Freeze Frame #144: Rang De Basanti

As ensemble dramas go, Rang De Basanti ranks among the best that has come out of Bollywood in recent times. Apart from the fact that it is mostly well-written and acted, it deserves brownie points its effort to make the freedom struggle relevant to a generation born decades after independence. The most obvious way of looking at the efforts of Bhagat Singh, Gandhi et al is that they did all they could to make our nation independent and got there. But then, freedom was more than just an abstract ideal for them — it meant the power to determine our destiny as a nation. We got the power, rejoiced for a while and then for the most part, just turned away from the responsibility it entailed.

After spending the better part of its running time letting its characters learn their lessons from the historical characters they portray, the story takes a turn that demands that they show what they have learnt. While the idea of using Ajay’s (Madhavan) death in an aircraft accident as the catalyst is perfect, the way they react to it isn’t as well written as it ought to have been. But this post isn’t about where Rakeysh Mehra went wrong, but about a nice little scene where he got it absolutely right.

The scene I speak of is one where the gang is lounging around at a club/restaurant of some sort, and get into an argument about the state of the nation and whether or not it’s their responsibility to do something about it. Strictly speaking, this scene isn’t “necessary” to the plot, but it accomplishes a number of useful things.

Firstly, this argument is a reprise of the same discussion in an earlier scene. Ajay’s views on the issue are the same, but watch how the other characters react to it. The overall thrust of their argument is still the same — there’s nothing they can do — but you can see that their earlier cynicism is now tinged with a note of despair. And when Ajay pushes the point, you see that it affects them more than it used to. Mehra also adds a nice little spin to their usual humorous response. This time, they parody the way in which Ajay’s funeral might be conducted. It is done with their usual gusto, and despite his anger at their indifference a moment earlier, Ajay is amused as well by their antics. But without really pushing it too far, the scene manages to create a little tendril of unease. It feels like a joke taken too far. More importantly, it primes us for the scene a little later when we find out that Ajay has indeed been killed. It is not the last time that these people meet Ajay, it is clear that it is their last significant memory of him.

While his death is the catalyst for the rest of the proceedings, it is in this scene that Mehra assembles his pieces for the endgame.

 

Freeze Frame #143: Baasha

I am sure there are a lot of Padaiyappa fans out there. Ditto for  Chandramukhi, Kuselan and Sivaji. I even know someone who claims to like Baba — for reasons too numerous to mention, I am disinclined to hold it against him, though. But as far as I am concerned, the last great Rajni movie that came out was Baasha.

There are numerous reasons for this, the most important of which is that it carries very little additional baggage. Sivaji had a romantic subplot that pretty much epitomized silliness. Padaiyappa was just too long, almost like someone stole a megaserial script from Radhika’s vault, gave the main character a penis and amped up the star power. Kuselan came close, but sometimes felt like a nice little story jostling for space with Rajni’s stardom. Chandramukhi faced a similar problem — it took a nice little supporting role and gave it more than its due simply because of who was playing it.

Baasha doesn’t do any of these things. It wants to be a great masala movie as much as it wants to be a star vehicle — as a result, although Rajni is present all over it, it doesn’t feel excessive. I think one big reason is the script. I cannot think of too many instances where a remake turned out to be infinitely better than the original simply by introducing a bit of nonlinearity in the storytelling.

For all its commercial success, Hum isn’t a particularly great movie. It starts well — the pervasive sense of fear about Bhaktavar (playing magnificiently by Danny Denzongpa) is well created, and when Tiger (AB) breaks the shackles, it is quite effective. But once he escapes and begins a new life, it all becomes very ho-hum. You know that his past will come back to haunt him, so all that is left is to see how and when. By adding a considerable bit of buffoonery involving two Kader Khans, the tension is brought down a couple more notches. By the time Bhaktavar came back, it was all I could do not to yawn.

Take Baasha on the other hand. Its central choice is very simple: Take the first act of Hum and push it down the order. Start with a man trying to lead a quiet life, with little hints that indicate that there might be more to him than it seems. The man you see is the typical do-gooder hero, but you are never allowed to take that for granted. For one thing, there are moments when he is about to lose his cool and his “other” identity seems to surface briefly, only to be quelled. There is also a moment when he reveals it to someone, but you don’t hear what is said, only the panicked reaction to it. Throughout the first half, the tension mounts. Just to ratchet it up even more, there is a sequence where he allows himself to be beaten up by a goon just to avoid a conflict.

