Huang Yong Ping in Paris

Gallerie Kamel Mennour: Huang Yong Ping, Caverne 2009

23 October to 19 December 2009

Paris, France

On entering the Kamel Mennour gallery, one is stopped short by a big rock that seems to have been pushed up against the wall on the left. There is no explanation for the rock squatting in the middle of the room, allowing only a little space for the viewer to walk into the next room. However, when one does walk into the adjoining room, (on the other side of the wall against which the rock has been pushed up) one notices a small heap of rubble on the ground and a hole in the wall. On looking through the hole, one discovers a scene that is wholly incongruent to the gallery atmosphere. It is the dark inside of a cave (a view of the inside of the rock mentioned above) with projections of bat-shadows on a screen. The cave is filled with two types of figures- the Buddha and members of the Taliban (resin sculptures- dimensions variable). Their faces are turned to the darkness, but their forms clearly evoke their identities.

Two things especially stand out in this work: the entire narrative leading to the climactic spectacle inside the dark cavern and the pairing of the Taliban and the Buddha. The presence of the big rock suggests a violent invasion of the pristine whitewashed space of the gallery. It represents an almost clear and present danger, but refuses to tell us exactly what the danger is, as if the space of the gallery is not conducive for this dark tale. For this, the viewer needs to walk to the other side of the wall and look through the hole drilled in the wall. It recreates the obsessive attempt to give ‘us’- the western audience- a view of the ‘real terrorists’. In other words, the present gallery, located in Paris, does not allow a space that will allow this scene (in the cave) to be articulated and thus, makes it necessary for the artist to undertake this elaborate artificial narrative (almost like a journey).

The idea of pairing the Taliban and the Buddha is a clear reference to the destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamyan by the Taliban in 2001. According to the Taliban, statues and representations in sculpture were fundamentally un-Islamic. There is definitely irony, therefore, in restoring not just the Buddha in a clandestine cave but also the Taliban in sculptures. The caves are an imitation of the real caves where the Taliban were hiding out during their long, protracted war against the U.S.A after 9/11. Thus, if one can assume that this dark cave is the usual space for the Taliban, what becomes more ominous are not the figures of the hooded fundamentalists (created in a deliberately caricatured manner anyway) or the shadows of the bats, but the precise rendering of the Buddha itself. It is as if the Buddha has appeared within the confines of the Taliban’s hiding place and is waiting silently like a ghost for answers to damages done. This contemporary reading is given an edge when one considers the cave to be a reproduction of the platonic concept of art and the impossibility of representing ‘reality’ through imitation.

The other major work exhibited here ‘begins’ in a similar manner. ‘L'OMBRE BLANCHE’ is a big (250 x 450 x 210 cm) sculpture of an elephant in the room. It is constructed with buffalo skins on structural steel and resin. The elephant is as present as the rock, described above. However, unlike the installation above, this refuses to generate meaning. It refuses, for example, to gather contradictory placements and identify with single points of access and understanding for the viewer. The buffalo skin is crumpled and sags in places. It is also used to make a cloth that seems to be wound around the elephant’s feet, perhaps tripping it. It is more, in fact, like the elephant in the Indian legend that blind wise men try to interpret. Popularized in John Godfrey Saxe’s poem, it tells the story of six blind wise men who attempt to ‘understand’ what an elephant is like: one of them falls against the sturdy side of the animal and decides that it is like a wall, another one gets hold of the ear and decides it’s like a fan while another one feels the tusk and decides that it is like a spear and so on. It symbolizes the difficulty of grasping every side of an issue of magnitude and any attempt to interpret and argue will inevitably reflect on the interpreter’s lack and blind spots with respect to the ‘complete picture’.

The other exhibits are two series of watercolours on parchments (510 x 43 cm / 410 x 43 cm). They refer to ancient Chinese texts and resemble torn parchments as if recovered from archaeological digs and findings. This extends the underlying theme of the exhibition space imitating the space of a Museum. The elephant could belong to the Natural History section, while the parchments purport to shed light on ideas and art in the ancient world. Along with the brooding, frozen cavern- it all adds up to a somber experience that underlines death and danger and is cynical about contemporary history in a manner similar to Damien Hirst.

Thomas Bernhard in Bruges

Further evidence of the ruthlessness that sleeps under the innocent cobblestones of Bruges, Belgium:

"In the Belgian city of Bruges a few hundred years ago a nine-year-old chorister who had sung a wrong note in a mass that was being performed before the entire royal court in the Bruges cathedral is said to have been beheaded. It seems that the queen had fainted as a result of the wrong note sung by the chorister and had remained unconscious until her death. The king is supposed to have sworn an oath that if the queen did not come round he would have not only the guilty chorister but all the choristers in Bruges beheaded, which he did after the queen had not come to and had died. For centuries no sung masses were to be heard in Bruges."

When the decade went to the Movies

Instead of tackling the best-of 2009 list, I thought about a few good movies that will probably mark this decade more than others. A best-of 2009 list is easier to defend because there aren't too many to choose from, but I still haven't seen a few I'd like to before I do this. So, the best movies of the decade list is cursory, thinly defended and mostly off-the-top-of-the-head. One important factor, perhaps, is that the list is somewhat auteur-heavy. If filmmaker X has done 5 absolutely brilliant movies this decade, I will try to find a 'most representative work' and just put that on the list. It is quite possible that another film by the same person deserves to be on the list, over some other movies on the list. It is also, I understand, hardly to my credit that even after watching sundry obscure or underground sub-cultural and other reactionary movies I can only name movies that most have seen and definitely heard of. The order is arbitrary, they're all 'like, the best movie ever!duh'.. Reactions to this list will inevitably tell you more about yourself than your shoelaces can.

1) Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love, 2000)
dir. Wong Kar-wai

I doubt if Wong Kar Wai was 'discovered' after this movie. 'Happy Together' had already won the Best Director Prize at Cannes (in '97) and he was picked up by Asian slick-flick-freak Q. Tarantino the year before for the distribution of 'Chungking Express' in North America. All of this gives you a certain idea of how Wong Kar Wai made his early movies (except for 'Days of Being Wild'). Fast cameras chasing suspicious women wearing new-wave wigs and sunglasses, mildly violent, quirky love stories and lush images soaked in neon lights. 'In the Mood for Love' was a more meditative movie. It stopped to listen and peek at windows, crept up slowly in smoky diners, and hung around like a lurid rumour about adultery. The frames were not merely lit but set ablaze by Christopher Doyle. The stuffy sets, lingering slo-mo, the Nat King Cole interludes went on to create in most of us a nostalgia for things we never knew about.

2) Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)
dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet

How can one forget the greatest source of the flashy French New-Wave dramas? Hollywood melodrama, of course! In some ways, Amelie is not unlike 'In the Mood for Love' in terms of the way they are mounted and cross-referenced. Douglas Sirk's melodramas loom large over both of them, including Sirk's fantastically painted frames. Amelie resurrects the deadpan narrator from the early Godard (a great admirer of Sirk) movies and convinces us that he's still the funniest narrator in film history. The manners, the gentility of dix-huitieme Montmartrians, the discreet quirks of the bourgeoise and you will still persist in calling this a disgusting indulgence in upper-class feel-good? You must be a ninoquicampoixpoop.

3) Battle Royale (2000)
dir. Kinji Fukasaku
Surely, a separate list needs to be made that will take account of all the fantastic movies made in the far-east this decade. Although a few of them have taken a route I cannot bear to follow on account of a weak stomach (Takashi Miike), some of them have also fallen slightly below their explosive potential as displayed in the 90s, especially Takeshi Kitano. But Beat Kitano is present and kicking as the most insane bad-ass teacher with a chink of gold in his heart in Fukasaku's amazing video-game take on the Lord of the Flies experiment.

