'Kahaani': Fact of fiction of fictitious fact

What is Kahaani all about? Kahaani is, well, about a fiction…erm…a story. Kahaani, technically speaking, is also about storytelling…as in how to tell a story…Well, Kahaani is also about fabrication, what fiction usually does…and the truth literally turns out to be stranger than fiction…a truth which is fictive, but not impossible. And like all good kahaanis, Kahaani too unfolds catalyzing in every reel a nail-biting curiosity of “What happens next”, finally leaving you bewildered, baffled, and confounded. Once the initial bewilderment wanes and the kahaani sinks in (both these happen in a jiffy), a deep pleasure is all that you feel: it’s akin to having finding your way out of a bemusing labyrinth on your own. Sujoy Ghosh and Advaita Kala (in association with Suresh Nair and Nikhil Vyas) have done a marvellous job! Namrata Rao’s scissors and adhesive have cut and joined the frames with remarkable adroitness attributing to the narrative just the right kind of pace.
The film has employed the mother-motif to an unforeseen effect: a pregnant woman in search of her husband. Sympathy rarely rains on her, as she finds herself caught in a quagmire of dangerous crimes that lurk in the underbelly of an apparently warm city. Kahaani tells a hitherto untold story of Kolkata, jolting the audience into an awareness of evil that resides in the interstices of the city. Here, Kolkata is no longer the romantic city of Tagore’s poetry and rosogolla revolving around the pleasant colonial hangover of the Victoria Memorial; nor is it the city of the unassuming Bengali bhadrolok. In fact, on closer observation, the city does not seem to belong to Bengalis any more. Ghosh de-romanticizes Kolkata to an extent no Bollywood film has ever does. The brief prefatory fragment metonymically related to the main narrative invokes an anxiety about the city that is increasingly intensified not to be resolved ever. A sense of uneasiness refuses to desert you long after the curtains come down. (I was half in mind to avoid the Metro while returning home) Kahaani has ended up defamiliarizing Kolkata sufficiently. The Benjaminian concept of the city as labyrinth has hereby acquired a new dimension.
Vidya Balan enacts a pregnant mother with so much credibility that, well…you know…I mean she carries the baby bump really well. The way she walks, the anxiety of not finding her husband that grows with every passing moment and in her lighter moments with the two children (Vishnu and Poltu)…Vidya, erm, Bidya is perhaps the most believable of all on-screen carrying moms we have seen so far. Next year too the National Award for the Best Actor (Female) should be in her custody. Thanks to Roshmi Banerjee, the casting director. Parambrata, Kharaj, Dhritiman, Nazawuddin Siddiqui and Shantilaal are perfect choices for the roles they have essayed. However, it is Saswata Chatterjee who steals the show, cold-bloodedly. I still feel goose-bumps as I think of his Bob Biswas.
Kahaani is after all based on an age-old theme; I wont tell you which. But it has been given such a makeover that you do not realize that all along you were watching a known story. That’s why I said in the beginning that Kahaani is also about “how to tell a tale”. One of the best films in the recent years, Kahaani deserves no less than a nine out of ten in all the categories, except perhaps in the musical one. In any case, music is not its mainstay. It’s the kahaani!

"The Dirty Picture": What’s not so dirty about it?

I watched The Dirty Picture sitting in the rear stall of Roxy Cinema amongst a raunchy, unsophisticated crowd whistling suggestively at every drop of the pallu and every hard-hitting dialogue! The 80s were exuberantly revived in the theatre as well as a marvellously uninhibited Vidya Balan bosom-thrust the narrative forward in a believably recreated well-known and often disparaged cinematic garishness of that decade. I was too small to have been to the theatre in the 80s; my first-hand experiences of the cinema hall had begun after the mid-90s, when multiplex comfort could not be even dreamt of. In the 80s, till the late 90s in fact, the educated middle class, especially Bengalis, had strong reservations against Hindi cinema, its mindless violence, titillating choreography and awfully ear-splitting cacophonies that posed as songs. Silk Smitha, the Southern siren, was as tabooed as pornography, or perhaps a moral sin! In fact, I clearly remember I was not allowed to see an otherwise ‘clean’ Sadma on Doordarshan, simply because of Silk Smitha’s erotic cameo! I guess more than the issue of clothes or rather the lack of it, Silk Smitha posed a major threat to the bourgeois hypocrisy about sexuality and sexual desire, by her totally no-holds-barred gestures and parade of socially ‘hidden’ body parts. The Dirty Picture self-reflexively satirizes this moral pretension by exposing the bawdy reality that lies underneath.
The most interesting aspect of the film is the format: reviving the 80s format to tell a 80s story is rather commendable. The sets, the costumes, the choreography, the songs, and the dialogues are all moving intertexts of what we have seen in the 1980s blockbusters. The dialogue gets as cheesy as Bahuton ne touch kiya hai, lekin kisi ne chhuya nahi, yet is so compellingly appropriated by the over-the-top narrative that you really feel drawn in. Vidya Balan makes it all sound and appear so convincing, as she almost effortlessly moves from cleavage-revealing, navel-flaunting raunchiness to sentimental vulnerability.
The film is commendable because it deconstructs what it seeks to construct almost in the same breath: while cashing-in on the female body as the most marketable commodity, it turns upon itself to satirize the practice with credibility you can’t help marvelling at. However, the film is rather weak in several points: especially, Silk’s acceptance speech at the awards function stand out like a sore thumb. The second-half of the film sufficiently loses the punch of the first, for Silk’s downfall is much too drastic and somewhat unexplained. Yet, what is interesting is that, the film could make appear the downfall tragic rather than engaging in moral judgement. But again, despite her boldness and unpretentiousness, Silk somewhat disappoints in death. Why that red sari and the vermillion? I mean the bridal makeup? She could have thrown conventional desires to the wind in the end as well! The film had not prepared us for this.
If not for anything else, watch the film for Vidya Balan: she has cautiously toed the line between the vulgar and the sexy, mouthed the mushy sentimental lines with tremendous credibility, and moved from the compulsively naughty to the lovingly vulnerable with so much sincerity that you can’t help ask yourself whether she is the same demure Lalitha. Naseeruddin Shah has given lechery a new meaning altogether. Emran Hashmi has definitely improved as an actor. But Tusshar is an eyesore! Had he not been there!
Well ‘dirtiness’ gets a makeover in this Milan Lutharia venture: remember it is not a biopic of sorts. It is perhaps the story of several so-called B-grade female actors who rise and fall without perhaps making any difference to the industry, but whose stories need to be told.

