There is a bittersweet bit of irony at play in the fact that Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s Academy-award winning short documentary film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness is on the schedule at LIFF2016. I watched it the same day I heard about the death of Pakistani internet sensation Qandeel Baloch (allegedly an honour killing at the hands of her brother).
A Girl in the River traces the case of the attempted honour killing of a girl at the hands of her father and uncle. Each year, the film tells us, at least 1000 Pakistani women are killed by family members who deem that they have sullied the family “izzat” or honour in some way. Saba’s “crime” was to run away and marry – in fact, to marry the man that her own family had arranged her marriage with, a marriage they decided to break off when Saba’s uncle objected on grounds that the groom’s family status was below the level of that of the bride’s. Saba was shot, stuffed into a bag, and thrown in the river. That she managed to survive is a miracle in itself. That her father and uncle were clearly the perpetrators of the crime is obvious – they admit to their actions, justified, of course by Saba’s attack on their honour.
The film is a fascinating and heartbreaking look at a system which pits tradition against modernity, at varying interpretations of Islaam, and at community pressures which come into play – it turns out that in the cases of honour killings, perpetrators may be acquitted and released if close family members of the victim forgive them. Saba, having survived, must be the one to decide if she will forgive her father and uncle and allow them to go free.
When Vibhavari (Sugandha Garg), an up-and-coming Bollywood music director, finds herself facing a creative block, she sets off for Punjab to meet and record folk singer Bibi Swaroop (Sadhana Singh). She first meets Bibi’s son, Mastana (Siddhant Behl), a charming and personable local singer himself, who insists that Vibs must listen to him sing and record him. In Mastana and his mother Bibi, Vibs finds the inspiration that has been escaping her. It’s not surprising that Vibs and Mastana grow close – close enough to spend the night together, admittedly encouraged by not only their music, but also by a bottle of Gulabo (the country liquor that also featured in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola). Mastana is mortified; Vibs sees it as something pure and natural, but, in the end, no big deal.
This, frankly, is one of several refreshing things about Shefali Bhushan’s film Jugni (literally a female firefly, but the word also refers to a kind of life essence, making it an incredibly apt title for a film that deals with music as a great life force for those creating as well as those listening) – there is no grand romance between our two leads, and, in fact, they both have partners (Preeto and Sid) with whom they share equally messy relationships.
The film is not without its flaws, however. The story indulges in clichés (especially around the film world); performances are inconsistent. There are moments where I feel like more direction was required, where actors should have been pulled back. In a film where music takes the centre stage, it’s unfortunate that the actors are woefully inadequate at playback singing, making those moments seem awkward and forced. There are, however, some cracking dialogues, and many of those are delivered deftly. It’s too bad that both the story and its performances are uneven and sometimes downright clunky, because where Jugni is good, it’s very good and very entertaining, and when the performances work, they’re spot on.
Shefali Bhushan spent a number of years gathering folk sounds and folk music (she was the force behind the wonderful site Beat of India), so it’s no surprise that Jugni’s music director Clinton Cerejo’s music (with a little help from AR Rahman’s sufiana qalam) is the heart and soul of the film. And probably my favourite sequence is the one in the opening credits, where we see Vibs wandering throughout Punjab, learning to play traditional instruments, and talking with the region’s singers – a region where, she is told, everyone is a singer. Moments like those are when Jugni truly shines.
With Island City, director Ruchika Oberoi presents a tryptich of stories dealing with oppression and alienation in the modern island city of the title, Mumbai. In the first story, “Fun Committee”, Vinay Pathak is perfect as Suyash Chaturvedi, the corporate drone working at Systematic Statistics. The company’s Fun Committee has decided that the best way to combat declining productivity is to subject its employees to orderly, organized, obedient fun. Chaturvedi is taken to the mall in the company “Fun Van”, given an envelope of coupons, and a set of instructions that he is required to follow to maximize his fun. An accidental swap of coupons with a terrorist undergoing a similar experience has him mindlessly gathering the pieces of a rifle and putting them together, something he seems to find more engaging, at least, than gathering up pink teddy bears and riding the carousel in the mall.
