the sport, this does not take away from the fact that Mr Phogat is undoubtedly a patriarchal figure, who actually may need therapy over his unresolved issues, my friend says.

I could understand her line of reasoning, but I presented some counterpoints:

If you switch wrestling with, say, academic excellence, which would certainly ring a bell with most of the audience, then you would not have a movie. (Actually, academic excellence may be the wrong term. It's just acing the exams that we are after.)

For, that's what it is about: your parent making your career choices for you and making you bring their dreams to reality. 

Yet, there's also a few other things to consider here: there comes a point in the movie where the girls realize they are privileged for having wrestling as a career option as compared to a life of domesticity. Here's where they stop pushing back and own their father's dream. Of course, you may ask what choice do they have? 

But if we do find joy and meaning in what we are doing, does it matter so much how we came unto that choice? Does it matter that there were other roads (worn out though they maybe)?

Thing is, yes if Phogat weren't in rural Haryana, he should have been consulting a shrink. Or, if he was asking his daughters to ace the JEE exams. But because he is in rural Haryana where female-male ratio is one of the lowest in the country, the choices he makes for his daughters definitely make him swim against the mainstream, and thereby qualify him to be a hero. 

Yes, he is making the decisions for his daughters, but would feminists be happy if he were not to? That is, if he were to just accept that wrestling was not for his daughters and married them away? 

If you remove the particular circumstances of a story, you end up with a controlled environment. But then all human reality would more or less be the same, removing perhaps the necessity for art and its criticism.

Dangal can be looked at from the alternative education viewpoint, too and you would arrive at much the same points and counterpoints. Phogat’s way of parenting is very much mainstream, parent-led rather than being child-led.

But does the outcome justify the means? Again, this is not an easy question to answer. For, if it were just mainstream academics that the father was pushing the girls into, the answer would be straightforward enough. However, in rural Haryana, if Phogat hadn’t exposed his girls to another possible world for them, they would have hardly had a chance at life, much less sporting excellence. How would the girls know what they had in them if their father hadn’t shoved them into the akhada?

But does that validate the rat race Indian parents enter their children in, with the justification that they know what’s best? Hardly, I’d say. Still, this movie does pose some tricky questions.

Oggarane misses an opportunity

Oggarane is a step above the usual Kannada movie fare, but I would stop short of calling it unusual. It did have the potential to be better than it is, though.

It starts to be a movie on mature love, but mid-way it can’t resist the temptation of mixing it up with the song-and-dance routine that must accompany young love on screen. The use of the food motif, too, could have been carried throughout.

What irritated me were the different ways in which the significance of marriage is portrayed for the leading man (Prakash Raj) and woman (Sneha Prasanna). For the man, it is a simple need for companionship but for the woman it is loaded with vulnerability. For God’s sake, man, when will we get rid of this clichéd crying of the lone, unmarried woman? Do people who write up these storylines even know that the majority of women in India are actually breadwinners in their family? And, I am not even talking of white-collared professionals, but the women that you see at construction sites, in the fields, and on the roadside. The husbands of most of these women have either abandoned them or spend their days in a drunken, wife-beating haze.

As a cub journalist, I once came across a village in rural Bangalore district, where I met so many abandoned women that I was tempted to give a hackneyed title to the story such as ‘The village of abandoned women’.
And, that’s for the utterly poor.

Then, there are the self-supporting professional women of the middle class who are in a discreet way made to feel inferior to their married peers, in spite of being achievers in their work lives and leading fulfilling personal lives. Is marriage the way to nirvana for women, while just being an emotional option to the man? Sheer nonsense. Most of us do feel the need for companionship at some point in life, but everyone need not and does not seek it out in the same way.

The other WTF moment was when the caricatured gay character in the movie tells the leading lady that she must act decisively and not miss an opportunity to land Rai. He hints that he’s still single because God erred in deciding his fate (that is, his being gay is a mistake). At this point, I began to doubt if the people who made this movie live in this real world. If the director frowns upon homosexuality, why even have a gay character in the movie? Just for a few laughs? How is that even fair?

What has stayed with me from the movie is the below song by my favourite singer, Kailash Kher, and the fact that product placement has firmly made its way to Kannada movies. Otherwise, it’s an easily forgettable flick.

