[ARTICLE] India NOW! at TIFF
David Chute
Comment. It is not offered as a finished piece, or as the work of an
expert. Far from it. Any corrections, reactions or suggestions that RMIM
posters might have to offer will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
By David Chute
The Tamil film director Mani Rathnam, a featured artist in
Toronto's "India NOW!" program, could be a breakthrough figure --
the John Woo or Tsui Hark of India, an authentic popular artist
who expresses himself fully in a commercial idiom. Which I
suppose makes actor Kamal Haasan, who plays the title role in
Rathnam's sinewy 1987 gangster epic Nayakan ("Hero," a set of
sharply pointed variations on The Godfather) the Chow Yun-fat of
Madras. Haasan's performance as Velu, the son of a murdered union
leader who becomes a smuggler and then a lordly mob boss who
sticks up for the downtrodden, stands up rather well to the
Corleone dons of either Pacino or De Niro. And in addition to
grave force of personality that comes through effortlessly, Kamal
exhibits qualities of sweetness and playfulness that have so far
eluded those dour Yankee gentlemen. (The actor is often referred
to simply as "Kamal" by the home court fans; the name also means
"lotus" in Tamil.)
In Bharathan's highly effective blood-and-thunder family
melodrama Thevar Magan ("Thevar's Son," 1992), Haasan enters the
story as a callow young rich kid in trendy city clothes,
returning to the brutal, feudal landscape of his ancestral estate
in rural Tamil Nadu, and evolves before our eyes into a solid,
deep-rooted, commanding personality that seems to be his natural
persona. He seems to absorb all the weight of regional tradition,
to have turned iward and aquired more density, as if his feet
will sink into the earth at every step. When his sophisticated
fiancee (Gowthami) returns after several months to find him
transformed from a modern young Indian go-getter into a grave and
terrifying country patriarch, the effect is spine-chilling; this
is no longer a mere human being but a sort of sacred monster, a
back-country demi-god.
Both Nayakan and Thevar Magan manage to suggest the
ambiguity of Haasan's motives when he embraces patriarchal
values; what guy wouldn't prefer having his feet kissed to
wrestling with all the compromises and half measures of modern
egalitarian maleness? In their own distinctive, tough-minded
fashion, these pictures are wish-fulfillment fantasies of ideas.
The "India NOW!" program, orchestrated by David Overbey and
Noah Cowen, offered Anglo-North-American observers a rare
opportunity to see a brace of commercial Indian movies over a
ten-day span that made the interconnections and implications all
but impossible to miss. In the West, only the occasional
eccentric like Dennis Potter or Terence Davies has explored the
expressive possibilities of "playback songs" in dramatic
contexts; characters pouring out their deepest feelings, or just
kicking up their heels, while lip-synching to a pop song. India
turns out 600 movies a year, in ten regional languages, and every
one of them is a "music drama" -- if you consider shimmying
nautch girls who rob trains, dashing disco dancers who are also
psycho killers, and political prisoners who serenade their absent
loved ones from captivity, the stuff of drama. In India, all
commercial movies are bound to incorporate six to eight songs
and/or dance numbers. "Film songs," in fact, have been part and
parcel of the Indian pop music industry since the pre-playback
period of the 1930s, when only singers could become stars.
Shammi Kapoor, in Junglee ("The Untamed," DATE TK), emotes
with wholehearted soulfulness to his lissome lady love. The silky
vocal tone is supplied by the legendary "playback singer"
Mohammed Rafi, the sentiments by the Shenkar Jaikishan tune
"Ehsann Tera Hoga Mujh Par" (TITLE TRANS TK). Kapoor says says he
loves the woman so much that his love will survive even death;
after he is gone "and the dust is blowing over (his) grave, (he)
will still know where (she is)." But when the song recurs much
later in this long film, the context has shifted drastically. In
the course of the story it was she, not he, who expired. A devil-
may-care playboy type given to rolling down snowy slopes in
Kashmir hollering "Ya-hoo!," Kapoor now lies sprawled half-
asleep, or perhaps drunk, in film noir black & white, brooding
over his loss -- as his lost love returns to him as a ghostly
vision, mumuring exactly the same song, this time through the
even-more legendary playback artiste Lata Mangeshkar: "Even when
the ashes are blowing on my grave, I will know where you are." If
this coup de ecran doesn't make your scalp tingle, you should
might consider a tingle-echtomy.