“Fun Committee” is absurd and surreal and deliciously funny and dark at the same time – think of Jacques Tati crossed with Aki Kaurismäki. It’s a sharp send-up of everything wrong in the corporate world, and highly entertaining and thought-provoking.
In the second story, “The Ghost in the Machine”, a man lies on life support after being the victim of an odd office shooting, an event that allows his long-suffering wife (Amruta Subhash) a chance at managing the household on her own without his constant requirement of having her account for everything spent. She regains control of the family finances, goes back to work as a teacher, and her family begins to thrive and be happy, especially as they enjoy the latest serial on television (“Purushottam”, involving the tales of a perfect husband). Their joy at the recovery of their favourite perfect television husband is tempered by the sudden recovery of their overbearing husband and father, who is far from the model one seen in the popular serial. “Ghost in the Machine” uses the device of the television serial to parallel the experience of the real world family to great emotional effect.
In the film’s final story, “Contact”, a serious, quiet, young woman named Aarti (the always excellent Tannishtha Chatterjee), who works at a newspaper printing press, is engaged to Jignesh (Chandan Roy Sanyal), a foul-mouthed lout who appears to care more about his motorcycle than he does for her. “All this romance-shomance is rubbish,” he tells a buddy, happy that his future in-laws have arranged their marriage so he can concentrate on his business. Aarti suddenly begins receiving love letters from an admirer who seems to be the only person who truly understands her, and for the first time, hope blooms in her face. The truth of who her correspondent really is, however, manages to quash what little flame of joy that had been lit in her life.
Oberoi cleverly connects her three stories in ways that allow Island City to stand as a thematic whole. Her characters are dutiful, orderly, obedient; their lives leave little space for fun. And yet, as the film reveals, there are moments of hope, of love, of relief from the oppression of daily life in the Island City, though perhaps not enough to result in a completely fulfilling life.
If I were asked about the one sound in the world I love, hands down the answer would be the whirring of a film projector. In this day and age, when digital is king, I still remember the joys of watching films at my uncle’s house, the whirr of the projector, the dancing of dust in the light in front of the lens and – joy – the ability to send the thing into reverse, which gave us countless hours of silly pleasure. I still remember the excitement of learning how to use the projector myself, a skill that I’m sure has grown rusty as I’ve enjoyed a world of media streamed right to my computer.
The changing nature of the film business in India acts as a catalyst to explore the relationship between a father and a son in Bengali director Kaushik Ganguly’s latest film, Cinemawala. Pranabendu Das (Paran Bandopadhyay in a wonderfully subtle performance) sees himself as a true “cinemawala”, a film exhibitor, a grand merchant of hope and passion of dreams that will allow people to forget the troubles of the world as well as their own. He is ashamed of his son Prakash (Parambrata Chatterjee), who sells pirated DVDs, an illegal business that his father finds both immoral and a desecration of everything he holds dear. His son is a thief, and his thievery is causing the decline of cinema halls, of a beautiful world that allowed people to forget their problems.
Pranabendu Das lives in the past: his world is the one of India post-Independence, post-partition, when people needed distractions to lighten the burdens the world placed on them. His is a world filled with stories of Supriya Devi and Uttam Kumar – especially of Uttam Kumar, whom he calls the prince of fairy tales. His son’s world is whatever people want to buy – usually the latest Dev or Jeet film on DVD. The irony, of course, is that Pranabendu compares cinema to alcohol, allowing people to forget their pains and sorrows, but he drowns his own sorrows at the disappearance of his kind of cinema world in a bottle of rum, each glass prepared by his projectionist Hari (Arun Guhathakurta), who sits and listens to his ramblings and tries to take care of him now that he no longer has films to project.