The Black Swan

I saw this movie immediately after watching this clip, which basically warns against falling for narratives or stories. But how do we do that? We are all made up of stories and spew them by the minute. Yet, he (Tyler Cowen) has a point: when we tell a story, we inevitably tell it through our filter. So, any story leaves off something off the 'original' and takes on a little of the teller. A story also becomes in some way 'of' the story-teller.

So, it was in this frame of mind that I watched Black Swan. Saying anything about good vs. evil narratives is quite a self-conscious effort, post-Cowen's clip. But here goes.

The movie The Black Swan is all about white and black; good and pure juxtaposed against evil and sinful/lusty. But only until a point – after which good melts into evil and vice versa.

Nina needs to play both characters – the white swan and the black swan – equally well. She is a natural at playing the white swan, but when it comes to its dark counterpart, her performance pales, freezes. Because, however vulnerable her public, white self may be, it exercises great control over her self-mutilating, repressed side. This side can only come to its own at night, or when she is safe from the prying eyes of her over-protective (and perhaps abusive?) mother.

The role is a challenge to Nina quite simply because in real life, she is the white and black swan. With much difficulty, her white swan-self has kept the black swan out of her public, conscious reality. If she must play the black swan to perfection, she must come dangerously close to her hidden, tucked-away side. And, that’s a risk, and she knows it.

The best stories (hope Mr Cowen is not listening) or at least the ones I fall for are those that leave you with no answers, that meld white and black to an indistinguishable point.

Take Macbeth, for instance. Is Lady Macbeth entirely to blame for her husband’s deeds, or was she just the spark that kindled the murderous rage within Macbeth himself?

It is also a sad commentary on the temporal nature of show business. Youth-beauty-talent-the quest for perfection and eternal fame – and the descent into depressing reality.

Nina, of course, has her cake and eats it too. She delivers a perfect performance – black and white – and then dies – just as the plot requires. She does not live to deliver a lesser performance. Considering the toll that the black and white swans take on her, it’d be perhaps difficult for her to ever play the role again – let alone with perfection. Eternity is perfect, and her role was to remain eternal.

As with most personal, non-work things I write these days (or don't), this too requires much more elaboration than that in this post. But here I must end for lack of time.

Delhi Belly

I watched the movie a month ago but found the time today to blog about it. I enjoyed the movie immensely and was surprised to find people scandalized and shocked by it. So, here's my quick defence of the movie:

Why do you like Delhi Belly?*
Its spontaneity, creative dialogue, and, of course, its celebration of oral sex, especially that rendered to women. Let the tribe of 21st century men grow!

But, DB is full of swear words! How can you like it?
Grow up. And, if you haven't done that yet, don't go to movies labelled 'A'. And please give adults their space, too!

What if children hear such words or see the movie?
I read my first adult fiction when I was perhaps in Class VI. Many of us have peeped into the forbidden adult world way before we were supposed to. It didn't hurt us, I should think. At least, it didn't hurt me. Children are not supposed to see this movie, of course, but if they do so sneakily and they will, there's no stopping them. It's a difficult world to grow up into, no doubt. But before we get too worked up about children learning adult stuff from a movie, what about the endless violence and mind-numbing zombie-like make-believe world celebrated in our movies? That's family entertainment, eh?

Why is the movie in English?
Why shouldn't it be? But DB has a Hindi version, too, which has done much better than the English one.

There's hardly any Delhi in the movie.
Meaning? Did you come to the movie expecting a quick tour of Delhi? Not that they didn't show any Delhi, either. So, cheapskates, get your free Delhi ride yourself!

*These were actual questions I heard discussed on various forms of media.

Give me another chance, I wanna grow up once again

I’m so glad I didn’t take Pratim Gupta seriously.

3 Idiots made me laugh heartily and unexpectedly cry the next moment. Maybe because am not an arty-farty type, thank God for that. But it wasn’t just me. After a long, long time, I saw an entire hall roaring with laughter and then fall suddenly silent.

Why indulge in rat races, let’s leave it to the rats, eh? The subject of Aamir’s movie has long begged representation. Every year, the moment after results of Class X or Class XII are announced, you can brace up for news of kids killing themselves. But, we’re all way too numbed up towards it.

