since no one else seems to be watching any movies (no new discussions in a week) i’ll start a thread on non-mainstream, yet not quite arty bombay cinema. in the u.s these might be equivalent to indie’s or studio-indies:
“company” and “naach” (both by ram gopal varma). varma is an interesting young director who formally and thematically works out his ambivalent relationship to the bollywood aesthetic in a number of his films. “naach” in particular seems to be very much about the question of relating to and functioning in an industry with a history of formulaic pandering to audience expectations. it also shows he’s been watching a bit too much of wong kar wai.
“haasil”–mentioned this earlier, will repeat the recommendation so someone watches it.
“yuva”–mani ratnam’s most recent. more within the bombay mainstream than the above but may warrant inclusion here. ratnam may be the most technically adept director working in bombay (he’s really a tamil filmmaker), certainly the flashiest. “yuva” is about the intersecting stories of three sets of young people in calcutta and their life-choices etc. some stunning set pieces, including a particularly violent opening game of kabbadi in a prison and the climactic fight scene in traffic on a bridge. should be quite accessible to americans.
will add more as they occur to me.
i see that netflix has one of the best movies to come out of bombay in a while: sudhir mishra’s hazaaron khwaishein aisi (thousands of such dreams/desires). i recommend it highly, even though the subtitling on non-english dialogue is of often comedic quality*. it isn’t exactly a bollywood film; in american terms it would probably be an independent film. set in the 1970s before and during the emergency this is a very powerful, realistic film about politics and commitment and corruption in postcolonial india. the performances of the three, largely unknown, leads are stunning. the screenplay is in both english and hindi. oh, and no song and dance sequences.
i’m not sure why this didn’t get a release in the u.s. i think it would have done well on the art-house circuit.
*actually, i’m misremembering: the subtitling of the hindi dialogue is fine (though for some reason most of the swearing is untranslated); but if you turn the subtitles on you also get superfluous english subtitles of the english dialogue (of which there is a lot) and this seems like it was a co-written by the babelfish engine and microsoft spellcheck.
this sounds interesting . . . arnab, what is “the emergency” to which you refer?
the emergency.
you may also want to brush up on the naxalite movement.
thanks arnab, I’ve bumped Hazaaro Khwaishein Aisi to the top of my queue.
so jeff and chris, did you see hazaaron khwaishein aisi yet? did you like?
I’m watching it tonight. For some reason best known to Dr Melfi, I responded to the whole To vs Woo, Lau vs Yun-Fat debate by watching all three ‘Better Tomorrows’ this week, bumping ‘hazaaron khwaishein aisi’ from its scheduled slot.
I did like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi but not as much as you did. I missed the powerful realism you mentioned and found the story lines to be a bit more generic (youthful love triangle crossing over battle lines of class, ideology, etc.) than I was expecting (in other words the story didn’t feel as unique to me as I had hoped . . . I felt as if I had already seen multiple versions of this story). Perhaps this has something to do with the socio-political context which shapes the dramatic action (and maybe the Naxalite Movement and the political Emergency the film documents did not cross over as well as I might have wanted it to). The film also felt a bit rushed to me, like maybe it was cutting corners in ways that deflated the dramatic tension. The filmmaker made three films that year; could it be that such a large out pouring of work led to productions that were more watered down than intended? Thoughts?
i’m not sure about the desire for novelty–though i suppose that this is an expectation that cultural production of all kind from india is cursed with these days.
since you didn’t find it gripping and i did, i’m tempted to say that the socio-political context may not have translated, but will wait to see what chris makes of it. i agree that the ending disappoints–if that’s what you mean by the film feeling rushed. i’m not entirely sure what to make of the ending.
Well I just finished HKA and I liked it a lot. It is true that telling political history through the lives of characters is hardly novel, but there are better and worse ways of doing it, and this worked for me. At first the revolutionary rhetoric is caricatured, but it takes on real depth after Siddharth (and then Geeta) move to the village in Bihar. It becomes a real, lived struggle and the middle hour of the movie is gripping.
I do think that you needed a fair amount of background to be able to place the characters in the political context. The Emergency is simple enough, but the factionalism inside the Congress Party, the reliance of the government upon corruption, and role of local police (the use of rape as a deliberate weapon of intimidation, for example) are alluded to but never explained. There is even a lovely scene reminding the viewer of Indira Gandhi’s well-known love of her pet dog that just drifts across the screen without comment.
The back and forth between Hindi and English as used by the main characters as a mark of the caste/class/education of the person being spoken to is also fascinating. All Hindi in the village. Always English when Vikram is trying to impress senior politicians. Half and half when talking among themselves or with parents.
There is a little too much “just in time” film-making, with Vikram saved unconvincingly, and Siddharth shot but then not killed. But all the leads are good, as are a slew of secondary characters. Chitrandga Singh — who Arnab says is a relative unknown — is simply fabulous. I also liked the ending. Vikram does not suddenly become a hero; he denounces Siddharth and curses him. He just gets caught up in the chaos of military rule and repression, and it is that message — that “big” events have human consequences — that is the strength of the movie.
