The May 2010 issue of UTV World Movies Magazine carried an article I wrote comparing Bollywood and Mexican Cinema with urbanization as its underlying motif. I am not very happy with it. I think essays of such kind need a person with greater expertise about the subject matter and with greater skill. My article reads more like a generalization extrapolated from a very limited knowledge of Bollywood and Mexican Cinema. As several friends have expressed a wish to read it, and as it is past May the month of the issue, I am posting a version of the article somewhere between my final draft and the one printed. All good parts were suggested and/or directly written by my editors.

Mexico has a small film industry. About 350 movies are released annually including Latin American, European and Hollywood ones. Hardly 60 of them are produced locally. Billion-dollar Bollywood is twice as big with over 100 movies produced and released each year in theatres alone. Even as the world cinema makes inroads into the lucrative Indian markets, it still prefers Mexico when it comes to creative talent. Names like Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo Arriaga, Guillermo del Toro, Gael García Bernal and Salma Hayek are a few examples. That may not be without reason.

Your God, My God
With over 85% Roman Catholics, secular Mexico is somewhat similar to India with its 80% Hindu population. Nearly half of Mexico’s population is estimated to be regular churchgoers and in India there are more religion-based programmes and dedicated channels and more temples and pujas than ever before. Gods, like their followers, prosper in the face of development. What is surprising is the steady decline in religiousness shown in Bollywood movies. Probably not so surprising.

The movies that travel across the world are often those set in urban milieus . They are the kind which portray the progress and problems of the shining economies and thus resonate better with the higher income groups at home and overseas.

Today Bollywood rarely makes movies where religion plays a major role, other than when it takes up its favourite themes of relationships beyond religions, of communal riots, or of terrorism. The clichéd scenes of a mother or a wife visiting a large idol of Lord Shiva, a Muslim stopping himself from committing a crime on hearing the echoes of a namaaz recital, or a joint family merrily standing in the mandir wearing white are mostly a thing of the past. Neither are these days for mythology, nor for atheist militancy. While increasingly large numbers of youth aimlessly vacillate between religious fervour and agnosticism, recent movies that address faith as a concept and not merely as a category hardly come to my mind. As if drowned by the din of modern machinery, conversations with God – blameful, remorseful, and thankful ones – and externalised internal debates have become antiquated and not yet upgraded.

Sins (Vinod Pande, 2005), set in a coastal town in Kerala, is one recent movie in which religion played a central theme, but it sank to such abysmal depths that its director chose to make Red Swastik (2007) next. Reincarnation is central to Karzzz (Satish Kaushik, 2008), but it is only a remake of Karz (Subhash Ghai, 1980). Interestingly, Sins may have borrowed a thing or two from the Mexican Oscar-nominated The Crime of Padre Amaro (El crimen del padre Amaro, Carlos Carrera, 2002) which was itself adaptated from renowned Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queirós’ novel of the same name. Both movies are about a small-town Catholic priest who becomes infatuated with a young girl. The Mexican movie became the biggest commercial success of all time in Mexico, even after the offended Catholic organisations emphatically asked the government to ban it and the people not to see it. This is not an exception. Acclaimed director Carlos Reygadas is most known for Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (Batalla en en cielo, 2005), and Silent Light (Stellet licht, 2007), all of which examine Christianity and its myths.

Sex and Other Stories
Unlike the controversy surrounding the “sexually explicit” topless scenes of Seema Rahmani in Sins, the controversy of El crimen del padre Amaro only had to do with them involving a Catholic priest. While exploring sexuality more “openly” is fast becoming a favourite among our directors demonstrating the urban leap of faith in movies, unabashed exploration, depiction and even reception of sexuality has been common to Mexican mainstream movies and audiences. In the coming-of-age movie And Your Mother, Too (Y tu mamá también, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) two teenage boys learn about love, friendship, sex and life during their road trip in company with an older woman that they both become attracted to. The movie set a record by getting the biggest ever opening in Mexico and went on to become a cult classic around the world.

