Laugh riot for the right reasons, across all seasons

Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Never mind, mates!) 1983

Calling this NFDC-sponsored, anti-establishment satirical masterpiece a laugh riot is rather unfair given its sterling quality of dark humour, a rarity for Indian cinema, mainstream or offbeat. All the same, it is an approximately apt description for an out-and-out entertainer in a league of its own which instinctively charms every audience type.

Talking in terms of two extremes, there’s a big load of over-the-top slapstick for those who love belly laughs while popping corn, and for those who crave for meaning in cinema, the umpteen parallels between the reel and the real are a treasure trove for the keeps.

Among other feats, this flick beautifully hints at the poignant truth of the nation’s unofficial social anthem “Hum Honge Kamyab” (We shall overcome!) as also the distant dreams that professed priorities like clean water, good roads, sturdy bridges, affordable housing, and corruption-free governance remain to this day.

Way back in 1966, Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni made his first English feature ‘Blow-Up’, a psychological thriller about a hedonistic fashion photographer who unintentionally records murder on camera in the course of clicking snaps of a girl in a recreation park.

The idea of this milestone movie was loosely borrowed by the makers of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron for one of their defining scenes where the protagonists accidentally click a murder and invite trouble that eventually spells their doom.

As heroes, they have little to write home about: two starry-eyed shutterbugs keen to make their mark in a marked world run by a well-oiled leviathan mafia we know very well, one that binds criminals across spheres with underhanded goals and aspirations sanctified by the system. Not surprisingly, their bravado makes them marked men in the wrong sense, as the sacrificial lambs to cover for the sacred cows of a two-faced society.

The screenplay is a conscious potpourri – almost a commedia erudita of Italian descent - of black and white caricatures in the name of characters - with their motives underlined and madness overdone but methods sidelined - certainly not just for laughs, but with little objection if the audience thinks otherwise.

The rustic cadences of the film’s dark humour help its cause, unfolding the incongruity and bigotry pervading our lives but steering clear of highlighting them, which is what makes it a great film made with a shoe string budget under INR 10 lacs and the greatest star cast ever assembled, you could call it the Sholay of offbeat cinema…

Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani as the protagonist photographer duo, Pankaj Kapoor as the shady builder Tarneja, Satish Shah as the city’s corrupt municipal commissioner D’Mello, Om Puri as Ahuja, the perpetually inebriated, well meaning rival of Tarneja, and Bhakti Barve as Shobha, the vulturous editor of the tabloid Khabardar (which literally means ‘watch out’ and implicitly ‘don’t you dare’).

The support cast and crew were equally epic: Satish Kaushik, Neena Gupta, Deepak Qazir, and Ashok Banthia in bit roles of big import, engaging plot, courtesy of Kundan Shah and Sudhir Mishra, Vidhu Vinod Chopra as the production controller, dialogues by Ranjit Kapoor and Satish Kaushik, music by Vanraj Bhatia, Binod Pradhan’s cinematography, Renu Saluja’s editing, sound by K.S.Ravi, and art-direction by Robin Das.

The nearly 15-minute auditorium scene - a hilariously improvised version of the Draupadi Cheer-Haran episode from the great epic Mahabharata - is a fitting climax for a film of this genre. It subtly ensures poetic justice by downplaying the stature of several characters from the reprehensible episode and smartly reverses the inherently wrong that was made to look right…

…for instance, the morally superior, mace-holding Bhima takes matters into his own hands to the point of insubordination to his more revered brothers Yudhishthira and Arjuna,

the dramatically transformed kuru brothers Duryodhana and Dushasana shed their villainy and stand by Draupadi as her trusted lieutenants,

and the ‘yeh kya ho raha hai’ rant of the original Dhritrashtra is pushed into oblivion as the new avatar  passes a work-around verdict: that Draupadi is neither a property of Kauravas nor of Pandavas – she belongs to her father Drupad!

Kundan Shah was one of those few filmmakers who are aware of their products’ shortcomings even while the world raves about them. Rather than reel in the effect of the film’s popularity despite the commercial failure, he lamented the fact that his film set a rather low benchmark given the sheer lack of contenders in the said space. For him, his film’s success was a matter for deliberation on the antediluvian state of Indian cinema, not a cause for raucous celebration of his solo effort.

Last but not the least, one must applaud the liberal, dissent-friendly socio-political environment of the 80s which allowed a film like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro to be made and released in theatres.

