“Perhaps, you are scared of conventional happiness”

This year, 15th Kolkata International Film Festival, had in its kitty a number of French films of which I got to watch two: The Day God Walked Away and The Frontier of Dawn. The first one is an extremely realistic portrayal of the Rwanda genocide, sometimes stomach-wrenchingly grotesque, and the second is a love story of a photographer. None of these are great films so to speak; yet, the second film did manage to impress me. This photographer (he would constantly remind you of the handsome photographer of Aparna Sen’s Parama who compelled the demure Rakhee to rediscover herself beyond the confines of her home) falls in love with a married actress who dies shortly after. Though it was a steamy affair, the guy, devastatingly debonair, falls in love again. However, none of the two affairs seems to move beyond carnal desires, and the bindaas photographer does not really seem involved in any of the affairs emotionally. But the second affair transpires into responsibilities, as the girl suddenly announces that she is pregnant and wishes to keep the baby. Though reluctant, the photographer relents and they are about to tie the knot. Once the wedding day is fixed, whenever the would-be-groom stands in front of the mirror, he sees his former girl friend, the dead actress, appearing in his place and inviting him to be with her. Anxious and awfully perplexed, the photographer seeks his friends’ counsel: while one blandly puts it as his subconscious surfacing in form of the dead actress, the other points towards something more profound, and perhaps a bit spine-chilling. Terribly sceptical of marriage and the social rituals associated with it, this loveable friend tells him “Perhaps you are scared of conventional happiness”. The dead actress rises from the dead to incarnate his fears. Careless, mobile, completely in love with life, and revelling in carnality, this photographer is wild, and cannot be bound within domestic circles. Although he has agreed to marry and raise his baby, for that is exactly what society demands of him, he is scared of being harnessed. Usually (and more often because you are expected to, for that is what it has been), people are expected to rejoice at the prospects of having a baby and a family. But there’s no harm in thinking otherwise. It’s like Camus’ Outsider who does not feel like weeping at his mother’s funeral.

This photographer listens intently to his friend’s explanation and the night before the wedding commits suicide. He was indeed scared of conventional happiness. Many of us are! And I sympathised with him, completely. Why can’t we have our very own ways of being happy?

Mammon turns God: Contemporary Bombay Cinema’s Penchant for New Money

It’s already a cliché to link up everything Bollywood does today with the economic liberalization in India, a project kicked off by Rajiv Gandhi, realized by the finance minister Manmohan Singh, the fruits of which were reaped by the BJP. While n-number of articles have been already churned out on the changed look and import of the family drama and candy floss romance, much has not been yet written on a new genre which emerged in the late nineties and is still alive and kicking — a new form of slapstick comedy related to the worship of Mammon (or pursuit of cash), and a variation on that, a neo-picaresque comedy of the cop and the crook.

While rags-to-riches stories in the earlier days had a morale associated with them, the morale of hard work and perseverance, the new flapdoodles (most of them are barely comedy in true sense of the term) celebrate the short cuts to easy money and associated comfort. Most of these films end in happiness, with a few exceptions. The pursuit of money is the dominant instinct that drives the plot, and all age-old values connected with friendship and kinship ties, honesty, hard work, etc are unsentimentally shoved aside. No moral compunctions are any longer associated with hera-pheri, for the consumerist impulse is so overwhelming that it almost instinctively destroys any obstacle on the road to the riches. And while we were thinking that such a phenomenon is remarkably urban and bourgeois, Priyadarshan, a pioneer of this genre, came up with Malamaal Weekly where an apparently primitive village with a local feudal system still going strong, is incurably caught in the whirlpool of easy money-making. Here the road to easy money is the age-old lottery; but what is interesting is the comic euphoria in which the entire village participates, as each of them lusts for a share of the one crore won by some Anthony who incidentally dies before the money is encashed. This late capitalist craziness for cash, interestingly, ends with the collapse of the local feudal system, when the tyrannical village thakurain drowns in the river. The highly over-the-top comic chase sequence in which the entire village follows an enraged thakurain determined to convey to the lottery inspector the elaborate lie the villagers had resorted to, ends in the death of the feudal lady, when her motorcycle accidentally suffers a head-on collision with the lottery-inspector’s Ambassador. A distraught cowardly inspector is assured safety by the cunning villagers, for they promise him to keep the whole incident under cover, provided he never ever returned to that village. The poor lottery inspector agrees, and the villagers breathe a sigh of relief for that one crore is now safely in their custody, no matter how many shares are to be given out. The film thereby ends in the triumph of capitalism over feudalism, which also brings in its wake a remarkable transformation of the mythical Indian village associated with honesty, simplicity, naivety, and love. The country/city binary thus disintegrates, opening up the space of the village to the corruption which was so far a special character of the city.

Such changing nature of the country, the small town and the suburbs are seen in other films as well. The dream of good life has certainly caught up with almost everyone across the country, as small-town boys and girls have become adventurous and abandon conventional roads to happiness. The Yash-Raj blockbuster Bunty aur Bablee tells such a story, where a small town boy leaves his hometown dumping a secure government job and his female counterpart sneaks out of her home to become Miss India, throwing away a prospective marriage proposal. When things do not work out the way they imagined it to be, they both join hands to become the all-time famous rogues, almost turning into youth icons. They effortlessly hoodwink the cop, and make interesting headlines with their innovative ways of burglary. The same picaresque narrative is repeated in Dhoom 1 and Dhoom 2 where the crook turns burglary into a glamorous profession, thereby emerging as the hero, in comparison to whom the cop appears in rather poor light. These neo-picaresque films are a significant departure from older stories where the heroic cop won accolades in the end, while remaining deeply rooted in the idealism of the oath he had taken on the very first day of work. Interestingly, in these films, where money is the only driving force, the cops appear clownish, figures to be laughed at or even pitied, every time they are masterfully outdone by the intelligent crooks. This remarkable role reversal of the cop and the crook is an interesting marker of the changing times. The law of the land however remains unchanged; but seems to have become inadequate to impose obstacles on the path of these super-crooks who care a damn for morals. Virtue and vice seem to gather new connotations as the global dream of a good life, or in other words the worship of the hidden God of late capitalism (read, Mammon), catches up with the Indians, changing their lives forever; however, we still do not whether this change is for the better or the worse!