Frustrated by his father’s judgement of him, Prakash decides to use a gold bracelet given to him by his mother Kamalini (Aloknanda Ray), for whom the family cinema hall is named, to buy a DVD projector in order to show movies at the local fair, and it’s a decision that serves to bring the relationship between father and son to a confrontation. Prakash refuses to work in the fish wholesale business anymore, calling his father a fisherman, which the old man sees as the ultimate insult – not because the work itself is demeaning, but because he sees it as Prakash’s rejection of the one bit of honourable employment he has, in favour of something illegal. “No business is demeaning, if it is truthful,” Pranabendu tells his son, asking him how he will justify what he does to his own child, already on the way.
Judging which of these worlds is better – old or new – is not as simple as it seems. Pranabendu raises a temple, in which cinema resides, but he is estranged from his family – his wife, Kamalini, for whom the cinema hall is named, has left him; though his son and daughter-in-law live with him, the relationship is anything but warm (though the long-suffering Mou clearly cares for her father-in-law, she is caught between father and son). “Now that you have a family,” Kamalini tells her son upon learning that her daughter-in-law is pregnant, “give it time. Don’t make a Taj Mahal in her name and then forget her.”
Ganguly’s films, especially Shabdo and Chotoder Chobi, have marked him as a filmmaker willing to explore the stories of marginalized professions and communities, and Cinemawala is no exception. But Cinemawala, perhaps, is a film that represents the concerns of a modern, globalized world and the society and moral values it is struggling to replace. Ganguly asks not only what it means to be a cinemawala in this age; but what it means to be a human being? What things will we place value on? What choices will we make, morally, socially? Are there values we should be hanging on to, even as we replace the things that represented them?
A wheel of change is turning, but change doesn’t mean anything more than different joys and different sorrows. And a father’s sorrows over his son need no retribution in this turn of the wheel – it’s the next generation, as a son becomes a father and discovers his own son’s betrayals, that will make up for the previous generation’s sorrows. Children betray their fathers; husbands betray their wives; and the world continues to turn.
Which brings me full circle: Ganguly’s storytelling is brilliant, as in the scene presenting the removal of the projectors from the Kamalini Cinema as a funeral procession for a disappearing art. I am, most definitely, firmly entrenched in the digital age; but I couldn’t help but shed tears at this moment, and, like Pranabendu, feel some sorrow at a world that will never experience the pleasures of seeing an actual film, and hearing the sound of a proper film projector.
Pari (Hetal Gada), 10, and her younger brother, Chotu (Krrish Chhabria), 8, live with their aunt and uncle after their parents were killed in an accident. Chotu is blind – though we discover as the film unpeels itself that Chotu wasn’t always blind, that he became that way after becoming ill after being badly nourished, something which could have been prevented. Pari, though, promises her brother that he will regain his eyesight in time for his ninth birthday, that they will see rainbows when he finally can see again. When she sees a poster of her idol, Shah Rukh Khan, encouraging people to donate their eyes, Pari decides to write to him, sure in the belief that he will help Chotu regain his sight.
The village postmaster is indulgent, at first, sending a few of Pari’s letters on. But then he tells Pari’s uncle that enough is enough, he must talk to Pari, and reveal to her what everyone in the village knows – that their aunt has refused to pay for an operation that would restore Chotu’s eyesight. At the same time that she discovers that many of her letters have been left unsent, Pari also learns that Shah Rukh Khan is shooting a film on location in Rajasthan. She and Chotu run away from home; Pari is determined to go find Shah Rukh Khan. She is sure that if she could talk to him, he would help Chotu.
