Cirkus: Review

There should be a way to get unhinged Ranveer Singh performances without having to see Rohit Shetty films. Singh is not as effective here as Simmba, where he threatened us with a good time before the film collapsed on itself. But even in Cirkus—a considerably worse film—his exertions are something to hang on to (at least in the first half, after which he seems to run out of gas). When his voice goes high and his body arranges itself at weird angles, he’s more a Looney Tunes creation than a flesh-and-blood actor. It’s a pity no one can encourage his natural silliness the way Shetty does, for no Hindi director makes films that are more determinedly, defiantly stupid.

Cirkus begins in the 1940s, with a doctor (Murali Sharma) out to prove, for some reason, that upbringing matters more than bloodlines. As an experiment, he interchanges babies between two pairs of twins at an orphanage who are up for adoption. Both sets of brothers are named Roy and Joy by their new parents, circus-owners in Ooty and a wealthy couple in Bangalore. Ooty Roy develops his own circus act—‘the electric man’—in which he joins exposed wires on stage (a childhood accident has made him immune to electric current). Bangalore Roy is trying to woo heiress Bindu (Jacqueline Fernandez) without running afoul of her status-obsessed dad (Sanjay Mishra). I wish I could tell you something useful about the two Joys, but they’re just… there.  

Bollywood rules dictate that separated twins must feel some unexplained connection that precedes their meeting. Thus, the electricity that courses through one Roy turns the other into a livewire, though he doesn’t know why. Naturally, a large part of the film is extended scenes of both Roys electrocuting people. It’s funny the first time and maybe the second, but after a dozen attempts you’ll start to wonder if actual electrocution is a worse fate than watching something this juvenile. 

After the Bangalore Roy and Joy turn up in Ooty, the film becomes a series of mistaken sightings. Shetty doesn’t bother distinguishing the twins, which would've at least given Singh and Varun Sharma a chance to show some comic versatility. Both sets of brothers look, sound and act exactly the same. Both families live in mansions. Maybe that’s why the twins don’t meet till the very end: the viewer would barely be able to tell them apart. 

It seems almost cruel to bring up RK/RKay in the same breath as Cirkus—one of the year's best and a leading contender for the worst. But Cirkus forces that comparison on itself by attempting to reference and pastiche ‘50s and ‘60s Hindi cinema. So you get songs from that era (‘Aao Twist Karein’, ‘Babu Samjho Ishaare’) used as comic filler and Mishra talking like Dev Anand crossed with Ajit crossed with David. It’s depressingly unimaginative—especially in a year where several Hindi films have made witty use of old songs. 

After Singh gives up the ghost, the film becomes a purgatory of bad slapstick and recurring gags. Pooja Hegde, as Ooty Roy's wife, tries to play it straight. Shetty regular Siddhartha Jadhav shrieks and mugs gratingly as a criminal with a Little Richard bouffant. Deepika Padukone turns up, presumably to ask her husband what he was thinking when he signed the film, and hurries off after a forgettable dance number. The only performance with some wit is Vrajesh Hirjee’s sinister auto driver. It apparently took four writers—Farhad Samji, Sanchit Bedre, Vidhi Ghodgaonkar and Yunus Sajawal—to come up with ‘bulbul, hit me’ as the English translation of ‘aa bail mujhe maar’. And that’s the best joke.

I foolishly assumed a film called Cirkus might actually be interested in the workings or even the nostalgia of travelling circuses. But that would involve actual effort, research, thought put into design. So much easier to not have any characters apart from Roy and Joy who work in the circus. Similarly, why bother trying to figure out what Ooty and Bangalore might have looked like in the ‘60s when you can have sets that look like an Archies comic threw up?

Any such complaints will be dismissed by Shetty and team as the griping of elitist snobs. You see, they make films for real viewers—mass films, family films. I can picture one such unit out to see Cirkus: mom dozing off; dad bored out of his skull, wondering why he insisted on a family outing; daughter busy on Instagram; son making plans to watch Avatar again. No filmmaker working today has made a virtue out of doing less.  

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

IFFK 2022 diary: Stories of collapse and renewal

Four minutes into Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, the film’s title flashes against a dark blue background, replaced by pulsing lights. This morphs into a thicket of trees seen from above, through which is visible a search party with blinking flashlights. The screening was on the sixth day of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK); for many it was the third film on that day, so some amount of fatigue would have been natural. Yet, this little trick was greeted with an audible gasp. Not for the first time that week, I felt like I’d found my people—the sort whose minds are blown by things like scene transitions.