Precisely why this film is vintage stuff, a laugh riot for the right reasons, across all seasons. Do watch it at a device near you…

Harness of Wilderness

Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders, 1984

The name of the film couldn’t have been more redolent of the twin flames that make two halves of one whole in screenplay form. The punctuation between the two locations signifies that the former is a small region within the latter province, but the two proper nouns suggest an intercontinental diversity across nations; in this case, France and the US. The film traverses the existential trajectories punctuated within both metaphors.

For a deep, introspective film, the narrative is pretty linear, largely moving from point A to point B and onwards, save for the fag-end wordy affair that goes back and forth, albeit only as monologues sans flashback – explicit or otherwise.

Wandering aimlessly through the thick of the desert, our protagonist Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) collapses at a store alongside a gas station in a desperate attempt to quench his thirst, midway through what seems like some soul-cleansing expedition. Having endured a short stay at the nearest clinic run by a slimy doctor keen to make a fast buck, he is reunited with his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) after four long years. Walt drives Travis home from Texas to LA but only after clearing a painful hide-in-seek litmus test with his sibling, thanks to the latter’s extreme reluctance to terminate his wilful exile.

It is at the LA home that Travis comes face to face with his son Hunter (Hunter Carson) and old memories are rekindled when he revisits a Super 8 Kodak footage of his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski, daughter of celebrated German actor Klaus Kinski) en route a happy road trip from a distant past.

A silent resolve germinates in his mind despite knowing well that it would cause inevitable ripples in the life of the childless couple - Walt and his French wife Anne (Aurore Clement) - now doting parents to Hunter, apart from being his magnanimous benefactors.

Yet, Travis is absolutely sure of his plan of tracing the whereabouts of his estranged wife led by the cues Anne provides in a clandestine tete-a-tete. After the initial reserve and inhibition, his son Hunter begins to trace vital remains of his biological father in the now skinny, bony apparition keen to make friends with him. It’s not long before Travis takes the bright and chirpy kid into confidence and shares choicest portions of his plan.

Father and son set about their covert mission in a battered Ford pickup that Travis has secured with his brother’s money. A bigger challenge awaits Travis after he finds Jane; she’s now a regular staffer at a sleazy peep show parlour in Houston, indulging customers through one-on-one phone conversations in provocative costumes. Travis uses his desert guile to reach out to her in two attempts, first to make sure she’s not neck-deep into the business, and second to establish co-ordinates of mind and soul by posing as one of her customers. He reveals his identity by recounting their real life story as a fable, which she picks up in the course of the narration, either at the very start or midway through it, as both possibilities have tell-tale signs in the footage to support their plausibility. Jane is enthused enough to bare her soul in exchange, and a semblance of an elusive rapport between the separated couple begins to take shape.

Travis scores a resounding goal when he reunites mother and son in a plush hotel (unlike the cheap motels he’s used to)  but he is not with them to cheer it. He leaves yet again to lose himself in the rough country, but this time there’s no desperation. Instead, an implicit relief rooted in restitution fuels his onward journey into nihility.

The end makes for a glorious climax on reels, but it doesn’t condone the viewer’s perplexment about the protagonist’s psyche and extreme choices. Yes, we know from the parlour episode about his extreme fondness for his beautiful wife, much younger to him, which grew into an obsession overwhelming enough to make him shun work and stay home with her. We are also told how the wife resented this mindless attention when the household was hit by dwindling finances, and he hit the bottle in turn. We are aware how his rage made him a suspicious spouse and irresponsible parent.

Yet, none of it explains why he should decide to fade away in oblivion. There’s no commensurate build up or back story to help expound either his fatal disillusionment or his consistent lack of concern for the feelings of his selfless brother and his good-natured wife. In contrast, there’s a lot of rich cinematic ammunition to vindicate his preposterous waywardness, like the masterly shots of arid desert landscapes, fleeting glimpses of highway motels, weather-beaten vehicles, life-sized but lifeless movie posters, archetypal montage of LA neighbourhoods and Houston highways, and a delightfully haunting musical score that add colour and depth to his melancholy state.

