Farah's Family Affair

Any piece of art, (or for the purpose of this post, just about anything), always, at its genesis, starts off raw, before being fine-tuned and chiselled to perfection (relative, I know). Over the course of my entire conscious life, I can recall only one exception to this rule. Let me, then, follow it, and present my thoughts and emotions in their rawest form, much like Farah Khan’s latest work, one that feels freshly ejected out of a stomach (upwards or downwards, don’t ask me how, don’t ask me whose).

The most common mistake, (grievously injurious, if not fatal) people would make is to deem it as one of those leave-your-brains at-home ones. They would pay for it dearly with their empty skulls, smashing them to bits, while their precious contents lay safely at home. Unaware readers would probably be shocked, thinking she has made something with at least an iota of sense. The only thing more shocking than that, is this hard, cold fact: her most recent offering is miles below her last work. Yes, everyone, she has managed to undercut her own abysmally low standard. Here is an ‘artist’ who, in that sense, has constantly reinvented and refined herself.

For this admirable feat she has her brother to thank. They seemed to have engaged in a game of one-‘up’manship that has produced several gems over the last few years. All of their work is a tribute to the Hindi cinema of the 80’s which they are desperate to recall back to life. One would think I’m doing her a service writing about her work, but believe me, I’m doing myself the greatest favour by purging myself of it.

Is Farah Khan biologically female? And, for that matter, is Shirish Kunder, biologically male? Normally, these questions are none of my business, but when such confusion and identity crises crop up in a piece of work where the former is credited as ‘director’ and the latter takes credit for ‘story’ and ‘dialogues’, and when this piece of work is thrust upon an unsuspecting audience, most of whom do not share the abovementioned couple’s homegrown bawdy sense of ‘humour’, my mind is hard pressed to ask them.

A trio of pansies frolic around in pink, fawning over the lead bimbette gazing longingly at her flawless beauty, simmering with barely-suppressed lust and jealousy at the same time. They are forever in heat, waiting to prey on just about anyone with a flat chest. The bimbette, on the other hand, played by an ‘actress’....... wait, more on her later.

Anyway, the bimbette is the most honest character here (helped greatly by a career-best performance). Just looking luscious and changing costumes by the dozen. Well, she happens to be a female too (not just biological, she’s a WOMAN) in case we had forgotten. Farah Khan devotes three songs and about ¼ the running time to show her in all her womanhood, with a super-toned figure and voluptuous hip-shake to boot. The bimbette curls up in heat for everyone other than her owner. Whereas the owner tries his best to keep her on tight leash, awkwardly covering her juicy limbs before everyone. Talk about women empowerment. Again, I wonder who is the woman among the two, Khan or Kunder? Indeed, they touch some really deep issues about gender and sexuality. It would have helped had these issues not been about themselves.

The male lead is, well, hard to lay a finger on. Mouthing filth, handling eye-candy all throughout, he does serve as every woman’s fantasy.........., or wait, was it a man’s wet dream? Or was it gay? Or was it that every man is gay? Or every woman is gay? Or every woman is a man? Or every man is bisexual? See what I’m talking about?

I think they tried their best to reach out to physically challenged people, primarily the deaf. Like Bhansali, who tries to reach the blind through blinding razzle-dazzle, they try to reach the deaf by raising hell with voices. All of them here scream till they are sure each and every member of the audience sees every vein, every nerve, every orifice, every pore screaming in tandem. Never mind if she deafens those cursed with a normal hearing, to death. We’ll wait for Farah to reach us in her next outing.

What transpires on screen is a mirror for real-life. What the male lead does to a bunch of naive villagers is what Farah and her partner Kunder do to us, the naive audience. And the entire episode of the headless horseman is thrown in.............. for what? To do an expose on child labour? Human trafficking? Drug-running? Kidnapping? To show that con-artists too have a heart? Or the dilemma of an unlikely hero? Or just to show us they are capable of paying a tribute to something as esoteric as ‘Sleepy Hollow’?

Probably the only thing Farah knows as a director is to do spoofs. If an entire lifetime in the industry, armed with unending passion for ‘masala’ movies (so they claim) yields something like this, or like some of her brother’s work, it spells nothing but doom for the Hindi film industry.

