I recently caught a few scenes from SS Rajamouli’s Simhadri on TV. Some showed the hero hacking bad people. Some others showed the savior promising more bloodshed. Some scenes had crowds in them cheering the violence. All may have been cheered by the crowds involved in making and watching them.

A day before that I had watched part of an interview of SS Rajamouli (the initials stand for Super Successful, I am told). Thoroughly discussing his craft and influences, of course. He explained how all his characters are rarely seen in a real society and are larger than life, but how they are all realistic. I can’t comment on their being larger or smaller than life, but I notice that most of them do not value life.

I disapprove. My snobbery and indifference are sufficient reasons, but for once I feel eager to offer an explanation.

The setting is easy enough to grasp. There lives a superhero who minds his own business. Unbeknownst to him exists a most bestial villain enslaving the society with his thousand goons. The superhero accidentally saves a stranger or the villain accidentally mutilates a member of the superhero’s kith and kin, and inadvertently the two cross paths. The righteous superhero rises, becomes the guardian, massacres the thousand and one miscreants, and sets the society free. (I fully acknowledge the injustice done to the story by not explaining the roles of the heroines, the comedians and the items.)

The protagonist succinctly summarizes his principle as, “padimandini kApADaTamkOsam champaDAnikainA siddhamE chAvaDAnikainA siddhamE.” I am ready to kill or die to save ten people. I dare say that this is shared by many of the protagonists played by today’s “mass heroes”. Apparently simple and adjudged by a majority as valid, it is a war-mongering violence-hungry non-principle that is useless, inefficient and incomplete.

Neither killing nor dying is the first solution. They are rarely a solution at all, and at best temporary suppressants rich with side-effects. It is the reason why societies hire Police (hire, yes). It is the reason why societies debate the validity of capital punishment, and many have abolished it. It is the reason why the United Nations was and is considered an important idea and institution, however dysfunctional it may seem. That, life has value. If this sounds too preachy: killing is not a solution because it is not reversible yet (our medicine isn’t even advanced enough to heal fractures perfectly), and dying is not a solution because if one is willing to die for people he or she is likely to be more useful alive in the future. (I am doubtful about this justification for people certified to be dying.)

Superheroes are relatively unknown. I sometimes wonder whether the hope may be an implication of the importance given to Hindu mythology in Indian culture. Sri Sri wrote, “evarO vastArani EdO chEstArani eduruchUsi mOsapOkumA”, and another poet I can’t recall wrote, “evarO vacchuvAralani mIkElA vRdhA bhrAnti?” Why this useless delusion that some savior will come? Useless. Even the most courageous of people who bring change in the modern society, real heroes that are largely ignored by Indian filmmakers, are rarely blood-thirsty.

Corruption is relatively universal as a manifestation of greed and need in every opportune society. The superhero’s act does not involve empowering the society (whatever that means). It remains opportune for another at a later point to take over. Inefficient. The superhero’s style is more inefficient because it is at most an act of transferring fear from the society to the leadership, a temporary transfer. The superhero’s act of toppling itself is a form of monarchy (multi-starrers perhaps cater to aristocracies), a form of government that many societies have long ago recognized as ineffectual and less desirable than a democracy.

The incompleteness is best explained by Thomas Barnett about how it is not enough to change status quo (winning a war here) without reestablishing a stable self-governable system.

I wonder why the filmmakers continues to successfully retry the experiment numerous times, as if expecting different results.d

Interval. The director being a big Sergio Leone fan chose to include a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the shocking scene where Frank draws his pistol and slowly takes aim at a child. (The scene that may have inspired a similar scene in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay.) As fun as the homage may be, the particular scene was a bad choice here. It would have made a lot more sense to choose the opening scene at the railway station where three trigger-happy men wait patiently for Harmonica. That particular scene truly captures the pace of The American.

The main reason why Anton Corbijn’s The American is not doing well is that it has unfortunately been mis-marketed as an action thriller. Another reason is that it is not a movie for everybody. I often hear that one has to be in a certain mood to watch some movies, which I often disagree, but had I not been ruminating about solitude recently I wouldn’t have liked The American. After playing Michael Clayton it is easy to imagine why George Clooney may have been drawn to playing Jack the American. The movie is not so much a story as is a character study. It should have retained the novel’s title of A Very Private Gentleman.