The apparently progressive views of the urban youth, the controversies about the morality of pre-marital sex, a greater and more open dialogue, and most importantly the emergence of the multiplex crowd have all laid a foundation for “bolder” experiments. Love’s a Bitch (Amores perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000), one of the most well-known Mexican movies in India is an anthology film in which one story deals with the forbidden love between a man and his brother’s wife, and another with the extramarital affair between a family man and a much-younger supermodel. Showcase it beside Bollywood anthology Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee, 2010) which dealt with love and sex (although between unmarried adults) like no other Bollywood movie before it. It is common knowledge that CBFC India bisected a sex scene in LSD because it deemed it too long for the Indian audiences.

Mexican cinema enjoys a vastly more liberal censor board and a protective government. Mexico decriminalised homosexuality in 1871 — an achievement for a country with such a great Catholic majority. Violence against members of the LGBT communities (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual) remains a serious issue in Mexico, but movies have moved beyond the derogatory comedian “marica” (sissy) stereotype that was common till the seventies. Julián Hernández, for instance, is making a name for himself by writing and directing movies about homosexuality, like A Thousand Clouds of Peace (Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, 2003) and Broken Sky (El cielo dividido, 2006). The Mexican government not only protects these movies for frictionless screenings, but it also supports efforts toward greater sexual tolerance and AIDS awareness through MIX Mexico, an annual LGBT film festival held in Mexico City.

More than a decade after venues and posters of Fire (Deepa Mehta, 1999) had been set afire by fanatics and thugs in broad daylight, Bollywood is yet to produce a movie that does more than running ludicrous gags about a couple of characters pretending to be or wrongly perceived as homosexual. Indian cinema and audiences (including the multiplex crowd) continue to squirm when a movie explores sexuality beyond the consensual intercourse between an Adonis and a Venus, with strategically-placed props and camera angles. On the other hand, Indians have for long been comfortable with graphic violence.

In the Thick of Action
The claim is undeniable. Many Indian parents take their children to theatres showing “fighting movies”. Action blockbusters are broadcast on television channels during primetime hours. Bollywood has always banked heavily on “action”, though its renditions have evolved dramatically. Extravagantly choreographed stunts featuring risk-taking heroes and their doubles have replaced dishum dishums. Cold silvery handguns which can bore neat holes or make messy spaghettis off a skull have replaced cardboard machine guns. Cavemen villains operating from beeping, kitschy hideouts have made way for the chic face of evil. Besides, even the nature of these crimes are now more urban, more sophisticated. Stories are being drawn from real-life inspirations and movies featuring the increasingly dangerous cities rife with extortion, kidnapping, corruption, the omnipresent underworld, sex crimes and now terrorism are being abundantly made.

The appetite for violence in Bollywood and Mexican cinema and of their audiences is comparable. In Without Name (Sin Nombre, Cary Fukunaga, 2009) two men force a child to carry out the execution of their prisoner, and then feed the prisoner’s viscera to dogs. In Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) the protagonist of the first story primarily earns money through brutal dog fights, and pissed off bad men shoot their defeated dogs in Bollywood ishtyle. While crime in Mexican movies is usually about the drug cartels, corruption in the Church and the government, and illegal emigration, they have also started scratching beneath the surface with movies like The Zone (La Zona, Rodrigo Plá, 2007). La Zona is an unsentimental critique of the urban society, of the great virtual wall between the rich and the poor, and especially of the changing realities and requirements of the well-to-do to live peacefully within the confines of their secure, gated communities.

People, lives and stories will keep changing till they reach stable ground during urbanisation. Both Mexico and India are in that stage now where the past is a powerless patriarch, impotent but an influence nonetheless on whatever the future is to bring. Change is imminent and exciting. Especially for filmmakers hoping to tell riveting stories of a generation caught in conflicts, external, internal and liminal.

The only thing I knew about Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha is that it originally had a five-minute sex scene which the CBFC cut to half. The last Hindi movie that I watched in a theater was Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. I was mostly disappointed by it, mainly because I fail to understand the greatness of Devdas. What struck me about Dev D then and LSD now is the increasing sexual liberation that mainstream Bollywood is witnessing. It is nowhere close to accepting sex as an integral part of life (as in Europe), but it is acknowledging its presence in the society, in youth, and on the Internet.