There is an emotional, almost a metaphysical pull to the use
of music as a storytelling device that is light years beyond the
"corniness" and melodrama that is often attributed to popular
Indian films. In the West, only grand opera produces comperable
effects. Imagine a popular cinema, then, in which dramatic music
was an everyday element of the vocabulary. Who cares that in
recent years this precious resource has been squandred on
trivilitites, under the dire influence of disco, rap, and MTV?
How did this exhilerating form of lyric cinema, unique in
all the world, come to be in the first place? Around the turn of
the century, we're told, the lip-smacking bombastic conventions
of imported British blood and thunder stage melodramas merged
with the "music drama" structure of native devotional theater
forms like tamascha and jatra to shape the most overt
characteristics of Indian commercial cinema. The pattern was set,
according to critic Somi Roy, by the subcontinent's very first
feature film, D.M. Phalke's Raja Harischandra (1912), which was
based upon an episode of the Indian national epic Mahabarta.
"Indian cinema," Roy writes, in an essay published in Asian Art &
Culture (Spring-Summer 1994), "had begun retelling or
reinterpreting a mythology. In doing so, cinema joined a two-
thousand-year-old tradition." To this day, Roy believes,
"(Indian) film characters represent not complex psychological
entities but ethical archetypes."
This is a narrative environment infused with mythological
fantasy, where Gods routinely walk the earth and the natural and
the supernatural, the real and the surreal, are fully expected to
intermingle -- where anything is possible. In the West, after
all, ghostly intervention hasn't been a staple of high drama
since the time of Shakespeare. In Indian movies (we can't say
"Hindi movies," anymore, because over half of them are now in
Tamil) reality is volatile, always on the verge of bleeding over
into its supposed opposite. Indeed, caustic observers like V.S.
Naipaul have seen the subcontinent's apparent inability to
disentangle fact and fantasy as a primary obstacle to humane
progress in that part of that beleguered corner of the world.
For a while there was room in Indian film production for
both "socials," topical dramas that often championed (as they
romanticised) the downtrodden, and old fashioned "mythologicals."
India's collective fantasies were at least fairly benign in the
immediate aftermath of independence, in the 1950s, when
progressive commercial artists like Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, and
Bimal Roy made popular entertainments that actively promoted
secular liberal values, particularly brotherhood across lines of
class, caste, and religion. But the central movie fantasies
turned vicious in the 1970s, in the widely imitated super-anti-
hero adventures of the definitive Indian superstar of the last
two decades, Amitabh Bachchan, whose underdog prowess bordered on
the supernatural. Key Amitabh films like Mard ("He-Man") and
Laawaris ("The Disinherited") operate in a realm class of wish-
fulfillment fantasy that goes way beyond what any Western
observer could reasonably expect. Plots as far-fetched as an El
Santo story are deployed with all the pomp and gravity of
Biblical epics. With their superintelligent animal side-kicks,
the twin brothers separated at birth (one good, one bad), the
long-suffering mothers afflicted with amnesia, the slinky rich
girls who fall for tongawallas, the films seem to be working
overtime to cram in every last cheesy convention of pulp fiction
and melodrama. (In fairness, they do have a minimum of two-and-a-
half hours of running time to fill; Indian audiences like their
movies long.) With the rise of Bachchan, there no longer seemed
to be any sharp distinction drawn between mythological beings and
mere mortals on the big screen. The way Bachchan's characters
look and especially sound (he's a wiz with accents) may signify
street smarts, but they are clearly daemonic entities,
embodiments of unstoppable social and psychic forces, rolling
over ervery obstacle.