Some of what I saw in Thiruvananthapuram was standard film festival audience behaviour. People clapped when a famous director’s name was onscreen . They applauded if the film had won a prize at, say, Cannes. But some things were unique to IFFK audiences. I’ve never seen so many stick around to complete difficult films, be it Bela Tarr’s Damnation or Ann Oren’s Piaffe. I’ve never seen a packed theatre watch a silent drama in rapt silence (F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise), laughing or applauding at the right places. This enthusiasm was matched by the organizers allowing as many as possible to watch the films, to the extent that, in many screenings, walk-ins sat in the aisles (I myself did this in Alam, my penultimate screening in a long but rewarding five-film day).

My festival began with two of the best films I’d see that week. There have been a number of fine naturalistic films about children lately—Playground, Petit Maman and Softie, all in 2021—and Close is a stunning addition. Lukas Dhont’s film won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2022, and, to my mind, deserved the Palme d’Or more than Triangle of Sadness. Two Belgian schoolboys spend all their time together, a friendship so close that their classmates wonder aloud if they’re gay. This leads to a heartbreaking separation, filmed in beautiful warm colours and anchored by the impossibly delicate performances of Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele.

Corsage, by Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, is in the vein of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a historical figure viewed through palpably modern eyes. Its subject is Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who ruled Austria and Hungary in the second half of the 20th century. As played by Vicky Krieps, she’s a fascinating, contradictory figure: a reluctant monarch, prone to depression and sudden whims, dismissive of the pomposity of courtly traditions, smart and sharp-witted. Bored by her stuffy husband Franz Joseph I, she seeks diversion in trips abroad, horse-riding, and the company of her gay cousin, old lovers and friends, and a young man who’s developed a prototype for a moving picture camera. Kreutzer doesn’t adhere by historical record or shy away from anachronisms, instead creating a spiky, thoroughly modern period heroine.

There’s been some wonderful cinema coming out of the so-called Arab world in recent years. One of the best films I saw last year was George Peter Barbari's Death of a Virgin and the Sin of Not Living, from Lebanon. IFFK had three fine and very different films in Arabic. Firas Khoury’s Alam is a high-school film set in modern-day Palestine. Tamer is your average teenager, neglecting his studies, disappointing his principal father, trying to impress the new girl in class. But a plan to raise the Palestinian flag in place of the Israeli one on the school building brings with it the excitement and dangers of political engagement.

Lotfy Nathan’s Harka is a slow-burning film —inspired by an incident of self-immolation that triggered the Arab Spring—about a young Tunisian man who wants to leave the country but finds himself caring for his two younger sisters. The pick of the three films, though, is Taarik Saleh’s Boy From Heaven, a religious suspense film that plays like a story arc on Homeland. The gaze, however, is inverted, not Western and Christian but African and Muslim. Adam, the son of a fisherman, is accepted to the prestigious Al-Alzhar University in Cairo. His plans are derailed when he’s dragged into a net of political intrigue surrounding the election the new Grand Imam. Saleh’s script, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, is unusually philosophical for a breakneck thriller, and Tawfeek Barhom is superb as the terrified but quick-thinking Adam.

Triangle of Sadness drew a large crowd, as Palme d’Or-winners always do. I thought Ruben Ostlund’s film—about a luxury cruise that’s shipwrecked—was a disappointment, blunt in its critique, shallow in its skewering of shallow people. But wow, did it work with this audience. Every broadside launched at capitalism was greeted with laughs and cheers. This was a running theme through the festival, where anything left-leaning, anti-imperialist or vaguely revolutionary was met with enthusiasm. Alam, awarded best Asian film and best debut director at IFFK, turned out to be a raucous screening, the political awakening of Palestinian teens resonating with the young audience.

Whenever Iran goes through a tough time, its cinema only seems to dig deeper. I saw two sublime Iranian films at IFFK (there was a third that I missed: Leila’s Brothers, starring Taraneh Alidoosti, arrested last week for protesting the execution of Mohsen Shekari). No Bears was Jafar Panahi’s last film before his ongoing imprisonment for alleged anti-government protests; he was earlier forbidden from directing, an order he subverted with a series of sly, metafictional films. No Bears has the self-referencing structure of those works, with Panahi in a village on the border with Turkey, directing a film about a couple illegally crossing the border. But the tone is bleaker, the delight of outmanoeuvring authoritarianism now replaced by pessimism and self-examination.