All this might work well enough even with some other actor, but what really sells it is the fact that we know who Rajni is. Every time you see him controlling himself or going out of the way to avoid conflict, you’re not just wondering why the character would do this. You’re wondering why Rajni would do this. The movie takes his image as an invincible hero and asks him to rein it in, so that the audience is primed for the moment when he finally cuts loose.

This comes at around the midpoint of the movie, when the aforementioned goon goes too far and hurts his sister. This is, as far as movies of this ilk are concerned, The Unforgivable Sin. In what has since become a  tradition in action sequences involving a hero facing off against multiple goons, the first man unfortunate enough to make a move is hit so spectacularly hard that he doesn’t get up again.

I watched this movie in a little single-screen theatre in Chennai and when that blow landed, the entire audience erupted in cheers. The cheering didn’t die down until the fight sequence got over. And you know what, I could perfectly understand the feeling. Because I was whooping and hollering along with them.

ps: Shankar seems to have understood this strategy quite well. Throughout the first half of Sivaji, Rajni takes what is dished out to him. It is in the second half that he starts hitting back. Now, if he hadn’t made Rajni play such a lovesick twit in the first half, it would’ve worked sooo much better.

pps: Can you come up with instances where the remake turned out to be much better than the original? Might make for a good (if short) list.

ppps: And no, Hum Aapke Hain Koun doesn’t count, even if it made more money. I thought Nadiya Ke Paar was the better movie by far.

 

Freeze Frame #141, #142: In the Bedroom, Mystic River

When people are faced with a tragedy they cannot make sense of, they try to explain it to themselves in terms of things they understand and can control. They just need something to pin it on, something to channel their frustration into. Very often, a movie will concentrate on selling one of those explanations to the audience, simply because it takes far too much courage to do otherwise. One reason why I treasure In the Bedroom and Mystic River is that they are possessed of that courage.

Both films feature characters who are faced with a personal tragedy. In both cases, they eventually answer with violence and have to deal with their guilt, although for differing reasons.

In In the Bedroom, Matt ends up killing the man who murdered his son, but it is not purely a matter of revenge. His rage against his son’s killer may have remained impotent, were it not for the fact that his wife could not take it. It is her inability to deal with the tragedy that makes her turn on him and goad him into doing it.

In Mystic River, on the other hand, Jimmy is well capable of violence, and it was just a matter of finding the man who murdered his daughter so he could extract revenge. However, he finds out afterwards that he killed the wrong man.

Both men are consumed with guilt afterwards. In the Bedroom ends with a shot of Matt lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling while his wife sleeps beside him. You sense that, in the end, he is utterly alone. In Mystic River, on the other hand, Jimmy’s wife tells him that he did the right thing:

Because it’s like I told the girls. Their daddy is the king. And a king knows what to do and does it.

Think about this: the case where the wife is supportive is the one where the husband has killed the wrong man.

The key isn’t whether or not the guilty man was punished, but how the characters react to tragedy. Revenge is a very visceral reaction — irrespective of how civilized we would like to be, we cannot deny the fact that we are often dissatisfied with less than an eye for an eye. Both women regard their men as the instrument to achieve it. Their reaction is determined by whether they deem their husbands capable of the task.

What if it had turned out that the man who got killed at the end of Mystic River was indeed guilty, while the man who got killed in In the Bedroom was actually innocent? My guess is, these couples would have turned out the same way even then.

 

Freeze Frame #140: The Shawshank Redemption

First things first. If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption so far, please do the following:

1. Compulsory: Find a DVD of the movie and watch it. If you happen to live in a small town where the only available copy of the DVD is with a curmudgeonly octagenarian neighbour of yours who insists on watching it every night and wouldn’t even dream of giving it to you, even for a few hours, go online and order yourself a copy. I know you were expecting me to suggest that you kill that cranky old coot, but remember: any man who would watch this movie every night deserves to live, whatever his other qualities.
2. Optional: Once you’ve finished Step 1, consider reading the rest of this post. I plan to discuss a big spoiler here, so don’t tell me you haven’t been warned.

I’m serious about this, okay? Really, don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.

