The naive idealistic hopeful Muslim girl about to marry her Hindi beloved (from Bombay)
Bhuvan’s heroic stand as batter (from Lagaan)
Dear Friends,
The last week or so I’ve returned to working on my book on Austen movies. One of the Sense and Sensibility movies is a Tamil free adaptation, Rajiv Menon’s I Have Found It (2000), and, as I have done with the three I’ve written up thus far (1971 BBC, writer Denis Constanduros; 1981 BBC, writer Alexander Baron; and 1995 Miramax, writer Emma Thompson , all called Sense and Sensibility), I’ve been watching and/or studying and taking notes on, reading about, related movies.
In this case it has meant first reading about Indian movies: there’s more about Bollywood (Bombay movies) than Tamil (South Asian), but the two kinds are subspecies of Indian movies. I’ve two books and a group of essays. And then re-watching or watching for the first time those Indian films I can rent or buy which have English subtitles. Now most of these are movies which have been hits in the US or UK or Europe — or why gain subtitles? Indeed those I’ve watched thus far have been uniformly superb: two years ago I made it my business to see Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005), and this past fall, one made partly for the US market, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, 1991 (and so not an Indian film [see commnt to blog], but an American one with Indian motifs, rather like Nair’s Namesake (2006) which I’m going to show my classes in a week or so); Sastosh Sivan’s Before the Rains (2007); a “classic” by Satyajit Ray, Charulata (1964, Englished as The Lonely Wife, based on a 19th century Indian novel); and now one by the director Mani Ratnam (with Menon as cinematographer), Bombay (1995), and one Menon said he admired tremendously, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan (2001).
I’d say that in comparison to Lagaan and Bombay, the two Austen movies I’m going to write about, Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice and Menon’s I have Found It are weak (especially the essentially silly B&P) or simply an ordinary if in some ways compelling human drama and love story, with the important subtext of strong women, drawn from Austen’s S&S (IHFI). B&P may also be said to be a remarkable sustained blend of superbly done satiric and joyful song and dance (so I will try to see her Bend It Like Beckham [2002] this coming weekend too).
So that’s the context, how I’ve come to sit here at times enthralled, quivering, and occasionally bored, mostly at moments in <em>Guru (2007), also a Ratnam-Menon product: it has some tedious filler dance-and-song and doesn’t become riveting until we realize the hero’s in-laws are plotting to destroy his financial empire and him. Indian movies are all so long that there is a comparison between them and a long novel. You must sit and watch, sometimes over the course of a day and a half before you’ve done (as I have other things to do so am interrupted).
For tonight I want to write about Lagaan and Bombay mostly, with some mention of Guru. In the case of Lagaan (which means “Tax”), I became so involved in the cricket game between the dastardly cruel English and the exploited, impoverished, brave and noble Indian villagers, that I was in an intense fever of anxiety lest the Indians lose that game of cricket, so much was depending on it. I literally ran home to finish the movie and couldn’t bear watching while the other side (the dastardly English) scored points. I cannot remember ever caring whether one team won a game over another, and here I was gripped, gripped, my emotions at full pitch.
The Indian team between training sessions
The way it was done was to make a lot I could care about ride on the game. Here’s the situation:
It hasn’t rained for two years in Champaner, a village in sweltering central India, but Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne, who is a Billy Zane doppelgänger), the commander of the local British regiment, isn’t about to give the parched villagers a break. He makes a bet with Bhuvan (Aamir Khan), the most spirited of the villagers (and of course, the handsomest), but only because he believes it’s a sure thing: If the villagers can beat the British regiment in a cricket match, he’ll cancel the land tax for two years; if the British win, the villagers will have to pay three times the normal, unreasonable amount.
Captain Russell feels confident because the villagers have absolutely no idea of how cricket is played. But Bhuvan believes that it is close enough to a game called “gilli-danda” they all played as children, and with the clandestine assistance of the captain’s sister, Elizabeth (Rachel Shelley), who’s appalled by her brother’s cruelty, Bhuvan begins putting together a team (by Dave Kehr; see the rest of this review).