If No Bears has a heavy heart, Imagine has a sprightliness that bears comparison to Richard Linklater’s Before series. (One should remember, though, that Iranians own the conversations-in-cars genre.) A cabbie in Tehran is captivated by a passenger who scatters her brother’s ashes and proceeds to tell him her life story. This is repeated with all his subsequent passengers, all talkative women in a spot, all played by the magnetic Leila Hatami. Light on its feet, clocking in at 78 minutes, it’s a reminder that romantic comedy-dramas don’t need to be high-concept or star-driven. All you need is two appealing strangers talking the night away.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Avatar: The Way of Water: Review

All my life, I’ve seen films ranging from mildly entertaining to barely satisfying described as ‘one-time watch’. Apart from ‘masala’, no other term is used as frequently or with less discretion by Indian viewers. The general idea used to be: any film that isn’t great but doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. Then, in 2009, Avatar introduced a new kind of one-timer. 

Whatever you think of its artistic value, it seems pointless to argue—as many have done—that Avatar had no cultural footprint. In transforming 3D from a gimmick to a mainstay of commercial cinema, it altered the landscape beyond recognition. And it wasn’t just that. Avatar gave us the sort of film that would not—could not—be properly effective on any screen but the largest one. The worth of these films was intrinsically aligned to spectacle; what soared in a theatre viewing was, on a TV screen, diminished, silly. People started using ‘theatre watch’ to describe films you should watch once, and only on the big screen.  

Avatar: The Way of Water is the most beautiful theatre watch you could imagine. When its predecessor released, it was a seismic jump in effects technology; all anyone could do for years was play catch-up. Once they did, films went louder, bigger. Perhaps sensing that there was only so much branch left unsawed in that direction, Cameron sets his sights on a different frontier in Avatar 2. Instead of scale, he opts for richness. There is an extraordinary tactility to the film. Everything feels supple and life-like, from a shimmery polyp to a fish struggling on a hook. The images breathe, something I wouldn’t say about even the strikingly imaginative Denis Villeneuve, let alone a Marvel film. 

In the time since the Na'vi uprising that marked the end of first film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have been living a life of familial bliss. They have four children: sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and daughters Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and Kiri, whose birth mother, Grace Augustine, is in an inert state (both roles are played by Sigourney Weaver). Jake is fully Na'vi now, chief of the Omaticaya clan. But his old life intrudes in the brash form of military man Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), killed in battle by Neytiri but back as a super-Avatar—a T-800 to Jake’s pre-conversion Terminator from the first film. To save the clan from Quaritch and his forces, Jake decides to go into hiding with his family. They’re taken in by the Metkayina reef tribe, who live off the ocean, communing with aquatic life.

Any animator will tell you water is devilishly difficult to create on screen. There are issues of movement, transparency, shade, reflectivity. Avatar 2 is three hours long; two of those are spent in or around water. Cameron would have known that the success of film would hinge on water looking real, figures moving through it realistically, coherent and visible action being staged in it. That he manages this so convincingly is the film’s towering achievement. I saw an actual ocean yesterday, but I prefer Cameron’s.

Yet, all this will hardly matter once the film leaves theatres weeks or months later. Just as the rainforests of Avatar were neutered by the laptop and TV screens they were seen on, so will Avatar 2’s play of water. What viewers will be left with is flat, boring dialogue—a feature of the first film as well—and storytelling that’s simple and unlayered. No one has anything interesting to say; all that isn’t strictly functional is hippie eco-utopian babble. The cast is hard-working rather than exciting. The only soul-searching character is Spider (Jack Champion), a human boy who's friends with the Na’vi. All the texture is in the visuals.      

The film’s politics are much the same as the first time: respectful of indigenous cultures, critical of colonization and ecological terrorism. A lot of big Hollywood films are similarly positioned now; Avatar 2 has the same bland virtuousness. There is a nice extended sequence that shows the hunting of tulkun, a whale-like creature sacred to the Metkayina, by humans. But the only detail with some bite is when Quaritch says he’ll bring back Sully family scalps, a reversal of filmic tradition where the scalping antagonists were indigenous people.