And what’s with the beeped-out piece of dialogue in the lead’s signature line that is repeated ad nauseam? This, when ribald cracks at the gay community abound? The Censors are really hand-in-glove-in-crotch/ cheek-by-jowl-by-pube with the makers.

Pardon me for being so scattered, but what, exactly, do we go into a movie for, paying through our orifices, as we do? Acting? Story? Drama? Dialogues? Good looking people? Camera-work, editing, set design, for sticklers? Good songs, at least? Exotic locations? Humour, if nothing else? If so, what do we make of this, devoid as it is, of any of the above? What do we enjoy? The sight of an overheated bimbette dancing suggestively in revealing dresses before a village full of half-naked, skeletal, hungry (in more ways than one) villagers, cruelly tempting them. Or Siamese twins sharing a trouser? Or a blind albino being slapped around, dressed as a Britisher in colonial India for a half-assed film? Honestly, I would have loved it had they shown her being devoured limb-by-limb by those villagers. Am I justified then, in refusing to deem this as a movie? What is it, then? From what I see, it is home-made X-rated material. Meant for an extremely select audience, meant to be kept within the family. Just between the couple at the heart of it. Probably an anniversary gift to each other. Meant for nights when they feel a little low. The other couple involved here, the male lead and his real-life wife, probably gift similar presents to each other every year, going by his regular work.

The last time the lead bimbette decided to act slutty onscreen she gave us ‘Boom’. That occurrence was historical in the way it systematically decimated the careers of almost all those associated with it and took a sizeable portion of viewers’ minds with it. Except for the bimbette and a certain superstar. As the Joker says, “what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stranger.” The bimbette has deigned to act slutty onscreen again. She has recreated the occurrence quite accurately.

It is a matter of grave and immediate concern for the basic intelligence of the human race that there exist beings on this planet carrying Farah Khan and Shirish Kunder’s genetic material and fully capable of transmitting it to others. But then again, unbelievable as it may seem, Farah Khan and Farhan Akhtar are first cousins. Maybe there is hope for the human race, after all.

Inception: An auteur's dream

In one of his earliest interviews about the movie, Christopher Nolan described 'Inception' as "a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind." This one statement contained enough enigma and exhilaration to set our hearts and minds, punch-drunk after 'The Dark Knight', pulsating.

Comments like "why does June have to come between May and July?" and "everyone else making movies-go home. Do a bank job or something. Nolan just outran us all before we even got in the race", seen on cinema websites were indicative of the roiling, restive hysteria that preceded this flick. The lock-stock-and-barrel cast too did nothing to bring peace. On the contrary, it sent several ignoramuses (me included) scurrying, to look up actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard, online. (I swear, for 2 years after she won the Oscar, I did not know anything about her beyond her name. Until, that is, Inception came along.)

And then, there were the trailers. Rhapsodies of sight and sound. Filled with impossible, unforgettable, divinely poised and symmetrical visuals, set to tectonic, overwhelming, Hans Zimmer pieces. The trailers that sustained me through 10 long months, as I OD-ed on them.

The most definitive scene-one that figuratively sums up the entire movie- is the one where Ariadne, the tyro architect, grasping the order of the dream world under Cobb's tutelage, creates a pair of humongous mirrored doors underneath a boulevard of successive archways in Paris. Each door is hinged on an arch adjacent to the other. So when the doors hinge themselves shut, their mirrored faces come to a close parallel to each other, with Cobb and Ariadne in between them. The effect is instantaneous: reflection upon reflection, image upon image stretching away to infinity.

Nolan has always been fascinated by perception: be it the warped perceptions, refracted through the prisms of diaries and journals and legerdemain, that formed the basis of an implacable one-upmanship in 'The Prestige'; or the fragmented perception of the anterograde amnesiac completed with the help of tattoos in 'Memento' (is it just me who senses an echo of 'Memento's tattoos in 'Inception's totems?); or the fear-addled monstrous perceptions in 'Batman Begins'; and, finally, the sleep-deprived, guilt-ridden, mist-cloaked perception of the ageing detective in 'Insomnia'.