Russell is a cruel sneering man. We see him kick, beat, and humiliate the villagers; he lives in the lap of luxury, and has decided to do this to tillitate himself with these people’s misery. Slowly each of the villager’s personalities emerges, and our hero Bhuvan is shown to be great-souled: he takes an untouchable, a Sikh, an old half-crazy despised man onto his team, because he needs them and they are willing. A curious fillip to the European viewer is Russell’s sister not only teaches the men how to play the game, she comes to love Bhuvan.
Rachel Shelley as Elizabeth (so the white woman watching could have someone to identify with too)
Everything is done to up the ante and create excitement and despair. Russell pays one of the villagers on the team to be a spy and to try to throw the game. The umpires tend to side with the English. There is wry humor in the obtuse words and gestures of the English watching the game; we find them hilarious all the while feeling they act so superciliously and sure of themselves because they are so powerful. The songs and dances are rousing and stir the heart with desire for them to win.
It is a kind of fantasy. I suppose the Indians of old really would have liked to be able to beat the British out by a single duel of this sort, and what better than this upper-class game.
Our team (David) beating the empire (Goliath)
Gowariker, writer, director had a brilliant idea and executed it with extraordinary passion and panache. Jim tells me the hero, Aamir Khan, went on to star in a film about the 1857 Mutiny, The Rising.
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Shekar seeking his children frantically
Bombay had me quivering with horror and distress. It started very slowly as I watched a Hindu young man fall in love from afar by merely seeing the face of a Muslim young girl through her black burka. After much effort, he manages to reach her, and she falls in love with him at first sight too. Both sets of parents are bitterly against any match: in an article on the Austen movies, Linda Troost and Sayre Greenberg argued that the Indian adaptations uniformly make family and friends kind and a haven in the Austen films because the culture (it was implied) would not criticize family. Well, maybe the two Austen films show this, but in this film and Guru, family members are profoundly cruel, adversarial (the hero’s father resents paying for his son’s education), vengeful (the heroine’s father plans to marry her off in ten days, a plan which precipitates her courageous flight to Bombay and immediate marriage).
The open-faced Muslim bride (Manisha Koirala)
The somewhat older experienced Hindu groom (Arvind Swamy)
What is so riveting, compelling, horrifying is after a few years of living together peacefully in Bombay (after initially being rejected by their neighbors for their intermarriage), Bombay erupts in bloody riots where Muslims and Hindus proceed to beat, stone, hack, and in whatever horrific way possible (they set one another on fire) murder the person of the other religion, destroy each another’s property (by fire mostly), bomb buses, cars, whatever is in their way.
What stays in my mind is the frantic cruelty of the way the crowds of people seek to destroy individuals and houses: they pour gasoline over people’s heads, over cars, over houses, and then set them on fire. A kind of wild half-crazed exhilaration and maddened despair might be said to be at the core of this, but poverty is not enough to account for such horrors. I know in Europe people accused of heresy were burnt at the stake. What is it when religion gets involved? People who kill themselves as an example to others during ethnic and social and other wars also set themselves on fire. How are we to understand this terrifying impulse?
Here is this story told in detail from another blog:
It’s a beautifully photographed (by Rajiv Menon) story of personal and urban conflict when Hindu and Muslim encounter each other. On the small scale, Arvind Swamy (the most un-herolike hero I’ve ever seen) plays Shekar, the journalist son of a conservative Hindu father, who falls in love at first sighting of Shaila Bano, a Muslim girl who lives in the same TamilNad town, and has an equally staunch father. Manisha is gorgeous in this movie and the lengths her suitor goes to are perfectly understandable.
Facing parental opposition, the two flee to Bombay so they can marry and live in peace. Things go fine for a few years, though there are hints of what’s to come when Shaila is buying vegetables one day and a group of saffron-robed men pass by, chanting slogans. Shekar works as a journalist while Shaila tends to their twin sons, then Ayodya happens, and the city is torn apart by two spurts of rioting between Hindus and Muslims, in December and then January.