You can see why Cameron took all these years to come up with a sequel: he probably spent months just figuring out how someone might roll their eyes underwater (he does and it’s brilliant). He has hinted at plans for other Pandora ecosystems and worlds, to be explored in three further films. If this comes to fruition, it could well mean we’ll never see another Cameron film outside the Avatar universe. As gorgeous as Avatar 2 is, as unrivalled as Cameron is in doing this exact thing, I regard that as a loss. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

'Jeanne Dielman' and canons in flux

In 1952, Sight & Sound, a British film magazine, asked 63 critics to name their top 10 films of all time. The 100 Greatest Films of All Time poll was repeated every 10 years, with a growing corpus of voters. Bicycle Thieves topped the first poll, and Citizen Kane the next five. In 2012, it was dethroned by Vertigo. The 2022 poll was announced last week, with over 1,600 critics from across the world voting. Of all the films tipped to be No.1, no one could have predicted Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

A simple description of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film is that it observes a Belgian housewife, played by Delphine Seyrig, going about her day. It is calm and unhurried, not a lot of camera movement, long takes. We watch Jeanne as she cooks, cleans, eats with her husband, takes care of her son (we also learn she's a sex worker). The running time is over three hours. It takes time and willingness to settle into the rhythms of the film but the payoff can be a kind of revelation.

In the 2012 poll, Jeanne Dielman was at No.36. In the intervening years, you could sense its stock rising. It placed third in a 2019 BBC poll of the greatest films directed by women. Film canons have always been skewed towards male directors from the US and Europe. Akerman’s film was already well-known in art film circles but to jump so many places and become the first film by a female director to top the Sight & Sound poll suggests tectonic changes in cinephilic attitudes and discourse over the last decade.

I use the term “art film” with care. Jeanne Dielman is the first instance of a dyed-in-the-wool critic’s film topping the poll. Vertigo, Citizen Kane and Bicycle Thieves have their mysteries and challenges, but all three are films a lay viewer can appreciate without too much difficulty. Whereas I don’t see how anyone can argue that Akerman’s rewards are more hard-won. This is not a knock against Akerman's film. Jeanne Dielman is an important film and a difficult one: It should be possible to admit the latter while believing the former.

I do feel that the “greatest ever” entry in any field ought to have a quality to it that when someone with a curious mind but uninitiated with the discipline regards it, they can understand what makes it great. Jeanne Dielman, in my eyes, does not have this quality (I am aware that this is an entirely personal yardstick). Still, I would say that the poll has done its job perfectly. Critics are meant to argue for works that the public is unaware of, or is unable to appreciate without context. For 70 years, the top positions were passed around between acknowledged (male) masters: Welles, Hitchcock, De Sica, Ozu, Renoir. Akerman is like a splash of cold water on an exercise that badly needed that sort of shock. Suddenly, there’s an edge, an excitement to the discourse, a sense that a particular kind of cinema has ‘won’.

There’s another wrinkle in this time’s poll. Forty-eight of the titles, including Jeanne Dielman, have been released by the influential US-based distribution company Janus Films, which feeds the Criterion Collection, a leading physical media label. The tastemaking of Janus/Criterion is all over the list. The only non-US, non-European films that aren’t theirs are Tropical Malady and two by Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a less US-Euro-centric list than last time, but most ‘discoveries’ seem to be happening through a single channel.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

An Action Hero: Review

Seems like yesterday I was hoping for a Ayushmann Khurrana film that set him free from the shackles of social reform (it was seven weeks ago, when Doctor G released). Just like that, Anirudh Iyer’s An Action Hero releases—no message, no redemption arc, only Khurrana being shallow and calculating and eminently watchable. All I can say is, if I knew it was wish-fulfilment month, I’d have asked for something else.

Maanav is not a stand-in for Khurrana; this is clear five minutes in. He’s an action hero, something Khurrana has only been in one film, and doesn’t seem to do middle-of-the-road dramas, Khurrana’s bread and butter. Right away, we know this won't be the meta-fiction of Fan (Iyer allows himself one such reference, when Maanav tells a reporter, in all seriousness, “I have a social responsibility”). Instead, An Action Hero is a sly, nimble thriller, as unimpressed by Bollywood as it is scathing about the people who hate it. 

After a long day’s shoot in Haryana, Maanav just wants to take his expensive new car for a spin. But the entitled younger brother of a local councilor has been waiting for a photo-op, getting ominously angrier with every brush-off. When Maanav zips off in his car, Vicky chases after, catching up on a deserted forest road. There’s an argument, a threat, a push. Suddenly, Maanav is standing over the dead body of a young man he just met.