4) Oldboy (2003)
dir. Chan-wook Park

I'm giving the impression that all great movies from Korea-Japan this decade were violent blood and gore spectacles that were ripped-off or remade in various capacities by Eli Roth, Sanjay Gupta and co. It's probably true, although in my defense I can direct you to equally wonderful films like those by Kim-ki Duk. But can you really say for sure that a gem like '3-Iron' had no violence in its heart? Oldboy is not just a bloodfest but a fantastic revenge drama that borrows as much from the best Greek tragedies as Bruce Lee movies. Chan-wook Park has done some excellent movies this decade (except for 'Sympathy for Lady Vengeance') and I'd recommend all of them to anyone.

Digression: Since I've already added too many Asian movies (excluding the sub-continent, which will appear shortly) I'm in a slight quandary. There are too many good movies from Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand to ignore. I will just mention a few.
Kim-ki Duk's 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring'(2003).
Tsai-ming Liang's 'What Time is it There?' (2001). Wihtout doubt one of the most interesting directors in world cinema today, although he can be difficult (like A. Weerasethakul) in some of his lesser works. 'The Wayward Cloud' (2005), especially, is not a good example of his movies and I was quite violently divided when I saw it for the first time. But after picking up themes he follows from his earlier movies (with the same protagonist) I see him as a very cynical, but meaningful reader of the Antoine Doinel character in contemporary cinema.
Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 'Last Life in the Universe' (2003). A bit in the Takeshi Kitano category, but if it's well done with the sunny side down it can hardly be a drawback, can it?

5) Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006)
dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

This movie shares a premise that is frighteningly similar to Michael Haneke's 'Cache'. If the idea of surveillance is a throw-back to the repressive regimes of the past, what role does it play today in functioning democracies? German cinema has often been an antidote to the supposed fluff of the French movies. Not without some truth. This decade saw some excellent movies (does the decade have eyes?) from Germany including 'The Edukators', 'Head-On', 'Goodbye Lenin', 'Sophie Scholl: The Last Days', 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' and 'The White Ribbon'. They are all grim departures from 'Run Lola Run' and try to make sense of important issues that haunt Germany today and engage directly with questions of ideology and its distribution among the peoples of the state.

6) Gegen die Wand (Head-on, 2004)
dir. Fatih Akin

One of the major directors in the world today. It is safe to say that he hit it big with this movie (although his earlier movies are worth a dekko). An explosive, energetic look at a new generation of Turkish people struggling to establish their identities in Germany, the film manages a scarily perfect coup by extracting fantastic performances from the leads (especially Birol Unel), great music and immaculate writing and direction.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 'Distant' came as a slight disappointment when I watched it after this, mainly because his themes can be reduced to easy readings of morality in Dostoyevski's world, but then he grew on me and I admired his wonderfully shot 'Three Monkeys' as well. I mention Ceylan because he is a nice and quiet contrast to Fatih Akin's aggressive Turkish soul-searching in 'Head-on'. The difference, obviously, being that Akin himself was born in Germany and Ceylan is all-Turkish.

7)Hable con ella (Talk to Her, 2002)
dir. Pedro Almodovar

In conventional Almodovar fanspeak, everybody loves 'All about my Mother' and finds 'Bad Education' "quite interesting". 'Talk to Her' is either appreciated to the heavens or drilled into the ground for its horrible politics. I love how Almodovar's trajectory has shaped since his earlier fluffy Howard-Hawks-quick-exchange, bizarre comedies (until Antonio Banderas moved on to Hollywood) to a very mature exploration of the most important words in a Theorist's vocabulary: sexuality, the body, Woman, inter-textuality, identity and Buxomism in Penelope Cruz. This movie is about as politically disrespectful as 'Tie me up! Tie me Down!' was accused of being, but a steady audience of his oeuvre will discover greater things, things even Jacques Cousteau had not dreamed of hitting up against. Pedro Almodovar's films are as densely connected to other films as Tarantino's are. The difference, in my opinion, being that Almodovar uses them for greater emotional thrust and dramatic potential than Tarantino (visible again in his new movie 'Broken Embraces').

8) Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon, 2009)
dir. Michael Haneke

I find it difficult to select a representative Michael Haneke movie. His movies are quite explicitly linked in terms of themes, even 'The Piano Teacher' which may look very different from his other movies at first. I found 'Cache' and 'The Piano Teacher' to be among the best films I have ever seen but I also think that 'The White Ribbon' has managed to contain elements from both the movies above and managed also to keep a similar dramatic edge as in those movies. There is no doubt that he is, for me, among the great directors of the world today and I would've included both 'The Piano Teacher and 'Cache' in the list if I wasn't trying to restrict it to one per director.

9) Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
dir. Jim Jarmusch

I've had a hard time defending this film. But I've never seen people saying bad things about films like 'My Dinner with Andre'. I love both the movies. Not because they are revolutionary anti-movies or somesuch. 'Coffee and Cigarettes' is my idea of a very good Sunday afternoon watch. It is intelligent, quirky, but not painfully so, does not assert or deny anything either and is pretty much contented with small sketchy je ne sais quoi half-stories that leave us wondering about the characters. It represents a different kind of nostalgia. A nostalgia for grand movies of the past with a perfectly linear, epic storyline that captures us for 3 hours and then goes with the wind. Since these stories don't happen anymore, how do we tell our small insignificant narratives at all? Short stories are temporary, but heady: like coffee and cigarettes.

10) No Country for Old Men (2007)
dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

The best Coen brothers movies are still, unfortunately, in the 90s. I haven't seen 'A Serious Man' yet, but 'No Country for Old Men' was the Coens at their best and a bit more. What could otherwise have been another perfect decade was somewhat ruined by duds like 'Intolerable Cruelty' and 'The Ladykillers'. It started off well with the brilliant 'Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?' and 'The Man who wasn't there' and they made an impact with that amazing Paris Je t'aime short as well. But then, admit it, these aren't Fargos or Barton Finks.

11) Synecdoche, New York (2008)
dir. Charlie Kaufman

There should be a very good reason why I have selected this over the other Charlie Kaufman-vehicle ('Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind'). I should know that. There are brilliant movies that are made to reflect on how movies are made. Being Charlie Kaufman, however, is knowing how to take a step ahead. This movie is not just about a theatre director (Caden Cotard, played by Philip S. Hoffman) trying to make that big ambitious magnum opus, but a dreamy Kaufman take on how this magnum opus becomes his life as he grows old in surprising leaps, the sets get as big as life, his body disintegrates and the play is barely off the ground. His big sets are a stark opposition to his wife's minuscule paintings and there are visual clues all over the place. It's a movie puzzle that is, I thought, much more relevant and profound than 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'.

12) The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
dir. Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson is good.

13) Memento (2000)
dir. Christopher Nolan

Nice:eciN.

14) Shortbus (2006)
dir. John Cameron Mitchell

Actually, now that I think about it, 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' is a much better movie. But I'll keep 'Shortbus' here because it allowed me to cook-up my own art theory term: 'Splotch Expressionism'.

15) Elephant (2003)
dir. Gus Van Sant

'Paranoid Park' was somewhat similar and 'Milk' was epic. 'Gerry' was about... Anyway, since I am somewhat of a sucker for style, I loved the way Van Sant (the same weirdo who re-made a terrible 'Psycho') handled the approach to the movie.

