It isn’t until I came to Sydney that I started watching movies on a regular basis. The foreign films on SBS were a catalyst – as were super cheap DVDs from a brother based in SE Asia :-)
In spite of the movie watching I still feel a bit bemused by visual media, well at least the entertainment part of it. There’s something a little strange about an entire industry composed of people play acting so we can be as the saying goes, amused to death. Theatre aka playacting has been around forever, nevertheless it feels different. For one it is a labour intensive enterprise which limits the endless reruns of television or movie halls. And at least some parts of it are part of a continuing tradition of storytelling, like an annual Ram Leela. So watching grown up people act out endless made up tales can sometimes feel like a waste of time.
Of course in the world at large the appetite for manufactured tales only seems to be increasing. And perhaps nowhere more so than in India which must surely lead the world in terms of sheer output, both on the big screen and by way of television. A pity then that in this vast outpouring, there is hardly anything of merit. One may extol Bollywood’s campiness and joy and there are blogs devoted to it as an art form but to me it often seems like the ice golas of my childhood, highly coloured and sweetened on the outside but tasteless once past the surface. And while Indian arthouse films have conventionally existed in the slipstream of popular cinema and are a welcome corrective to the general dross, many simply aren’t as good as films made elsewhere. Of the movies I picked up while in India this is true of two movies that I saw recently, Ishqiya and Love, Sex aur Dhoka. On their own they are a change from the bewildering mess of most Indian movies (here I include lauded movies like 3 Idiots, which did its best to live up to the latter part of its title) but they still fall way short of the movies that normally find themselves awarded on the festival circuit.
Ishqiya is part of a genre that can best be termed the bawdy UP sex caper though to be honest the only similar movie I have seen is Omkara which is hardly a caper. Still one knows the type, an ostensibly rustic film set in Northern badlands featuring bad ass men, lusty wenches and accents broad enough to convince urban filmgoers that the whole enterprise is entirely authentic. Ishqiya is no different though I can’t seem to recollect the mandatory item number with the usual mirchi laundiya descriptors. Though Ms. Balan’s character is of that type even in respectable widowhood. Add to this two small time crooks on the run and you have the classic caper. Then add to the mix a comic villain, a smart ass kid with the best dialogues, a few songs and it all jogs along nicely enough till it falls apart quite spectacularly half way through and limps its way to a supposedly clever ending. Any resemblance to the real UP is purely coincidental. It could have been better to be truly enjoyable, as it is I think one is supposed to feel grateful that it exists at all.
Khosla ka Ghosla was a nice enough addition to the kind of cinema Indian filmmakers do best, i.e. the joys and travails of the middle class. I can’t quite trace its origins but the genre certainly peaked with the charming and inoffensive movies of the Chatterjee-Mukherjee brigade in the 70s and even some Ray-Sen movies in many ways belong to this genre. Few movies effectively capture Delhi, all of Dibakar Banerjee’s do, though this Delhi is a far cry from the Delhi of Chashme Buddoor. Similarly Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! was also very effective in immersing the viewer in the Delhi of the lower middle classes but somehow its faintly surreal tone was lost on me. And the Paresh Rawal bit weakened the film. LSD seems a companion piece on the nature of modern India but it too fell short in far too many ways. It does have an affecting middle section (maybe its the actors who made this section) but on the whole it never rose beyond the ordinary. It is not your average Bollywood flick for sure but surely by now this is a filmmaker who should be measured against his international contemporaries. And if one does so, the movie falls short. The different modes of filming for the three sections (briefly, the honour killing, the sex tape and the sting operation), the general observations on a voyeuristic society where everything is filmed, and the stories themselves never really transcend the obvious and you have the feeling you have seen it all before. In short, the richly bizarre, cruel, delicate, subversive and contradictory realities of India far outstrip any attempt at fictionalisation and the movie itself fails to see beneath this surface.
The third movie I saw Wake up Sid doesn’t seem to fall into the conventional Bollywood/Arthouse divide. Rather it is an indie film on the lives of self-absorbed twenty somethings that owes much to its American progenitors. But because it doesn’t want to be anything else than a slight, coming of age roman à clef, it has its charms. It is undemanding and sweetly performed, though Ranbir Kapoor at times reminded me of a line from a Keith Gessen novel where Gessen tartly observes that people’s expressions were now down to the few arch mannerisms of television shows. Surprisingly, in spite of the slightness it had a genuinely affecting ending, helped along by this song.