Things get much worse when Vicky’s older brother enters the picture. Maanav, having fled to London (“It’s what Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya did”), is considering turning himself in when Bhoora turns up in kurta-pyjama and dowdy coat, shooting two cops who are making a house call on the star. He has a haircut as uncool as Anton Chigurh’s, and, as played by Jaideep Ahlawat, has something of his bloody single-mindedness too. He won't kill Maanav softly, insisting on hand-to-hand combat. But years of pretending to be an action star have turned Maanav into a surprisingly tough customer.

Thus begins one of the funnier deadly pursuits in recent Hindi film. As Bhoora finds his target slip out of his grasp again and again, his irritation builds. This is where the film really starts to cook, because there’s no one better than Ahlawat at looking disgusted at the plans of god and man. Khurrana is a good match, with as baleful a stare. Neither is a classical fighter—though Maanav tries some fancy kicks and flips—so their clashes have a slapdash quality, in particular a messy encounter in the kitchen. 

As with most Anand L. Rai productions, the writing (by Iyer) is salty and the characters eccentric. There’s an image-conscious don, a thoroughly unlucky assassin, a chef-lawyer-hacker. I loved the Haryanvi journalist who mangles car names, and the henchmen who Maanav tries to bribe and who decline saying, “We love our job.” There’s also a running babble of news anchors yelling about Maanav with no evidence or interest in what’s actually going on. Iyer is attempting to send up the depravity of TV news in India, but it wears thin after a while, not because it’s an inaccurate impression but because the original is so ridiculous that there’s no room to satirise. More interesting, I thought, are Maanav’s actions after Vicky’s death. It’s absolutely an accident, and Vicky was the aggressor. But Maanav’s instincts are the same as any rich, powerful kid in this situation: flee, cover up, throw money at the problem (Akshay Kumar, playing himself in a funny cameo, responds to Maanav’s plea for advice with a plea of his own: don’t tell anyone you met me). Bhoora and Maanav both dismiss their hangers-on as ‘fakes’, but their own facades crack as well, revealing two men driven by ego and self-preservation rather than honour or any innate heroism.   

Watching the hysteria build back in India, the don tells Maanav that, as a famous person who’s slipped up, he’s now seen by all as an opportunity. This is the spirit that animates An Action Hero, a society on the edge resentful of the rich and powerful, waiting to tear them down even as they grimly hang on. To me the final gambit felt too clever, an overreach both difficult to buy and unnecessary. I liked the sideshows but all I really need is Ahlawat and Khurrana in a room, trying to hurt each other’s feelings.  

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Qala: Review

Of the many inspired touches in Qala, the most incisive is the recurring use of a Himachali lullaby. The melody is enough to move you to tears, as Mohit Chauhan’s version of the song used to do to me. Sireesha Bhagavatula sings it here, unaccompanied, and it’s just as pretty. But the words carry a dark undercurrent. A mother sings to her young girl, why do you look so wan? The daughter replies that a peacock singing in the forest has stolen her dreams. We’ll get a gun and kill the peacock, the mother says. No, we mustn't, the girl says, we’ll just silence it, lock it up in a cage. And there are two lines that aren’t used in the film: Where do the moon and stars go?/ mother, where do the ones we love disappear?/ The moon hides and so do the stars, daughter/ but those we love don’t go anywhere.

There’s a reason these lines aren’t sung. The reassurance the mother in the song offers is not replicated by the mother in the film. Even without them, though, it’s perfect for Anvitaa Dutt’s film, which is a thing of tenderness and violence and beauty. It almost feels like Qala is extrapolated from this, like Lootera was from O. Henry’s ‘The Last Leaf’. There’s a girl with dreams deferred. A songbird silenced. The sort of mother who’d kill a peacock for singing.  

We first meet Qala (Triptii Dimri) at the height of her fame as a Hindi film playback singer. A crowd has gathered to catch a glimpse of her on the balcony. For a second, she’s an apparition, a beam of light, before we realize it’s sunlight reflecting off the gold record she’s holding. Inside, she takes questions from the press. She starts off serenely but tension builds as the sexist questioning continues. Then one reporter asks about the time her mother had come down to promote her brother. Qala shuts down. “No,” she says, looking away. “She has no son. There’s only me. Only me.” 