16) El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006)
dir. Guillermo del Toro

The fantasy genre was given a brilliant thrust by Del Toro this decade. I watched 'The Devil's Backbone' after watching Pan's Labyrinth and was glad to find similar themes beginning to appear in that movie. There is some unwritten rule that allows fantasy movies to acknowledge the dark world inside fantasyland but never give it a complete reign of bloodfest and orgy. Okay, that's not how it goes in Pan, but the violence is definitely more shocking than You-know-who's chalky face that looks like a salamander's behind.

17)Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

This film is obviously no match to 'There Will be Blood' (for the decade). But it's kinda cute. And I love it when a director like PTA- after handling movies with winding, roundelay narratives- delivers such a fantastically made simple nothing-to-it story straight up.

18) Herbert (2006)
dir. Suman Mukhopadhyay

Am I basically saying that this movie deserves to be called one of the best Indian films of the last decade, even over more obvious candidates like Fool n' Final, Main Prem ki Deewani Hoon, Aamdani Atthanni, kharcha rupaiyya and Mujhse Dosti Karoge? I suppose so. I hate the fact that I haven't seen outstanding movies from other places in India. The ones I have seen aren't that good, so it's best if I accept my limitation here and go with what I know more about. Although Rituparno Ghosh would have been a good choice, with Shubho Mahurat or Dosar, I still yearn for some of the old Utsab and Unishe April moments from the 90s. It doesn't help that he is also coming up with plain bad movies now and then. Instead, Suman Mukhopadhyay's film took me by surprise and opened up awesome possibilities in Bengali movies. The wonderful use of old north Calcutta neighbourhoods, the disturbance of the late 60s and the shamanism help narrate a wonderful story with an epic imagination that is quite rare in smaller cinemas ('regional cinema'). I think this sounds quite blurb-y, in fact.


19) Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002)
dir. Fernando Mereilles

'The Constant Gardener' was good, 'Blindness' was okay (although I didn't understand most of the harsh attacks- it seemed like a good adaptation of a difficult novel). But this movie was different.

20) Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007)
dir. Julian Schnabel

Painters taking to movie-making should always be an exciting event. Remember Kurosawa was a painter and Satyajit Ray was a great graphic-artist. But then again, M.F Husain has made movies that are very difficult to take seriously. Schnabel's movies are achievements in filmmaking. They are always pushing boundaries, but none as much as this wonderful masterpiece that, and I need to whisper this, opens up new vistas in the medium of movies. A visual delight from beginning to end, I cannot think of a lot of movies that have such emotional depth coupled with cinematic inventiveness.

21) Monsoon Wedding (2001)
dir. Mira Nair

One of the most delightfully observed films ever made, Monsoon Wedding is the great Indian film of the decade I had most fun watching. The characters were memorable and it ran across all the familiar genres that we've grown up watching- the melodrama and the musical. Yes, that's all Bollywood offered us in terms of cultural capital. If the acting was not slightly off in 'The Namesake' (apart from Irrfan Khan) I would have put that on the list and made a stand for the normally third-rate category of Indian crossover films.


22) Lost in Translation (2003)
dir. Sofia Coppola

I think we're back full circle to 'In the mood for Love'.

Other very good movies: Mulholland Drive, Du Levande, The Squid and the Whale, Les invasions barbares, Dil Chahta Hai, Le conseguenze dell'amore, The Departed, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Inglourious Basterds (maybe if I re-visit the list later...), A History of Violence, Dancer in the Dark, 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 days, Lars and the Real Girl, Black Friday, Kaminey, Dosar, Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien), The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Kill Bill- the 2 volumes, De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, Intimacy (dir. Patrice Chereau), The Hours.

The White Ribbon: Funny Ideals

There are historians, there are revisionists and then there are people who just rummage the dustbins and try to see what exactly went wrong or where exactly it started going downhill (a moral angle, if you will). This is different from a straightforward writing of history- from below, from above- wherever. The White Ribbon(2009) never tells you that World War I is only a year away from the beginning of the events in this movie, because everybody knows that. It doesn’t tell you anything about private lives of Archdukes at the time, nor does it detail a story of fascinating class struggles; although it does show you how things are not quite alright within the Baron’s family and class tensions have stretched the village like a taut bowstring. The implications of the movie, its importance and significance, is completely derived from things outside the movie. International directors with auteurist tendencies have a defined mode of storytelling. Michael Haneke is not an exception. Cache (Hidden, 2005), is in some ways a narrative like The White Ribbon, placed in the contemporary socio-political climate. The videos of the upper-middle-class family are made by unknown people and they depict nothing apart from their daily lives. The question one is likely to ask is- who is/are responsible for these videotapes and Haneke teases us into believing this to be the driver of the narrative. By the end, you understand that it wasn’t what Haneke was interested in at all. Haneke is a director who is interested in observing how people react in circumstances that- they ardently believe- are not of their own making. One can only be reminded here that Haneke has also adapted Franz Kafka’s The Castle for the screen. Although I have not seen this adaptation, it is easy to see what attracted Haneke to Kafka. It is easy but distracting to get mired into interpretations of Kafka stories. While they could certainly stand for complicated symbols and allegories, their fabulous nature lends them a quaint melodramatic edge (bleak, Haneke might be- but aren’t The Piano Teacher and Funny Games, in their relentless nature, somewhat melodramatic too?) . Kafka is also never interested in explaining why things happen to his characters (who knows?), but what exactly happens- in loving, poetic detail.

The White Ribbon is narrated by a schoolteacher reminiscing about certain strange events that happened in a small village in Germany about a year before the First Great War. It starts when the village doctor, riding home on his horse, trips on a narrow wire which throws him off and injures him severely for many weeks. Shortly after this, a woman working in a saw-mill falls through a weak floorboard and dies. Then the Baron, who employs almost half the village- including the woman, is also sucked directly into the strange events when his son is abducted and later found severely beaten and hung upside down in a barn. The schoolteacher-narrator does not hint as much as almost forces us to believe that the children of the village have something to do with these events. He constantly attracts our attention to them. The children, from their very first appearances, do not really look like they’re in ‘The Sound of Music’. A heavily repressed- sexually, politically and economically- community (society is too big a term, though it would not be misplaced here either) is all but passing their perversions, disguised as ideals, to their children, without seeming to be completely aware of it. When the eldest son and daughter of the village pastor commit some vague teenage mischief, the pastor chastens them with a stern speech, beats them with a cane and ties a white ribbon on them. The white ribbons, he tells them, signify purity and innocence; until the children align themselves completely to this ideal, the ribbon stays on them. The son of the pastor is discovered walking on the narrow ledge of a bridge by the narrator. When he rushes to save him before he falls, the boy gets down and in response to the narrator’s questions, says that he was only trying to see if God wanted him to go on living. It does not take an adult to see how internalization of ‘ideals’ is a running theme with the repressed children of the village.

As the disturbing outbreaks of brutal violence increases and begins to take on a ritualistic mode, the villagers hardly take any serious steps to find the culprits. This cavalier attitude, ironically, seems to vindicate the bizarre violence as it continues unabated with another attack on a disabled boy, the child of the village midwife (Susanne Lothar). She claims, towards the end, to know who the culprits were and leaves for a city nearby to get the police. However, she does not return and there is no trace of her son in the village either. Then, the villagers hear, the Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated.

