MANTO - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Three

Manto was a superb short story writer who lived in India, and then Pakistan, in the middle years of the last century.  Like COLETTE, his best works were in the short story format, and they shocked and scandalised with their honest depiction of sexuality, corruption and plain real life.  But where Colette's Claudine novels sold like hotcakes and made her and her husband the talk of Paris, Manto was sued for obscenity.  Moreover, his life was marred by the times in which he lived.  As a Muslim he found himself a persecuted minority in Bombay as racial tensions rise during partition. As a true Mumbaikar, he doesn't one to join his co-religionists and flee to the new nation of Pakistan. But when even his best friend - a Hindu film star called Shyam - in a moment of anger, swears he might even kill Manto in a mob, Manto finally decides to join his family in Lahore. At first he seems to fit right into the literary life around the Pak Tea House, but in this new impoverished country his earnings are slashed, he's once again tried for obscenity, and he sinks into alcoholism. It's a devastating portrait of a man ripped from the life he knew and loved, never truly at home after that, and maybe just as psychologically desperate as the hero of arguably his most famous story, Toba Tek Singh.

Nandita Das' new film of the MANTO story has much to recommend it. Most importantly, it stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui - the break-out star of Netflix's superb SACRED GAMES.  He shows both Manto's charisma and buoyancy in the literary debates of Bombay, but also his stubborn and unapologetic commitment to depict reality and his unravelling in Lahore. There's a particularly moving scene near the end of the film where he realises that his friend has not forsaken him, but is so far gone he cannot reverse his life. And so Manto's tragedy becomes yet another story of the blight of Partition. But so much more relevant because India still faces censorship today.  Just watch the Youtube interviews with the makers of SACRED GAMES, talking about how much swearing they could have because they were airing on a US streaming service! I feel Manto would've approved. The other thing struck me - and saddened me - was how Siddiqui plays characters in both SACRED GAMES and MANTO who are driven by, exploited by, their lives blighted by, religious violence between Hindus and Muslims.  Is progress even possible on these issues?

My criticism of this film is that it might be opaque for viewers unfamiliar with the history of Partition - or even with a sense of the coolness of seeing Rishi Kapoor in a cameo - or a passing reference to someone making Mughal-e-Azam.  More seriously, the film seriously loses pace when it reaches Pakistan - maybe a metaphor for Manto's career - but a fatal flaw nonetheless.

MANTO has a running time of 112 minutes. The film played Cannes, Toronto and London 2018.  It does not yet have a commercial release date. 

BEFORE THE RAINS - engaging but somehow slight

BEFORE THE RAINS is a beautifully photographed, well-acted period drama about the consequences of cross-cultural marital infidelity in pre-independence India. Linus Roache plays a British planter having an affair with a married village girl played by Nandita Das. She is naive enough to believe that he will eventually leave his wife for her. In his defense, one can say that in their early scenes together, he seems to be genuinely fond of her. But when she arrives at his house, beaten by her husband, he callously pays her off, asking his faithful driver TK to take her away. The only person who seems surprised by this is the girl, who returns, leading to a cycle of disruption and violence.

The best thing about BEFORE THE RAINS is the photography of the lush Keralan countryside, by DP turned director Santosh Sivan. The performances are also decent, especially from Rahul Bose as the servant who mediates the story. He starts off as a faithful believer in the British Empire, willing to be ruled in exchange for civilisation. His journey to realisation of the true nature of Empire is at the heart of the film. The girl and the natural environment are all symbols for the country itself - exploited for a buck. The problem with the film is that the metaphor and the substance of the drama are rather obvious. It's a plot you can see coming for miles, and a message that is far from revolutionary.

BEFORE THE RAINS played Toronto 2007. It was released in the US in May and is currently on release in the UK.

The cinema of Nagesh Kukunoor.

My recent post on the Madhur Bandharkar's Mumbai trilogy, led me to reconsider my experience of Indian art-house cinema and prompted this post on the recent cinema of writer-director-actor Nagesh Kukunoor. They are two complementary directors. Bandharkar's cinema seeks to expose corruption at the very heights of Indian society. He uses fast cuts, hand-held cameras and the brash confrontational structure of investigative journalism. The over-riding tone is angry. By contrast, Kukunoor's cinema deals is more quiet, more personal, more sentimental and less polished.

Kukunoor's first film was his incredibly lo-fi 1998 feature, HYDERABADI BLUES. He plays the protagonist - a young Indian man who returns home after a decade in the US and finds himself bewildered by the traditional process of wooing a wife. Kukunoor shows his flair for comic dialogue and for creating authentic emotional dilemmas. But the film falls down for its ridiculous denouement and the rough-and-ready technical spec. So this is arguably an interesting movie for fans of his later work, rather than a must-see for general audiences.

Kukunoor's next movie was the 1999 coming of age tragicomedy, ROCKFORD. It's about pre-teen boys in an Indian all-boys Catholic boarding school. Kukunoor captures the dramas of growing up in a strict environment, friendship and first love with candour and wit. But this is a less successful film that HYDERABADI BLUES. Although filmed on a larger budget, the editing and framing still have a haphazard feel. The plot was a bit random too. Big issues, such as sexual abuse, are introduced and then neatly dismissed. And the lead actors, young Rohan Dey and Nandita Das give mediocre performances.

