Closet Therapy

A Perfectly Organised Closet is Heaven Indeed. Many a fruitful weekend can be spent on it. And much like the writer of this post, I have an untidy dining table but an organised wardrobe.

Le(s) Fils

On the flight to Mumbai, I watched Le Fils de l'Epicier, a modest, charming French film that follows the return of the prodigal son. The son of the title (Nicolas Cazale) is a prickly, depressed lad who takes over his ailing father's grocery run through the villages of Provence. Initially acerbic, full of resentments and conscious of unpaid bills, he begins to like his eccentric old customers, softens, finds love (with the charming Clotilde Hesme) and has a rapprochement of sorts with his father.

I was put in mind of it when I had my customary glass of sugarcane juice at the Rajawadi Raswanti Griha. The taciturn middle aged bhaiyya was absent, replaced by a young lad who may or may not have been his son. Like the grocer's son, he was abrupt in taking my order and keen to settle payment as quickly as possible. One lives in the hope that age and experience will soften le fils de vendeur de jus de canne à sucre (the French mouthful for a sugarcane juice seller's son as provided by this translation site).

I went home for the funeral of my youngest uncle. It wasn't the best of times, the bookends of the siblings had fallen off leaving my grandparents remaining fils a shocked and disoriented middle. It is already more than three weeks since the event and some of the early shock has subsided. While my uncle's absence was sudden, its aftermath is likely to play out over time.

Handlooms

Stumbled on this site by accident. Great visuals and lovely saris mean I keep going back to it.

Seven Steps and a Minister's Daughter

Another weekend at home with domestic chores and DVDs. Its been a tiring two and half months and my watching of serious cinema has faltered. On the other hand Australian free-to-air telly is so dismal I rarely watch it*. I had picked up Saptapadi on a visit to Kolkata and it seemed to occupy a middle space so I decided to give it a go. It turned out to be immensely watchable. While melodramatic and following many of the unrealistic tropes of the cinema of its time, it was also surprisingly quiet in parts (as an e.g. the confrontation scene between Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar's father starts off as the usual hi-jinks but unexpectedly concludes in a plea that appeals to her better nature, in contrast the one between Sen and her father hews to ghastly stereotype) and imbued with ideas and intelligence. It is also finely idealistic in the way 50s movies were and remarkably compassionate in the way it treats almost all the characters, though Uttam Kumar's character is clearly infallible. The acting is pretty consistent and you can see how Indian actors approach roles and bring a specific style to their acting which deeply taps into the Indian psyche. The movie itself is imbued with themes of sacrifice, salvation, undying love, humanity and a belief in goodness, all familiar themes in Indian literature. It is intended to be uplifting and it achieves that purpose.

Similarly Manthiri Kumari, though a different kettle of fish, is an example of how well constructed some old films were and how well they use dialogue, sadly a dying art in modern cinema. This may well be because the movie was intended as DMK propaganda, but it works on its own. The movie is surprisingly perfectly paced and edited, somewhat uncommon for what is really a very twisted Indian tale of palace intrigue (don't know if Ellis Dungan had a role in this) . And like all movies with extremes of good and bad characters, this one has the most delicious villains who are given their comeuppance by a good but clever woman i.e. the eponymous Manthiri Kumari. This movie also has one of my grandmother's favourite songs, "Vaarai nee Vaarai", which is a love song and a coded song of death all at once. In fact Tamil cinema in the 50s spans an astonishing range, much of it with a political subtext, and makes for interesting viewing. Manthiri Kumari is really the odd one out in my list of favourite movies but I do recommend it.

*Sometimes SBS is an exception so this weekend I also watched The Spectator which almost made me change my poor opinion of Italian cinema.

The Last Aztec

In my mundane life of the past few weeks, the odd bit of frisson came from watching The Last Aztec. It was a meandering, eccentric doco and rivetting in parts. DBC Pierre's idiosyncratic, garrulous and not to speak of drunk presentation and some kind of mad love for Mexico meant you watched the whole damn thing regardless of whether it was fact or grandiose, passionate assumptions. The title seemed sly - appearances notwithstanding, he may well be the Last Aztec.

The Norwegians are Coming.....?