Right at the start, Nolan, the artist, offers us a palette of scenes that play into each other. The first of these follows a young Cobb (Dicaprio) and his right-hand man Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) as they try to extract a piece of treasured information from the vaults of a wealthy, powerful Jap, Saito (Watanabe). They are, however, caught in the very act of stealing by Saito and a comely, regal, gun-toting lady. What's more, she uses it with impunity, shooting Arthur through a knee, while interrogating Cobb. On the verge of getting shot in the other knee, Arthur is shot dead by Cobb himself. From there on begins a breathless chase through the labyrinth of Saito's royal residence. Cobb is desparate to evade capture and death, especially at the hands of the female, who, in turn, is equally inclined to reward him with both. Abruptly, we see Arthur waking up from a deep sleep in a totally different setting. (First rule of Nolan's dream world: if killed in a dream, you simply wake up. But there are other kinks to this seemingly straightforward rule, as seen later). Working with a practiced mixture of urgency and cool, he instructs the other person in the room to give Cobb a 'kick'. We see one shot of Cobb slumbering on a chair placed atop a raised wooden platform overlooking a tub full of water. Before we grasp the goings-on fully, the scene again cuts to the chase in Jap bungalow: Cobb is trying his best to shake off his pursuers, firing and dodging bullets, smashing and overturning furniture, until he arrives at a clearing. With equal dexterity, the scene once again shifts to Cobb getting his 'kick'. These scenes are now intercut with those of Arthur attending to a prone Saito who seems to be on the verge of waking up from a deep sleep. The 'kick', as we come to know later, involves giving the sleeping subject a violent shock, often physical, so that he well and truly wakes up. Cobb's chair is literally kicked (with him on it) into the tub in a stunningly orchestrated slow-motion sequence.

Meanwhile, Cobb standing perfectly still in the clearing, watches as jets of water cascade down the walls through the ceiling. A split-second later, he wakes up drenched, to find Arthur and Saito already awake. A confrontation ensues between the three of them, and the interrogation continues, albeit with the sides reversed now: Saito is at the receiving end. At their wit's end, Cobb and Arthur realise the only way to extract the information from Saito is to force it out from him. In their despair, there is a brief struggle at the end of which Saito finds himself on the floor, his cheek pressed to an unusual carpet. Seeing which, Saito coolly deduces that he must be in a dream and that too, in someone else's dream.

The scene cuts again to one set inside a speeding train. Arthur, as usual, is the first one to wake up and immediately prepares to give the other 'sleepyheads' a 'kick'. This time it's gentler (an opera song over headphones that echoes eerily inside the room with the unusual carpet), but the circumstances are more pressing. The audience, I suspect, will never tire of Nolan's sublime gift for springing surprises and epiphanies, his flagrant pulling-out-the-rug-from-under-one's-feet machinations.

It is at that precise instant that we realise the source of the dream to be inside the speeding express train in Japan, where the threesome (Cobb, Arthur and their architect, Nash) are dreaming furiously, preying upon Saito's (who is asleep on a nearby seat) subconscious.

By giving us a dream-within-a-dream and by working backwards/outwards, he makes us, the audience really go through the paces, be with him on every step, explore every facet and nuance exactly as he wants us to and yet, the complete picture eludes us. Until the final instant of revelation. By ensuring that we, his audience, are in such a state of thrall, in such an equilibrium between possibilities, he forces us to question everything before us and inside us. By obliterating the distinction between dreams and reality, he makes us question the truth of the reality that we perceive.

To move on with the story, we find out that Cobb is an extractor, who, using a futuristic dream-sharing technology, can penetrate a target's subconscious via dreams and extract secrets from it. Saito, who had resisted an earlier salvo by Cobb, now gets hold of his architect Nash, and forces Cobb and Arthur to do his bidding. Saito heads the world's second largest telecom empire. Quite naturally, he hopes to topple the numero uno telecom giant, the young Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Yet Saito seeks to act in the most insidious way possible, and this is where Cobb and Arthur come in. What they need to do is the exact reverse of their usual job i.e. instead of stealing ideas or secrets, they have to plant an idea, or rather a germ of one into Fischer's mind. An idea that would grow, like a parasite, seeking subsistence from the alienation of Robert Fischer from his dying father, Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite), who had built the empire brick by brick, ultimately propelling Fischer Jr. to dissolve his inherited empire.