The film is shot in black and white- not to make an intense statement, I think, but to simply invoke memories of the time that are already present in history books in black and white photographs. The effect is chilling nonetheless. Haneke, in his usual, relentless, fashion gives us a strong, dramatic narrative that does not pretend to be anything apart from just that- a narrative. It is really up to the viewer to believe what the schoolteacher says and even take it further and propose that these are the first signs of the National Socialist temperament to come. If the setting and the idea reminds you of M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Village’, you don’t have to be very hard on yourself. This makes you think again what an awesome exercise Shyamalan had attempted in that film, until he brought it down, brick by brick.

Children in Haneke’s films can hardly be said to be angelic. Benny’s Video (1992), an early Haneke shocker is about a young boy (the actor- Arno Frisch, grew up to be one of the two Funny Gamers) who brutally kills a young girl with multiple shots from a bolt gun. However, the children in Haneke aren’t exactly experimentally bred wild savages on strange islands either. Benny’s Video opens with a video recording of Benny’s father killing a pig with the same bolt gun. If Nazi killing in Nazi-occupied France or killing Bill is a bloodthirsty on-screen exercise of fun, the implications are dire, Haneke might pontificate. It would be a pity if that was all the point he had to make, and thankfully it is not so in The White Ribbon. He talks about violence that is taking place under the covers, behind closed doors (in one of the most brutal scenes of the film- we hear the children scream from cane-beatings on the other side of the door) and a violence that smothers the natural innocence of William Wordsworth’s children.

In some ways, one knows almost from the very beginning if one wants to ‘resolve’ the question of the strange events of the film by proceeding to take the narrator for granted. This will make The White Ribbon not only Haneke’s most accessible film, but one of the easiest ever made and leave you in peace to turn your attention to his Palm d’Or competitor Lars von Trier’s crazy shenanigans instead. Antichrist has everything onscreen, and for a scream, even talking foxes. It is a horror film that has all the makings of ambitiousness without ambition. But to direct a huge, ensemble cast in a film that sweeps over every imaginable terrors of the past century (and further), with an arrogant self-assurance is what sets a great filmmaker apart from a mere provocateur.

*The White Ribbon won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year (2009)

Flowing of water, throwing of Names

A screaming comes across the sky of Europe. There I've said it here, because I cannot say it anywhere else. A boulevard wrapped in wind from the Seine, weather 'strong as a woman' as I, for example, walk slowly down. Flaneuring is an art I have not accomplished yet. I have also, not yet learnt to say new things about Paris. Things Edmund White hasn't mentioned already. A book I picked up in a village outside Paris quotes 'wonderful country France.. pity the French!" I shouldn't have put that in quotes, it may have been "wonderful city Paris, pity the Parisians!" I forget which. A few years ago I might have said, a little hard-heartedly, "Wonderful city Calcutta, pity the Calcuttans!" I'm not so sure anymore.

The walker finds a fair French person walking down from the otherside. Impassive, set face; if she's a woman, maybe a bit of decolletage, if he's a man, a tight pair of jeans that barely reach his ankles. A bit of Arthur Rimbaud about his hair. Bonjour I say, not hoping for much. She or he, remembers me from the so-and-so gathering(Asie Extreme Society, maybe, making me feel like a Takeshi Kitano character) and smiles, comment ca va, etc. As she or he turns to go I see, quite by chance, an angry cut covered carelessly by a band-aid on the ankle. I'm left standing on the pavement, suddenly plagued with memories I have never had- of great Wars in colored textbooks, meanings created out of coffee stains, rains that have nothing to signify, hard-veined leaves from sweeping, rich trees and a river stocked with wine-bottles and humain despairs.

With chocolatey hands I pick out a book from a shelf in a house on a cobblestoned hill. I have a difficult time attuning this image of the hill to memories from movies. The book is strangely stirring. I seldom admit to reading poetry, but I do now to myself. The poet is Attila Jozsef, Hungarian, never-heard-of. He writes the usual laments I think. Not new to a connoisseur like myself- reader of Herbert, Seifert, Milosz, Szymborska, even Kertesz. Then I'm caught off-guard with a storm image in a poem:

"In a dull field the wind is getting dressed,

its fingers, in a flurry, stop and fumble,

and drop the branches that were pressed

to its bosom: enraged, brittle leaves tumble"

With a name like Attila, he had proletarian sympathies of the Freudian kind. He had stayed in Paris in his youth and returned to Hungary brimming with gauschist ideas. This reminds me of a student who volunteered to explain his work to us with a socialist party in Paris. 'We hope to overthrow Capitalism', he said shyly. This quote I remember.

There are traces of people having lived, smoked and walked in this city. In the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Co., among Henry Miller's graphitti and Gonzo books, I noticed a post-it asking for help with a Thanksgiving party. I wondered if it was written by a resident writer, writers who are obliged to read a book a day (two days if it's War and Peace) and write a page to earn their baguettes and sleeping holes. It's difficult to smell Hemingway's beard in Shakespeare and Co. or have a cappuccino next to the shop with an existential cigarette because material things like coffee and cigarettes are expensive and immaterial things like Hemingway's ghost is constantly batted into corners by flashing cameras and do-you-have-Sophie-Kinsellas. In this atmosphere, while no-writers like me quietly write, a writer like Hemingway would pull out his gun and shoot.

Growing into the writerly life in Warsaw and Benares

Two novels in quick succession. Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Certificate and Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics. The Romantics had everything going for it. A self-conscious literary premise, Benares, postgraduation woes, Civil Service "Mains", Sentimental Education, drifting, the 80s bleeding into the 90s- my own private nostalgic phase in Indian history and an acknowledgment- finally- of stoned foreign hippies who mistake Siddhartha for a crash course on Indian spiritualism. The Certificate on the other hand, promised nothing more than an amusing read. A quirky, ironical novel set in 1922 Warsaw, narrated by a character in a similar stage of life as Samar- of The Romantics. David Bendiger, looking for a Jewish identity outside of hassidism, running away from a rabbinical future, finds himself in Warsaw, penniless, with no place to go except sit up in his crowded in-laws' hovel and a chance lover Sonya who works with dressmakers. Hope comes to David in the form of a certificate that will allow him to travel to Palestine and settle there as a goodwill ambassador from the Diaspora. Who will pay for his travels? Why, a girl called Minna from a rich decadent class of Jews in Warsaw promises to sponsor the trip if he enters into a fictive marriage with her which will enable her to meet her fiance in the Palestine again. And of course, during his brief stay in Warsaw- before his papers are made ready for departure- he falls in with a couple of cynical communist women from whom he rents a small windowless room. Menage a trois of the stuff adolescent dreams are made of, but hardly what would excite a response dipped into a hummus of 'serious literature'.
While Pankaj Mishra's laborious je ne sais quoi narrative meanders around a lot of things, jumping in fits and starts, Singer's narrative is sharp and precise. It's a world someone like me is supposed to know nothing about (unlike Mishra's) but can immediately identify and get hooked. The period is self-consciously literary because it's 1922, the year before Modernism walked out of the closet and Bendiger's flakey pseudo-philosophical leanings, a Nerudaesque yearning for the talent of being poor and the affected, contrived nature of it all is hilarious yet born out of a deep and intimate knowledge of having lived through great sadness. If Mishra's book is a frustrating boat-ride promising a view of the exotic ghats of Benaras from a great distance, Singer's novel is like discovering an early Philip Roth, i.e, minus some of Roth's great pretensions and Portnoy as a writer, not Zuckerman. An early Roth novel that you thought was one of his lost works.

It's all good

My friend touched 120 on the longest flyover in the city and said bridges are like shit in this city shit and small you get up and you're down the next moment just to go up and down. The yellow taxi at the lip of the bridge had the right taillight missing.