Next up is the 2001 satire on Bollywood, BOLLYWOOD CALLING. Pat Cusick plays himself - a failed Hollywood actor who decides to take bit part in a Bollywood movie directed a has-been played by the legendary Om Puri. Once again, the technical package ratchets up a notch in this flick, though far from perfect. Still, it was a testament to Kukunoor's increasing success that he managed to cast Om Puri. The script is especially good on the culture clash between East and West and in lightly mocking the intrinsic ridiculous of the Bollywood masala movie. But there is no rage and no anger - no exploration of the darker side of an industry with mafia links and a bad track record on sexual abuse. Instead we get a very schmaltzy denouement where, once again, all loose ends tie up neatly and in the best of all worlds. I mean, you don't have to make a movie as fierce as PAGE THREE, which is less a satire than a rant. But, BOLLYWOOD CALLING isn't half as perceptive, accomplished, visually inventive or tragicomic as Merchant Ivory's 1970 classic, BOMBAY TALKIE, for instance.

2003 brought a turnaround in Kukunoor's career, as far as I am concerned. With the dark thriller 3 DEEWAREIN (3 WALLS) he made a movie of real emotional depth and political importance. It is powered by surprisingly good performance from mainstream Bollywood actors - Jackie Shroff, Juhi Chawla and Gulshan Grover - as well as a typically brilliant performance from Naseerudin Shah. The movie opens with a no-nonsense depiction of three murders. We then move forward in time. Chawla plays an abused housewife who is interviewing three convicts on India's death row. They are played by Shroff, Shah and - in an absurd lack of humility on his part - Kukunoor. The thriller aspect arises from why exactly the woman is so interested in these men. The tension builds - there are no silly songs to destract from it - until a powerful and uncharacteristically dark denoument. The result is an accomplished and powerful film that breaks the Bollywood mould and is definitely worth trying to watch. Indeed, the only real flaw is Kukunoor's reluctance to cast a better actor than himself in a lead role.
After such a promising film it is disheartening to say that in 2004, Kukunoor released a flimsy cash-in - HYDERABADI BLUES 2. The least said about this mediocre feel-good nonsense the better. But things went from bad to worse with the admittedly critically acclaimed 2005 schmaltz-fest IQBAL. This is a polished, emotionally manipulative, hackneyed underdog/sports movie. Picking up from the plucky young things in LAGAAN, here we have a deaf-mute boy who triumphs over his family's objections to play for the Indian cricket team having been talent-spotted by no less a legend than Kapil Dev! Seriously.

But before we can write off Kukunoor as a Bollywood Spielberg-lite, he flip-flops back to form with this 2006 flick, DOR. Ayesha Takia plays a naive and kind-hearted Hindu girl called Meera who marries her childhood sweetheart. She lives with his highly traditional (for which read patriarchal and oppressive) family while her husband leaves home to look for work in a factory. But soon they receive the news that the husband is dead. He was apparently pushed from a balcony by his room-mate, a Muslim man from north India. Meera is now a young widow - at the lowest rung of the social ladder - and kept as a quasi-slave in her husband's house. Still, she does not object to this until she meets a North Indian woman called Zeenat (Gul Kirat Panang). Zeenat is a feminist Muslim who teaches her to have some fun and think for herself. However, Zeenat has a hidden agenda. Her husband has been convicted of killing Meera's husband and the only way she can save him from the death sentence is to persuade Meera to pardon him.

The movie is beautifully filmed and shows the difference in landscape, culture and customs of Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan. DP Sudeep Chatterjee does excellent work. The script and the two lead performances are also praise-worthy. In particular, Meera's awakening is subtle and convincing. All in all, DOR is a quiet, patient, lyrical film that, along with 3 DEEWAREIN, makes Kukunoor a director that it's hard to dismiss.

All these films are available on DVD.

PROVOKED - sub-daytime TV drama

PROVOKED is a straightforward re-telling of the Kiranjit Ahluwalia case. Kiranjit was an Indian woman who was brought to England for an arranged marriage. She was convicted of murdering her abusive husband in the late 1980s. Because she had killed him two hours after he the latest occasion of domestic abuse, her lawyers could not argue that it was a matter of self-defence. At this point, the Southall Black Sisters - a non-profit support group for abused women - took up Kiranjit's case. They helped launch the appeal that established the British legal precedent of using "battered women's sydrome" as a defence.

The worthiness of the subject matter should not however detract from the fact that this is a poor-quality production. The abrupt cutting between scenes, the hackneyed dialogue, A R Rahman's melodramatic score and the pantomime characterisation and acting do not serve this important story well.

In the world of this film, people are either put-upon victims or evil villains. Kiranjit's husband is particularly one-dimensional, but the prison guards and rozzers are also thinly drawn. The acting is similarly unconvincing. A host of British day-time TV "stars" play versions of their TV characters. So "Phil" from Eastenders is back as a Nasty cop, and "Ash Ferreira" is back as a nice but rather anonymous lawyer. Rebecca Pidgeon, Robbie Coltrane and Miranda Richardson are all decent actors, of course, but the first two have little more than cameos and the the third inhabits a character so unlikely in a story-line so schmaltzy as to be literally incredible. And what of Aishwarya Rai in the starring role? She simpers. And simpers some more. The audience has no glimpse of the emotional life a woman who was driven to brutally kill her husband.

PROVOKED is on release in the UK.