Saito plays a tempting game of quid pro quo with Cobb, offering him a return to his home and his children. We learn that Cobb has been in exile after having lost his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), unable to return home facing charges for her murder. Cobb grasps at this opportunity with the hope of a dying man. He assembles a team comprising of a greenhorn architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), a thief-cum-impersonator Eames (Tom Hardy) and a sort of a psychopharmacologist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who specialises in powerful sedatives necessary to maintain sedation during episodes of complex, multi-level dreaming.

The rest of the the movie follows this motley crowd of dream rangers as they prey upon the subconscious of the unaware, guileless Fischer. Along the way they have to contend with dangers of the dreamscapes, both expected and unexpected. The most fascinating concept we are introduced to here is that the passage of time in a dream vis-a-vis that in the real world. Since brain activity is heightened in a dream state, reasons Nolan, the passage of time relative to activity is slowed down. This increase in the time period is as much a part of the dream's verisimilitude as eveything else in it. In simple words, once inside a dream you have more time on your hand than you have in reality.

He further extends this concept to a dream within a dream, and another dream within the second dream, going upto four successive levels of dreaming. For instance, a time period of a few seconds in reality, may translate into a few hours at the first level of dreaming, a few days at the second level and probably a few years at the fourth level. This concept forms the basis for one of the most innovative and impressively-handled montages seen on film: action scenes occuring at four different tiers of dreams, all intercut and enmeshed in each other. The relativity of time (indicated by the most effective and justified instance of slow-motion), the effects of atmosphere, emotional states and physics of one dream level upon the other(s) (especially of gravity), the dangers of dying inside a dream while under sedation....... these have never before been experienced on film by most of us. Even as we watch them on screen, we literally rub our eyes in disbelief.

In addition to all this, thay have to deal with Cobb's wife, Mal, or rather her living memory. One of the dangers of dream sharing, as they realise all too well, is exposing oneself to others' subconscious minds with all their darkness and spite. (A very similar aspect had been dealt with more extensively in Tarsem Singh's seminal 'The Cell'. Here, Nolan refrains from going to deep and dark for the audience's comfort). Cobb's longing for his wife is so profound, it pervades his conscious and subconscious mind, rending it with guilt and remorse. Hence, Mal's projection (human creations of the subconscious, as called in the film) often appears as a kind of nemesis that Cobb cannot control, for the simple reason that he does not want to control it. He wants to be punished by it, so that he can unburden some of his guilt.

Technically, the film is non-pareil. A film about dreamscapes should, by definition, look and feel infinite. But, by relying more on real locations, astounding set-design (Guy Hendrix Dyas) and some epoch-making photography (Wally Pfister), than special effects, Nolan shows us the infinite power of bravura technique. Even the special effects used have a realistic basis: for instance, in the scene where Cobb and Ariadne rise from the sea and walk along a shoreline of crumbling buildings, the whole landscape was created basing the special effects upon actual photographs and footage of crumbling buildings.

Or the by-now legendary action sequence between Arthur and several henchmen under distorted gravity and the sequence that follows. Nothing in it was special effects: the whole lobby was, in fact, a 100 feet long corridor piece rotated through a complete 360 degrees by means of clamps, driven by 2 enormous motors. Gordon-Levitt was banged around for weeks inside the corridor before the final shot was canned.

Or the fact that the series of exponential explosions that occur when Cobb and Ariadne are sitting at a roadside bistro, was again using special effects based on actual of explosions. For the actual footage, pressurised nitrogen was used to trigger the explosions which were shot and later touched up by the special effects team, to give us the incredible final shot. "Add a little truth to the lie and it makes the whole thing seem truthful", as Alfred Bester once wrote.

Grouches, finding nothing else, may quibble about the lack of a single outstanding performance, especially from this movie, coming, as it is, after Heath Ledger's iconic Joker. But the fact is, it is a heist movie with an ensemble cast, with one of the most novel, complex plotlines in recent times. Within these parameters the mammoth cast works superbly well.

Leonardo Dicaprio plays the man lost in fighting his inner demons (while holding on to his sense of duty) yet again. A true Nolan hero. Along with 'Shutter Island', it makes a pair of grieving-widower roles for him this year. In fact, he almost completely effaces himself from the movie, so withdrawn is he.