LSD is not doing as well as I wish it. On its eighth day, a Saturday second show screened on the biggest screen of a multiplex here was only half-filled. I wonder whether it is the unknown cast or the reality atmosphere that is putting off the crowds. If it is the word of mouth about the “adultness”, it is a pity for it has nothing more shocking than is shown round the clock on various Indian news and reality TV shows.

The movie opens without titles, with a promise that the viewers will be treated to three raunchy movies for just one movie ticket (though popcorn doesn’t really fit here), and it takes us on an unabashed tour of sensationalism. The three “movies” tightly share their themes and are loosely interconnected in the way many well-known non-Indian movies are (e.g. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Paul Haggis’ Crash, Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic). I don’t intend to draw too much attention to this novelty, but it has been executed carefully here and I would like to see whether and how Indian Cinema milks it.

In the first movie, a young lad and a lass studying in a film institute fall in love while he directs a movie for his diploma certificate in which she plays the heroine. She is rich and he is street-smart, but together they are only fools for love. They reminded me of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (creepy Ricky Fitts with a camera in hand) and Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (director and ingénue). Why the scholarship-sponsored young director would make such a clichéd and terribly-acted movie is beyond me (he prays director Adityji), but its production gave Dibakar the opportunity to throw many stones at today’s state of Bollywood and more on reality TV. The entire movie is shown through a camera spitting out the timestamp, aspect ratio, battery charge, and lighting, and I was initially curious why Dibakar chose to include them. He may have been drawing our attention to the fact that the characters outside the young lad’s movie act as dramatically (reality ishtyle) as those inside it. It is a distraction. It could be my inexperience with watching reality TV. During the first married night of the protagonists, I found myself wondering whether the shot would be cut because the camera only had two minutes of charge left.

Voyeuristic hidden camera scandals are apparently all the rage in India, and Indians find the grainy videos more orgasmic than autoerotic asphyxiation. I am amused by the amount of research that must have gone into making the second movie, which revolves around an unemployed loser’s attempts to make a titillating video using the CCTV cameras in a supermarket. He desperately needs the money, and his conscience can turn around and on and off like the cameras that he controls (and sometimes doesn’t). After one beautiful caricature of a salesgirl calls his bluff, he digs his way towards another salesgirl with low self-esteem. He respects and likes her, gets attracted to her, tries to possess her, and she falls for him. The characters and their story are more developed than in the previous movie, but they mostly continue to act, especially talk, the way people do on reality TV, as if they are aware of the camera and the roles that it entails for them. Random thought: would a man jerk off on the night that he witnesses a gun shooting?

In the third movie, a cameraman who was once involved in prestigious sting operations, finds a candidate for a sex “sting of the century” which is all that his new employer wants from him (thanks to TRP ratings and a beautiful award on her table). The candidate was abandoned by the topmost album singer for a Russian (could have been an Ukrainian) who was quicker on her knees. The scorned woman wants revenge after surviving a suicide attempt (like the cameraman). The cameraman and the woman try to execute the sting operation, sketched by his boss and her assistant, and enhanced by them. As the movie progresses, the camera recedes, and while I welcomed it, it also distracted me too much just the way head-hopping and POV transitions within a paragraph distract readers. I am mostly ignorant about camera positions, but here I started feeling that it interfered with the story.

While the three movies seem to be centered around love, sex and betrayal respectively, each of them have all three elements as their central themes. The most enchanting aspect of LSD is the set of progressions from one movie to the next: the receding camera awareness, the increasing camera importance, the thickening plots, the deepening characters, the increasing casualness of sex, the decreasing crime, … I tip my hat to Dibakar Banerjee.

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Himmat karne wAlonki hAr nahin hOti

Three years ago Anupam Kher received a note that read, “You don’t belong to the category of heroes and lead actors, but we can’t not award you because that would draw everyone’s attention to our impaired judgment,” along with a Special Jury National Film Award. It was for his role in acclaimed Assamese director Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, a movie which may have been unfortunately misconstrued and mismarketed as a reminder of Gandhian ideals along with a sensitive close-up look at dementia and related disorders.