The Old Men and the Sea

On re-reading Ernest Hemingway's classic swansong (the title of the post is a clever take on this work if you've already identified it) I was reminded of our heroic struggle with the elusive maiden-in-a-red-dress who went by the name of Literary Theory in the final year of my undergraduate study. Old, because, as mentioned before, we were experienced campaigners in our final year surviving arbitrary marking schemes, awkward student to staff co-ordination, confusing administrative changes and bland food. Men, I admit, is a hasty generalization as there was one woman in our small group (It was Feminism, really, that made Man human, we learnt) and Sea, because, well, that is what Literary Theory turned out to resemble by the end: the endless, ruthless, belligerent, heaving, yet promising, exciting, beautiful and sustaining Sea in Hemingway. We were promised great things and we found Lit Theory to be like this great, heaving sea promising us mysteries of a magnitude that we could never completely comprehend. The delights were like sprays of salty sea-water, mixed with a glorious sunset- a cocktail of subaltern studies and Malevich's square, 'differance' and hysteria, modernity and sublime, will to power and self-fashioning, etc. and etc.- all magical terms to us greenhorns, led to believe in the quiet majesty of all this.

Soon, peripatetic professors stitched Foucault to our souls, much like the Holy Word, smirked Spivak away, recited Derrida in a frenzy and upbraided our bourgeois acceptance of a language that was inherently phallocentric. However, the inglourious basterds, meaning us, met them half-way with a campaign that was apparently uneventful but only we could feel the sea that raged in our souls and minds. The magical terms were laid down on the table, stripped of the glitter, and we were finally expected to make sense of it. And we did. We condescended to our rival group who were studying European Drama and never failed to laugh at their modest ambitions- Ibsen! who studies Ibsen?!- and were ecstatic to discover at the end of the year that Frankenstein's narrative structure attempts to put the monster into the center, which, needlessly to say, being ever-elusive, hovers right outside the text and, adding Spivak, therefore, arriving at the reason why he (the Other) can never be selfed by Victor. It was an intellectual achievement that was similar to the one experienced by Jackson Pollock when he discovered that he wasn't just dripping paint on the canvas, but starting a movement. It could also feel, at times disarmingly, like watching golf on television with background sound edited in from a snuff video.

We became veritable steppenwolves roaming the nights between two rooms across a landing, swooping at buttered parathas and wondering if we really must include someone like Althusser into Marxism when he is really, just a brilliant structuralist at heart? It was a heated debate until, due to lack of some essential facts (and wikipedia) deep into the night, it ran into the sand like a beached whale. There, I'm back to The Old Man and the Sea again.

Among the first ones to bring sparseness into prose- long before Coetzee- the most beautiful half-sentence in Hemingway's novel that resonated with me and my memories was: "Bed is my friend." Without making it sound unsavoury, it'll suffice to say that the bed was the churner where most of my ideas found substance. As the fish dragged the old man around, promising him a bulk he could barely measure, Lit Theory tied a rope around our neck and made us believe that although it is impossible to look from outside the structure, an outside-inside view can be attempted nonetheless. If the language of one culture is impossible to create perfectly in another culture, how does translation affect us so much? Everybody loves The Little Prince, without having a mastery over French Resistance politics. The problem is, I tried to suggest to myself (talking to myself was another severe side-effect of Lit Theory), that if one has read Borges- none of these issues seem new. But I shut up, because I couldn't claim to understand everything Borges said anyway. Translation issues always reminds me of my Bengali friend who translated Tagore's title- Chaturanga as 'The Wise Body-part' and passed out laughing. Or when I automatically tend to think of Jhumpa Lahiri as translated from Bengali (I don't do this with any other writer including, say, Amitav Ghosh or Amit Chaudhuri)- although I consciously check myself all the time.

Meanwhile- falling into disuse, I tend to apply Lit Theory at random now. Even films. 'Fallen Angels' shows a terribly lonely postmodern state where people long to make themselves known by being ridiculous, or withdraw into a walkman inside a crowd. On watching 'Gunda' I was tempted to impose Fredric Jameson's idea of fetishism in late-capitalist societies. Then I realized it was a Mithun movie. So human voices woke us, and we drowned. The tragedy would be complete if I fought off the sharks from my skiff and realized, in the end, that I was only bringing in a majestic skeleton.

The compulsory post on Kanti Shah's GUNDA

This is the compulsory post on Gunda, required of any self-respecting film-enthusiast-cum-blogger. However, I won't go over most of the cult-fawning, and will direct you elsewhere if that is required and meanwhile, like all other posts on Gunda, pretend to say something different about the film. This requires you to have watched the film or at least, read some of the other posts on the film that talks about its characters and details the plot, especially since I won't be able to name some characters at all- like Bullah's brother- out of a pure sense of shame.

Bizarre films have a reputation that is built around one major consideration: that it is constructed around a sense of being bizarre. By being bizarre, one means that all the referents in the film are stripped of daily familiarity to such an extent that it seems, yes, bizarre. However, what contributes to this feeling is not the specific nature of bizarre-ness, but the ways in which regular constructs of what is 'normal' or 'sane' is constantly undermined by throwing these notions in a disarray. In Bunuel's celebrated short film, Un Chien Andalou, commonly regarded as a highpoint in surrealist filmmaking, the things that make the film 'weird' are simple subversions of regular acts by only juxtaposing them with things that one would not normally put them up against. Harmony Korrine's Mister Lonely (2008), supposedly his most 'accessible' film, centers around a Utopic commune that is peopled by impersonators of famous cultural icons like Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe- married to Charlie Chaplin, with their daughter Shirley Temple, the Three Stooges, James Dean, Madonna, The Pope, a foul-mouthed Abe Lincoln, The Queen and a few others. They stay together in the commune and get together to perform 'the greatest show on earth' annually to generate an income. However, when almost nobody shows up to watch them perform, things take a turn for the worse. The film has been perceived by many as bizarre. It is bizarre for the same reasons as mentioned above. It not only constructs its bizareness out of cultural referents that are used to make-up what is sane and normal, but relies on them, nostalgically, to point out their own difference and, if I'm not pushing it already, it's own unmeanings. In other words, it is impossible for films like these to appear bizarre if a constructed sense of 'normality' did not exist.

The case with Gunda is entirely different. One is tempted to douse any writing on Gunda with extreme profanity, adulatory quoting of its immortal dialogues and generally repeating how effing good it is. However, a near-perfect amalgamation of these things have been realized by greatbong already, so I won't go there. I'll merely attempt to see how dangerous is Gunda's bizarreness.