During the first riot, the boys are terrorized by a group of men who douse them in gasoline and keep asking “Are you Hindu or Muslim? Answer!” while fumbling to light a match. The sons narrowly escape, but the effects are profound. In a brief and wrenching scene, one twin, Kamal, riding on his grandfather’s shoulders as they head home from a temple visit, reacts instinctively when seeing another small mob, reaching down with a small hand to wipe the ash off the older man’s forehead while doing the same to his own. In the January riots, as the family flees a burning home, the boys are separated from their parents and then from each other. One is taken in by a hijra, the other by a Muslim woman (see rest of blog for more on the historical reality of the mid-1990s)
So our hero and heroine get caught up in these crazed city-wide conflagrations twice, and in both instances are separated from their children.
The terrified children
The second time destroys their fathers and the heroine’s mother who have at long last come to visit and been reconciled to some extent after the first visit. They are burnt to death. We see them frantically running everywhere to find their children, believing them dead, and the final moment when they do (improbably I admit) find the children after the children have re-discovered one another is such an intense relief I really shivered.
Of course the point of this film is to make a strong case against religious prejudice and its dire destructiveness. The film does neglect to show the conflict is at its core economic: over jobs and power. It simply blames “politicians” for stirring up hatred without explaining why this is possible so swiftly. The intense poverty of so many people.
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Guru is a noteworthy film too, and by its end I was very involved. It tells the story of a lower or middle class young man who fights, claws, and struggles his way up from a poverty-striken life in a village to the luxurious life of a wealthy manufacturing businessman who runs a huge corporation. To move from his lowly place to such a high one, he must break laws, cut corners, do deals; this film might be said to justify CEOs, but since it’s set in India, the context is different, and he is seen in the film as a savior, as doing his best against out-moded laws and customs which keep the wealth and power in the hands of a few.
Along the way he marries a beautiful village girl, Sujatha (played by the ubiquitous Aishwarya Rai who also has twins — apparently a desideratum — two for the price of one?) and becomes involved with her family, and there’s the rub. He rouses the intense jealousy and hatred of his brother-in-law, Shyam (Madhavan) whose ego he bruises, and this brother-in-law and his wife’s grandfather set out to expose and ruin him — and they almost do. A side story is of his wife’s crippled sister who the brother-in-law has married almost out of spite, but who he loves intensely and gives a few years of happiness before she dies of multiple sclerosis. The actress who plays this role, Meenu (Vidya Balan) delivers a touching performance. I surmize we are to feel this villain hastened her death with his love-making.
Abhishek Bachcan as Guru
The performance of Abhishek Bachchan as Guru (full name Gurukant K. Desai) makes this film, and some of the minor characters he meets in business, e.g., the man who comes with him from Turkey and tries to commit suicide when the brother-in-law pumps information out of him. Many moving moments which are made probable come out of everyday life in a fiercely competitive locally-controlled (by bosses, by people in power) economy.
There’s a good blog on this movie (with a summary) and its music and cast too.
Rai in one of her dance routines
Guru may feel more relevant to our world today — the way Bombay is, than Lagaan, although we may take the side of Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story, here greed is seen as part of a healthy dream to improve the lives of all. Guru does not drain everyone else, but wants to take them with him.
In this sort of idealism we do see the weakness of this film in comparison to the other two; similarly the two Austen films have positions and stories that won’t stand close scrutiny by a realist. And yet what they do add are strong women’s roles, women transgressing to some extent (B&P) and going out on their own for jobs. In most of the above films women are wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and their big jobs are to have and care for children, cook, and wait for the man to return and be loyal to him. Period.
No one who has seen the above three films (or the others I’ve cited) can ever say that the vast world of cinema created and enjoyed by Indian culture is in any way inferior to that of the European countries (say French), middle eastern (say Turkey or the ex-communist ones) or English speaking ones (Hollywood, the UK). Some parts of their audience may be naive but so are parts of the audiences al over the world, and these movie-makers are not, and their “movie grammar” (to refer to all their techniques) when it gets going can be more powerful than the European-Hollywood. They know how to root their stories in primal emotions and build on these.