A compulsive escapist who clings to the harness of wilderness shunning all filial responsibilities in a supposedly futile search on a flimsy pretext that leads him nowhere save for a black hole of nothingness ideally doesn’t make for an endearing protagonist. Yet, you stay glued to the screen as the movie rolls at a lazy, languid pace, thanks to the sterling conviction of director Wim Wenders and screenwriter duo Sam Shepard and L. M. Kit Carson. Clearly, the questions they raise through the film are far bigger and better that those that perplex us. In any case, when life itself is inherently illogical, why should we insist on plausibility of character action in a commendable cinematic endeavour that probes into the darkest recesses of the human mind. If  we accept Travis without his backstory, we touch the soul of the movie the way the makers want us to, which also does justice to the phenomenal performance of the lead actor, matched with aplomb by a marvellous support cast.

Hollywood’s thankless veteran Harry Dean Stanton, who was not the first choice for the role, was god sent as Travis given a whole lot to his advantage: his turbulent Kentucky upbringing, Buddhist ideals, affinity for country music, and above all his scrawny frame and movie-friendly face. No wonder, he once famously said, “If I never did another film after Paris, Texas, I’d be happy.”

Hunter Carson as Hunter certainly ranks among the best child characters ever etched on celluloid. The father-son chemistry that unfolds on screen is definitely one of the film’s most resonant parts, at par with the allegorical saloon booth scenes between Travis and Jane.

That this film won the Palme d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival speaks volumes of the jury’s criterion for that year. Such verdicts are unthinkable in contemporary times as we are more used to the baffling voting patters of the Academy Awards which bestowed seven Oscars on the Marvel-like extravaganza ‘Oppenheimer’, only because it was a Nolan film, never mind if the story and characterization were shattered to pieces by the nuclear explosion in the name of technical finesse.

Homework notebooks for students of all ages

Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Kahne-ye doust kodjast?’ (Where Is the Friend’s House?) 1987

High up in a pine tree, you will see a child who will lift a chick out of a nest of light. Ask him, ‘Where is the friend’s house?'

This canto from the renowned poet and painter Sohrab Sepehri’s work ‘Address’, (English translation by Jerome W. Clinton) forms the title of master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s epic cinematic vignette ‘Kahne-ye doust kodjast?’ (Where is the Friend’s House?) and aptly so.

Among the few films of this sensitive genre, there are fewer who have so delicately unfolded, stopping short of unduly highlighting, the unadulterated innocence that can pervade a child’s heart and mind, powered by purpose, as also the propensity to politely and single-handedly defy the flurry of adult whims and fancies in the guise of discipline that threaten to break its tender cocoon with brutal attacks of incessant regularity.

The profound story is simply told with a delightfully matter-of-fact nuance.

Ahmad (Babek Ahmadpour) is extremely worried for his elementary school classmate Mohammad (Ahmad Ahmadpour); his agony has reached the point where mounting stress makes way for calamitous distress. What could have bothered an eight year old to cause an anguish of this scale?

Well, back home from a tiring day at school, he has found to his horror, the notebook of his classmate Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh tucked in his school bag, a notoriously confounding twin image of his own notebook. Now, unless Ahmad takes corrective action overnight, this error of inadvertence will spell doom for Mohammad the next day.

Why? Because the form teacher’s cardinal rule for the class is that homework must be done in the notebook and notebook alone, as it helps him assess the progress made by the student over time. The teacher has already issued an ultimatum to Mohammad, a repeat offender, that he will be expelled if his homework is found scribbled on loose papers the next day. So, Ahmad can’t but let things take their course. He must intervene but how?

The film relays Ahmad’s heroic albeit futile attempt to return Mohammad’s pivotal property well in time while there’s time, locking horns with the mighty challenges posed by elders at home, on the street, and in the wilderness that leave him hapless and helpless: ruthless admonishments in quick succession, stony indifference of zombie-like inhabitants of identical dwellings and similar names, absurd tangents of street banter that waste his precious time, flawed directions and cryptic instructions that repeatedly set him on the wrong trail, and misguided counsel with neither will nor intent to address Ahmad’s pressing problem at hand.

Distance is one among the many unnerving obstacles in Ahmad’s way. He is from Kokur, and Mohammad hails from the neighbouring Poshteh. A difficult terrain of labyrinthine alleys, arduous  stone steps, and deserted zigzag pathways separates the two locations. How Ahmad goes about his nobler-than-noble mission and achieves a magnificent turnaround towards the end is best watched, not narrated. Suffice to say our two little comrades, Ahmad and Mohammad, steal a quiet triumph, if not the the last laugh, which is obviously lost on the elders that rule their lives.

Seamlessly interspersed within the central narrative are disparate scenes that tell a lot about the universal realities common to the globe, as also provincial constraints of an Iran of the seventies, when the totalitarianism of Ayatollah Khomeini was at its peak.