This song works but on the whole can Indian cinema leave song interludes behind?!
In spite of the movie watching I still feel a bit bemused by visual media, well at least the entertainment part of it. There’s something a little strange about an entire industry composed of people play acting so we can be as the saying goes, amused to death. Theatre aka playacting has been around forever, nevertheless it feels different. For one it is a labour intensive enterprise which limits the endless reruns of television or movie halls. And at least some parts of it are part of a continuing tradition of storytelling, like an annual Ram Leela. So watching grown up people act out endless made up tales can sometimes feel like a waste of time.
Of course in the world at large the appetite for manufactured tales only seems to be increasing. And perhaps nowhere more so than in India which must surely lead the world in terms of sheer output, both on the big screen and by way of television. A pity then that in this vast outpouring, there is hardly anything of merit. One may extol Bollywood’s campiness and joy and there are blogs devoted to it as an art form but to me it often seems like the ice golas of my childhood, highly coloured and sweetened on the outside but tasteless once past the surface. And while Indian arthouse films have conventionally existed in the slipstream of popular cinema and are a welcome corrective to the general dross, many simply aren’t as good as films made elsewhere. Of the movies I picked up while in India this is true of two movies that I saw recently, Ishqiya and Love, Sex aur Dhoka. On their own they are a change from the bewildering mess of most Indian movies (here I include lauded movies like 3 Idiots, which did its best to live up to the latter part of its title) but they still fall way short of the movies that normally find themselves awarded on the festival circuit.
Ishqiya is part of a genre that can best be termed the bawdy UP sex caper though to be honest the only similar movie I have seen is Omkara which is hardly a caper. Still one knows the type, an ostensibly rustic film set in Northern badlands featuring bad ass men, lusty wenches and accents broad enough to convince urban filmgoers that the whole enterprise is entirely authentic. Ishqiya is no different though I can’t seem to recollect the mandatory item number with the usual mirchi laundiya descriptors. Though Ms. Balan’s character is of that type even in respectable widowhood. Add to this two small time crooks on the run and you have the classic caper. Then add to the mix a comic villain, a smart ass kid with the best dialogues, a few songs and it all jogs along nicely enough till it falls apart quite spectacularly half way through and limps its way to a supposedly clever ending. Any resemblance to the real UP is purely coincidental. It could have been better to be truly enjoyable, as it is I think one is supposed to feel grateful that it exists at all.
Khosla ka Ghosla was a nice enough addition to the kind of cinema Indian filmmakers do best, i.e. the joys and travails of the middle class. I can’t quite trace its origins but the genre certainly peaked with the charming and inoffensive movies of the Chatterjee-Mukherjee brigade in the 70s and even some Ray-Sen movies in many ways belong to this genre. Few movies effectively capture Delhi, all of Dibakar Banerjee’s do, though this Delhi is a far cry from the Delhi of Chashme Buddoor. Similarly Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! was also very effective in immersing the viewer in the Delhi of the lower middle classes but somehow its faintly surreal tone was lost on me. And the Paresh Rawal bit weakened the film. LSD seems a companion piece on the nature of modern India but it too fell short in far too many ways. It does have an affecting middle section (maybe its the actors who made this section) but on the whole it never rose beyond the ordinary. It is not your average Bollywood flick for sure but surely by now this is a filmmaker who should be measured against his international contemporaries. And if one does so, the movie falls short. The different modes of filming for the three sections (briefly, the honour killing, the sex tape and the sting operation), the general observations on a voyeuristic society where everything is filmed, and the stories themselves never really transcend the obvious and you have the feeling you have seen it all before. In short, the richly bizarre, cruel, delicate, subversive and contradictory realities of India far outstrip any attempt at fictionalisation and the movie itself fails to see beneath this surface.
The third movie I saw Wake up Sid doesn’t seem to fall into the conventional Bollywood/Arthouse divide. Rather it is an indie film on the lives of self-absorbed twenty somethings that owes much to its American progenitors. But because it doesn’t want to be anything else than a slight, coming of age roman à clef, it has its charms. It is undemanding and sweetly performed, though Ranbir Kapoor at times reminded me of a line from a Keith Gessen novel where Gessen tartly observes that people’s expressions were now down to the few arch mannerisms of television shows. Surprisingly, in spite of the slightness it had a genuinely affecting ending, helped along by this song.
This song works but on the whole can Indian cinema leave song interludes behind?!
And now to non-amuse myself for awhile.
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