BTW, after watcher ‘Hassil’ back in the fall, I looked for other films with Irfan Khan in them. For no especially good reason I saved one of them, ‘Warrior’ to my saved list. It just popped up as a May 2nd release. Arnab, do you know anything about it?
i’ve heard mostly good things about the warrior–my understanding is that it is really a british film, by a director of indian origin. it has won a lot of festival awards–though there was some controversy over it being submitted as england’s entry to the oscar’s, because hindi is not recognized as an official language of england.
the irfan khan fan, however, should look for a film called maqbool (or makbool), a quite wonderful adaptation of macbeth into the bombay underworld. i’m not sure if netflix has it, but i do…
One additional reaction to HKA, and here I think I do agree with Jeff, the political history of India is never interrogated in this movie. There is nothing revisionist going on, and the Emergency is portrayed in simple terms of right and wrong, with familiar tropes of repression, cowardice, and revolutionary fervor. I’m not saying the period is in need of revisionism, by any means, but the characters occupy a static image of India rather than reworking, in some small way, how we, the viewers, think of that period of Indian history. That did not reduce my enjoyment of the film, but it certainly made it less successful as a political film.
yes, the film is extremely nostalgic about a politics represented by old men in nehru caps (vikram’s father standing in for jaiprakash narain).
Not that we need my mere echo, but I enjoyed this, but didn’t find it “gripping” as much as solid and engaging. (I recall our conversations about Syriana, a very different kind of movie but one which also had somewhat familiar narrative conventions–parallel to familiar, if still commendable, political lines.) It’s a good film–I’d have enjoyed it at a theater, or more likely been very pleased by catching it on HBO or something. (And it was nice to get the rec here.)
I want to take up, on a side note, the question Arnab posed about release–why wasn’t this picked up for the States? It certainly is at least as good as the long stream of quasi-nostalgic WWII cheesefests Miramax excelled at through the ‘nineties. What does, doesn’t transfer, and why? Arnab–how does this question about film echo or differ from your arguments about the transfers and availability of only certain Indian fictions?
Mike,
I think you may have answered your own question about why certain films get released in the US…it has to do with a certain kind of national nostalgia. I am not interested in denying the power of films by people like Fellini, Ray and Kurosawa—but their films do have the effect of reinforcing certain cultural stereotypes about the nations from which they come. This selection criteria ensures that we mostly get, say, sex-art films from France and tender stories of the triumph of the human spirit from “troubled” nations. Even with all the talk about “global film” I think we get often get movies that have been filtered through cultural stereotypes and national caricatures. Even with the filmmakers I’ve mentioned their more complex films–say Fellini’s earlier films and Ray’s later films–(more complex in the sense of less connected to nationalist stereotypes) get lesser play and less attention.
Just to reinformce Arnab’s recommendation for ‘Maqbool.’ It is very, very good, with a whole slew of fine performances. Not just Irfan Khan, but the actor that plays the gang leader, Abbaji, is also excellent. There is a certain quality that Brando brought to Don Corleone here: almost tenderness in the violence that is necessary to run a mafia. Anyway, well worth watching. It is true that Netflix does not have it, but my college library has three copies, so anyone who wants to watch should be able to easily find it through inter-library loan.
I was a little disappointed with ‘The Warrior.’ The scenery is staggeringly beautiful — making the New Zealand depicted in LOTR look a lot like NE Ohio — and there are some good performances. But it is pretty dull: Irfur Khan goes catatonic about 15 minutes into the movie and the remainder of the movies sees him wandering towards his home town and a holy lake with the same pained expression on his face. Along the way he meets a young man who unconvincingly comes to substitute for his dead son.
I doubt I would have noticed had Arnab not tipped me off that the film is an Anglo-Indian collaboration (FilmFour produced it), but once you know, it is pretty clear that this has a somewhat different sensibility to the Indian films I have been watching recently. I am not sure if I can describe it, but it seems less joyous, lacking moments of comedy (even in serious films), and it certainly takes itself very seriously, right down to the ponderous soundtrack. Still, as a travel documentary, it can’t be beat.
Anybody know anything about an Indian film titled ‘Kaante’ and supposedly a remake of ‘Reservoir Dogs’? A friend mentioned it but it is not on Netflix.
Oh, and after commenting on the scenery in ‘The Warrior’ and assuming it is Kashmir, a Pakistani student told me that more recently a lot of bollywood films that appear to depict Kashmir are actually filmed in Switzerland, to avoid “the troubles.” I do not know if that is true for ‘Warrior.’
kaante is not worth the time. it was interesting for die-hard bollywood audiences because we rarely get to hear our actors swear onscreen. not much else to it.
the warrior arrived while we were in l.a (where we met up again with mark and dayna at the bounty). will watch this weekend. i seem to remember that it was in fact shot in india–will report. from your first post, chris, it does sound like this is the result of some hot-shot brit-asian filmmaker deciding there’s no reason he can’t go all chen kaige/zhang yimou in india.
the warrior is dull, dull, dull. oh, and boring too. as far as i could tell it was shot in rajasthan and himachal pradesh. but it wasn’t even as gorgeous as i expected it to be. our drive from delhi to ladakh last year was far better. i advise anyone who hasn’t yet seen the warrior to skip it and look at the image gallery of our trip instead–it looks better and there’s more interesting narrative.
The photos were very nice. But where were the nudies of you? I demand skin. More than that coy boys-in-the-spring shot with you and your paramour Shayne (a pornonym for certain).