They also have a different set or differently-nuanced archetypes for men and women at the heart of the stories. I surmize Hollywood has not been able to make in-roads into Indian theatres because of a fundamental difference in the stereotypical males we find in the West, say the tough, hard, carapace, loner American, Robert de Niro, and the tough (always there for men), but loving, tender, sensual interactive male, Gerard Depardieu. I have to think more about the women in western movies, but at first blush I have not seen anything like femme fatales or independent “spunky” women in these films. I’ve read of prostitute-types, but this is sheerly in the area of sex where the Indian film may differ. Not that that’s not important 🙂
Enough for now,
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Separately because it’s a mix of an American and Indian Film: _Mississippi Marsala_ by Mira Nair
I watched this interesting and moving movie a few weeks ago and recommend it to all. One use of Netflix is one no longer needs to choose a recent movie and one can choose from a huge array of what’s in print, and then just wait for the goodie to come :). I also said the screenplay writer is also a woman, Sooni Taraporevala who also wrote the screenplay for _Namesake_ and _Monsoon Wedding_ , both directed by Nair, and _The Namesake_ which I’m doing with my students this term — and it’s going over wonderfully well, boys and girls both )I do have a lot of recent immigrants in my classes, and two from India this term). I neglected to mention that Sarita Coudhury who plays the heroine nowadays reads for the better books-on-tape or CD and it was she whose reading aloud of _Namesake_ I listened to some months ago now.
The story begins in Uganda where Jay (Roshan Seth) and his family are being driven out, and pronto. Idi Amin is threatening the lives and obviously taking the property of all non-blacks and that includes people who would not be considered quite white or white in the US: apparently among the groups of people in Uganda in 172 were Indians. We are seeing a middle class group of people dispossessed and displaced, and in this experience fall way down in status and their ability to have a fulfilling life.
I wrote yesterday about a black man, the loving friend of Jay, Okelo (Konga Mbandu) who loses out so badly in this social rearrangement, he self-destructs. It’s not clear if it’s an overt suicide or one where the person dies from forces within him or herself. Yesterday I wrote about him in terms of Bachmann’s Malina; today I want to emphasize how we see how black people and men suffer from these cataclysms of viciousness too. To copy and paste just his case: there is a portrait of a sensitive kind tactful black man, Ugandan, Okelo, and what happens to him is he disappears just in the manner Bachmann describes in her poem. Societies can destroy males too. We first see Okelo scolding the older male hero, Jay (Roshan Seth), and berating Jay for speaking aloud and telling him now he must leave Uganda and Jay getting very angry and saying how can he leave, this is his home, here is his property, and Okela tells him since Imin is there this is a country only for black Africans. We don’t understand quite what we are seeing until the end. At the end we see in a flashbook that Okela silently turned over a suitcase of money to jailers to free Jay (Jay never knows of this). Jay comes back to Uganda at the end and tries to find his old friend and discovers he’s dead. It’s too late; he never talked to his friend after the scolding, never thanked him (he still doesn’t know the friend turned over all his money to free Jay). He suspects but does not know that Okelo is Meena’s father — this is hinted strongly. Okelo didn’t fit into the new school system, we are told and just disappeared. They were told he died. We are not told he committed suicide only that he sickened. Jay learns by going back to Uganda it’s no longer home and his home is where the persons who count to him are, where his wife is working in Mississippi (miserable though this state and society is too)
And of course he’s not the only black suffering. What happens after the prologue, is we are in the 1990s and the young heroine, Meena (Sarita Choudhury, she’s played by a relative or daughter of Mira Nair when a young child) is grown up and the family living in Mississippi. Jay either has a menial job behind a counter in a hotel or does not work for a living, and spends his time writing letters to gain his property back from Uganda. His wife, Meena’s mother, Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore) appears to be the real support of the family, or the one who brings home a salary; she works in a store. Meena cleans in the hotel and is 24 years old. At a party, Meena meets a young black man, Demetrius Williams (Denzel Washington, very handsome and upright type); at first he goes for her to make another very sexily dressed black woman who has snubbed him jealous, but slowly he does fall in love with Meena, and they slip away to a hotel to make love and be happy.