Jack is a veteran in the profession of making custom weapons for professional assassins. Naturally his head is filled with doubts about what his dangerous customers, or any strangers for that matter, might be up to. In the opening scene, he is ambushed by Swedish gunmen for a reason that he doesn’t know. Perhaps he had built a weapon that was used to kill the enemies’ leader. As much as it is improbable it is also not impossible for his beautiful companion to be one of the Swedish enemies, so he shoots her in the back of the head.

We see three women in the short period of his life. He suspects all three. Two of them gravely.

As a skillful craftsman he is well-adjusted to a very long life of solitude, as may be best in his profession, but it is occasionally clear that he enjoys certain company. His solitude is at least partly a compromise. He must have trained himself to make his face unreadable. He rarely talks to anybody, never about his feelings, and he doesn’t show them on his face even when alone. Jack is alone on the screen for almost half the duration of the movie, may be more, and George Clooney made it an enjoyable experience for me. It is non-trivial because most of the scenes are not exactly what we consider “action”. But at no point does his mind seem blank. Unreadable sometimes, but never blank. There are moments when it is clear what he may be thinking, and moments when one can only guess. We see a man who is gradually getting tired of his life, who is getting desperate by the doubts eating his insides, who has allowed himself to feel guilt. There may be awards.

I have several complaints about the movie, much unlike what I heard from most of the audience in the theatre last night. Primarily the movie is not long enough. After the interval the second half of the movie seems rushed, abandoning the deliberate pace of the first half. (The righteous CBFC India made it worse by chopping several minutes of a crucial character’s role, presumably because she works as a prostitute in a bordello.) It is also possible that a cruel studio executive, no not the producer George Clooney, might have demanded some quick action before the movie ends. I hope to one day see the director’s cut, though it is unlikely to be much better.

It is only right that the movie is set in Abruzzo. The slow movement originated in Italy. Another irrelevant note that I can’t resist: Violenta Placido is one of the most beautiful names ever, as beautiful as the actress.

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To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the few works that I read more than twice, watched more than twice, read the book first and then watched the movie and still didn’t get disappointed. Harper Lee’s novel is also my default gift, the way some gift the Bible when they can’t think of anything else.

The novel is dearer to me than all the other child-protagonist novels that I’ve read, including those by Mark Twain and JK Rowling. Even though Scout, Jem and Dill all together have hardly an adventure that can compete with those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter’s. Even though their thriller isn’t as thrilling as the others’. Even though their presence to the world is seemingly inconsequential. Perhaps for those very reasons.

What Scout narrates about that summer creates in me the most intense nostalgia of a childhood that I seldom dwell in. I find it effortless to imagine walking beside those three with our hands on each other’s shoulders, to pull Scout’s hair, to grab Jem’s collar, to kick Dill’s shins, to grow up along with them. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter are great fun, but I didn’t belong to their circle as a child.

When I think of the narration, I can hear Kim Stanley whispering in my ears. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices, right there beside Joan Fontaine’s Rebecca. The movie opens with the most creative title sequence I can remember. And Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch. Not getting tired of superlatives, am I?

When I read somewhere that Pauline Kael described Atticus as “virtuously dull”, I had to agree and to face the question of why he was still one of my favorite characters. “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn’t explain.” That’s why. Atticus is seen through the eyes of Scout, his daughter. Most children below ten probably still feel that way about their dads. I hope they do. When I was ten my dad was the calmest, wisest, strongest, noblest and the most loving man there could possibly be in the whole world. He hasn’t changed much, though I have. Harper Lee through her vivid, humorous, and sensitive writing created a magnificent lens to see the world through.

Shush now. I actually wished to type a few lines from the novel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and this whole post is a tiny thin excuse for it. I may be breaking a law or two here. I consider the following scene the most powerful one I’ve ever read and watched.

———-

“Hey, Atticus?”

I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.

There was a smell of stale whisky and pig-pen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me; I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had never seen before.

Atticus got up from his chair, but he was moving slowly, like an old man. He put the newspaper down very carefully, adjusting its creases with lingering fingers. They were trembling a little.

“Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

“Go home, I said.”

Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance between them: Jem’s soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and snug-fitting ears were our mother’s, contrasting oddly with Atticus’s greying black hair and square-cut features, but they were somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.

“Son, I said go home.”

Jem shook his head.

“I’ll send him home,” a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.

“Don’t you touch him!” I kicked the man swiftly. Bare-footed, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin, but aimed too high.

“That’ll do, Scout.” Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t kick folks. No –” he said, as I was pleading justification.

“Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way,” I said.

“All right, Mr Finch, get ‘em outa here,” someone growled. “You got fifteen seconds to get ‘em outa here.”

In the midst of this strange assmebly, Atticus stood trying to make Jem mind him. “I ain’t going,” was his steady answer to Atticus’s threats, requests, and finally, “Please Jem, take them home.”

I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did get home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer’s night, but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts buttoned up the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and at the centre of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen falt.

Mr Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feel, clad in heavy worn shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham?” I’m Jean Jouise Finch. You bought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr Cunningham dispalyed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ month, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes me and he shut it.

“Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes … that you all’d ride it out together …” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

Asghar Farhadi’s Darbareye Elly opens with a small group of friends starting on a reunion vacation along with their families and a guest Elly. Even those who are not friends are friendly. But the truth is, even the close friends are only friendly acquaintances now just the way most once-close relationships transform from friendships to friendlinesses with each passing chapter of life.

They all make their way to a beach-side villa and begin having fun the giddy way grown-ups do. In a peculiar scene, the close-up of a stranger boy’s unreadable face is shown as men dance merrily. The fun ends abruptly on the next morning, when first one of their children almost drowns in the sea and then they discover the disappearance of lovely Elly. From then on they go through hell as they search for her, make some meaning of her actions based on what they know of her, and try to inform her folks.

In the middle of the movie we hear the quote, “A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness.” We get the bitter ending, and the characters an endless bitterness.

Elly is judged throughout the movie. Whether she can make a suitable wife, during the first half; the breadth of her character, during the second half. The movie’s merit lies in engaging the audience in two ways — in getting us deeply involved with the search for Elly, and in unconsciously tempting us to judge Elly and all those characters judging her.

Elly very much wanted to go home, which her hostess wouldn’t allow. She may have abandoned the playing children and left on a whim without informing anybody. She is a kindergarten teacher who possibly loves children. She may have drowned while trying to rescue Arash.

Sepideh’s husband Amir hit his wife. As the IMDB plot keywords suggest, he may be a wife-beater as that very well suits the oppression that we associate with everything Iran. He ruefully cried that it was the first time he hit her. Given the enthusiasm with which Sepideh arranges events from reunions to matches, Amir may be a husband who gives his wife the freedom that spouses deserve.

Sepideh conspired to fix Elly with recently divorced Ahmad through the reunion, told lies beginning with the white lie to the villa caretaker that Ahmad and Elly are newlyweds. Sepideh may be a dishonest woman mindlessly playing her own immature games. She brought everybody together, knew the past of Elly. She may be a person who loves the company of others and may genuinely be trying to help both Elly and Ahmad.

Ahmad… Shohreh… Peiman… Naazi… Manoochehr… all characters lie or withhold information, for their own reasons. The movie can be used as a good case study of writing withholding information.

As the director brilliantly orchestrates each of his characters in their chaos in an apparently effortless way, he also manipulates the audience into judging, that which all the characters themselves do. The judgments are often proved wrong, as imminent in cases where all facts aren’t uncovered, and as when convenience and expedience take priority over conscience. His characters do not stand out as personalities, but as different kinds of general characters each of whom we very well know. He seems uninterested by the inanimate and allows only the people, the sea and the kite to be seen on the screen. I suspect none of this is unintentional.

Having seen only a handful of Iranian movies and read very little about Iran, I am tempted to take the movie as a portrait of the Iranian society. Through some of the themes are applicable to all mankind, I could empathize with all the characters, making me speculate that the modern Iranian society is not very different from the one I live in.