Now that the formalities have been dispensed with, let me get on with it.

The Shawshank Redemption spends most of its running time in establishing the steady rhythm of prison life. Even the establishment of Andy’s innocence and the jailer’s subsequent cover-up is done without unseemly haste. By giving itself space to breathe, the movie draws us in so surely that we find ourselves as “institutionalized” as the inmates themselves.

Apart from the pacing, which is a brave choice for a Hollywood movie, the other interesting choice is the use of a voiceover narrative. That the voice is that of Morgan Freeman, who plays one of the inmates and Andy’s closest friend, is definitely a plus. But narratives in general are tricky: if you don’t do it right, it would just seem like you just didn’t write the scenes well enough and needed the help of a narrator to explain things.

If you’ve read the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), you will notice that the narrative follows the novel’s text to a good extent. A lot of it is in terms of commentary on a particular scene. In the one where Andy locks himself up in the room with the public address system and plays a Mozart opera on the loudspeakers, Red (Freeman) says:

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Now, this is beautiful prose, but it doesn’t add anything to what you already realize when you see what happens. Like I said, redundancy. But then, a curious thing happens. Maybe it’s the timbre of Freeman’s voice, but you grow used to hearing it in the background. You begin to look forward to it, even if all it provides is a postscript to the events unfolding on screen.

I didn’t notice this on my initial viewing. Not even in the next couple of times after that. But there was this moment recently, when I was watching the movie on TV, that it struck me. There is a scene where Andy seems to have lost all hope, after the warden ensures that the only man who could’ve helped exonerate him is silenced. Red learns that Andy is now is possession of a stout length of rope, and lies awake all night worrying about whether his friend might have been pushed too far. And sure enough, the next morning at roll call, Andy doesn’t step out of his cell.

Darabont paces this scene deliberately, drawing out the suspense until we finally see the inside of Andy’s cell and find nobody there. It is a nice little moment of surprise, because nothing has really prepared us for it. But that is all I felt at that moment: a bit of surprise. A little later, you hear Red’s voice, over a montage of shots of the subsequent manhunt:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison.

Even today when I watch The Shawshank Redemption, I find that Andy’s escape really registers emotionally only after Red has said spoken of it. I guess in some ways, it’s another form of institutionalization.

 

Freeze Frame #139: Quiz Show

I watched Quiz Show on TV eons ago and thought it was a wonderful film. But over the years, my memory of it faded to the point where I could only remember one scene with clarity. Recently, when it came on TV again, I stuck around to watch that scene and then zapped on to other stuff.

The movie tells the story of the rise and fall of a quiz show named 21 which, it turns out, was rigged by its producers in order to get higher ratings. In the third act, when things slowly unravel for everyone involved in the show, there is a meeting between Richard Goodwin, the Congressional investigator probing the scam and Martin Rittenhome, the head of a pharmaceutical company which sponsored the show. The conversation features the sort of cynical truth-telling that we are probably quite used to by now:

You see, the audience didn’t tune in to watch some amazing display of intellectual ability. They just wanted to watch the money.

That Rittenhome is played by Martin Scorsese might have much to do with why I love this scene. Listening to Scorsese’s voice is almost as pleasurable as watching one of his best movies. But this isn’t just me being in love with how the man speaks.

To understand why this scene works so well, you have to listen to the movie rather than just see it. For two acts, the movie seduces you with softly spoken voices of well-mannered people. When you hear Herbert Stempel, the deposed quiz show champion, complain about the show being rigged, it seems like so much whining even though you realize that he is probably speaking the truth. John Turturro does a wonderful job with this character, and a big part of how his character is seen in the movie has to do with how he speaks with a rough, unpolished accent.

Goodwin, on the other hand, befriends the current champion Charles Van Doren — erudite, charming, born to a life of privilege. The movie is seen through Goodwin’s eyes, and his relationship with Van Doren is central to the movie. We, along with Goodwin, are charmed by the other man. We share his illusions about how the television business seems to work, even though we ought to know better. And when the illusion finally shatters, we share in his disillusionment. Again, even though we ought to know better.

Therefore, when the Scorsese character talks about what the show really meeant to the audiences, and when the Kevin Pollak character (who produces the show) talks about how they viewed the quiz show as entertainment and not an actual contest, the tone of these scenes is in stark contrast with the rest of the proceedings.