I remember once participating in a seminar for teachers, where my teacher said that a child’s imagination should not be ‘corrected’, or tampered with. And, a teacher simply got up and asked, ‘What’s the main point?’

I have met some very different teachers in my life. One of them had a way of teaching through anecdotes and life experiences. I absolutely loved his classes and learned so much about human behaviour from him. But the last time I went to Bangalore, he said his current students had complained about his teaching methods. They didn’t like it that he went ‘off topic’!

I guess a movie has its limitations and it’s difficult to touch all aspects of an issue and, of course, the kind of teachers that I have met are really a minority, outcastes even. But the point is that by the time kids reach college, they have already become part of the system like Chatur, the Silencer. They may not be open to and indeed may find it very difficult to adapt to a system that encourages them to think rather than score.

Anyway, getting back to the movie, yes, there are the usual college scenes like ragging, a Hitler-type principal, but heck, this is a movie about college kids. What did you expect to see? Yogis standing on their heads? I guess not.

But I wouldn’t have defended the movie, if not for the lively, clean, and smart humour weaved into it. The balatkaar speech takes the cake, of course.

The 3 Idiots have done a good job and really can’t say who’s better than whom. All’s well with the songs, they’re very hummable. But I’m surprised that Kareena snuck in some bad acting, given so little time she had in the movie.

All in all, I vote for the movie and urge the janata to go see it. And, after you’re done laughing, don’t get to keeping up with the Joneses all over again.

Aargh, there's more I could write, but have to cook dinner :(

Vicky Christina Barcelona: one cliche too many

When the credits started rolling, I was surprised that this was a Woody Allen movie. Till now, I hadn’t ever equated predictability and clichés with Allen’s movies, and here was this movie brimming with every romantic cliché you could possibly think of.



Cliché no. 1: Two women – one pragmatic, the other free thinking – go to Barcelona for different reasons but end up falling for the same guy: an edible-looking Spanish artist (If you’ve already had enough, read no further. Believe me, this is just the beginning of cliché hell.) Allen can have his triangles or quadrangles or any geometric fantasy, but what grates is the part about the American women – tourists – falling for a Spanish artist.

Cliché no. 2: The pragmatic of the two – Rebecca Hall – is already engaged but sees in Javier Bardem a life she could have if she chose to. So, is it going to be her conventional (read: boring), American fiancée who represents stability, or is going to be the red-blooded Spaniard who will take her up paths of unknown pleasures? Agh, God, this is the dumbest, really. Women often know how to get the best of both worlds, but such women simply don’t feature in movies or books, it seems.

Cliché no. 3: The names of the Spanish characters are ultra-cliché, especially that of Juan Antonio.

Cliché no. 4: Bardem and his ex-wife, Penelope Cruz, are the wild, bohemian spirits and shock the prim, civilized Americans.

Cliché no. 5: It all happens in a faraway place from home – Spain. So, you see, we get hornier abroad or is it just the Barcelona air? And I had this sneaking suspicion when I was watching the movie. The Barcelona in the movie – which competes to be another character - is what tourists want to see it as. In the Barcelona that Marta Bausells Hernanz knows, you can’t walk into a restaurant at 12 in the night and get a table just like that.

Allen’s Barcelona is beautiful, of course. But a little too much out of a travel brochure.

Everyone else in the movie is mouth-watering, too. But just eye-candy quotient cannot make a movie win, though it can definitely save it from total oblivion.

I liked the title song and, strangely enough, the quaint and rather unnecessary narrative.

Slumdog, colonial legacy, etc.

The other day I was chatting with a friend about Slumdog Millionaire. He said it was one more of those unbelievably un-ending attempts to sell India's poverty. (Really! If only India's poor knew how valuable they were. They must know, of course.)

Anyway, from Slumdog we went on to talk about contemporary literature and how I felt we lacked one, one which is truly representative (though I don't see how one text can ever be representative of India). He disagreed and said we did have contemporary literature, only it needed to be translated into English (from Bengali, he meant. My friend is a Bong.)

Then, I clarified that I was talking about stuff written by Indians in English. To which, he said, “But why should we write in English? What's the need?”

It seems so clichéd to talk about all this, but here's my bit for what it's worth:

Anyone who loves to write will not mull over which language to write in. We write in the language that comes naturally to us, the language in which we think.

