Vishal K Bharadwaj

You’d think that Sanjay Leela Bhansali would stick to what he got successful at — the extravagant, melodramatic, ultraromantic megadrama — but instead, he goes and makes a songless film about a deafblind girl and her teacher.

So, it seems, that Indian commercial cinema is going through another phase of diversification. The last time this happened (or at least perceived by the press to have happened) was in 2001, when films like Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai redefined what exactly it was that made an Indian film. Frankly, though Jism and all its spawn gave people the impression that the whole scene had regressed (thanks in no small part to some big budget flops from established directors like Sooraj Barjatya and Subhash Ghai), the commerical revolution in Indian cinema continued unabated. Films like Agni Varsha, Jhankaar Beats and Meenaxi continued to poke holes in the hull, but were either total flops or dismissed as that very catchy new genre, the ‘Crossover’ film.

Today, however, it’s back to the heady feeling of 2001 and the promise of globally successful Indian commercial films (read: white people — specifically Americans — must watch and like it). Surprisingly, only one film is causing this renewed buzz, and that film is Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black.

Back in the late 90s, Bhansali’s first film was the oddly titled Khamoshi: The Musical, which involved A deaf-mute couple, their child, and, of course, Salman Khan. I can’t tell you any more because I, like many, didn’t see the film, and while it did garner critical acclaim, it didn’t do much commercially. Bhansali went on to make the much more successful films, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas, and firmly established Bhansali’s style of opulent sets, opulent costumes, and — to me, at least — a lot of very melodramatic acting. Hum Dil… was a nice enough film, a bit too long and a bit too angsty, but being as it was firmly within the confines of traditional commercial cinema, it fared much better than Bhansali’s first film (and thankfully gave Anil Mehta a bunch of great films to photograph, some of them being Lagaan, Agni Varsha & Saathiya).

I tried to watch Devdas. I tried to watch it many times, but could never manage more than five minutes at a time. It was just a little too theatrical and melodramatic for me, but nevertheless it was a big hit.

You’d think that Sanjay Leela Bhansali would stick to what he got successful at — the extravagant, melodramatic, ultraromantic megadrama — but instead, he goes and makes a songless film about a deafblind girl and her teacher.

Opinion has been pretty divided about Black. There are people who absolutely love it, those who absolutely hate it, and both sides spend as much time as they can trying to convince the other party that they’re right. One Black fan went so far as to take out a full page ad in a city daily urging people to see the film. Unfortunately he made the mistake of bad-mouthing a lot of (perfectly good) commerical films, and he — and Bhansali and Black by proxy — got the ire of the industry for a few days.

With all this, for lack of a better term, noise in the air, I decided to just clear my head of any pre-conceptions and go and see the film for myself (hadn’t been too interested in the first place, because the trailers were downright terrible, plus I’m not the biggest fan of the Disabled Person Triumphs genre). I’m not going to tell you the story of Black because it’s pretty much exactly as you would expect from a film like this. How it’s approached is what would make or break the film for me.

On the technical side, the cinematography (by Dil Chahta Hai and Yuva lensman Ravi K. Chandran) is top-notch, as is Omung Kumar’s production design. The film is set in some unspecified time in the 1920s and 30s, and instead of being slavish to the period the film’s sets and locations are treated with an impressionistic flourish. Sometimes it looks like a theatrical play, and a good one, at that. Monty’s (no last name given) musical score is adequate but utterly unmemorable.

The film’s performances are where the real strengths of the film lie, with pretty much everyone putting in a solid turn. About the only problem I have is with Amitabh Bachchan’s god-awful English accent. At first I tried to dismiss it as just the character being drunk during his opening scene, but soon it became apparent that this was the way the character talks; it was forced and sometimes unintelligible, especially when the character starts shouting (when all you can hear are a series of sharp hissing sounds). It’s a bit of a let-down… I mean, this is Amitabh Bachchan we’re talking about.