This has been hinted several times by many posters who have attempted to even subject the film to existential critiques and, of course, allegorical readings of India's economic liberalization in the '90s (read the greatbong's hilarious, but astonishing attempt). But what I'm driving at is the sense that almost nothing prepares us for what Gunda assumes as its own, mundane, reality. Most of the film is shot, for no given reason, at an airport tarmac and the docks of, I suppose, Bombay. A sudden leap in the first scene makes this assertion also beyond comprehension. A brothel is portrayed as a wide room filled with beds hanging from ropes, and the hero (Mithun Chakraborty) goes to a pub where his girlfriend arrives and starts dancing, making the whole place look like nothing one can ever describe or hope to describe as anything other than a Bollywood set. Everybody speaks in perfect rhyming couplets, added to the fact that they are penned by a person called Bashir Bhai Babbar, and they not only don't reassure one as they did in Satyajit Ray's Hirak Rajar Deshe, but convey a feeling that is so antithetical to feelings normally evoked by any poet (even Charles Bukowski) that even Neruda's plea for an impure poetry sounds pristine and victorian. Here, I'll fall into the first predictable trap and quote from the film: The arch-villain Bullah's signature line runs- "Mera naam hain Bulla, rakhta hoon main khullaaaaaa", Ibu Hatela's "Mera naam Ibu Hatela, Ma meri chudail ki beti, baap mera shaitan ka chela, khayega kela?", or Bullah's anguished cry on seeing his dead sister “Munni meri behen munni, munni meri behen munni, to tu mar gayee? Lambu ne tujhe lamba kar diya? Maachis ki tili ko khamba kar diya?". The women have precisely two types of characters in the film: minor and incidental. All the incidental women characters in the film are prostitutes regularly bad-mouthed by their pusher and the minor characters are Mithun's sister, his girlfriend and, if you allow, the villain's woman Haseena- named thus so one can fit in a couplet regarding the villain, Haseena, spare time, physical exertion and sweat. All the minor women characters are raped (Mithun's sister- twice, almost) and the perpetrators normally declaim happily before the act- "Chatri hotee hain kholne ke liye, chadar hotee hain orne ke liye aur ladki hotee hain cherne ke liye".

The point is not to prove how essential it is to disregard the film as having any empathy with 'reality', but to see how far it pushes the attitude of fetishizing in Bollywood and its axiomatic principles of plotting. Because really, if you choose to ignore all the exaggerations (impossible though it is) , Gunda is just a revenge film at heart, not unlike, say, Oldboy. The fact that Gunda appears bizarre is not because it subverts things we hold as fixed markers of cultural meaning (Chaplinesque, Bergmanesque, Punk is not dead, etc.) but, because it completely invents a grammar of what is 'normal' for itself, and then goes along subverting it! An Andalusian Dog challenges our conception of reality and everybody can interpret its motivations in a wide manner of possibilities, because it has challenged a reality that we all share. Whereas, Gunda assumes a reality, a filmind, so completely alien to our own that we are left baffled for entirely different reasons. Most have called it a work of pure genius, and it is not parodic, although the director's- Kanti Shah- other films haven't shown much promise. It bears a steady rating over 8 at IMDB, with 1,607 voters last time I checked (Shahrukh Khan's Billu is rated 6.4 by 803 voters). It's probably one of the funniest films ever made, but has none of the ingredients of a comedy. Self-reflexively, (there are several striking self-reflexive moments in the film; now I'm not yelling Lyotard) at one point, Pote (another sub-villain) threatens Shankar (Mithun) by saying that his (Shankar's) life is a comedy for all of them but will end in tragedy. Make sense who may.

Unstrung

Leonard Kraditor’s neighbour is unstrung. She stands in the corridor outside his parents’ flat (Leonard’s staying with them for sometime) as we hear her father yell at her from upstairs. Leonard offers her to come in for a bit and she seems glad at the suggestion. They look around Leonard’s parents’ flat. It is littered with books and photographs. So, she asks Leonard, are you what- the reading-reading, always reading type? Leonard gives a short laugh and looks down at the floor.
This not an extract from a novel or a short story- although it could pass for a very good read. This is how Leonard meets Michelle in James Grey’s film Two Lovers (2009). Michelle is volatile, teetering on the edge most of the time and played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Leonard, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is awkward, suffocated and stretched like a bow. He could also be unstrung and that is what one thinks right after the first scene of the film, when he drops a bag of dry-washed blazer and jumps into a river. Except, he doesn’t go ahead and kill himself. He thinks of something indistinct and swims to the surface. He goes home wet and gets his nice Jewish mother worried. Some way into the film, Sandra, who Leonard’s parents want him to get married to (Sandra Cohen), tells Leonard that she wants to take care of him, that she knows he’s not really well and she wants to be with him. Leonard says almost the same thing to Michelle after she tells him that she’s broken up with Ronald- a married man with kids. Leonard had been Michelle’s “new best friend” for sometime then- they hung out together, danced at a loud party until she got smashed and cried her eyeliner out because Ronald wasn’t coming. Her grief, coupled with the pills she had taken before the party, worked her up so bad that she passed out in the bathroom and Leonard had to return alone.
I don’t know if I’d have made the connection otherwise, but since I have also been watching Maya Deren movies, I thought the Michelle-stereotype is a bit like Maya Deren herself. Michelle is the kind who would imagine strange things to herself in the absence of concrete proofs of love and toss herself over the edge. It is not exactly spontaneity, but a meditated version of it. Yes, meditation does kill the idea of spontaneity, but I’m driving at the kind of spontaneous series of baseless meditations that culminate in an act of sudden violence towards oneself. Excessively imagined version of things, is one way to say how it begins. What should ideally have been dialogic are posed as queries to the befuddled Leonard: Do you think Ronald will ever leave them and come to me? Am I being foolish? and the wrong answer could spell relapse. Without extending my lecture on pop philosophy further, I would direct you to Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon. It’s a brilliant study of what I tried to say above. So is Meditation on Violence, in a slightly different vein. Interestingly, she has also written a film based on her Tahitian voodoo experiences entitled Pagan Hellcat. I wouldn’t mind paying a bit to watch a film with such an interesting title!

Needless to say, Leonard being on the edge himself is fascinated by Michelle. And it is true that Michelle’s character can look extremely attractive. So much so that Leonard doesn't mind acting strange and foolish in front of her, expecting her, perhaps, to focus her attention on him. Unfortunately, it’s not for Leonard to realize this wild obsession. I identified Michelle as a stereotype (and one may have one's problems with this) because, by the end, the decision she makes confirms it. She perpetuates her myth by keeping herself permanently out of the loop and Leonard has to make the right leap, tie the strings together and finally fall in with taking photographs at Sandra’s brother’s bar-mitzvah and getting engaged to her.
Two Lovers is supposedly inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. Although I’ve read the story- it didn’t occur to me at all when I was watching it, to be honest. Maybe the distractions were too many- cell phone SMSing as plot device, A Short film about Love-references (he tries to spy on her through his window), Brooklyn, how-dashing-Elias Koteas-is, etc.. But it still remains a pretty old-fashioned film on love; the days when things moved more on dialogue and smart people being completely foolish.

The picture above is a still from Meshes of the Afternoon. The actress is Maya Deren.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Literature

So there we were, in the middle of a fresh lawn, surrounded by beer ads and wondering if the man in the rumpled blue jacket and crinkled eyes was Ian McEwan. Oh, I shouted like a girl. That’s him! Stop shouting like a girl, says my friend in a tone that suggests he’s not going to sleep with me. Rushing up to McEwan, we realized that he was already being mobbed- or, at least, as mobbed as you can get in a Literary Festival- by squat journalists carrying copies of Amsterdam.
A great fan, I said, gushing, followed by a mumble of stupid, personal details. Why did you stop writing short stories, was my only coherent question. I was too dazed to hear what he said. He signed my copy of Atonement, smiled up to his eyes and went away.

