Film Impressions

ESSAY: Cocktail—Why Veronica Must Die

THE DOOMED WAIF

There’s a scene in the latter half of Homi Adajania’s Cocktail where Veronica (Deepika Padukone) gets drunk at a nightclub. She has just been informed by her live-in boyfriend Gautam (Saif Ali Khan) that he now loves her flatmate and best friend Meera (Diana Penty) instead. Veronica falls all over Gautam begging him to take her back, trying to assure him that she’ll transform into the demure Indian wife his mother (Dimple Kapadia) approves of. 

This disturbing moment, while it unfolds in a dimly lit London club to the sound of thumping music and gyrating bodies with trendily dressed protagonists, strangely resonates of Chhoti Bahu’s pathetic plea to her philandering husband to give up his dancing ladies and spend time with her instead in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. She is willing to transform into the kind of woman he desires, and even take to drinking in the ultra-conservative environs of late eighteenth-century Bengal, if that’s what will keep him with her. Both women are seeking love and acceptance from the men in their lives and both are let down. Ironically, both men are equally shallow and self-serving and yet, these women want to be with them.

Deepika Padukone, Saif Ali Khan and Diana Penty in 'Cocktail'

REVIEW: Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster

A GREAT TRAGEDY RETOLD

It isn't exactly a remake but a tribute to Abrar Alvi's adaptation of Bimal Mitra's classic novel chronicling the tribulations of a doomed heroine in the waning years of the decadent Bengal aristocracy of the 19th century. Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam is a timeless classic. Tigmanshu Dhulia's Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster does with the same material what Vishal Bharadwaj did with Macbeth in Maqbool and Anurag Kashyap with Devdas in Dev D. He parodies/subverts it without trivialising the source material.

Gothic passion: Indie star Mahie Gill with Randeep Hooda

NOSTALGIA: Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962)

PATHOS AND POIGNANCY

Ever since the release of Abrar Alvi's Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam in 1962, there has been widespread speculation about the authorship of this film. Abrar Alvi was its director, Guru Dutt, its producer. Legend has it that after the debacle of his dream project Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), Guru Dutt vowed never to direct a film again. But enthusiasts and academics have analysed the film threadbare to sift the individual roles either of the Alvi-Dutt duo may have played in its creation. While it may or may not have been ghost directed by Dutt, it certainly possesses the qualities of subliminal pathos and innate delicacy which distinguished his cinema from that of other filmmakers of the time.

ESSAY: Honor Killings in Indian Cinema

ZAN ZAR ZAMEEN

‘Hai maujazan ek kulzum- ekhoon kaash yahi ho
Aataa hai abhi dekhiye kya kya mere aage’

(There are waves in the turbulent sea of blood I wish it does not go beyond this Who knows what one might have to witness in the future).

This is a couplet by Mirza Ghalib that was quoted in the landmark Supreme Court ruling in May 2011, which decreed honor killings as those rarest of rare circumstances in which capital punishment was wholly warranted. This is a marked change from the kind of tacit silence that authorities have usually maintained on such practices in the past, as has Bollywood’s cinema of escapism, except until recently.

In Love Sex Aur Dhoka, Dibakar Banerjee lets his rather maverick lens witness the honor killings of two young lovers, something that hasn’t usually been depicted so starkly in a film culture where miles of film-reel have otherwise been dedicated to ‘izzat’ or ‘abroo’ and complications thereof. While much of the film is niftily edited and relies upon intrepid splicing of shots from several cameras, with all the hand-held jerkiness we've grown to expect from the cinema vérité techniques that Mr Banerjee appears to have mastered—the murders here are framed in chillingly still fashion. The footage is raw, the camera has been thrown to the ground, no-one helms it. The fact that it’s kept running owes itself to the lead protagonist’s penchant for exhibitionism (he’s a trainee film-maker), but this is a brand of found footage that does not necessarily fit in with the film’s overriding theme of deliberate and intrusive voyeurism. 

Anshuman Jha & Shruti as the doomed lovers in Love Sex and Dhokha