One last word. Democracy may be the dream of modern Iran. As if to highlight the fallibility of collective judgments Asghar Farhadi shows his characters democratically doing what the majority decides. “A government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it,” wrote Thoreau in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. “Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?”

Image Source: About Elly Official Site

Trivia: The movie is the last Iranian movie in which Golshifteh Farahani (Sepideh) acted, and it may remain that way. Almost half the movies she acted in have been banned in her country. Peiman Ma’adi, who played Peiman, wrote Cafe Setareh. Taraneh Alidoosti, who as Elly asks Ahmad to translate the quote from German to Iranian, speaks German fluently.

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A few decades ago every ravishing vamp was made to die, either directly killed by the villain or during her own attempt to rescue someone following her remorse and newfound respect for “our values”. When a supporting character “slipped her leg” in her blind love for the not-so-good guy, towards the end either she died too or that not-so-good guy was good-ified and made to marry her. What would Helen Schlegel of EM Forster’s Howards End (1910) have thought about it?

Yoganand’s mUganOmu (1969) is one movie I recall where the heroine gets premaritally pregnant with the hero’s child. For the heroine herself to tread in that path seemed courageous, though the poor newborn had to be eventually left outside an orphanage and the movie had more to do with class differences and sacrifices of women.

Jandhyala’s nAlugu stambhAlATa (1982) dealt with similar themes and his chanTabbAyi (1986) through a short montage of scenes impressively portrayed the strength and vulnerability of Dr. Nischala who never married after a failed love affair.

Other than such occasional nods and mentions over the decades, women who make “bold” premarital choices have often been kept at a distance, if not outright oppressed, and this treatment is subtler though still perceptible today. Men, on the other hand, appear undeserving of such questions and thus this discussion is not even possible for heroes.

In Anand (2004), Shekar Kammula wrote a cute dialogue in his signature style of fragmented sentences. The scene was to establish Rupa’s openness and expectations from her relationship with Anand. In it she tells him that she had never kissed Rahul the way she kissed him. Sweet. Previously I never considered the dialogue to be anything more than what it seemed to be, but the last time I came across the dialogue I realized that the writer was carefully marking the heroine’s territory.

Rupa continues to be hailed as the true independent Telugu heroine after a long time. The movie starts with her breaking off a marriage with her boyfriend minutes before tying the knot, on seeing one side of her future husband and mother-in-law. Then why was she not allowed to cuddle up with him during their courting before that marriage that never happened? Would that have degraded her character from independent to “loose”? Clearly everybody seemed to accept her making out with the hero before anybody mentioned marriage.

I wonder if this is the implicit non-stand that the Telugu film industry takes. Anywhere else one couldn’t be sure whether a character marries another, but in Telugu movies there is rarely such a risk. So this stand appears bold enough for the younger generations to like the heroine going all the way with the hero, and restrained enough for the older generations to prefer the heroine not going all the way with her boyfriend who wouldn’t become her husband. An old newspaper editor once called something like this “peeing down both the legs”.

Among recent movies Chandrasekhar Yeleti’s anukOkunDA oka rOju (2005) appeared to accept the reality without judging either way. Tsunami Swetha’s was a character comfortable with her life style that occasionally involved sex. Her unplanned pregnancy and planned abortion get reprimanded by her friend Sahasra and respectfully treated by the doctor.

This line of thought accidentally reminded me of Mouli’s manasu mamata (1990), a rare movie which dealt with premarital choices of women and their consequences (as deemed appropriate for those times) with the sensitivity it deserves. I watched it very long ago and cannot recall to my satisfaction. The heroine (Sitara) gets pregnant with her first child (Tarun, in his first Telugu movie) and then marries the hero (Naresh) without telling him the truth. The hero loves the son as his own, and the heroine doesn’t because he is a living reminder of her guilt. They are mostly happy, maybe bittersweet, until a family friend (“Subhalekha” Sudhakar) asks their suggestion in marrying a “cheDipOyina” woman (Sudha Rani) who confessed to him about her past. DV Narasa Raju wrote both mUganOmu and manasu mamata. I tip my hat.

Times have changed and reality with it. The directors and writers, the actresses and their dubbing artistes, all know it well. I hope to watch a movie on what they know more than what they think the audience will prefer. Once in a while.

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