Ironically, while the young Ahmad shows great character and exceptional resilience in coming to terms with the mayhem around him, every adult is visibly childish about his or her rant or wont – the grandmom won’t stop reminding Ahmad to remove his slippers prior to entering her sanctified premises; the mother wants him to ceaselessly shuffle between housework and homework without a whimper; the idling, heartless  grandfather is itching to torture Ahmad with the cold-hearted drills he himself endured during the formative phase of his regimented upbringing; and the father is obsessed with tracking frequencies on his radio, ignoring the turbulent waves of human emotions emerging from a pocket-sized station in close vicinity. The class teacher, though well meaning and the least hostile of the whole lot, is equally ruthless about his hard-coded mandates.

In an evocative scene unfolding by the pavement, a hard-nosed manufacturer and trader is seen making a strong case for the sturdiness of his iron doors, brazenly borrowing a page from Ahmad’s, nay Mohammad’s notebook, for taking stock of customer orders and pending payments. A lonely, ageing artisan of the old order that Ahmad meets later in the day, does the exact opposite, of singing the virtues of his wooden frames, now part of a dying legacy that will inevitably fade with him. While the former is blatantly inattentive to Ahmad’s plea, the latter wants him as an all-approving sounding board to release the pent up frustration of his wooden life.

That child labour runs parallel to child education becomes evident from many telling frames - there's a kid who repeatedly complains of backaches while at school, which, on the face of it, appears like a filmsy excuse to avoid homework till the viewer spots the root cause when he is seen carrying heavy milk cans, apparently an integral part of his day-to-day routine.

The people of the province seemingly value the worth of education but like so many spread across the world, learning for them is only what transpires in the classroom in the supreme light of the all-knowing teacher, and the ultimate proof of their kids’ didactic progress is the completion of the proverbial homework.

For the discerning viewer, the film’s conclusion becomes apparent during the fag end frames and there are a couple of instances when the subjects seem off-guard on camera, but that does not take away even an ounce of the delight and contentment of having witnessed sublime poetry unleashed on celluloid.

It is unfair to call child artiste Babek Ahmadpour’s awesome effort a performance, such is its sincerity and true-to-life essence, clearly the outcome of Kiarostami’s unique improv experiments with the kids of Koker. Kiarostami’s camera astutely underscores the supressed emotions of Ahmad’s roving eyes and radiant face, and the significance of his thoughtful gestures, through a fine blend of closeups and longshots. He also makes recurrent use of emblematic motifs like doors and windows to convey larger truths. Farhad Saba’s haunting cinematography is subtly suggestive of the all-pervading gloom and hopelessness of the milieu, while Amine Allah Hessine’s music accentuates the initial strife and the decisive turn of events with minimal strings beats.

The camaraderie between Ahmad and Mohammad has a magnetic charm about it; you would want to spend a few moments in their noisy classroom for a first-hand experience of earthy compassion that is rarely encountered in the real world.

That we don’t find many kids of Ahmad’s psyche in both rural and urban settings of today is our collective tragedy, a fallout of our misplaced priorities that meticulously and conclusively deprive a childhood of its essential nutrients. We can’t but attribute this moral turpitude and emotional wreckage to the perils of digital invasion, pandemic-induced devastation, or the consequences of global warming, our pet targets to blame for anything and everything that goes astray.

Roma

It is nothing short of a miracle that films like Alfonso Cuarón’s hashtag#Roma are being made, released and revered in contemporary times; these are movies that instinctively remind us of towering legends like Ray, Ghatak, Kurosawa, Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, and Renoir.

Alfonso creates an enduring human document which is autobiographical in essence but universal in significance. Alfonso's camerawork is a black and white sketchbook (the art is hearteningly devoid of the artifice found in the work of many showy makers who love to flaunt their superficial work as 'open to interpretation' )

Most frames convey a truckload of the 'unsaid' for the discerning viewer who finds:

the pathos of the protagonist, the housemaid Cleo matching that of Borras, the family dog, whose poop reminds the household of his loved-yet-forsaken existence before it is cleaned up by the dutiful Cleo

Cleo's aspirations as stillborn as her baby which fails to make the decisive transition from fetal circulation to Vagitus, 'the first cry'

the eluisve bond between individuals seperated by class differences and united by a similar fate thriving on parallel tracks - humane without being democractic