Rittenhome doesn’t tell us something we don’t know. He just reminds us of something we allowed ourselves to forget for the past 90 minutes.

 

Freeze Frame #138: Love Actually

There is nothing extraordinarily memorable about the movie, but if I’m stuck between watching Citizen Kane and Love Actually, I am likely to choose the latter as often as not.

To quote what is probably the best line in Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect.

I very often don’t watch this movie in one go — I just fast-forward to specific portions. Sometimes, I just follow one plotline from start to finish. Sometimes, it’s a specific scene. Like the one where Rowan Atkinson gift-wraps a necklace while Alan Rickman looks on. Or the one where Hugh Grant is first introduced to Natalie. Or any of Bill Nighy’s or Emma Thompson’s scenes. Sometimes all I need in order to make my day is a glimpse of Thompson’s smiling visage when Bye Bye Baby gets played at a funeral service.

But my favourite of all time is the one where Colin walks into an American bar. To quote Ebert’s description of this particular subplot:

There’s also one hopeful soloist who believes that if he flies to Milwaukee and walks into a bar he’ll find a friendly Wisconsin girl who thinks his British accent is so cute she’ll want to sleep with him. This turns out to be true.

Exactly how much this turns out to be true is, to me, the best part of this movie.

 

Freeze Frame #137: Pasumpon

I remember watching Pasumpon years ago on TV and thinking, there’s no earthly reason why this movie should work.

The son (Prabhu) of a zamindar is estranged from his mother (Radhika) for two decades because she remarried after her husband died. He grows into adulthood and still carries around that resentment, although by now it has become more of a habit than a conviction. Indeed his own actions as the local lawmaker are in favour of widow remarriage. It is only in the end, when his mother is on her deathbed, that he manages to swallow his pride and reconcile with her.

The entire movie is replete with scenes of dramatic excess. Take the timing of the reconciliation scene, for instance. The son finds out that his mother is seriously ill, and spends an entire night lying awake before walking over to her (and his stepfather’s) home. Why would he do this other than to draw out the tragedy?

And yet, the closing moments manage are so powerfully moving that it comes as a surprise. Nothing about the scene is surprising, you could second-guess every line of dialogue, subtlety isn’t even on the same continent… And yet it worked. Or is it just that I am an utter sap? (Most people who know me reasonably well would nod, smile and say yes, that’s exactly it. But humor me for a moment, will you?)

My choice of standout scene in the movie, however, wouldn’t be the aforementioned. It would be one that comes a bit earlier, where the son beats up a local goon who insults and hits his mother and half-brothers. At the end, he tells the goon that, if anyone has the right to beat up on his brothers, it would be himself.

I was midway through my groan when the camera panned to his mother’s face. As she is led away from there, she speaks in a voice tinged with such pride in her firstborn, yet such sadness at their separation… Two decades worth of price and sadness, distilled into two minutes of dialogue.

 

Freeze Frame #136: Pineapple Express

Right at the end of Pineapple Express — which follows Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle into the annals of the Improbably Good Stoner Movies — the three heroes have breakfast at a diner and unwind. I am no homophobe, but I believe that the only plausible human reaction to their conversation would be to laugh and say: “How gay!” I also believe that this is precisely the reaction the makers wanted to elicit.

What is interesting, though, is how David Gordon Green frames his shots. The guys are sitting at a table in a diner, two to one side and one to the other. Right behind their back is another customer eating breakfast at his table. In a number of frames, this guy is visible. It is obvious that he can hear the entire conversation. He has not appeared in any of the earlier scenes. So you expect one of the following things to happen:

1. The guy would turn out to have something to do with the plot, and would announce his presence and function at the appropriate moment.
2. He has nothing to do with the story, but is there simply to provide a reaction shot to the conversation.

Throughout the scene, I kept looking at the guy, wondering which of these it would be. I expected him to do something, anything. But he just sat there, eating his breakfast with nary an expression flitting across his features.

It was only after the scene got over that I realized how skilfully the director had been eliciting my reactions while keeping this seeming nonentity in the frame. There are times when you just gotta love being f***ed with like that.

