Film Impressions

REVIEW: Iti Mrinalini

PRETENTIOUS AND POINTLESS

An aging actress has come out of self-imposed retirement of 15 years (she went off cinema because Satyajit Ray died without working with her) to play Kunti in an arty English language film about Karna. At the film’s after-party, she finds out that the much younger director (Priyanshu Chatterjee) who’s also her lover, has offered the lead role in his next to a younger actress after pledging it to her. The actress decides to commit suicide. She goes home, tells her maid she’ll be sleeping in late, and proceeds to rummage through a trunk filled with old albums, posters, diaries and other memorabilia which takes her on nostalgic journey.

Her life unspools in flashback. She may be an actress by profession, but the memories are mostly about former lovers and a love child, and about life passing her by. By the time it’s all done, dawn is breaking through. Sleeping pills in hand, she spots messages and missed calls on her phone. They’re from another lover saying, “I’m there”. She puts the pills back in the bottle for another day and takes her dog for a walk instead.

ESSAY: Enthiran

GOD OF ALL THINGS

By Joyojeet Pal

During the release of Sivaji in 2007, I dutifully showed up for the first day first show outside San Francisco. The tickets for the first show had been sold out within ten minutes of the day they were open for purchase. I gratefully made an underhand deal with the theatre owner for a folding chair in to be placed in front of the first row of seats for $20. At the theatre, I realized I wasn’t the only joker willing to do this, there was a long line flush with Veshtis and already screaming fans, on one side of the box office waiting for their portable chairs. Worse, I signed up my fiancée, who spoke no word of Tamil, and was clearly disconcerted by the ominous signs of what seemed likely to follow. Further, the film was late, with all of us waiting in line. The wait gave me no sense of disgust or irritation at the prospect of my likely neck-craning experience, rather increased the excitement of anticipation. 

ESSAY: Women Who Have Jobs And Other Troublesome Pursuits (Part 3)

THE WOMAN WHO WANTS TO BE A MAN

by Joyojeet Pal

Read Part 1, Part 2

One look at the depiction of women driving car and two-wheeler drivers in Tamil cinema, and one needs little further evidence that a woman ought not to cross into a man’s domain. The office secretary is a traditionally gendered occupation and easy to depict sexually and trivialize. In fact, the secretary poses no serious threat to the supremacy of a man in the workplace, since, at least in office scenarios, the secretary reports to a man. An area of greater contestation is jobs where women replace men. Here, the focus is not only on the sexual complexity of a woman in the male domain of offices, but also on her neglect of her feminine duties through holding a job.

ESSAY: Women Who Have Jobs And Other Troublesome Pursuits (Part 2)

VAMPITUDE

by Joyojeet Pal

Read Part 1

Vampitude here is defined as the desire of a woman to undermine the rectitude of a man, usually with her sexuality as her primary weapon. The mythological nymph Menaka who helped trip over the sage Vishwamitra with her wiles is our exemplar. The classic though unwitting vamp of Tamil literature is Madhavi, the dancer who Kovalan, the husband of the virtuous Kannagi moves in with in Silappatikaram. In the epic, the dancer is herself an intellectual, and a deeply complex character who eventually gives up her life for monkhood, though RS Mani’s popular pre-independence screen adaptation (Kannagi, 1942) of Madhavi was that of a seductress, and the bête noire of Kannagi, the iconic heroine in waiting. In short, Madhavi is the starting point Kodambakkam vampitude.

ESSAY: Women Who Have Jobs And Other Troublesome Pursuits (Part 1)

By Joyojeet Pal

In 1973, K Balachander made Arangetram. In the film, the eldest daughter of a rural orthodox Brahmin family moves to the city to get a job. She is forced by circumstances to earn a living as a prostitute, but works her family out of poverty. In 2000, Rajiv Menon made Kandukondain Kandukondain. A rural Brahmin family is likewise impoverished, and the eldest daughter must negotiate life in a city to earn a living. She gets a job as a software engineer, and works her family out of poverty. 