Marion Cotillard looks so hauntingly, achingly beautiful, we can partly feel Cobb's grief and contrition, over losing such a woman. Nolan's version of a femme fatale.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt bears an uncanny resemblance to Heath Ledger, having the same slit-like eyes and high cheekbones as the late actor. He is pitch-perfect as the impossibly suave (hair, waistcoat, tie firmly in place even after a literally gravity-defying sequence), always in control Arthur. He is the perfect foil to Dicaprio's wild-eyed, haunted Cobb. His verbal jousting with the dandy, yet rugged, Eames (played with crisp, droll English humour by Tom Hardy) provides most of the laughs.

Ellen Page, as the rookie architect who gradually discovers the new, exciting, dangerous, infinite world, perfectly mirrors the audience response of awe, wonderment, exhilaration and panic.

Ken Watanabe is shrewd and manipulative enough.

Cillian Murphy is too good an actor to look out of depth in a role that is a far cry from his usual ones. He is aptly confused, tremulous, paranoid and shattered. To see him at the receiving end for no fault of his is quite a surprise, though.

The acting legends, Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite, are always welcome, even if only for 2- scene roles.

For a film about dreams, and that uses dream imagery liberally, 'Inception' stays outstandingly sharp, both in image quality and in narrative structure. Nolan shows consummate control over his writing and direction. For the dream sequences, the camera stays equally focussed, sharp and objective. The DoP eschews any fancy lighting or camera movement or any effort to be surrealistic. The result is a series of images that baffle in their continuity, confound in their juxtaposition and disorientate in their clarity. Surely as mind-bending, if not more, as several other dream-drenched movies.

Blessed with a $160 million budget, and a story so homogenous and organic, it could only be a long-cherished dream (10 years, in fact), 'Inception' is a triumphant paragon of personal film-making on an epic scale. The fact that its near-universal critical acclaim and (hopefully!) blockbuster status are its twin rewards, is typically Nolan in its symmetry.

Of Nolan, logic and the Joker

OK, after about an hour of having delusions of grandeur about my inaugural post, I am back, with my back on mother earth. Following my thoughts and typing them out as organically as possible is the best way to get started, much better than attempting to compose something fittingly grandiose for a milestone (another delusion) that starting a private blog is.

Christopher Nolan is my GOD! No other way to put it: I hope the bluntness of this statement indicates my all-consuming respect for him. I discovered him wrong end first, so to say. The first movie I saw of his was 'The Dark Knight'. Now, I had seen it in a cinema hall. Blame it on my difficulty in understanding the accents completely or the hyper-complex plot, I didn't grasp the full import of the film. Like most others, I was overawed by Heath Ledger's Joker, the action scenes and the gadgets. But something told me there was more, inconceivably more in the movie to go barking mad about.

The reason for this afterthought, actually came much later, when I saw another movie of his called 'The Prestige'. Much like his trademark narrative style, my process of discovering my GOD too was non-linear. I saw 'The Prestige' just before my semester exams. The month that followed seemed achingly slow and at long last the vacations arrived and I could finally lay my hands on the DVD of 'The Dark Knight'. 'The Prestige' deserves a post by itself; on watching it I realised that no ordinary mortal could have made it. And, by corollary, nothing made by him could be remotely ordinary.

It was with this in mind that I sat down to watch 'The Dark Knight' with the luxury of subtitles. It took me three complete viewings to completely appreciate what I had seen. It is not just a movie, it is the truth. The truth about what human beings are and what they are capable of becoming under extreme situations. It plays maddeningly upon the eternal paradox, the fight between good and evil, and like most paradoxes, only attains a solution by smashing its own rigid logic to smithereens. It thus reaffirms the fact that human beings are multi dimensional, multi layered creatures and any attempt to straitjacket them into two-dimensional, mathematical logic (read: morality and propriety) only results in anarchy. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, for fiction is, for the most part, aided by logic. Logic can only give you so much control, it can only make you "as good as the world allows you to be", paraphrasing the Joker. And when that control is lost, anarchy reigns.