What follows is an incredible journey for these two youngsters. At the heart of it all is the delicate and beautiful relationship between the two siblings. Pari is determined to do anything to help her brother. Chotu – well, Chotu has a fiery temper and a sense of independence, as well as a wicked sense of humour, but his one and only fear is that he will not have Pari’s hand to hold on to. The love of this brother and sister for each other is lovely; so, too, is their constant bickering and bantering. They are true siblings, there for each other, but also willing to scrap and argue, most especially over their choice of film heroes. Pari, as we have seen, is totally devoted to Shah Rukh Khan. Chotu is a die-hard Salman Khan fan, even wearing a replica of the silver and turquoise bracelet that “Bhai”, as he’s known to his fans, wears. In one of the film’s most delightful and enjoyable moments, each morning before they leave for school, Chotu flips a coin. Whoever wins the toss gets to start a story about his or her favourite star. Pari complains that a win for Salman stunts her creativity; Chotu bemoans the inevitable romance track that comes with SRK.
Their journey is filled with wonder and danger, and even a few miracles. On their way, they meet strangers who help them, who watch out for them, and who save them, for not everyone they meet is looking out for their best interest. And almost everyone they meet has a story about Shah Rukh Khan – adding to the film’s charm and humour (and it has plenty of both).
Dhanak is a film with a message – with several messages, in fact – but director Nagesh Kukunoor never allows it to become preachy or maudlin. He’s aided aptly by all the performances in the film – Pari and Chotu’s aunt and uncle could easily have been seen to be evil, but instead, the actors give us enough nuance, which, combined with the excellent storytelling, allows us to accept them for who they are, and to understand that they are not bad people, they just need to learn to do better for the children entrusted to their care.
In some ways, I’m not surprised I so throughly enjoyed Dhanak; Kukunoor also directed two of my most favourite films, Iqbal (2005), about a deaf and mute youngster who wants to play cricket – and there, the brother/sister relationship also forms a strong core; and Dor (2006), a film about the relationship that grows between two women, one Hindu, one Muslim, when they are brought together over a challenging issue.
“Magic is everywhere,” says dadisa (Bharati Achrekar, whose voice viewers may recognize as that of the upstairs Auntie in The Lunchbox), a blind old woman who Pari and Chotu meet on their journey. “Once you see it, all you have to do is reach out and grab some in your fist and swallow it. And then you will see the magic in you.”
Nagesh Kukunoor must have grabbed a whole fistfull of magic, for his film Dhanak is just cracking with it.
(Dhanak opens in India on June 17, 1016, after a strong run on the festival circuit. This review was originally part of the Bollyspice coverage of LIFF2015.)
Totally Filmi's appearances elsewhere
The "It Takes a Thief Blogathon" hosted by Moon In Gemini
I'll be writing about Sapthamashree Thaskaraha.
The "Food in Film Blogathon" organized by Speakeasy - Mostly Classic Movies
I'll be writing about Ustad Hotel.
"The Swashathon is back! 2017 Blogathon of Swashbuckling Adventure" organized by Movies Silently
Check for my Swashathon entry in July 2017.
"The Great Villain Blogathon 2017" organized by Speakeasy, Shadows and Satin, and Silver Screenings
Check out my Great Villains entry on "Mogambo khush hua! Mr. India's most iconic villain".
"Try it, you’ll like it!" Blogathon organized by Movies Silently and Sister Celluloid
I will be writing about Junglee.
"Winter Sports Blogathon" organized by Le Mot du Cinephiliaque
I will be writing about Breakaway.
"Criterion Blogathon" organized by Criterion Blues
Where I've contributed my review of Satyajit Ray's classic film Charulata.
"The Swashathon! A Blogathon of Swashbuckling Adventure" organized by Movies Silently
Check out my Swashathon! entry on 'Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1952)'.
The "Classic Movie History Project Blogathon" organized by Movies Silently
I will be writing about "The Apu Trilogy" directed by Satyajit Ray.
The "Beach Party Blogathon" organized by Speakeasy - Classic Movies & More
I will be writing about "Mosayile Kuthira Meenukal" directed by Ajith Pillai.
The "My Favorite Classic Movie" Blogathon for National Classic Movie Day
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