This is true, and also untrue in profound and damaging ways. There could have been a brother, if he was not lost in utero. Would Urmila (Swastika Mukherjee) have been a different kind of mother had the first thing she learnt about her daughter not been that she'd absorbed her sibling’s share of nourishment in the womb? She’s a distant, pathologically demanding parent from the very start, playing a harsh classical vocal on the gramophone as she rocks her child in the cradle, no love in her eyes (Amit Trivedi does a terrific job with the songs, which span thumri, folk and old Hindi film, and the shimmery score).  We learn that Urmila’s grandfather was a famous thumri singer, and that she sacrificed her own musical dreams because it was more acceptable for a man to carry forward the legacy. Qala grows up in a gothic mansion in the frozen wilderness of Himachal with a singular mission: to become the voice of her gharana, and thereby win her mother’s affection.   

There were baroque touches in Dutt’s first film, Bulbbul. In Qala, these flourishes are woven into the fabric of the entire film. Apparitions appear in mirrors. The screen is flipped 90 degrees, turning an emotionally fraught moment into a physically impossible one. As Qala’s mental state fractures under the cruel instruction of her mother, it becomes difficult to distinguish reality from hallucination. A party turns phantasmagoric. A bug flies into an eye. A silver ball of mercury is a visual rhyme with a water droplet, which becomes a dozen shining drops, which become sleeping pills. Dutt and cinematographer Siddharth Diwan work wonders, the images following a kind of dream logic. There’s a transition from Qala standing in a spotlight in the snow to her recording for the first time in the studio. During a later recording, at the peak of her inner tumult, she imagines the studio filling with snow and breaks down. 

Perhaps Qala might have moved on, found satisfaction in her success and the friendship of lyricist Majrooh (a warm, watchful turn by Varun Grover), if the only thing she had to shake was her mother. But there’s something else—another brother that never was. At her first public showing, Qala is surprised to hear that a young folk singer named Jagan will be performing after her. And she’s shattered when she sees her mother moved to tears by his voice. (Jagan is played by Babil Khan, who is so incredibly pained and who so resembles his father, Irrfan, in some scenes that it made me start.) When Urmila brings Jagan to live with them, Qala’s humiliation is complete. He’s everything she isn’t: beloved to her mother, a natural talent rather than one who’s taken it up as a mission, a real orphan instead of a child with an absent parent. Even when she’s eclipsed him, he haunts her. The Bergman-like harshness of the family drama is confirmed by a replication of the famous framing of the faces in Persona.

As Bulbbul was feminist horror, Qala is feminist psychodrama. It is particularly interested in women’s prescribed roles in the first half of the 20th century, and the limits placed even on trailblazers. Qala is discouraged from becoming the torchbearer for her gharana. Naseeban Apa (Tasveer Kamil) is a rare film music composer, but must ignore the gossip this generates. Qala hires a woman as her secretary, but only after arguing with a man about how it would look. The photographer who visits Qala for a magazine shoot is a woman, modeled on Homai Vyarawalla. Qala tells her in passing she loved her set with Indira—a reminder that a woman would be in charge at the top too. Yet, even she is relegated to the back of the room by male journalists during a press meet, and has to be called forward by Qala. 

One revealing scene sees a doctor called in to check on Qala, who’s had a breakdown. “There’s commotion… here,” Qala says, touching her head. “And fear… here”—indicating her heart. The doctor brushes it off as a ‘ladies’ problem’, a case of acute artistic sensitivity (hysteria was a common diagnosis that sent healthy women to mental hospitals even in the 20th century). She asks him to prescribe sleeping pills. “Aap sochna band kijiye (stop thinking)”, he advises. There’s a sense, in this scene, and many others, of everything reinforcing everything else; the long shadows in the room hinting at the shadows in Qala’s mind, the billowing curtains behind her patterned like skeletal trees in the snow. 

Urmila’s hate for her daughter is so all-consuming and inexplicable that it seems to me to inhibit Mukherjee’s performance. But Dimri is startlingly good. She plays Qala at three stages in her life—as a young woman in the shadow of her mother, as a callow singer striking out on her own, and as a successful artist —and brings to each a different sort of tremulous intensity. There’s a long sequence where she’s recording her first film song in which she nearly falls apart as a result of nervousness and abuse. The change in body language when she finds a way to bury the pain and adopt a persona is near-miraculous. She shows, for an instant, how there can be noise in the head and fear in the heart, yet a song on the lips. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

'Argentina, 1985' and the use of filmed history

The first scene in Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 (on Amazon Prime) has a powerful man getting a report from a spy. The man is the Argentinian public prosecutor, Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darín), the informant his son (Santiago Armas Estevarena). The boy is reporting on his sister’s date with her boyfriend, who his father suspects could be a mole. Now, Strassera is revealed to be a good and courageous man, and the import of the scene is comical. Still, he’s firmly told off for spying on his daughter—initially by his wife, later by the daughter herself. It’s a small example of how the fear and doubt of a dictatorship can rub off on the best of people.