The film also breaks the cardinal writing rule of Show, Don’t Tell. Everything in this movie is told to you. Every single moment of the film seems pre-scripted rather than captured, every line, every action, and it doesn’t help that once in a while the film’s structure twists in such a way that it just leaves you bored. For instance, a character we only get a glimpse of in the first half reappears later and, instead of actually showing us something about this character, we get this dinner scene where she spends 5 minutes telling us about stuff that we could have seen in 30 seconds in the first half.

And that’s about it.

If you think I’m being vague about Black, not delivering the hard-hitting, conclusive ‘Yes or No’ review, then you’re right, because I had the unfortunate experience of being utterly unaffected by the film. I didn’t think it was the greatest movie ever made, nor did I think it the worst. It’s a fine enough movie when you’re watching it — some of you may even love it — but once it was over I was just… numb. I picked up my empty popcorn packet, dropped it in a bin on the way out and just walked home, pausing only for a sugarcane juice. I can tell you how the sugarcane juice made me feel, but not Black.

A month or so ago I saw The Incredibles and had much the same experience (hence I didn’t write a review for it).

I will say that Black is different from commercial Indian cinema, but I must also say that it is very much a stereotypical movie. Only it’s a stereotypical American movie, the kind that’s released in the last two months of every year and is engineered to garner a ton of awards in the following months. It is, as they say, an Oscar Bait movie, which is why it’s being touted as potentially being well received by the West.

It may be in Hindi and English and set in India, but it never feels like an Indian movie (perhaps that’s why it left me cold), and seeing as I don’t like Oscar Bait movies, I didn’t particularly like Black (or feel the need to spend 80,000 rupees on a full page ad in Mid-Day)

If you like Oscar Bait movies, do go see Black. Or don’t.

I, for one, won’t be affected either way. That’s a horrible, horrible thing for a piece of entertainment to do to you.

Vishal

“This is mature. The characters never hesitate to communicate what they feel openly. They don’t sit around crying for long, long static shots; they talk. They do’t wait around for misunderstandings to be turned into convenient plot twists like in other movies, and this, perhaps, is one of the first things people won’t like in Shabd. It’s no holds barred without degenerating into a shouting match…”

The job of a movie reviewer, in simple terms, is to tell you about a film and whether or not it is, in their opinion, worth your time and money. This is generally taken as meaning that the films recommended fall within what would be considered a ‘good movie’ by the reader or the majority of them. If it’s recommended, then it must be a good movie, or if it’s not your definition of a good movie then it must be what is considered a good movie by the ‘critical community’ and is therefore worth watching nonetheless.

I recall an incident a couple of years ago when a guy who runs a popular movie website put a film on his top ten of the year list, and mentioned that when he asked critics why they had given said film such a drubbing in print (while admitting to love it personally), they all replied that they couldn’t recommend it to their readers wholeheartedly, that is was a movie that would not be well received by the majority of their readers.

This situation does bring to light the fact that the majority of people look at cinema as a convenient piece of entertainment that doesn’t challenge them. The rationale is that they work hard all day and when they spend their 50 rupees, 30 dhirams or 8 dollars, they expect pay off not just in a general sense, but within a pre-conceived notion they have of cinematic entertainment. This has led to the heavy-handed genre system in place today. In America you have Comedies, Dramas, Romances, Action movies, Fantasies and Horror/Thrillers, and in India we have pretty much the same ones, although they tend to all smoosh together frequently. In a three hour movie with a fifteen minute interval in-between, you can start with a comedy/romance, have a dramatic/horror mid-point cliffhanger, followed by an action heavy second half and dramatic resolution.

This would translate into the standard ‘masala movie’ plotline of boy introduced — SONG — comedy involving boy’s buddies, Girl introduced — SONG — boy meets girl — SONG(s) (depending on duration of courtship) — girl’s parents/boy’s villainous rival/supernatural thingy objects, boy/girl dies/nearly dies — INTERVAL — boy fights all odds to defeat the minions of girl’s parents/villainous rival/supernatural thingy, gets beat up — SAD SONG — villains party — ITEM SONG — boy shows up, has final showdown, wins girl, buddies show up for one last joke, freeze frame on group shot, roll credits.