Hindi literature professor Uttam Chaudhary (Anupam Kher) is forgetful. Nothing uncommon for his age. He accidentally goes to a Chemistry class and goes on about Niralaji’s humanization of Lord Rama. Then he calls his wife who died a couple of years ago at the time of his retirement. Memory ailments have been troubling him for three years now, notwithstanding his psychiatrist’s prescriptions of placebos and his dutiful daughter’s wiping of his glasses. Having crossed a barrier, his condition is rapidly worsening with each passing day. And forgetfulness is not the biggest problem anymore. Delusions are. He thinks that his house is a jail, teenaged son a jailor, house-keeper a vicious woman bent on feeding him poisoned food, and himself to have been jailed for the murder of Gandhi which he doesn’t deny but claims to be by mistake. He recognizes only his daughter Trisha (Urmila Matondkar).

Trisha is not without her problems. She can’t concentrate on her work in Pratham, is pressurized by her fiance’s impatience, and is at her wit’s end in dealing with her father. His charades whether it is getting lost in the traffic, running away from home, or setting newspapers afire in his locked room, age her face and crush her nerves.

Even though one can’t miss the implication of a strong caring woman being an NGO activist, Barua’s remaining characters are as sensitive and more real. The confusion, fear, anger, and helplessness of the teenaged son who is increasingly preoccupied by his own future were brilliantly brought out by Addy and he impressed me the most in the cast. The elder brother in his chase for the American dream has for once not abandoned his roots, economically supporting the entire family, and on becoming aware of the extent of the situation he comes down to take the mantle from his sister who is herself breaking down. The gradual change in perception of an illness in a family by all its members, and the effects it has on each of them was handled in a way I haven’t seen in an Indian movie before. (Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue is another sensitive movie that comes to mind, but it is not about the family.)

Given enough focus, the thin thread where Uttam collects, hides, and sets afire to newspaper clippings containing violent crimes could have by itself implied a lot about his countrymen’s forgetfulness of everything Gandhi. Instead, Barua jumps from showing it to telling it through Uttam’s monologue towards the end of the movie to which every cast member applaud but I can’t. Had Barua not been overcome by this desire to also underline that Indians have forgotten Gandhian values, the movie would not have suffered.

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Chaudhvin Ka Chand is among the purest of Hindi movies I have seen, in terms of the language. Even though the movie opened with English titles, ladies before gentlemen, the only English words heard throughout were a few utterances of ‘municipality’, ‘doctor’, ‘inspector’, ‘judge’.

There have been very many triangular love stories based on the misinterpretation of words like friendship and sacrifice, and 49 years after its release the movie of course feels cliché-ridden even though it is not overly melodramatic. But setting it in the times of Nawabi Lucknow makes it more believable. Nawab Pyare (Rehman) falls in love with Jameela (Waheeda Rehman) the first time he sees her. Fate has it that he arranges the marriage of his best friend Aslam (Guru Dutt) with Jameela in his attempt to escape his own “match fixing” and to track his love and marry her.

“Tragedy ensues,” I thought to myself, and while it did, I was pleasantly surprised by how it unfolded. The conflict which is immediately clear to the audience was used to create ample suspense for the majority of the movie, gnawing our minds to ask when and which of the characters finds out first. This uncommon choice was not only fresh by itself, but also bought enough time for Aslam and Jameela to get intimate, to raise the stakes.

When Aslam and Jameela are alone for the first time, Waheeda Rehman’s expressions – a mixture of apprehension, coyness and curiosity – accurately convey the first days of a marriage. Keeping everything aside, this one scene 45 minutes into the movie has preoccupied me in the last few days.

ye duniyA agar mil bhi jAye to kyA hai! I watched the Telugu remake of Pyaasa, malle pUvu a couple of times before. It is a beautiful story of a struggling poet (Guru Dutt) and a hooker with a golden heart (Waheeda Rehman), two well-known stereotypes, though they were not yet stereotypes in 1957. At least not in Indian cinema.