Now, this should logically be the mother tongue, right? Mostly, it is. But because many Indian children are educated in English right from the first day of school, they may use English + mother tongue equally well.

I think in English a lot: this could be because of my profession, my education, or just my inclination. But, as long as I know and love my mother tongue equally well, I don't see why I have to shy away from the fact that I would prefer to write in English.

English wields a lot of political power over Indian languages, it's true. But, after more than 3 centuries after colonial rule, cant we get over the hangover and see it as a language, and not as something we grudgingly use because we were forced to use it 300 years ago? I mean, learning or speaking English shouldn't automatically mean you despise or refuse to learn any other language, be it Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, etc. If you choose to do so, [that is, look down on your mother tongue or Indian languages], that is your choice.

I do not like to look down or hate a language. I, for one, absolutely love to learn new languages, and love to discover the whole new worlds, new cultures, sub-texts buried deep in the womb of each language.

It is sad that most kids today cant read or speak a complete sentence in their mother tongue without faltering. And parents are hardly bothered with that. I had once read somewhere that the less you use a language, the more you lose in terms of the knowledge that comes with the language, like the different people who speak it, their occupations, knowledge about their bio-diversity...

For instance, there could be herbs or spices that grow only in a particular place and only people who live there know about it. They have a name for it in their language, possibly a whole culture built around that local uniqueness. But it remains outside your awareness and if the language perishes, all such knowledge, will, too. (My grandma can look at a herb and say what remedial powers it has. This language will die with her -- Of course, we'll always have our KAPLs and Daburs, but at the household level it will be lost. – Neither my mother nor I have bothered to learn this from her. Of course, this is not really about language politics. It's more of post-colonial India's suspension between the knowledgeable past and the liberating present. Aah, there we go again... making India's colonial past a reference point.)

Well, to sum it up: I don't see a contradiction or a dichotomy in myself if I say I love my mother tongue and English, and choose to write in English. I sometimes write in Kannada, too, for my own consumption. I frankly don't think it is worthy of putting it out in public. If I could give enough time to it, I think I could write as well in Kannada as in English, but, time... that is the one thing I don't have.

Romulus, My Father

A couple of days ago, they were showing Munich on HBO. Coming so close after the Mumbai attacks, a lot of the anger seemed familiar.

But this post is not about Munich or Mumbai, there's only so much you can discuss hate. Munich just reminded me of Eric Bana's other movie I recently watched: Romulus, My Father.

The movie explores the relationship between a father and son very intimately. It has speaking silences and spaces (something that I loved very much): the director, Richard Roxburgh, doesn't see the need for dialogue or narrative in some of the strongest moments of the movie. The movie had potential to be a very melodramatic one, yet it shies away from the overt expressions of melodrama.

This is perhaps Eric Bana's best performance till date. There is a natural, quiet way about him that suits this movie well. Kodi Smit-McPhee, Bana's son in the movie, is very lovable and shows very sensitive acting. There's a lot of joy in the movie, thanks to Kodi, despite the sadness that runs through it.

The movie is based on Raimond Gaita's memoir. Gaita grew up in rural Australia through his mother's painful absences and unstable behaviour and his father's resilience.

I would love to watch this movie again for its silences and the gaunt Australian landscape.

Look within

Into the Wild is about a young man who wants to avenge himself by running away from his parents, their materialism (basically everything they stand for), home, and society in general. A lot of teenagers think about doing that, and some do it, too. But Christopher McCandless redefines running away by going to Alaska, because he wants to be absolutely sure he will never be found. And he never is, not alive at least.

He’s running away from a lot of childhood trauma brought on by his constantly fighting parents. His pain is so intense that he cannot think and act like mainstream people do. On his way to Alaska, he meets different and interesting people and some insightful experiences happen. I especially liked what Ron, the old man, tells Chris, “When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines upon you.”

Almost the entire movie is about is trying to wish away, nullify or deny some hurtful memories/people. His entire endeavour of running away is shaped or motivated by two people he desperately wants out of his life. When you do such a thing, you have not overcome it. It’s like you owe your entire existence to the pain. You are shaped by exactly the person or thing you hate or want to avoid. But then, what do you do when something bites inside you? Everything you do will naturally be driven by that pain, wont it? What do you do to overcome that pain? Hard questions, no easy answers.