This is you standard Hindi movie. This is what has, is, and will be the staple plotline of 90% of Hindi films for a long, long time. People say it’s all the same, that they want something different, but when something different — something truly different — does come along, they scoff at it and shun it like the plague (this is why four of the best films last year — Lakshya, Swades, Yuva and Meenaxi — were all critical flops, and not exactly commercial blockbusters).

Variations work. You can keep the same basic plotline, just shuffle the cards around and play it under new lights. In the 70s it was the Angry Young Man kind of films, the post-independence generation grown up and raging against the grimy machine that birthed them. In the 80s it was the more angry young men, only now they’d traded in their suits and
flared pants for stubbles, mullets and red baniyans, and while their predecessors were content with being angry at their daddies and the daddies of their lovers who had killed their daddies, the 80s hero was raging against The System.

Or Mogambo.

Mogambo (and Shakha and every other Blofeld-via-Gemini-Circus villain from that age) were still well tied into The System. Politicians were always hanging around their palatial dens, the pawns of these cancerous megavillains.

In the 90s people got a little sick of all the raging, and so the villains in the traditional sense were removed entirely, and replaced by familial discord, ideological differences, vanity and jealousy and the unstoppable urge to love, with nary a violent finger being lifted, except, of course, in all those gangster movies that followed Satya.

It is now 2005, and it’s about time we saw what this decade’s variation will be. A shrewd movie watcher will have already seen it, most notably last year. Most people don’t like this villain; most people don’t even know that they don’t like this villain, but they shun any movie that features it. The 2000s’ villain is the villain within. Or, to be more specific, it is the villain that many of today’s top directors are featuring.

So while Swades was about a man trying to find his country within him, Yuva was about three paths on that same road, each ending in a different destination. Meenaxi was about the giving of oneself, the cleaving of a part of you, about selfishness and life and the love of your creations, and Lakshya, the most straightforward, was simply about being. It’s not only last year; films like Dil Chahta Hai and Aks were tackling the villain as far back as 2001.

Which brings us to Shabd.

Leena Yadav’s film is very hard to describe, in the same way that M.F. Husain’s Meenaxi: Tale of 3 Cities was hard to describe, and if I were to compare Shabd to any other film, then it would be that one. Both are about writers, their muses, writers’ block, and love. Shabd has a much more straightforward storyline — unlike Meenaxi, it isn’t abstract — but nor is it a totally straightforward tale. You could say it’s like a Jeanette Winterson novel; it tells a story with rhythm and texture and mood.

The plot is basically about once-great-now-not novelist Shaukath Vashisht (Sanjay Dutt) starting his new novel after a two year dry spell following his second novel’s critical drubbing), his professor wife Antara (Aishwarya Rai) and the new, young professor in her school (Zayed Khan).
It’s a love story that is mature and warm and mad all at the same time, and for once, ‘mature’ doesn’t just mean that the protagonists wear suits instead of garish college-wear, or mention sex once in a while.

This is mature. The characters never hesitate to communicate what they feel openly. They don’t sit around crying for long, long static shots; they talk. They don’t wait around for misunderstandings to be turned into convenient plot twists like in other movies, and this, perhaps, is one of the first things people won’t like about Shabd. It’s no holds barred without degenerating into a shouting match (the other hallmark of ‘mature’ cinema).

The film looks and sounds gorgeous. Too often films use fancy effects and edits without adding anything to the experience, but in Shabd‘s case the editing, cinematography and post-production (along with Vishal-Shekhar’s excellent music) are essential. This is one of those cinematic movies; I can’t imagine it in any other format but on the big screen.

Aseem Bajaj’s cinematography is one of the highlights of the film; it alone is worth the price of the ticket. His camera is intimate and warm, lingering, quietly energetic. His work in Chameli was also top notch — although I was put off by a few times he resorted to gimmicky focus-effects and somewhat staid compositions — but Shabd is on another level entirely.