A stately pleasure dome, the Diggi Palace had a huge mirror behind the panel where hacks and writers conversed in front of a well-heeled audience. Not all the hacks were irritatingly insipid though. There was Jeet Thayil, a writer himself for a change, talking to Donna Tart about American Academia and wonderful Tishani Doshi (in a tent, this time) talking to a Scot miserabalist poet. Then there was Ms. Ghosh, in a glossy biker jacket, talking to McEwan about nothing in particular.
We wondered if we could get some lunch. We wondered if the beer-bellied man was the White Mughals-guy. A lean, grey-haired man promised to help us in any way he could. We spent the early evening sipping coffee under a large shamiana, staring at Aparna Sen trying to avoid K. Basu’s company. Sarnath Banerjee walked by, backpacked and smoking what may not have been a cigarette. The bookshops outside the palace sold Penguin paperbacks at a ten-per cent discount. After a session of an astonishingly sterile conversation about the Rani of Jhansi, subject of a book by one Jaishree Mishra, we ate lunch at a dhaba across the broad road, where seedy men made passes. No wonder it’s called the pink city, my friend complained.
At another memorable session, Manil Suri read the opening pages from his latest novel- The Age of Shiva- in an orgasmic fit that was so spellbinding that we wondered if the characters were making wild love. No, Suri patiently explained; it’s a mother’s feelings for her son.
We met Jeet Thayil in the royal loo. After embarrassing acknowledgments, we walked outside and wondered if he was related to my friend. He said it was entirely possible. He promised to reply to my mail and come for a talk. A little stall displayed a book of pictures of Indian matchboxes since the early 1900s. It was fascinating and expensive. It was by far one of the better books available to us, connoisseurs of literature.
After her discussion with the Scot poet, Tishani Doshi walked around wearing an abstract look on her face. Someone told me she’s coming out with a novel next year- The Pleasure Seekers, tentatively. Indra Sinha looked uncomfortable in a small garden chair, being directed by photographers. There were lots of Animal jokes flying around. We drank several glasses of water and wondered why there was a stable next to the venue. At the McEwan press conference, we met a young man with long-black hair who used the f word in a question to McEwan. He stretched out and told us that if we ever find a book with his name on it, someday, we should pick it up. We agreed, but in vain, because he didn’t turn out to be a pusher.
Then there was literature away from Literature. Our wonderful, eccentric hostess discovered strange Hindi comic books for us and her father told us about Ozu and Wim Wenders. Her mother cooked like we were back from Somme and sang beautiful songs in a secret language only I could understand. The roof was cool and inviting. We ashed our musings into a tiny jar which we flicked as a keepsake.

After the grand screening of Atonement, which we skipped, there was to be a music night with Anoushka Shankar somewhere in the middle of the city. We didn’t push hard enough for passes or even contraband access. Instead, we hailed a bus to Delhi at night, discussed literature among the low-lives snoozing inside their mufflers and arrived safely with our guts frozen enough to make us a little light headed.

“It’s solilo-quee and don’t you dare say anything about Shakespeare”

The Last Lear asks a question that is interesting though not entirely original: Are films the death of theatre, or perhaps, in a slightly less dramatic fashion: Is it possible to translate our centuries-old notions of acting and performance if the grammar of the medium changes drastically? “Be your tears wet?” asks King Lear of Cordelia. If cinema weeps, are those tears real?
Harish “call me Harry” Mishra is concerned, when offered to do a film, if he will be up to the task. He is worried that he will be of no use if his body is not completely presented to the audience. All these close-ups and zooms, where are the good old days when he would strut on to the stage and shout Shakespeare in a melancholic rage? For melancholic rage is the only emotion Harish Mishra, obviously and explicably Bengali, seems to be capable of. In one of his most benign and finally-at-ease-with-the-world plays, Shakespeare wrote Prospero as a character who is, no doubt, bitter about being cast off his kingdom with a child, but also wise enough, after no less than twelve years of introspection, that the path of revenge leads to the grave. His project was not a bloody revenge, but forgiveness- by which he wished to be free from the bands of bitterness and the sour wish for vengeance; things even an ISC-inflicted student can understand. However, call-me-Harry performs him with a vengeance. When a talented, off-beat filmmaker (read: chain-smoking, long haired man behind dark glasses) comes to Harry with a film, he gets up and does Prospero’s most benign and heart-warming speech “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes…”- a speech meant to be the beginning of his act of forgiveness- with a thunderous vengeance that would make even Lear wither.
But, let’s not split hairs.
Rituparno Ghosh has been making the kind of films which inspired an entire generation of young people like myself to think of a Bangla cinema after Satyajit Ray. Right from his second film, let’s leave originality of plot for the moment, he has scripted a brilliant alternative cinema that showed us how films could happen inside the decaying households of Kolkata. His conflicts were made exciting by the very banality of his settings. A celebrity dancer and mother talks to her daughter about the void left in their lives after the death of her husband on the 19th of April many years ago. The emotions are raw and unrelenting in their crunch. The entire episode is conducted within a single day and the film ends with a new morning, with new hopes ahead as the daughter receives a ‘phone call from her would-be fiancé. One can seldom think of a drama in a modern context that could be more Shakespearean than this, the plot of Unishe April. Utsav, probably my favourite Ghosh film, centers around a bonedi bari Durga Puja where emotions run high as the young wife is faced with a failing marriage- to the sound of the dhunuchi dance in the background. In Bariwali, as the eponymous character, played by Kirron Kher, wallows in a nostalgia that is at one with the decadent mansion she lives in, her life is suddenly upset by the arrival of a film crew out to shoot indoors for a film based on Tagore’s Chokher Bali headed by the brooding and enigmatic director played by Chiranjeet. Similar motifs? Yes, but not quite, unfortunately.
As The Last Lear unfolds, one wonders what to make of Harry- forced on to a pedestal by application to the daily-rigors necessary to do so. He is puzzling, eccentric, quotes Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, wears designer spectacles and calls a fellow-stage actor whose death is supposed to elicit a homage from him, a ‘her’ or ‘a bloody homosexual’. The point is made. He is a stage-addict who gave up his chance of a lifetime to play King Lear as he walked out of theatre due to a slur. He doesn’t understand acting for films (“what’s a show reel, what is DoP?” he asks) and has his inhibitions. Our talented man, however, convinces him otherwise with the help of a guess-what-that-guy’s-life-is-like game and CCTV camera. I’m not sure about the CCTV camera, but isn’t the former supposed to make some sense to a stage-veteran? Anyway, as the plot for the ‘film’ within the film unfolds (It’s called The Mask, dubious or nail-bitingly embarrassing- you decide) he is playing the character of a clown (symbolism alert) who, facing the death of his art, kills another person and is on the run. He goes to the hills and somehow becomes intrinsic to another sub-plot concerning the breakdown of a marriage between the characters played by Preity Zinta and Prosenjit (who the hell was dubbing for him?). Shabnam (Preity) has her own problems off-screen. She is taught by Harry to scream at the hills (he screams Shakespeare) and she breaks down after that. She passes on her good-advice at relationships later to Harry’s night-nurse Ivy. Ghosh seldom moves away from strict notions of unity of time and sometimes, even place (Unishe April, Raincoat). Real time in The Last Lear is concentrated on two simultaneous events: The premiere of The Mask at a Diwali weekend and Shabnam’s visit to the dying thespian’s house. The story of the shooting and what preceded it is told in flashbacks. Interesting, though not unfamiliar. Narratives don’t have to travel through unending measures of space and time, it could unfold in your backyard: Ghosh’s trademark as I mentioned earlier. It is revealed slowly how Harry pushes himself- a theatrical idiom- to perform even the climax-scene where he is expected to jump off a cliff as his director commands(this is not my metaphor)- a filmic idiom. He is loath to let a stuntman handle this scene. As his theatrical instinct burns him up, helped by a lot of alcohol, he requests the talented director to let him do the scene himself and signs an undertaking. A few seconds ago, he was told by the talented director: “You are drunk. You are completely sloshed”. Legal loop, anyone? The talented director has a thing for realism in his cinema so he wants the jump to look authentic- what this means is that by the end of it all- Harry is left for dead as the filmmakers reject him after the production.
My nitpicking may seem awkward and exaggerated. But these are the small things that would frustrate any discerning person. There is a constant hammering of Shakespeare to prove Harry’s worth although I’ve seen several films that are more Shakespearean without having a single word uttered from his plays. Utpal Dutt (the writer of Aajker Shahjahan) could invoke Shakespeare in the very way he conducted himself in films like Agantuk. Naipaul commented how Shatranj Ke Khiladi is almost Shakespearean in its economy and precision of dialogue and expression. And these are films that had nothing to do with Shakespeare. So, for a film that posits Shakespeare at the very front of its activities- it is definitely frustrating to see him flung about the room like left-over brandy. But I suppose, for an actor of Amitabh Bachchan’s caliber- whose melodramatic excess extends to shouting like a maniac to a small deaf-and-dumb girl in his most celebrated film in modern times- one can hardly expect a different approach to Shakespeare, perhaps, in his thesaurus, a synonym for high-melodrama, a synonym for looking around wildly as if suddenly struck blind, a synonym for shouting but ultimately, bad acting. However, I’m not saying we should go Julian Beck-avant-garde on Shakespeare and reduce him to murmurs in smoky cafes. Even if he has to exist as a metaphor for theatre at large- the dying theatre in this case- he should not have been presented as he is in this film- difficult, unapproachable and elite. Because Shakespeare isn’t and was never meant to be. In The Last Lear, instead of taking Shakespeare to be a simple symbol of theatre he is presented as an elite obscurantist inaccessible to everyone from the journalist to the actress. Except for the talented director of course, who appreciates Shakespeare but is forced to shout, during shooting, at the errant Harry that this is not bloody Shakespeare. What comes as a surprise is Shefali Shah’s inspired turn as Harry’s partner (or wife? Am not sure). Although the dialogues are childish at times and lagging in the emotional crunch Ghosh is capable of in Bengali (like Dosar, most recently), she shines in depicting her character who, interestingly, doesn’t travel outside the space of Harry’s home in the film and recreates, ironically, Harry’s character as something more attractive than even Mr. Bachchan could in all his screen-time. It gets overtly melodramatic in the end, but somehow I felt it was nearer to Ghosh’s terrain and wasn’t very put off by it. It was all managed by Shefali Shah and a few inspired shots towards the end.
A stronger script next time and Ghosh could consider not caring about commercial impulses like adopting a language for the mere sake of a wider audience. Don’t we have sub-titles for that? Everyone knows that a film like The Last Lear is not intended for everybody (a sad, but true presumption)- so really, a bag of contradictions is what The Last Lear stands out to be. King Lear is an intensely personal tragedy of a man unable to judge his closest relations. A weeping (and imprisoned) Cordelia is comforted