There is something amusing when a party hosted by a publisher is attended by well-to-do poets who exchange poetry during drinks, when poetry isn’t just read but a poet idolized and his anniversaries celebrated, when the world gets poetry-mania like Potter-mania.

Two characters, however, the ex-lover Meena (Mala Sinha) who jilted the unemployed poet to marry a rich publisher (Rehman), and the publisher who understands that an immortalized dead poet makes more business than an encouraged struggling poet, are to me more interesting than the doe-eyed protagonists.

Pyaasa is often considered the greatest of Guru Dutt’s, but I liked it the least among the three of his movies I have watched until now. It may be because it was the oldest of the three, or even because Guru Dutt was also its director. I felt an abuse of close-ups, sometimes in awkward camera angles, exposing some shady expressions that were better off when viewed in longer shots.

Guru Dutt had a knack for creating a mystery, perhaps a skill he acquired during his initial thriller days. It along with the aura that the queen of tragedy possessed possesses greatly benefited Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam. Of the three movies I watched this weekend, this was the most haunting, and the mystery of Chhoti Bahu overshadows the radiance of Jameela.

Atulya ‘Bhootnath’ Chakraborty (Guru Dutt), a middle-aged civil engineer visits the site of his new assignment and the ruined bungalow which is being deconstructed reminds him of a past voice that has haunted him since his youth… The young educated rustic comes to Calcutta for a job in the times of East India Company. He gets it in a factory beside the Chaudharys’ haveli. During the day, he tries not to fall in love with the factory proprietor’s daughter Jaba (Waheeda Rehman), and in the darkness he is drawn to the residents of the haveli.

He strikes an unusual bond with Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari) of the haveli. He cares for her and she confides in him, and that is how we get to know her. Even though the movie is titled Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam, it is the story of Chhoti Bahu, or at least the only story we care for. This wife of a zamindar is trapped in the haveli surrounded by long walls and tall traditions, and is abandoned by her husband for a pleasure-giving courtesan. Depressed and determined to win him back, she tilts the status quo by accompanying him in his daily binges.

Meena Kumari enlightened me that it is not a tragedy when a protagonist is cursed by fate, but that it is when a strong struggling character is crushed by the consequences of his or her own actions. Her end is not a slow melting of the heart but a sudden shocking heartbreak.

The Guru Dutt team made these movies with great care for strong settings, well-etched characters (even the stereotypes) and novel screenplays. All three characteristics go hand-in-hand and create a synergy that makes the movies memorable. Take away any one of those characteristics, they could still have been good movies. Take away two, they would be like most movies.

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Miranda Priestly: This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

“You’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” Thanks to the people in that room, I lead a life without fashion sense and that is a reason why I constantly see clues that imply the same about the rest of the world.

India has a large number of dark-skinned people and notoriously beats itself for it. Beauty creams like Fair & Lovely, matrimonial ads for fair-skinned women, Tamil movies pairing dark-skinned heroes and (very) fair-skinned heroines are evidences in display. As you go west, women in the middle-east still cover themselves with veils, for whatever reason, preserving their complexion. Women in the western European countries wore veils and hats to cover their faces to avoid a suntan too. I cannot immediately recollect a recent evidence but found one dating back to 1983 in the book that I am currently reading. In the eighth chapter of Elmore Leonard’s LaBrava, Franny Kaufman tells Joe LaBrava the following about Jean Shaw: And her complexion’s great, you can tell she stays out of the sun.

Until recently, fair skin was considered to be more beautiful. At least by those people whose opinion counts, for no reason.

The west, perhaps on getting bored, started trying out other colors. Olive, wheatish, and other darker “exotic” complexions became more desirable. Tanning industry got bigger and bronzing is now in vogue. It would not have bothered me much. But Bollywood is observing Hollywood more carefully than ever before. Hollywood is tanning and bronzing so Bollywood is tanning and bronzing so metropolitan India is tanning and bronzing. Only, Bollywood and most of India is tanned by nature.

I have a similar theory about hair colors. And tattoos. And kohl. And jeans. And jewelry. And… I have narrated so many times to so many friends that they lost the steam.