 

Freeze Frame #134, #135: Taare Zameen Par

I confess to not being overly enthusiastic about watching Taare Zameen Par when it came out. I have no idea why. When I finally did see it a few months ago, I kept wondering why I had waited so long. It’s a wonderful movie about a dyslexic kid having trouble in school until a sympathetic art teacher comes along and helps him out.

I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment that the second half is painted in very broad strokes and has none of the subtlety and power of the first half. Still, despite the fact that I know I’m being manipulated, I don’t feel like dissing it. I guess I like being a puppet every once in a while.

Two sequences stand out for me. One is an extended sequence in the first half where Ishaan bunks school and walks around the city for a while before coming home. When this scene started, all sorts of alarm bells were ringing in my head. No kid his age should be out alone on the roads like this!

But after the first 30 seconds of fretting about the dangers of the situation, I settled down to see what he would do. And I was drawn in. There doesn’t seem to be any conscious design to what Ishaan stops to observe and what he passes by without a second glance. It would’ve been easy to make him observe only those things that emphasize his artistic bent of mind. But the movie doesn’t try to shoehorn any pattern into the situation. It wisely recognizes that, to a hyperactive kid (artistic inclinations or not), anything could be interesting.

One of the pleasures of going to the movies is to find ourselves in the company of fully realized characters. There are so many movie characters who race so breathlessly through the plot that they hardly stop by to say hello. When a movie takes five minutes (heck, a whole first half, come to think of it) to do that, it’s gratifying. It is this attention to detail that wins the movie enough brownie points to make up for the string-pulling in the second half.

The other scene that worked for me is this little reaction shot right towards the end, when the Principal of the boarding school is about to announce the winner of the school-wide painting contest. We know already, having seen so many movies, that Ishaan would win. When the Principal announces that the judge has chosen a student’s work over his teacher’s, we know exactly what he is talking about even before any names are mentioned.

But a reaction shot of the art teacher beginning to applaud before holding back and waiting for the actual announcement? Now that is interesting, isn’t it?

It is not surprising that the art teacher would’ve guessed who the principal was talking about. But how often do the makers figure on giving this particular reaction shot? Think about all those movies where a competitor overcomes great odds to win a contest with a supportive coach by his/her/their side. How often does this reaction get shown, no matter how obvious? It is only after you see the shot that you realize that yes, this is exactly how he would’ve reacted.

 

Freeze Frame #132, #133: Once

A man stands at a street corner with his guitar, singing. During the day, when people pass by and are likely to drop a coin or two into his box, he sings popular numbers that they may have heard. It is after dark that he starts singing his own stuff. Whether or not his music is to your taste is, I think, immaterial — it is impossible to ignore the way his intensity goes up a few notches when he is singing his own compositions. 

A woman approaches him. “Where is she?” she asks after a modicum of preliminaries about why he doesn’t sing stuff like this during the day. “She’s gone,” he replies. It is clear that music like this cannot come out of anything other than personal loss. She doesn’t know him, nor he her. This is a pretty personal conversation for two strangers to be having. 

It turns out eventually that she is a musician as well. And that, I think, is all you need to understand. Once is a movie about two people who fall in love while they make music together. But it is not so much about their “romance” as about the sense of camaraderie and respect that two people share when they find common ground in a particular activity. In that sense, it has much in common with The Girl With The Pearl Earring, that little gem of a movie about Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting. 

Two scenes really stand out for me. The first is the one where they play together for the first time. It is at a store that sells musical instruments, where she has a deal with the owner to come in and play the piano for an hour. She brings him along, and they play a song he wrote called Falling Slowly. He gives her a rough idea of the music, starts off slowly and lets her join in. They play tentatively at first, slowly getting used to another person sharing their space. And as they grow in confidence, the music begins to soar. As a scene that shows the developing bond between them, it is nothing short of perfect.

It also serves to set up a later solo where he is in his room, singing a song about his breakup with his girlfriend. Home video clippings of them together plays in the background. It is clear that he hasn’t still gotten over her. But as he sings, you hear her (the girl, not the ex-girlfriend) voice slowly coming in, providing the harmony to his lead vocals. A part of you recognizes this and says, “Yes, this feels about right.”

These days, there is at least one big budget Hollywood musical coming out every year. Most of the time, the music is just an excuse to stage a big production number. But every once in a while, a movie comes along to remind you that the music doesn’t need the help.