The Joker is as anarchic as they come. In fact, he is so extreme, he is hardly human. He is elemental, like an"unstoppable force" of nature. He has no explicable beginning and, for all practical purposes, no end. The reasons for his scars differ with every retelling. He has no form of identification. Needless to say he is without remorse and above fear. He doesn't feel pain. So much so, he doesn't even wince or grimace or scream or bleed when he is thrashed around like a rag doll by Batman. He doesn't fight back physically then. Not with Batman. Rather, he tries to forge a kinship with him, something that rattles Batman completely, because he knows it in his bones, it's true. It is, as if Batman is looking at his own reflection in a mirror damaged beyond repair. He cannot believe it, but is forced to acknowledge that it is true, because when he looks into the mirror, he is alone. Him and his hideous reflection. For, Batman's place in society is the same as that of the Joker, that of an outlaw, as the Joker points out.

The Joker shows no emotion either apart from an all-consuming desire for anarchy. It is to the credit of the writers, Christopher & Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer, and also the late Heath Ledger that they made such an emotionless character appear so arresting on screen. He is a kind of a perverse Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's hero of objective idealism. In the scene where he, quite literally, burns a mountain of cash without a second thought, we realise his true nature. In a sense, that elevates him above a mere character, above human beings, above all the trappings of mankind. You begin to wonder: is he a character or a representation of all that is primal and absolute and un-human? You rub your eyes in disbelief at the things he does. You wonder where the hell he comes from. And you get the most chilling answer possible, in the form of this piece of dialogue: you see, this is how crazy Batman has made Gotham city, says the Joker pointing a camera to his own scarred, pasty face. And it is thus that the writers introduce the theme of escalation, another one of life's truths.

Escalation is best demonstrated by the arms' race between rival nations, a one-upmanship between two entities attempting, inexorably, to outdo each other, all the while intensifying the competition further, raising it to a higher notch. It's like the Red Queen Effect: you have to run to stay at the same place. The Joker is an answer to Batman, to everything Batman stands for. Batman is self-appointed,wears a hood, fights criminals savagely with a disregard for the law. BUT he doesn't kill. The Joker, likewise, wears make-up, is invited by nobody, feral, anarchic and goes a step further: he has a disregard for simply anything, including human life.
To say anything about Heath Ledger as the Joker now is redundant, but such is the effect of his performance, it does evoke a response, without exception. If I hadn't known that it was Heath Ledger who was playing him, I would have thought he played himself. When I see the Joker, I don't see Heath Ledger, I see just the Joker.

Perhaps, the most striking quality of Christopher Nolan is his astuteness. His exactness. He knows exactly how audiences react to something they see on screen. He knows exactly what goes on in the mind of the audience as it watches a movie. He knows exactly when and, in what measure, the audience would laugh, cry, be bored, be scared, fall asleep, be thrilled, be shocked, overwhelmed, be confused or just plain dismissive. In short, no one knows the mind of his audience better than Christopher Nolan. It is this assured knowledge that allows him to tell complex stories in his masterful non-linear narrative, fully confident of the audience's intelligence. Such is his mastery over his craft and the medium, that a first-timer watching one of his movies will grasp each and every detail, only when Nolan wants it, not a second sooner or later. And that, I believe, is a rarity.

'The Dark Knight' carries all of his hallmarks: a complex plot narrated succinctly, surgical editing, perfect superimposition of voice-overs with visuals, exploration of the grey area between good and evil, characters weighed down by guilt, yet guided by an unfailing sense of duty. In addition, it has all the trappings of a superhero blockbuster: hi-tech gadgets, intense action, ferocious car & bike chases, huge explosions, all backed by a thunderously grand, operatic, ominous score by Hans Zimmer. What is more amazing is to know that very little of it is CGI; most of the stunts are actually performed and most of the action is real. Wally Pfister's camera work, eschewing any flashy movement, is perfect, objectively capturing Gotham in all its shadows and the Joker in his rabid glee. Nolan steers clear of any sensational material like gore or foul language or substance abuse. For practical purposes, the MPAA rating of PG-13 seemed appropriate. But what we see is a grim, deeply unsettling, urgent film that travels into the blackness of the human spirit. All the more so because of its topicality and immediacy.

And if the trailers of his latest, 'Inception' are anything to go by, then God has delivered, yet again.