“We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales…”

Hardly the image of a man grunting about solilo-quee and hiding behind a fortress of vainglorious declamations and CCTV cameras.

Living with the dead

Cairo is morbid. They- and there are quite a few of them, littered around the grey Nile- are living with the dead, making a living out of the dead and also, recession or not, slowly dying themselves. It's probably a transitional model whose finer points may remind one of a regular Mahfouz novel. But it is happening. The pyramids, the great Egyptian ode to death, are imposing and awe-inspiring. Covered in sand and dust, they are the motif for the entire city. What is more disturbing is its strange-if not a harsh ironical- manifestation into a modern dystopia. The city of the dead is called by various names, slightly altered now and again and sometimes even meant to denote the city of Cairo in its entirety- as if the various names would somehow dissolve the reality of its existence. But it refers specifically to a wide arc of burial land outside the Citadel, close to the famous Khan al khalili market, that is also home to at least "two hundred thousand people". I am quoting our eccentric, Anwar Sadat-loving taxi-driver here, because there was no way I could verify this with anybody else in Cairo. The tourist guides refused to speak of the place and, well, it wasn't very easy to make ourselves understood to anybody on the streets. However, he was rash enough to take us into this modern valley of the dead and indeed the sight wasn't worthy of being advertised on Amazing Cairo. It's a cemetery- replete with new tombs and rusty gates, dusty lanes, graffitied walls, wrinkled women, disabled children and cobwebs living on or around the tombs of dead people: a grimly contrasting view against the Oreintal corpulence of belly dancers and self-indulgent architecture.(I couldn't find a mention of this place in their wikipedia entry either). Their attempts to 'hide' the place is quite pathetic as it stretches shamelessly and is quite the eyesore for being situated in the middle of hot tourist spots. It reminded me of Dharavi- as you fly out of Mumbai.

By what strange habit of continuity (or merely post-Infitah poverty?) have the thousands been reduced to a caricature of their land- living along with the dead? As the Sphinx alleged, people have stopped asking it to impart the wisdom of the ancient world that it contains. If that is true, the answers will have to remain buried in the sand.

The Resurrection of hair

Whatever it might be, I thought, slightly irritated for having liked it in the first place, this does not resemble a Matisse corpulence spread on thick red- as Byatt suggested. It's probably the system of the studio in the 1900s. C was lean and had a slow languor about his movements; actually I doubt if I'd have ever written this sentence if I wasn't reading too much of Alan Hollinghurst. He parked the comb on a bunch of hair and snipped around my ears with a measured belief of being able to find his way through this dense and unyielding foliage. A heady sound of snipping, the rustle of hair and the mirror did a lot of tricks with the lady sitting next to me. The spell was cast, but I could hear it shatter suddenly with loud, bad radio music and Pujo-gossip. (A sudden moment of Matisse- as I saw her throat expand terribly up to her nose, and explode in tiny collections of redbluegolden hair). C started talking with the lady next to me. Pandal hopping I see? No, of course not!- a gush, a short breathlessness- pandal hopping? not for me. The little one is sleeping at home- I thought I'd just pop in for a little facial... Oh I see! In the evening I suppose, then? No, maybe, It depends on Him, na? He says he's got some work... Oh that's sad, that's not fair!... Well, I've just got into the new Suchitra Bhattacharya novel- I'll probably read that and maybe watch- they're going to show Dosar this evening so... Oh right... snip, snip. In this ridiculous movie I saw, I butted into their conversation, though only in my imagination, this guy claims he can hear what people think when he's giving them haircuts. Can you? I mean, they show people like Pooja Bhatt and Koel Purie so I was supposing there's a catch- there, like a metaphor for page 3 clairvoyance or something, but let's at the larger thing- No, C replied, in his measured, contemplative manner. No, I can't really hear you. It's probably the scissors, isn't it? It's true, I thought to myself. He was being especially harsh on my hair and ears. His snips were slowly getting ferocious, tugging sharply and the sudden brushes against my ears were even worse- like the continued licking of an impatient flame. Er... I said; to myself, almost in tears. Sniff... What was that? Do you need a trimming of the beard as well? No, thanks- just the hair, I said, coldly.

In a bookshop, there generally is not much space to er... manoeuvre around, I said. But what about danger jackets? she asked. What is that? Oh, when there's increased footfall, you know- during the Pujos or some such festival? Yes, that is true- but I cannot imagine too many people wandering into the African Writer's section during Pujos for some reason, you know? A tremulous laugh as she threw back her hair. It was long, dark and the light seemed to shiver on its surface. Stop staring at my hair! Sorry, but it's pretty good and also, nice (the right word is always shelved away on these occasions). Oh, thanks. But I was very surprised, as I was saying, to find Bengalis here... you must come to my exhibition. I know a bit about photography as well, I volunteered.

Ten minutes later, as she walked away, I saw a strand of hair, long and frail perched quietly on the spine of a book that dealt with anarchy.