When ‘rubber tramp’ Jan tells him that he should not be so hard on his parents, Chris says, “I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth.”

So, what is truth? Or, should I rather say, what is the truth for Mr McCandless?
“Happiness is real when shared.” (This is the last thing that he jots down in his diary.) Is that his truth? And does he realize this truth only because he forgave his parents? So, the thing he was running away from was right within…?

Certain things this movie made me think of: if, say, there are people in similar life-situations who cannot walk away and have to face pain each day. How do they realize their truths (if at all there’s one to be realized)? What are their truths? Are they vastly different from McCandless’?

A thoughtful movie, well made. I loved the background music, too.

Why do you want to be scared?

I can understand why a new couple would want to watch a horror movie in a hall. But otherwise, why do we watch horror or thriller movies? (I don’t mean the murder mysteries, but the serial killer types. You know he’s out there and he’s gonna kill you. And mostly, we know his modus operandi, too.) Movie channels keep beaming them like nobody’s business. So, am sure they have some idea about what their audiences want.

So, why do we like to be scared?
1. Just too bored with the daily crap of our lives?
2. Get a kick out of seeing scared people running, getting hacked, mutilated, and the blood being sucked out of them. We just like to see blood? Just curious to see in which of the above ways will people die?
3. Because, it’s akin to what you feel when you see an accident on the road. You know it’s a gross scene, something you shouldn’t be keen to see, yet everyone crowds around, and you vie for a good view?
4. It’s way better than watching mushy stuff?
5. Helps you show off your sound system?
6. Fear turns you on? (Even better, being near a scared person turns you on?)

As is perhaps obvious, I don’t watch too many horror or shall we say supernatural movies. Serial killer types? No way. More than being scared, I find them so predicable. I did love The Sixth Sense, though. It’s sense of horror was so subtle, a quality you would never associate with a horror movie.

Was mighty depressed when I saw that my favourite channel BBC Entertainment too is going the scary way. They had such a good mix of shows, and now, of all things, they have shows like Primeval!!! Help!!

Sigh. Maybe it’s just God’s way of telling me to get back to reading. Yeah, Hollywood can even make the Devil boring.

Moooovies

Lolita
It almost hurts when Lolita calls Humbert a pervert. Oh, doesn't she realise he loves her so? But then she is just 12 (in the movie she's 14) and he is way older and you shouldn't think it's love. He's obviously taking advantage of her. It's just lust. Right? If he's a pervert, let's call him so, eh? But it's obvious we've been carried away by Humbert's fantasies, and 'to be carried away', by definition, means that you aren't thinking, .

The one scene from Lolita that will stand out in my memory is the one in which she is reading a comic book and giggling to herself. And suddenly, she shuts her eyes, throws her head back and lets out orgasmic moans. The camera zooms out to show Humbert lying back on the rocking chair with Lolita on his crotch.

So, isnt she an adult, or well, at least almost there, the movie seems to ask. For a moment there, you had us, Mr Director.

[Thanks, M, and keep them coming :)]

Hotel Rwanda
The plot reminds one of Schindler's List. It makes its point by playing down violence as far as possible, except when it turns up at the doorstep of Hotel Rwanda. When Rusesabagina's jeep goes off the road and he steps down from the vehicle to see what's wrong, he simply cant take a step without tripping on a human body. Very strong scene that.


Munich
It's the story of five assassinators recruited by the Israeli government to track down and kill the perpetrators of violence at the 1972 Olympic Games. Action is standard stuff, but this movie is not really about action. As there is one killing after the other, the assassinators arrive at the inevitable questions: will the violence serve any purpose? When will it end? Why should we as Jews do like the Arabs? What then does it means to be a Jew? (“Jews are supposed to be righteous.”) What does it mean to be killing for one's country?

When Avner (Eric Bana)'s mother tells him she is so proud of the work that he's done, Avner just stares back at her with blood-shot eyes. And I think he's thinking, “You mean all the blood... all the devious ways in which we killed people... the children I orphaned, the nightmares that haunt me, you mean you are proud of all that? How could you possibly be? You dont know what you are saying, woman.”

On a different note: Eric Bana is so so intense. Ahem.

I had seen bits of this movie just a month ago under extra-ordinary circumstances. Coincidences don't cease, it seems.