Indian cinema is devoted to fantasy to a degree that may
seem grotesque, given the dire extremity of the reality outside
the theater. The best documentaries in "India NOW!" zeroed in on
this vexing issue, struggling to find a sharp line between
actuality and illusion. Anand Patwardhan's Father, Son, and Holy
War is mostly about the alarming recent rise of nationalist and
Hindu fundamentalist movements in India, culminating in last
year's burning of a Bombay mosque by Hindu radicals, and a string
of follow-up bombings. In an explosive final segment, Patwardhan
explores the images of ferocious masculinity promulgated by the
Indian mass media; by the post-Amitabh cinema most of all. "Every
Indian movie poster looks like Rambo, now," the filmmaker says,
exaggerating only slightly.
Jill Misquitta, who wrote Dilip Ghosh's Children of the
Silver Screen (1990), about Bollywood's ubiquitous child stars,
frankly sees the distortions and falsifications of personality
inflicted upon these malleable souls as a metaphor for the
inherent falseness of Hindi cinema and its entire world view.
"Film should be an act of compassion, not exploitation," she
says. "The falseness of Bombay cinema distorts the soul."
In the intermittently readable recent book National Identity
in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (Texas, 1993), Sumita S.
Chakravarty sceptically offers a quote from critic Frederic
Jameson: "the star system is fundamentally, structurally
irreconcilable with neo-realism." Chakravarty hopes the heavily
neo-realist of India's parallel cinema can become a bit more
flexible, to stop seeing fancy and reality as polar opposites.
"Textual negotiation and accommodation (are) not ... lapses from
the standards of 'high art,'" she asserts, "but ... an engagement
with the store of images and icons, desires and fantasies in the
realm of public culture which is circulated largely ... by the
Bombay cinema." This assertion could be read as an extension of
the commonly promulgated view that movies derive much of their
unique power from a synthesis of the expressive tools of several
art forms. Clever artists ought to be able to make good use of
the unique resources of Indian commercial cinema, rather than
tossing them out wholesale.
Nayakan, like the other three Mani Rathnam films screened in
Toronto, shows us how much fine-grained truth can be acheived in
an Indian commercial film that honors all the conventions, by
(ill) repute the most flagrantly artificial on earth. Of course,
Rathnam carefully preserves the dignity and the credibility of
his gang lord hero by never asking him to synch to playback; the
de rigeur musical duties are always justified by the narrative
context (entertainers in a brothel) or handed off to a high
spirited side-kick (Jankaraj). Kamal Haasan's Velu kicks up his
heels during a festival celebration, in a moment of personal
triumph, but he kicks them up in character.
Rathnam's gentle domestic drama Mouna Ragam ("Silent
Symphony," 1987), shuttles most of its crowd-pleasing melodrama
off onto a siding, into a flashback to an early romantic trauma
suffered by the heroine (Revathi), who fell in loved with a
terrorist who was gunned down right in front of her. In real
time, she's the reluctant bride in an arranged marriage who can't
bring herself to submit to her new husband, a nice guy who loves
her dearly and always does the best he can. In sharp contrast to
the plot heavy norm of Indian movies, Mouna Ragam sticks to a
straightforward account of two well-meaning people negotiating a
domestic partnership. In every important respect it's less
contrived than 90% of Hollywood movies. The strong point of
Rathnam's screenwriting, here as elsewhere, is that the plot
complications he introduces spring organically from the
situations; they never feel cooked up. He elides the conventions
whenever he can: the songs are heard but not lip-synched, so that
they seem to embody the character's inarticulate longings. (Songs
can do that even with lip-synch: a love-lorn cop in Baazigar,
brooding at the wedding of the girl he loves, imagines himself
singing to her in the middle of a crowd or revelers at the
reception.)
Rathnam's most sumptuous and succesful picture so far, Roja
(1992), is almost static in its basic situation. A young engineer
(Aravind Swamy) is held hostage by Kashmiri terrorists and his
young bride (Madhubala) is desperate to get him back. Rathnam
holds the characters suspended in a state of high anxiety for for
most of 137 minutes, and the vibrating atmosphere seems to
energize the yearning romantic lyricism that is the pictures real
raison d'etre. The political setting, Rathnam says, is
incidental: "The films takes the point of view of the average
Indian who doesn't want to see his country split apart."