Performace-wise, Sanjay Dutt steals the film; he has a tough job too, since for much of the film he he alone on screen. I had never pegged him as a solid dramatic actor (he’s great in comedies like Khoobsurat and Munnabhai M.B.B.S.) but this performance is wonderfully nuanced, restrained and complex.

Look, Aishwarya Rai is very beautiful and all, but she’s never really delivered a performance I was 100% happy with. Until now. Yes, true believers, even she does a good job. Zayed Khan is rough in spots, but as the squeaky clean, vivacious ‘other man’ he holds his own. Certainly his best performance so far.

What more can I say; I think the film is near-perfect.

Near Perfect? Why not Perfect?

Because I can tell you right now, that 99% you will not like Shabd. It’s not the kind of film most people (critics included) will like; it bends most of the rules of commercial cinema while still being a commercial film; it’s not set up to be consumed in bite-sized chunks. It expects the audience to have — if not a brain — then at least an open mind and an imagination. In short, it’s a film by a writer, made for writers.

I can’t tell you to go see Shabd because you’ll like it. However, I’m not one of those critics who ‘owes it to his audience’ to
say a film is good only if it will appeal to them.

So I urge you, go see Shabd, because it’s worth seeing.

Page 3‘s strength is in its frankness. Subjects like homosexuality, drug abuse, sex, infidelity and yes, even pedophilia are depicted, no holds barred. Despite the inherent shock value of all these things, the film didn’t leave me with the impression that it was only for shock; things flow quite naturally.

If you would have told me two years ago (when Amit Saxena’s Jism was doing the rounds) that today a frank, slice-of-life movie about Mumbai’s high-society would be the first hit of the year (while skin flicks that try to out-thigh and out-cleavage Jism are being released), I would have told you it was highly unlikely.

But here were are in February 2005, THE FUTURE, and Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3 is out and strutting proud, even in the face of such heavily star-laden competitors like Black and Shabd (more on this film in a later post).

To be honest, I’ve never seen Madhur Bhandarkar’s work (despite the fact that he worked on one of my all-time favourites, Rangeela. Chandni Bar didn’t interest me in the least, Satta I have only ever seen half of (it did nothing for me, which is the worst thing a piece of entertainment can do), and Aan… well, it came out in the same year as Khakee, need I say more?

The only reason I actually trekked all the way down to Sterling to see Page 3 was Boman Irani. I could watch Boman Irani watching paint dry, and even though his screen-time in the film is limited, his performance alone is well worth the price of admission.

Irani plays the editor of a fictitious newspaper called Nation Today (which looks suspiciouly like the Bombay Times suppliment of the Times of India), and sparkly-eyed 22-year-old reporter Madhavi (Konkona Sen-Sharma) is the kid in charge of page 3, the page dedicated to pictures of the high-society parties and the people who populate them. Most of the time, nobody knows who these people are or what they do, but that they are famous and appear on Page 3 now and then.

The film opens, appropriately enough, on a PR agency pitching to a newly US returned NRI businessman (that guy who played Dr Rustom in Munnabhai M.B.B.S.) who can speak very little English, a subtle and realistic joke. The PR agency arranges a party in his name, marking his arrival into Mumbai society, and it is in this party that we are introduced to the major players in the movie. All the usual archetypes/stereotypes are present: the air-kissing middle-aged wives, the drink-drug-sex binging teenage kids of said wives, their armani-clad industrialist husbands, starlets, politicians, mafia, etc. In addition to this, a separate track involving all the chauffers of the party people runs concurrent to each do, and this serves as depricating comedy/commentary to what his going on inside.

In all this Madhavi does her reportergiri, not entirely reluctantly too. The rest of the film does have a plot, and a pretty decent one too, but to summarise it would be to take something away Let’s just say that in high society everyone is not as they seem, a few people die, a few people change (Madhavi among them), but the parties, inexorably, go on.