In 1983, Argentina had just emerged from a military dictatorship that lasted seven years. During that time, thousands of men and women were intimidated, tortured and killed by the military authorities, who used the threat of guerrilla fighters as an excuse to fight a “dirty war” against opponents of all stripes. Democracy returned after Raúl Alfonsin was voted in as president. What the top military brass probably did not expect was being put on trial for their crimes. Known as the “Trial of the Juntas”, it was the first time a country’s military commanders had been tried in a civilian court.

When the film begins, the trial has not yet been confirmed—and Strassera is not exactly looking forward to it. “Of course I’m scared shitless,” he tells his calm wife, telling her it could be a trap by the generals, who still wield a lot of power. But he also knows that as public prosecutor he has no choice but to accept it if the judges agree to try the case—which they are shown doing in a fluently choreographed sequence. Strassera hopes to assemble a legal team with the help of Carlos (Claudio Da Passano), his theatre-director friend, but they just end up saying “facho” (fascist) and “super-facho” to each other’s suggestions (the word, heard through the film, should resonate with viewers today who are used to seeing it brandished in any sort of political discourse). This allows for a delightful montage where the deputy prosecutor, a passionate young man named Luis Ocampo (Peter Lanzani) and Carlos hire a bunch of students out of college.

Argentina, 1985 might sound like cinematic spinach: a film with a dour lawyer as hero, with the recounting of multiple horrifying testimonies from the junta years. Yet, Mitre somehow also makes it fleet-footed and winsome. There’s a Spielbergian zip to proceedings. Strassera gains in moral stature as the film goes on, Darín’s expert underplaying making the moments when the lawyer’s reserve cracks all the more memorable. And there are close to a dozen lively characters playing off him, the canniest of whom might be his precocious son.

This melding of sober historical moment and caper-film lightness reminded me of another South American film. Pablo Larrain’s No (2012) is set in the run-up to the 1988 Chilean plebiscite, when the country’s citizens were given the chance to decide whether dictator Augusto Pinochet would remain in power—as epochal and volatile a moment as the junta trial. Adman René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal) is tasked by opposition leaders to direct a single commercial that will convince the public to vote “no”. His masterstroke is to create something colourful and fun instead of informative and depressing. Saavedra is a composite but the campaign is real—you can watch the commercial on YouTube.

I was particularly taken by the decisions taken by these two films with regard to using actual footage. Larrain took the bold decision to shoot No with specially assembled U-matic cameras that aped the look of television in the 1980s. The result looks like a home video, a mistake. But it allows Larrain to use the news reports of the time and the actual campaign ad without any visual dissonance. It doesn’t just look like 1988, it looks like it was made in 1988. “This bold gambit makes for a shadowy, flaring, low-definition eyesore of a movie—until you appreciate its ingenuity as a special effect, naturalizing the archival artifacts in its midst and…enabling an immersive yet thoroughly mediated experience of history,” wrote Denis Lim in Artforum.

Mitre finds a similar, though less radical, solution. Argentina, 1985 is beautiful to look at, at times with the luminosity of a Norman Rockwell still life. There’s nothing that’s hand-held or cheap-looking. However, in a few of the court scenes, Mitre, without warning or ostentation, slips in footage of the actual witnesses testifying. These inserts look markedly different from the rest of the film but make visual sense if you consider how they are prefaced with shots of news cameras in court. We are seeing them as someone watching on TV in 1985 would. This idea is followed through in the scene where a journalist catches up with Strassera for a sound bite, and the shot where he replies has the same blanched, retro look as the inserts.

Larrain created his film in the image of its setting. In this, he follows in the footsteps of directors who have looked for ways to render history more authentically. For Winstanley (1975), Kevin Brownlow went in search of the exact breed of cows that would have been around in the 1600s. Juho Kuosmanen used a dreamy Kodak 16mm black and white film stock to transport audiences back to the 1960s in The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki (2017). Mitre’s innovation is subtler but no less thoughtful. He hasn’t yanked us out of the world of his film, and he has found a way of allowing history to seep in.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.