ESSAY: Cinematic Realism & the New Tamil Bloodfest

By Joyojeet Pal

The decline of Sunny Deol into near B-moviedom is an important indicator of the market reorientation towards upper class sensibilities in Hindi cinema. The fight scene is not gone entirely, but between the gloss of romances set in Switzerland and multi-starrer screwball comedies set in Goa, the regular visual ethic for the multiplex audiences of Hindi film watchers is increasingly less crusty. The one-man army bashing up a line of extras is more or less disappearing from the Hindi film narrative. As the prices of theatre tickets slide past the affordable ranges for the urban poor, Mithunda’s retirement from lead star makes timely space for a the rise of Bhojpuri cinema. Here, as in most vernacular cinema, the ceremonial bashing remains a necessary reinforcement of the protagonist’s masculinity and a guaranteed quencher of the audience’s blood-thirst at the end of a ticket price worth of air conditioning.

DVD REVIEW: Vinnaithandi Varuvaya (2010)

LOVE STORY 2010

By Joyojeet Pal

“Yenna daa maccha? Love-failureaa?” (trans: ‘What’s up buddy? Love failure?) This is one of the most repeated lines in recent Tamil cinema, perhaps at par with pregnancy proclamations of yore. So what makes a great love story? For most Indian cinema, failure is a good starting point. Indians love unrequited love, especially when it’s peppered with a dash of misogyny. What other culture can boast such a vast archive of ‘sad songs’ in practically every vernacular of film songs, with a distinct numerical skew towards the brooding male baritone. Theories abound through overturned quarters of Old Monk: perhaps the love story is situated perfectly at the point of bare contact between tradition and modernity in urban India. Indeed, the college or neighbourhood sweetheart (that one possibly never even got introduced) was a brilliant distraction, a blinding hope that obscured the reality of a parent-induced partnership that lay in ambush somewhere down the line. 

REVIEW: Tamil Padam

AN AUTHENTIC SPOOF

by Joyojeet Pal

A few years ago, I sat across from a film producer trying to peddle a script. It was a spoof of a typical Tamil film set in Vaniyambadi. The producer, who fell asleep almost immediately as I started the reading confessed a spoof was not a saleable genre in South Indian cinema.. In the neighbourhood of ‘mass films’ populated by testosterone-peppered fans frothing at savage beatings, the spoof offers temporal relief in the comic sequence peppered with mimicry of film stars, nameless politicians, and other easy targets like municipal services. But moving from interludes to an entire film based on comic satire was, in his now discredited opinion, untenable. In the past year, three money-making films in Tamil have been straight-out spoofs – Quick Gun Murugan, Irumbukottai Murattu Singham, and Tamil Padam. Of these, the first two are cowboy westerns, the third, Tamil Padam, is quite simply what its name translates to -- ‘Tamil Film.’

REVIEW: Raavan, Raavanan (3)

A SOFT CORNER FOR BAD GUYS

'It's best I should let you go...If I let you go, she is mine to take... I should let go of your hand... But maybe I will save you for her.' The voices in Beera's head are racing wildly ahead of the action. Beera and Dev are hanging off a bridge that is burning on both ends (symbolic? I don't know). I like Beera more and more for this madness. And you see Dev with feet of clay. You see Ragini actually choose Beera over Dev. Most people don't like that. We want our heroes to be 'All Good', heroines as only damsels in distress, not someone who asks sanjeevani/hanuman 'why did he not come himself?'. We want our villains to be 'Pure evil'. 

REVIEW: Jhing Chik Jhing

CHILDREN OF HEAVEN

Hindi cinema is going through a particularly listless period in its history. Not quite as bad as the ‘80s, but not much better either. There’s a serious dearth of good scripts and the idea of earning revenue through international ticket sales and NRI audiences has driven our films away from the realities of life in India, both urban and rural.

The Marathi film industry, on the other hand, seems to have revived itself by looking inwards. In the last three years, there’s been a slew of interesting films set in rural Maharashtra, some witty, others poignant; all well-produced, intelligently made and equally alluring –- Valu, Gabhricha Paus, Tingya, Natarang, Jogwa and now, Nitin Nandan’s Jhing Chik Jhing.