Page 3‘s strength is in its frankness. Subjects like homosexuality, drug abuse, sex, infidelity and yes, even pedophilia are depicted, no holds barred (okay, the pedophilia is not exactly shown — that would be illegal — but nor is it merely hinted at off-camera; this caused quite a shock in the Indian audience I saw it with, as we’re not very used to even hearing of it here). Despite the inherent shock value of all these things, the film didn’t leave me with the impression that it was only for shock; things flow quite naturally.

What is clunky is the dialogue, especially in the party sequences. It’s as if every line is tailored to be some kind of illustrative vignette out of a 50s school documentary. Because of this most of the already plastic characters appear even more two dimensional. In stark contrast to this, all dialogue involving Madhavi and her spunky room-mate Pearl (Sandhya Mridul, amazing as always) is punchy and entertaining, as is the office banter between Madhavi, Boman Irani and Bhandarkar favourite Atul Kulkarni (as a crime reporter, another well essayed role by the actor).

As the protagonist, Konkona Sen-Sharma is adequate, but doesn’t really endear and is a bit plain; in a film populated by dislikeable cardboard cutouts, it would have helped immensely to have a lead with some charisma. Oh well, on second viewing I’ll just substitute her with Rani Mukherji. I’m getting quite adept at this.

Another letdown is the cinematography. It’s functional, but that’s about it.

And finally, the worst offender is the audiography and dubbing, which ranges from okay to horrendous, and really takes away from the viewing experience.

Without giving away the ending, let me say that it impressed me; for once a realistic film has a realistic, mature ending. Too often do these kinds of films devolve into either sugary, deus-ex-machina meets jingoism endings (Nayak… oh wait, the entire film was like that) or total dystopian megatragedy (far too many to list here). Page 3 has a Mumbai ending; it seems cold, unfeeling, and harsh, but it’s actually empowering and positive.

One thing to note, though: there’s a sequence later in the film that is very gory (it’s the aftermath of a bomb blast, so what do you expect?), so stay away, all ye of gentler constitutions (as if the mention of pedophilia wasn’t enough).

Page Three is worth a watch on DVD (the TV-like cinematography will lend itself well to the small screen), or a cheap ticket at a matinee show.

Oh, and dear Mr Bhandarkar: do not tease us with Hrishitaa Bhatt in the music video and not have her in the actual film. I was sorely disappointed. Now that woman would have made an excellent Madhavi.

25 things I would say to Kabir Sadanand about his first film, Popcorn Khao! Mast Ho Jao!:

01. Fire your Editor (or get him to switch to organics).

02. Fire the Dubbing department.

03. Sync Sound worked for Chameli, and it would have worked for you.

04. Apologise to your cinematographer for sullying his magnificent work with such a crappy film.

05. Compared to Rashmi Nigam, even Sonu Nigam would have done a better job.

06. Stick to writing comedy dialogue, it’s your strong suit.

07. You do not need two Items in one film.

08. Also, the purpose of an Item Song is to actually spend some time on the Item… oh heck, just see #01

09. Establishing shots were invented for a reason.

10. So was the Plot Curve.

11. I mean, what the hell was the conflict?

12. Tell Akshay Kapoor that he’s in a Hindi Movie, not on a Broadway stage, and that the two do not necessarily demand the same kind of acting.

13. I know the big, expensive edit-suites at Prime Focus have sexy sexy post-effects, but that doesn’t mean you need to use all of them.

14. (come to think of it, maybe you need to switch to organics too)

15. (better yet, quit altogether)

16. Tell the guy who designed the logo to get a dildo or something, man.

17. Also, putting “This Season’s Warmest Love Story!” on the DVD box is just… ew.

18. Three Words: Plot. Coherence. Verisimilitude.

19. On second thoughts: PLOTPLOTPLOTPLOTPLOT

20. Go visit Khadi Bhandar and see what ‘uncool’ kurtas really look like.

21. Give us back the one hour of the film that seems to have been missing.

22. Take away the entire second half except for the Yash Tonk bits.

23. Speaking of which, shame on you for not putting Yash Tonk in any of the ads or posters.

24. Fire Tanisha’s make-up person.

25. Go find a man named Samir Karnik and have an nice, long chat about what you two have done.