At the core is a kind of Romeo and Juliet tale. The lovers are discovered, as they are, as this is still the south, small town attitudes, and nieghborhood spies everywhere helping the Indian family to refind the girl as they are possessive over her, and want her to marry within their familes and be an instrument of their attitudes. What then ensues is we see how the two families present their refusal to let the young people get together or marry as pragmaticism. Oh no they are not prejudiced; they are doing this for your own good; anyway why don’t you marry one of your own kind. I know see this demand is supporting the family clique (a new recent insight of mine). We get fierce scenes of accusation, recrimination of the two lovers by the two families. We have had hinted to us that Meena is actually not Jay’s daughter, but herself Okelos’ daughter and that’s why she looks so negro — the nature of her looks is not made explicit as it’s hot stuff, very hard to present without offending someone in an audience. It’s interesting to see this because in the south she is still identified as almost white: this shows the color of your skin or even features is not the point, it’s how you are categorized by everyone and who your family is.
What then ensues is the whites of the area get into the picture. They are indignant with this uppity young black man. Demetrius is a hard working (very upright as I said) businessman who has built himself a carpet clearning business (reminding me of _Sunshine Cleaning_, in the US for the unconnected the way up or to make ends meet is to go into cleaning). Suddenly his customers desert him and the bank calls in the loan. An arrogant white man on the other side of the desk sneers at him as imprudent and various nasty slurs of the usual type. From the opening to the end we have portraits of members of Demetrius’s family and they are people who suffer from race prejudice. Demetrius’ father has a menial job in a white owned restaurant (as waiter, in the kitchen). A cousin gets him out of jail and he berates him for staying in Mississippi. The cousin is going to California. He’s had enough of this shit. Demetrius has a brother going nowhere but down as there is no opportunity for him but through Demetrius.
The crisis is precipitated because Jay received a letter to come to court in Uganda to take back his property and he is demanding his family go with him. Kinnu seems the obedient wife, about to give up her job and go and they are taking Meena with them. There’s nothing there for her. She grabs a car in the lot (a relative’s) and zooms off to find Demetrius. How important it is to be able to drive 🙂 To cut to the ending, our lovers win out: they meet, somehow overcome the initial anger at one another because of all they have experienced, call the families and leave for California. Demetrius’s father shows kindness and loving care first by telling his son to go. Then Meena’s mother gives in.
Jay learns by going back to Uganda it’s no longer home and his home is where the persons who count to him are, where his wife is working in Mississippi (miserable though this state and society is too)
As above the film ends on Jay returning to Uganda and finding his property destroyed, Okelo dead. He decides to return to his wife. There is an upbeat scene at the end of black people dancing in the streets and we are supposed to love humanity and their spirit.
The film has flaws. Not all the actors are trained enough. At first it’s awkward or stilted in feel. There is the upbeat close tacked on. But it has so much going for it (see above). I particularly was drawn to the implicit exposure of the realities of family life and the complexities of racism and ethnic politics and what the “new” south (I live at its edges) really is. As opposed to endorsement of arranged marriage one finds in Lahiri’s first two books (not in _Unaccustomed Earth_), we see glimpses of an arranged marriage in Meena’s family where the young man and young woman are obviously having a bad sex life. She keeps him away from her; he doesn’t know how to approach her; they are miserable at night. This sounds like just what might probably happen between two people never knowing one another before in a repressive culture; it doesn’t help them that they are marrying and living in the US; perhaps in India they’d have confidants and do better.
What is remarkable most finally is our central couple are not upper class or upper middle class, not at all white, and not elite. It’s there the radicalism of the film really lies.
A fine strong woman’s film with many elements here would not be presented by a man. Okelo. The presentation of Kinnu’s secret and quiet desperation.
Ellen
And on the older (non-musical) Charulata:
I’ve never seen anything else by Ray, only read that Merchant/Ivory/Jahabvala claim his work as a precedent to their early in-India work and so an influence in general, and that the closing scene of _Remains of the Day_ where for a split second Emma Thompson (Miss Kenton, housekeeper)and Anthony Hopkins (Mr Stevens, butler) hold out hands to one another and then let go, is modelled on the closing moments of this one.