I know next to nothing about Norway, its literature or its films. But I am suddenly intrigued by the country. For one, I absolutely loved Get Ready to be Boyzvoiced, a boy band mockumentary. As a genre, a mockumentary is sort of adolesecent but I have to admit I can watch endless repeats of Boyzvoiced (happily a lot of it is on youtube!). And then there is Reprise, which I just finished watching and can't wait to watch again. There is a darkly delicious thread running beneath both these diverse offerings. No Oslo visit in the offing but I can always google all that Norway has to offer :-)

அம்மா

Not a day goes past without my remembering my mother. I miss her presence in my life in many ways. And though this is an emotion we associate with our children - "I wish to watch my child grow" - it is one I feel for my mother. I wish I could have watched her grow old.

This was written for her in Sydney circa 2003.




Here in this land
Far from where your ashes lie
your very spirit lies
An old man speaks to me of the dead.

Of lying down besides a mother's
spirit in the night
and then returning to the world
becalmed and wiser.

Through the expanse of time
and distance, I hear often
your spirit, a slow murmur
a soft touch in the night.

In my hours of sorrow
In my hours of joy
You return me to the world
becalmed and wiser.

Theodore Roethke's Dolor

Roethke on institutions:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Tu Chiami Una Vita

Having had to spend time at home in the weekends, I have been having a bit of a Jamesian moment. More accurately, a Henry James on Film moment. Perversely, given that hardly any film adaptation is an improvement on the book, I make it a point of collecting DVDs of films based on books. Watching James back to back, as I did, can be faintly disorienting if you are confined to the house - you almost walk out expecting carriages and bonnets on the streets.

I couldn't quite decide what to make of Jane Campion's adaptation of "The Portrait of a Lady". It is not Henry James but that is hardly a disqualification. The point is to take liberties with the text. But Campion's visual and ideological signature is so strong, if muddled, that eventually what we see is a Campion film that seems to have a tenuous connection with James at best. It strays so far from anything Jamesian that really only the kernel of the story is left. Even watched purely as a Campion film, it is somewhat wanting, you never quite engage with it in the way you did some of her previous films. Like all Campion films, it has a strong undercurrent of the violence implicit in a romantic relationship (by this I mean that is possible but not necessarily inevitable or desired) - she does seem to be drawn to the theme. Apart from some strong performances from the actors who play Madame Merle and Isabel Archer's cousin, all it really has going for it is Campion's absolute command over the images she chooses to put on screen.

Wings of the Dove is universally held to be one of the better adaptations of "unfilmable" James and it doesn't disappoint. It admirably manages the tightrope of paying homage to the source material and yet making the film its own beast. Its helped along by its cinematography (less ostentatious than Campion's), a pitch perfect performance from Helena Bonham Carter and the general structure and intelligence of the film. Lots of money, sex, deceit (few novels are little else but these seem to be constants in James) and also one of James' innocents in Millie Theale and the faint possibility of redemption through someone like her. Which brings me to the last of the movies and another of James' innocents - Catherine Sloper in Washington Square. This movie is fairly faithful to the book apart from a few changes, especially the ending. But its also a bit uneven and at times a bit broad in its depiction of characters (though this is after all an early James novel and not as elliptical as the later ones). Still, at the end of the film I felt I had made more of an emotional investment in this film than the rest, you feel for Catherine Sloper. Inspite of a few false notes, Jennifer Jason Leigh is effective in doing this. And I don't care how inauthentic Tu Chiami Una Vita is for the period - its still charming on film :-).

PS: Writing this I realised that all films seemed to have been made at the same time (96-97).

मखदूम मोहिउद्दीन

The 80s seem such a distant country and yet this is the decade in which I was a teenager and consequently it still feels so alive. How much in the past the decade is however brought home to me when I see a movie like Chashme Buddoor or listen to some of the better songs of the decade (leaving apart the fugly mainstream Amitabh-Jeetendra flicks). One of my favourites is Makhdoom Mohiuddin's Phir Chidhi Raat (he also wrote Gaman's Aap ki yaad aati rahi). Gloriously it is on youtube.



Watching the movies, I also miss the "ethnic chic" that characterised the better part of the 80s (see for example Supriya Pathak's clothes, the gajra, the parandhi in the clip). It was an expected backlash against the bouffants, pale lipsticks, printed saris and general ugliness of the 70s. This was also the decade of the Festival of India - the first time many of us would have been seen Teejan Bai's Pandvani at least on TV - and the tail end of this phase must surely be the sweetness of Surabhi that documented major and minor cultural aspects of India. Surabhi of course had the cute Renuka Shahane who managed to successfully co-ordinate short hair and very ethnic gear.