Paa: Emotional Extravaganza

Now melodrama is not always a bad word. Avant garde cinema has always been at wars with it, for that is the stuff popular cinema is made of. Of late, however, the dividing line between ‘art’ and ‘popular’ has thinned down, as far as Indian cinema is concerned. What we have today is something ‘middle of the road’: emotional melodrama weaved into technical brilliance; everyday reality stirred into the larger than life. R. Balki’s Paa is one such film. You would surely fumble a few times before calling it brilliant; but there’s definitely something that stays with you long after you have left the theatre.

Interestingly Paa is not about progeria, as all the promotional media hype surrounding it focused on. It’s a love story between a father and a son, where the son is incidentally a progeric baby. He could have been perfectly normal. Paa reminded me of a very well-made but not so popular film, starring Pallavi Joshi, Neena Gupta and Paresh Rawal, called Woh Chhokri (That Girl Out There). In this film, Pallavi Joshi estranged from her father (Paresh Rawal) at a very young age goes through several ups and downs and lands up in a railway yard slum, dirty, slightly deranged and often vulnerable to sexual advances of roadside tramps and railway coolies. Parallely, Rawal rises meteorically in his political career, and becomes an MP. Completely unaware of such a development, Pallavi recognizes her father on the television one day. She visits one of his meetings in the city, hoping a reunion, when her father remarried and popular refuses to recognize her, for he wants to keep his past strictly undercover, fearing a downfall in his political career. Pallavi returns to her slum, emotionally shattered. Paa apparently seems to retell this story, but from a different perspective. The ending, however, is not tragic; but rather hopeful. Amol Arte’s (Abhishek Bachchan) recognition of Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) at the expense of putting his own successful political career in jeopardy has lot to do with the popular notion of a changing India. Though the reality may be totally at odds with such popular narration of the nation as rising to be the next superpower, Paa sort of compels you into believing a definite change in the political scenario, with educated youngsters entering the picture.

The film also concerns itself with the establishment of the picture of the new Indian woman, independent, yet carrying within her certain old values. I do not want to sound judgemental in this: but I did not understand why a doctor, foreign-educated and powerfully independent, gets down explaining to a female patient the pleasures of motherhood. She seems to claim that motherhood is a natural necessity. Is that so? In this sense, the film appears a little regressive: putting motherhood above careers, the home above the world. This scene somewhat sticks out as a sore thumb even after you have been sufficiently involved emotionally with the naughty Auro.

And Auro! Yes, Mr. Bachchan scores spectacularly high. He almost literally enacts the metaphor ‘Old age is the second childhood’. He talks like a boy of thirteen, he emotes like one. He is naughty; he is loveable; yet, more mature than the age he plays. Your extra-diegetic awareness of the real age of the actor enables you to appreciate him more. He is the hero, sans heroism: his excellent comic timing, his expressive eyes, and his awesome co-ordination with the other actors in the frame win him the battle. All the best actor awards are waiting to populate his already overcrowded mantelpiece. All the actors are simply brilliant. Vidya Balan as the single mother is so natural that her star status is often forgotten. Abhishek’s character is a bit amateurishly drawn; but he does excel as a father. One fine discovery is Arundhati Nag. As ‘bum’, Auro’s grandma, hers is perhaps the second most powerful performance. The character is extremely consistent and therefore least flawed.

It’s laudable that Balki does not make a documentary on projeria. Unlike Taare Zameen Par where dyslexia was a major cause behind the marginalization of the protagonist, Paa does not make progeria a cause of humiliation of Auro. He is treated like every other child in school, and he is the hero of his group. Though Paa is not a great film, it’s worth a watch. Full-on entertainment, the film caters to every emotional nook and corner of your soul; be there, to be with Auro! He makes a great company.