It fits the definition of women’s film as defined (judiciously) by Alison Butler: it has a central female protagonist and concern with specifically feminine problems and experiences. This is very broad but it still omits a helluva lot of films.
What’s striking nowadays: the intense quietude of the film, its repression of outward action and implicit behavior which speaks for itself. In a way it’s a little tedious to watch at moments since nothing outward happens very much. It’s in black-and-white and a sort of grainy kind of blotched black-and-white which emphasizes the extravagance of make-up, costumse the woman wears as a matter of course, and the middle class kind of outfits the men do. The actors and actresses are normal size: it should be said modern actors are required to be slender too.
And of course the story. It takes place in 19th century India. The husband Bhupati Dutta (Shailen Mukherjee) runs a newspaper he’s very proud of; it supports Gladstone and he’s gone all day and much of the evening. Unspoken is the lack of a child born to the work, Charulta (Madhabi Mukherjee). She has nothing to do, and he asks a cousin to come live with her during the day to do his studies in Calcutta and also encourage her to write, Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee)
Amal and Charult slowly fall in love but never have sex and never openly admit it. We watch them at their daily activities at length — this is the long strethes of nothing happening but everything so intense. They are too good to betrya Dutta.
Dutta is idealized and the politics are shallower than today. He gives over responsibily to pay bills and other things to his brother-in-law. This reminded me of Prospero in _The Tempest_ while he goes about the important business of supporting Gladstone in meetings and writing (the film means that irony). Well to make a long story short, the brother-in-law embezzles the funds, never pays anyone and absconds. Dutta is rich enough, a Bengali upper class man not to lose everything but now he must give up the press. He decides to stay home.
Amal then flees rather than try to live ina threesome. She is devastated and one night Dutta sees this.
His world is in pieces. The men he trusted betrayed him — though he sees Amal meant well for Amal got some of Charulta’s writing pulblished (and it’s a piece we are to look at ironically). But his wife doesn’t love him either. Still instead of throwing her out in a rage, he forgives her and she and he are standing there with their hands at the end.
It’s done in broken stills, rather like the stills at the end of _Lost Horizon_ where it’s done not deliberately but because the film is broken.
We see so many things of the daily life of the wife, how she has no contact or anything to do. This seems to me somewhat unreal — at least in Jhumpa Lahiri and other fictions women are ever embedded in servants and family. I don’t know. But also the frustrations of Amal and the fatuity of the idealism of Dutta.
It’s not at all a Bolly wood film and makes no compromises, no pandering anywhere. It’s based on a 19th century Indian story by Rabindranath Tagore; the script though is by Ray who also wrote the music. I presume it’s an independent film but don’t know.
I will try to read more about it. We owe the existence of this VHS cassette to Merchant/Ivory company which paid to have it printed some years ago and distributed (before DVDs).
Any comments anyone wants to make about the film-maker, film, stars, Indian films, Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala productions (often talked about most unfairly), I’d be grateful.
Ellen
hm… so long and big responses! i will be not so talkative: i do not think that indian films are interesting. of course, it is another world and Bollywood has a right to exist, it has its own history and stars and it is great. but i do not find anything interesting for me there. all these songs, costumes, tears and so on … this is not my genre.
Brilliant as ever Ellen. It is many years since I have watched any Bollywood movies so I am fascinated by your recommendations. It is probably even more years since I last watched any Satyajit Ray films – I do recall that all I saw were masterworks. The best place to begin is probably with his very first film, Pather Panchali, which is also the first film in the ‘Apu trilogy’.
2/14/13: I re-watched all three films in this past week. This is a note on Mississippi Marsala:
This time I saw the movie differently: I now don’t think Okelo killed himself, but was killed by those who would have murdered Jay and see that Mina is Okelo’s child (by Kinno), and Jay knows it. But these kinds of details are less important than the treatment of exile, homeless, where one’s home is and how we do invent for ourselves an identity.
A still of Jay coming “home” to find home cannot be a place for him:
Ellen