The one film Rathnam and Haasan have made together, Nayakan,
had to be remade in Hindi (as Hero) to reach the big Indian
market; in 1993, a dubbed Hindi version of Rathnam's Roja was
India's top grossing movie after Jurassic Park. That's progress,
of a sort. Also, the 23-year-old Tamil film song composer (or
"Music Director") of Roja, A.R. Rahmen, whose harmonically rich
and catchy tunes from Roja -- and from his follow-up with
Rathnam, Thiruda Thiruda (Thief Thief) -- alternating between
buoyant playfulness and an extraordinarily delicate romanticism,
swept the country in re-recorded Hindi versions. ("Like a flower
growing on a dung heap," is how one Indian observer characterizes
Rahmen's stature among the current crop of copy-cat MDs.) In a
country and a culture where music and movies are so inextricably
linked, Rahman has to be considered a crucial element of the
influential Tamil triumvirate.
The best-received Rathnam film in Toronto was also the most
familiar looking, the high speed caper comedy Thiruda Thiruda
("Thief, Thief," 1994), which won the crowd over quickly with its
self-puncturing humor and non-stop cleverness. Rathman and
company come up with enough first rates twists and turns to keep
us glued to this silly story for 140 minutes, which surely
indicates that the it isn't "too long" in any meaningful sense.
Thiruda could almost certainly be a hit on the American
college-market repertory scene. Its story of a pair of buddy-
buddy thieves and the curvy women who come between them, has a
first-rate gimlet-eyed bad guy (Salim Ghouse) and a stirring A.R.
Rahman song score that is picturized a bit more conventionally
than in Rathman's other films. In this case the director seems to
relish the foolishness of Indian film conventions and to fret
about redeeming them a bit less; his fond complicity with the
foolishness is the key to the movie's triumph. Rathman controls
not just a movie's look but its tone to an extent that is
virtually unique in the Indian commercial flims I've seen.
The technical polish and the attention to detail in
Rathnam's films have reivigorated the conventions of Indian
cinema, without blasting them to kingdom come. Even the psycho-
hero Sha Rukh Khan films (he's been typecast since Baazigar)
suggest a willingness to slough off the high contrast black and
white melodramatics of the Amitabh era -- albeit for a different
flavor of melodramatics. (There's a good essay by Rashmi
Doraiswamy on Baazigar as the definative film of the post-Amitabh
era in the Spring 1994 issue of Cinemaya.)
Director Shakar Kapur describes his controversial Bandit
Queen (1994), based upon the experiences of a real-life female
outlaw, Poolan Devi (who has filed suit to protest his supposed
betrayals of reality) as an attempt to combine the best of both
of India's cinematic traditions, "using the way we talk to our
people to tell a realistic story. The point about this film, and
the reason people saying this is Indian cinema coming of age, is
because a director whose background is in Indian commercial
cinema [Masoom was his first mainstream success] is attempting to
make a realistic film." Inspired partly by Dennis Potter's
powerful use of "playback" in Pennies From Heaven and The Singing
Detective, Kapur hopes to attempt an inter-racial love story set
in the Hindi film world, about an ex-hippie Anglo extra and a
Hindi actress, "that would begin as a film about the making of a
musical and then become a musical." In other words, dissolving
the boundaries. Which puts Kapur, along with Mani Rathnam, Kamal
Haasan, and A.R. Rahman, squarely in the central tradition of
Indian popular cinema.
==
Many thanks to my generous informants on rec.music.indian.misc
and soc.culture.tamil: Prince Kohli, Ramyesh, Porky, Dr. Siddarth
Dasgupta, R. Sowminarayanan, and Balaji ThirumalaiKumara
[David Chute is an Los Angeles-based writer with a special
interest in Asian popular culture.]
That's it! Thanks for your patience.
--
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DAVID CHUTE - HUNGRY GHOST PRODUCTIONS
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213-739-1896 fax 213-739-8639 ch...@netcom.com
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